Contrary to some post's about war in Europe being avoided because of a "trading bloc". The formation of the EU was of it's time, that time has past, it is in the past: the last Century, and the EU has not moved on. As part of that trading bloc, the EU has ensnared through access to the single market, via treaties and agreements that when they come up for renewal, have clauses and hooks, to ensure that EEA and EFTA country's are compelled to become ever deeper embedded into the 'ever closer union' structure of all or nothing culture of the EU.
With ever increasing involvement with the single market/ customs union, the Sovereign state of each Country is diminished until it no longer exists., completely absorbed, with illusionary 'domestic policy' left to the individual Country's, of course there is a clause that also removes that unreal power as well. All, disguised in the small print, under the heading of trade in a single market.
It's important to focus on the current dissatisfaction of the citizens of the EU, in Italy, Germany, Hungary, Bulagaria, Slovakia, Greece. The politics of the EEA country's has polarised to extreme politics, as a backlash against the EU's free movement of people, economic austerity, high unemployment, pressure on housing, services, education, health services because of unplanned population expansion in some country's. The formation of ghetto's where dissatisfaction and disillusioned legal migrants feel excluded. The EU has stagnated since 2008. In the EU's attempt to create a United Nations of Europe, making itself an unelected 'state', using a single market access and open borders as a 'come and buy me' tempter, in this it has become revealed for what it is, an unelected closed shop capitalist corporate organisation pretending to be a democracy, and what is worse some have all fallen for it and are trapped in it.