I disagree with this view, competitions make countries specialized and become efficient. What you need is a free-market where goods and services can be traded with minimum restrictions. No need to create a government on top of legitimately elected governments, telling them to do stuff, etc.
A few things of note here though:
1) Introducing a common currency removed a lot of friction for exchanging goods and services within the Eurozone
2) The much hated normalization of product standards on EU level vs national level serves the same goal
And most importantly:
3) EU representatives are democratically elected by the citizens of its member states