Also, to me an institution keeping the peace also trying to contain the "contagion" of instability makes perfect sense. It's what I want and I contacted all my representatives to that end.
A few that I personally think are bad:
- Recent VAT reforms
- Cookie law
- Treating low taxes as "state aid" (EU Commission will be setting tax rates across the EU soon, just wait)
- Having a Parliament that can't make its own laws
But if you asked others you might get an answer like "the euro".
The EU has no relevance to peace or war. The USA is a much more strongly federalised union than the EU and had a brutal civil war. Most wars today are civil wars. There is absolutely nothing that'd stop the EU having a civil war even if it was incredibly federalised and had become practically a single country, like the USA. What has kept the peace in Europe was avoiding a repeat of the Treaty of Versaille, nuclear weapons, NATO, and the fact that European countries are now all mature democracies (the latter is imo the most important).
This is the first objective of the Maastricht treaty:
"strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the institutions;"
That sounds like championing democracy to me?
And why would you insist on a deal being all or nothing, bad with the good? Because you know that's the only way to get the bad ideas through. Same reason Congress attaches riders to bills they know will be strongly supported, when those same riders got rejected earlier.