The founding logic of the EU, and the euro.

2015. FT

For years, Italy and Brussels have squabbled, made peace and fought again over how to regulate food and wine produced in the eurozone’s third’s-largest economy. But a new row has now burst into the open after the EU demanded that Italy scrap a 1974 law — banning the use of powdered and condensed milk in cheese — on the grounds that it represents a “restriction to the free movement of goods”.

 2010. Bloomberg (repeat)

Italian rules allowing candy makers including Nestle SA to label their products as “pure chocolate” breach European Union law, the region’s highest court said.
Permitting chocolate made from pure cocoa butter to be called “cioccolato puro,” or “pure chocolate,” clashes with EU-wide measures which allow chocolate laced with vegetable fats to be marketed as chocolate, the tribunal in Luxembourg said.
EU law “makes no provision for the sales name pure chocolate,” the court said. Allowing an extra sales name for chocolate that contains no vegetable fat “is likely to mislead consumers and thus interfere with their right to obtain correct, neutral and objective information.”

 etc

German roofers were under pressure from the EU a few years ago because in Germany you were not allowed to start your own company without 7 or 8 years of experience, and other countries were far less strict. But German roofers were considered the best in Europe. At the same time small batch cheese makers in Switzerland are under pressure now from industrial cheese manufacturers in Germany, who buy up all the milk. 

If generalizations are truth then so are mediocrities.