People forget that bilateral trade agreements were the rule before the EU. In fact, the seeds of the EU were planted in a bilateral trade agreement between Belgium and the Netherlands just after World War II. It was later expanded to include Luxembourg (BENELUX) and became the basis for the Common Market and EEC.
Had the EU stuck to the trade benefits of the EEC and not expanded to micromanagement and open borders advocacy, there never would've even been a Brexit vote.
The German elites do not regard themselves as doing anything separate from the EU, which of late they make it plain they think they own.
The EEC had the framework for today’s micromanagement, and its beginnings in the form of not only the bureaucracy but also a common agricultural policy. It was always intended to be political, what with the intent “to establish an ever-closer union among the European peoples” and “to ensure the economic and social progress of their countries by common action in eliminating the barriers which divide Europe” made plain in the first two lines of the preamble of the 1957 Treaty of Rome.