The EU itself stopped pushing the "just a trading zone" lie a long time ago, back when they renamed from the EEC to the EC and then the EU. It literally advertises itself as a project to unify Europe into a single country ("ever closer union"), which unfortunately would be the death of democracy in Europe because the EU is a totalitarian system in which the civil service controls Parliament rather than the other way around.
It is also a FTA. And unlike most (all?) other FTAs, it has democratic elections. All the funky stuff it can do is tied into that democratic process, because that is what the member states wanted.
> into a single country ("ever closer union")
The former is not the latter.
> which unfortunately would be the death of democracy in Europe
Bothering with elections and MPs is a bizarro mirror-world way of doing that.
That aside: Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change; there's no way at all to forecast what this might look like given it's not even on the horizon yet.
They weren't even able to give UK citizens in the EU a way to claim EU citizenship despite several politicians wanting to make it available, because "EU citizen" is really just a shorthand for "citizen of an EU member state" rather than a coherent thing in its own right.
> because the EU is a totalitarian system
I work near to Checkpoint Charlie, I've been to the DDR and Stasi museums; if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The way you're using the word, I think 100% of all treaties would fail, given they are not (generally? Ever?) negotiated directly by parliaments.
The EU has elections and MPs, but doesn't have democracy. Same as a lot of non-democratic societies throughout history.
MEPs are pretty much powerless, which is why the EP fills up with joke candidates who think the EU should be abolished or who don't even bother turning up at all.
Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change
Why? Since Lisbon was rejected the EU treaties have been "self amending" (i.e. worthless). The EU routinely goes beyond its treaty-granted powers without pushback. It just gave itself powers to censor things globally, a power that appears in no treaty.
Also the EU already has: borders, taxes, a civil service, an army, a spy agency, a diplomatic corps, law making powers that override all others, a flag, a national anthem, a president, a cabinet, a central bank, a currency and dozens of other country-like things I'm forgetting. It's already more than half way there.
if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The EU is a totalitarian system; the freedoms you have today that didn't exist in the DDR are because the EU has not yet been able to completely subsume the post-war countries and institutions put in place by the allies.
Nonetheless the fact remains that the EU is not a real democracy. In a real democracy, elections mean things. Elections to the EU Parliament don't because the MEPs aren't empowered to change anything. This reality was made brutally apparent when the self-proclaimed Parliament was entirely cut out of the process of choosing the leader of the government. Instead you got vDL, someone with no history as an MEP and who didn't campaign. Why did she get the job? Nobody knows! The tiny number of people who theoretically made that decision point-blank refuse to tell anyone how it was made. That's way closer to DDR style leadership than democracy.
