Huge reductions in transportation and communication costs in the post-World War II era have increased the economic advantages and facilitated the formation of large markets. This benefits large and populous countries like the United States, China, India, and Brazil, and provides incentives to small countries to cooperate in creating large trade areas. The EU has been most successful in meeting this challenge. Its complex and unique multigovernance structure provides a common and encompassing bundle of market institutions and yet respects the member states’ political autonomy in sensitive policy and executive realms. Its success in promoting trade in goods, services, and capital has been such that until China's forceful entry in world markets in the early 2000s, globalization and Europeanization were virtually the same thing. The solidity of its architecture was evidenced in the 2008–14 period, as it weathered, certainly not without casualties, the Great Recession.

Consensus as the path of least resistance

European integration has proceeded largely through consensual decision-making by the EU member states (and rulings by the European Court of Justice). New members had to commit to and implement the acquis communautaire before joining. This consensus-based process has gradually vested competence and power in EU-level institutions in areas directly and indirectly related to market regulation and the circulation of goods, services, capital, and people.

European integration has thus followed a path of least resistance. Those competences and aspects of governance that are still left largely in the hands of the member states are to a significant extent those which neither citizens nor elites want to transfer to the supranational level (such as taxation) and those for which the citizens’ or their political and economic elites’ dominant preferences diverge the most and are most difficult to reconcile. For instance, whereas citizens in the EU's south tend to favor the strengthening of the EU's competence on issues pertaining to labor relations and welfare state provision, those in the EU's north oppose such strengthening; whereas citizens across the EU support the creation of a European army, the member states’ political elites are still dragging their feet. European integration in areas that remain largely under state control has also become more difficult because the EU has become a very big club.