The European Council, the meeting of EU leaders, has now agreed on:

The 7-year budget and the Recovery Fund
2030 CO2 emissions reduction target
Next steps in the confrontation with Turkey

If you wanted to know what intergovernmental integration looks like, this is it

The Treaties (Article 15, TEU) have a fairly limited role for the European Council - setting the general political direction

It's telling that it has developed into something much more, giving increasingly specific instructions on the detail of key laws

Legally, climate policy isn't even a decision for the leaders, it's a power held by the co-legislators (Council and Parliament) - and yet the decided it anyway because they wanted to have control

The legal process won't move forward till next week when Environment Ministers meet

And European foreign policy today is massively driven by European Council meetings

The European External Action Service keeps things ticking over but all major events - from summits to sanctions - are driven by the capitals

In other words, the European Council is becoming the go-to forum for pretty well any decision that the EU leaders consider to be important enough

It's much more hands on the steering wheel than the general direction setting that the Treaty actually envisages

Not going to say too much about why this has happened but a reluctance to carry out treaty change and the crises of the early 2010s likely both contributed to a change in psychology about how the leaders fit into EU decision-making

All this to say that not all integration means federation

There is no single person in charge of the EU, but the European Council is probably as close to a 'sovereign' as exists today

@KeohaneDan might interest you