Interesting questions you raise @neavvy.

My own opinion is always that a true free market will always out perform centralized authoritarian control in the arena of providing solutions.

The EU (and it's central banking controlled officiators) absolutely believe that solutions are a zero sum game. That is, they believe that in order to fix something, something else must be broken. In order to help someone, someone else must be hurt. Therefore, all of their "solutions" will be "lowest common denominator" solutions and will be forever hamstrung.

EU's GDP doesn't need to match or out perform the USA's or China's. The constituent countries would benefit most by learning self-reliance, balance and harmony within their own local regions... and then advancing in productivity through inner efficiency. The EU will never allow one member country to do this without exploiting it's success and passing out the wealth to bail out other countries which haven't improved their practices. In effect, the economic authority of the EU actually keeps it's member countries down.

The EU "philosophy" has demonized achievement and success and engendered a self-defeating quality of "European Guilt" in the minds of Europeans... it is, nothing less than a traitorous pact supported by skeaving mega-bankers who've weaseled their way into influential positions in the member country's political, financial and legal circles.

The best possible answer for anyone in the EU, is to physically remove the cancer of "EU" (meaning those corrupted globalist and central banking aligned policy makers) from their countries, reclaim their sovereignty, and then go about making REAL change locally.

You definitely don't want to compare yourself to the USA (in GDP or anything else)... which is eating itself from within and will eventually suck the (petro-dollar pegged) EU economy down with it after the next big economic bubble creates a catastrophic collapse (in which the central bankers are even now positioning themselves for cannibalizing that corpse).