Of course they are in the eye of the beholder. A few that I personally think are bad: - Recent VAT reforms - Cookie law - Treating low taxes as "state aid"

Of course they are in the eye of the beholder. A few that I personally think are bad: - Recent VAT reforms - Cookie law - Treating low taxes as "state aid" (EU Commission will be setting tax rates across the EU soon, just wait) - Having a Parliament that can't make its own laws But if you asked others you might get an answer like "the euro". The EU has no relevance to peace or war. The USA is a much more strongly federalised union than the EU and had a brutal civil war. Most wars today are civil wars. There is absolutely nothing that'd stop the EU having a civil war even if it was incredibly federalised and had become practically a single country, like the USA. What has kept the peace in Europe was avoiding a repeat of the Treaty of Versaille, nuclear weapons, NATO, and the fact that European countries are now all mature democracies (the latter is imo the most important).