Communist?
As I recall it the current EU was established to stabilize industrial development between Northern and Southern Europe and create something akin to universal European citizenship with a bill of rights (as Europeans can understand such things).
Then there was this little bitty part even Americans don't usually understand here ~ the uniform commercial code. We have one. It's an interstate compact. Europe decided to use the existing structure in Brussels to create their own European uniform commercial code with top down force.
About 99% of EU cultural battles center on that code. The US, by avoiding top down force has no cultural battles with our version.
The result is the folks who used to manufacture volcanic goat cheese in France moved to California ~ lots of French goats there and volcanic ash!
They feel safe for the moment.
The EU was
always meant to be a political union. First clause of the preamble of the
1957 Treaty of Rome (which formed the European Economic Community) says
“DETERMINED to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe” . . . and you can read the rest, including stuff about “eliminat(ing) the barriers which divide Europe” and so on. The Treaty of Maastricht established the “social market economy” as the uniform economy for all its member states.
And back in 2007,
Vladimir Bukovsky (a very famous Soviet dissident) compared the EU successfully to the USSR, and even said the EU was worse than the USSR in many respects.
Don’t say that Americans do not understand the EU. It is Europeans for the most part who do not understand it, even though its intent is more than transparent. So yeah . . . communist.