The EU, as currently constituted, cannot and will not be able to act as an independent power, much less as a pole, in multipolarity. It must change.

Except they probably don't want that.

When the U.S. switched from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, it basically switched from being a collection of independent countries that had a tight military and economic agreement to becoming one country. The States retained part of their sovereignty, which is part of why the U.S. operates so differently from other countries. But we went from something very much like a modern EU/NATO arrangement into a single national state.

Europe isn't likely to ever take that step. For a time, it was a belief among One World Order conspiracists and the like that the European Common Market --> European Union --> Adoption of Euro as currency would eventually lead to a single European country, as a precursor to forcing all the world's nations to merge into a single World Government. But while the ECM --> EU --> Eurozone has led to much greater economic integration, it hasn't really promoted anything close to the integration you saw with other national integration projects back in the day (the U.S., the unifications of Germany and Italy in the late 19th Century, etc.). Folks seem to like having some degree of correspondence between the "People" they belong to and national borders, and the Germans and French and Spaniards etc. don't appear to have any great desire to all be living in a single country the way that the early New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians and Virginians were willing to do back in 1789.