You might be right but you are missing a lot of nuance here. For instance, yes, Italy is not thinking about growth, true. But Poland? Poland is all about growth, they just made the list of the richest 20 countries in the world.

The real problem here is that EU as an economic block is much less integrated than people think. Pensions? Not integrated. Health insurance? Partially integrated. Exit taxes? A complete mess. Languages? Try speaking English or German or French in Spain. Etc.

EU has demonstrated that you can have local identities (I feel more Neapolitan than "Italian", for instance) and one economic block. Unfortunately, the economic block integration is not as deep as you might expect.