This is probably way more information than anyone cares about, but when I wrote my thesis, despite the TEC setback, it was at a high-point of constructivist thinking, which amounts to the belief that self-identification with institutions and structures gradually builds "we-feeling", where a group or groups come together under a banner of mutual determination. And that was what the TEC was meant to foster: the belief that the people within that treaty were a common entity with common aims. The scary supranational stuff that people fear, in essence. And it crashed and it burned in short order.
My argument, which ran so contrary to the norms of the time that my advisor refused to sign on to my thesis, ultimately resulting in me writing it entirely on my own, was that this was nonsense, and that national interest would always be at the forefront...that, where the EU succeeded, it would succeed because the constituents of the member-states believed it benefited them *as individual states*. And that might look awfully like the sort of argument put forth by those who want to secede from the EU, but it isn't. The EU has always been a multilateral organization. It will always be a multilateral organization. Sometimes, the occasional dingus will get the brilliant idea that it should be more than that, but in short order it reverts to a multilateral organization, because there simply will never be sufficient support for it to be anything else. Any suggestion that the EU becomes a supranational organization is self-defeating, because it requires the consent of member-states who don't want that in the slightest.
So on paper, I should be spiking the (American) football here, because Brexit was the purest distillation of my argument: the EU overreached in a fashion that, at least in a theoretical sense, encroached on the national identities of its member-states, and that resulted in a push-back that saw one of the largest constituents leave the Union. But I'm not, because it's dumb as all hell: the EU made a head-fake toward a thing that its members didn't support, and when they didn't support it, it pulled back, because that's how the EU does things. And more than a decade later, people are still freaking out about the thing that didn't happen and won't happen because the people of the EU didn't want it to happen and that isn't and shouldn't be a mark against the EU.
