The four freedoms of the single market you get in return are incredible.
There are some joint institutions – for example, Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), which is in charge of food regulation for both countries – but rather than an international bureaucracy, it is an Australian government agency. Even its Wellington office, all the employees are technically Australian public servants, even though they are mostly New Zealanders. New Zealand pays the Australian government part of FSANZ's budget; FSANZ issues new food regulations under Australian law and then the New Zealand government copies/pastes them into New Zealand law too: with rare exceptions, they are allowed to refuse to adopt a change if they disagree with it–Kava is a recent example, Australia has been cracking down on Kava due to concerns about the health risk, and using both controlled substances and food standards regulation to do so; New Zealand has been unwilling to go along due to its cultural importance to New Zealand's Pasifika (Pacific Islander) minority.
The issue is that the neighbouring countries are generally a lot poorer, and many of them are small island states, often with a shaky track record on democracy, so it just isn't politically and economically feasible to integrate them into the same economic relations as Australia and New Zealand have. There has been some talk of turning the Pacific Islands Forum, the regional international organisation, into a "Pacific Union", by expanding Australia/New Zealand's de facto economic union to the whole bloc. But realistically I think that's decades away, if it ever happens. And unless and until that happens, there is no real need to put the Australia/New Zealand economic union on a more formal footing.
We can send beer to your enemy in hopes they opt for boozing rather than shooting.
Also, they would like to sell things to and buy things from Germany and France, and the rest of the EU.
Economics determines military power. If Germany wants to build a military, they can and now they are, to a significant extent.
The big wave of accessions from former eastern bloc countries was partly driven by the promise of huge transfer subsidies, but those are now being made retroactively conditional on things like only voting in left wing parties and who knows what else in future. Not so directly appealing anymore.
Thefuck? The EU has been making everything conditional on privatization, deregulation and generally adopting more capitalist models in practically every aspect of government. You're calling this left wing??
A few examples of the demands: sell off our largest and state-owned bank; decouple, deregulate and privatize electricity generation and sale; open the up publicly-owned railways to private operators; increase the minimum age of retirement...
But I'm referring to the withdrawal of cohesion funds from countries like Poland and Hungary under newly invented rules like needing to share "EU values". These values aren't defined or written down anywhere, but the only countries that seem to violate them are those with conservative parties in power. The moment the conservatives are no longer in power, suddenly the country is in compliance with "EU values" again.
Plenty of conservative governments are in the EU. Freedom and democracy - which mean an independent judiciary and free and independent press - are not left-wing ideas!
So yes they are written down. And rightly so. Being conservative is fine but telling others how to live their life is not.
However this is indeed not the reason for the withdrawal of funds as others have mentioned.
Given the limits of oceans and seas, and Russia and Turkey to the east, there's not much more of Europe left that hasn't joined. They've actually succeeded in uniting almost all of Europe - pretty effing incredible, an historic achievement that will be admired for millennia.
A bureaucracy is a body of non-elected government officials.
The EU parliament is elected and the EU council is indirectly elected.
Trump-inspired conservatives are on their ways to be guaranteed majority at the next federal elections.
Canadians are just tired of Justin Trudeau after almost 10 years. Which happens to even the best of leaders, and JT is far from it.