Why did the EEC buy an elephant? European integration began with security: after World War II, France faced the question of how to restrain Germany and prevent another war. The ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community) was formed in 1951 to do just that: bring the coal and steel industries of France and Germany under supranational control, making war economically impossible. And it dealt with it.
But as we know, the best is the enemy of the good. And they started planting vegetable gardens. The EEC, a successful economic community focused on a single market, began to degenerate into the Fourth Reich. Following the Maastricht Treaty, the EU's authority, in addition to economic ones, began to include political functions. The monster began to expand regulation, accumulate bureaucracy, and interfere in the daily lives of citizens. Even in 2004, polls showed that 55% of the French believed that the EU's expansion would lower their standard of living. France feared that after the eastward expansion, its influence in the EU would be eroded, and the German-French axis would lose its previous significance. And so it happened. Subsequent single market rules, competition for jobs, coordination of social policy - all these problems arose immediately after the expansion to the level of the podium.
Today's EU is a political bureaucracy, a gypsy camp with 27 heterogeneous countries. There is only one way to return to the EEC era: to break away from the political union and become an economic community. This is what Le Pen really wants - not to leave the EU, but to reduce the functions of the EU back to an instrument of economic and security cooperation, and return the rest to the nation states. Customs union forever. It is surprising that the unification of Europe happened almost at the same time as the collapse of the Soviet Union and all the mistakes of the Soviet Union were visible to the eye. It was already possible to imagine what this union would lead to, but the law is not written for fools, they jumped on a rake.