This is the other part: if associate membership is a thing then won't half of the EU start thinking that's their future?
Because you simply wouldn't be offered the option of just deescalating your full membership to an associate membership. If you want to leave, you leave fully, and then in time we can discuss what happens next. Also, obviously an associate membership shouldn't feel more desirable than full integration if you're eligible to both. Indeed from the UK's perspective it would be exactly the opposite to what they wanted: free labor and movement but no representation.
Almost like many of the EU states were misled into their current situations.
"Being misled" is obviously nonsense that deserves no further comment.
Which many people inside the EU would observe seems completely consistent with EU behaviour.
Edit to add: "Being misled" would refer to the way the EU was sold to many participants in earlier decades as an economic union, and not an all encompassing political one, with it simply ratcheting that way. Whenever objections occurred referenda would simply be repeated until the populations complied. It's far from the exercise in democracy that proponents promote. (This is distinct from saying it is _all bad_).
Human cooperation does not mean misleading your compatriots into deals that you then ratchet up ever further until it becomes completely intolerable.
There are reasons that in the long run flexibility wins.
Mostly, like, the right to have, say, your own standards on chemical safety, tho. That is generally not something that most people would _want_; it basically just means you lose your job because import/export becomes, if not impossible, at least bureaucratically expensive enough that people will just buy from elsewhere.
Presumably by "half of the EU" you mean (sometimes) euro-sceptic states like Hungary or Poland? Well, these are not in EU because some illuminati/lizard people tricked them into joining and now won't allow them to leave, like some of their politicians would like you to believe, but because they enjoy billions of subsidies per year.
This was even a joke in the UK at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYqB0uTKlE
The Brits have a habit of only telling you the precise truth when they think you think they're joking.
This wasn’t intentional of the people who started the cogs turning, it was meant to be an empty gesture to get elected, no one expected it to actually pass.
Of course the set of countries and level of integration depends on whom you ask
I am of the view the UK should never have joined as a full member, and it would have been better to establish the two speed membership way back then, allowing France and Germany particularly to engage in further integration without mutual interference involving the UK.