EU certainly has good marketing. They do a few very obvious nice things for the consumers, like the roaming fees, and then nobody cares much about the rest – billions wasted on prestige projects, the economic and immigration crises, the terrible agricultural politics, the malicious copyright legislation, and so on.

> the economic and immigration crises,

Yes, nobody cares. Clearly, you've never heard about Brexit. Europe and immigration might have played a little role in that debate.

Or the rise of populism in Germany, France, the Netherlands and other countries.

Immigration is obviously such a non-issue that the AfD or the Front National (don't know the current name off the top of my head - they renamed) have absolutely capsized in recent elections.

Generalising, of course, but a lot of people don’t really care. Yes, the discontent is slowly growing, but it’s still small minorities that really oppose EU. All of western Europe (aside from the UK) have pro-EU governments at the moment.

Yeah, but most of Western Europe also has a pro-EU majority at the moment. You may just call it marketing, but stuff like Schengen, free trade, cultural exchange programs, funding for underdeveloped regions, and yes, EU roaming, are very popular. Of course, you can call each and every political achievement "just marketing", but then the term becomes meaningless and just demonstrates bias.

> most of Western Europe also has a pro-EU majority at the moment.

Depends a lot on how you ask the question. The pro-EU governments are working to turn EU into a superstate. The great majority of people don’t want that.

But thanks to the big visible benefits, like not having to change money, show your passport and pay roaming fees when going on vacation, most people still have a generally favorable opinion of EU, that lets them get away with their vision of the "ever closer union", despite the lack of democratic support of it.

It’s a common problem of indirect democracy. People really care about issue A and B, and elect politicians that align with them on those issues. Those politicians then have a free hand to go against the will of the people on everything else, leading to lots and lots of things happening without a democratic mandate.

If you only get one vote every 4-5 years, it’s almost impossible to make that vote count for all the decisions that’ll need to be made in between.

> Depends a lot on how you ask the question. The pro-EU governments are working to turn EU into a superstate. The great majority of people don’t want that.

Please show evidence of that statement. I'm not seeing anyone really pushing for federalism, in fact quite the opposite, holding the current group of countries model but with stronger ECB (bank) and ECJ (court) to prevent failures like Greece and Spain had.

Some slight moves to harmonize trade laws have happened, but not a lot. Some more in banking laws.

The first meeting of EU leaders after Brexit was devoted, entirely, to discussing the apparently urgent EU army.

Guess how much time they spent discussing that the EU was just rejected completely by the biggest vote in British history: none whatsoever.

The EU isn't even federalising, really. It's just centralising. That's happening despite the fact that very few want it because they aren't allowed to disagree.

New treaties aren't being signed, but that doesn't matter: the existing treaty is self amending and anyway, the ECJ can be relied on to always re-interpret the treaties to grant the EU new powers it was explicitly not meant to have. The Kafkaesque way they decided that state aid rules allowed the EU to control corporate tax rates is an example of that: the Commission was never given that power, explicitly and by design, but they took it anyway. With a corrupt Supreme Court ideologically devoted to increasing executive power, treaties and laws don't mean anything.

So I'd argue if you can't see it happening you're not paying attention.

> The first meeting of EU leaders after Brexit was devoted, entirely, to discussing the apparently urgent EU army.

The Brexit vote was on 2016-6-23. The next EU Council meeting was on 2016-6-28. According to the minutes [1] and conclusios the Council discussed the Syrian refugee crisis, economics, external relations and the Brexit vote. No EU army was discussed, the only defence-related thing was EU-NATO cooperation.

* [1] http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-27-2016-INIT... * [2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/21645/28-euco-conclusi...

> Guess how much time they spent discussing that the EU was just rejected completely by the biggest vote in British history: none whatsoever.

Immediately after this Council meeting the EU27 (all member states sans the UK) met in an informal meeting whose whole topics were of course Brexit and the state of the European Union.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/20462/sn00060-en16.pdf

The minutes of that meeting merely say that Theresa May informed them of the outcome, which they all knew already of course. It says nothing else. Quite possibly nobody else spoke.

The meeting I'm referring to is this one

https://amp.dw.com/en/uk-will-oppose-any-idea-of-eu-army-des...

In the years since the vote I haven't seen the EU agree on any changes triggered by the vote or even really discuss why it happened. From the agendas of their meetings you could think it'd never happened at all.

In recent local elections AfD more than doubled their previous results and is the second biggest Party in every of those local parliaments.

You need to adjust your irony detector.

> EU certainly has good marketing.

Surely you're kidding? The EU historically has terrible problems in transparency, effective communication of policies and general reputation problems because of the distance between it and its citizens. They have terrible marketing, famously so.

The EU is terrible in many ways. But all the big infrastructure project they fund with prominent EU branding (this bridge/airport/tunnel was kindly funded by the EU) as well as consumer initiatives like the roaming rules are all excellent marketing.

This sounds like bad faith argument, surely the EU investing billions in infrastructure or adopting consumer protection is not just marketing? That's a lot of effort to go through just to get the EU flag in people's faces.

Even if this is a bad faith argument - and it's fine if it is - that only serves to illustrate the EU's 'marketing' is not effective.

No, some of the infrastructure is of course useful in itself (although a good chunk is wasted, like this lovely report explains: https://www.eca.europa.eu/Lists/ECADocuments/SR14_21/QJAB140... ), but the prominent signs and flags proclaiming that said infrastructure was funded by the EU is certainly marketing.

You have no idea, in EU projects, even big ones, sometimes 66% or even more was from EU restructuring or agricultural funds, at least in Poland. A few extra from innovation and science funds, but those are peanuts.

I think you dropped an /s