We can never underestimate how even the core EU bodies confuse people - never mind the extra pillars and other organisations. The second proposition is that in any system where you have competing political institutions, there is an inevitable, almost Darwinian, struggle for supremacy. That's obvious when examining the events of the past six months. The resignation of the Commission was not purely about maladministration. It was also about one institution, the Parliament, engaging in a power raid on another.
Institutional war is a trait of almost all national political cultures, throughout history.
It happened, for example, in the English civil war. But one can make a comparison by saying the sums of money involved in that episode were, in monetary terms, almost exactly the same as that stolen every year from the British social security budget in fraud. If you try to imagine in a British context, the Commons voting to sack the cabinet because of social security fraud, which is completely unthinkable, you get a different angle on the usual idea that Brussels is apolitical, undemocratic and flaccid. We aren't yet at the stage of a tumescent European democracy but things, at least, are beginning to warm up. Either European institutions constantly compete, causing endless unease, or else they will be held together and the competition formalised in a constitution, one with enough popular assent to keep it in play for a lengthy period of time.