Conclusion:
It is hard to think of any major function of a State which the new European Union will not have once the Lisbon Treaty is ratified. The main one seems to be the power to make its Member States go to war against their will. The Treaty does provide that the EU may go to war while individual Member States may "constructively abstain".

The obligation on the Union to "provide itself with the means necessary to attain its objectives and carry through its policies" (Art. TEC/TFU 269 a), which means raising its "own resources" to finance them, may be regarded as conferring on it wide taxation and revenue-raising powers, although these will require unanimity to exercise.  

Currently public expenditure and the tax measures needed to finance it remain overwhelmingly at national state level. This is because such social services as health, education, social security and public housing, as well as defence, policing and public transport - the government functions which cost most money - are still mainly at this level.

However the new European Union will have its own government, with a legislative, executive and judicial arm, its own political President, its own citizens and citizenship, its own human and civil rights code, its own currency, economic policy and revenue, its own international treaty-making powers, foreign policy, foreign minister, diplomatic corps and United Nations voice, its own crime and justice code and Public Prosecutor. It already possesses such normal State symbols as its own flag, anthem, motto and annual official holiday.

As regards the State authority of the new Union, it is embodied in the Union' s own executive, legislative and judicial institutions: the European Council, Council of Ministers, Commission, Parliament and Court of Justice.  

It is also embodied in the Member States and their authorities as they implement and apply EU law and interpret and apply national law in conformity with Union law. Member States will be constitutionally required to do this under the Lisbon Treaty. Thus EU "State authorities" as represented for example by soldiers and policemen in EU uniforms on our streets are not needed as such.

Allowing for the special features of each case, all the classical Federal States which have been formed on the basis of power being surrendered by lower constituent states to a higher Federal authority have developed in a gradual way, just as has happened in the case of the European Union. Nineteenth century Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia are classical examples.  

Indeed the EU has accumulated its powers much more rapidly than some of these Federal States - in the short historical time-span of some sixty years. 

The key difference between these classical Federations and the new European Union is that the former, once their people had settled, share a common language, history, culture and national solidarity that gave them a democratic basis and made their State authority popularly legitimate and acceptable.  

All stable States are founded on such communities where people speak a common language and mutually identify with one another as one people - a "We".

In the EU however there is no European people or "demos", except statistically. The Lisbon Treaty is an attempt to construct a highly centralised European Federation artificially, from the top down, out of Europe's many nations, peoples and States, without their free consent and knowledge. If there were to be a European Federation that is democratic and acceptable, the minimum constitutional requirement for it would be that its laws would be initiated and approved by the directly elected representatives of the people either in the European Parliament or the National Parliaments.

Unfortunately, neither the Lisbon Treaty nor the EU Constitution it establishes contains any such proposal.

By giving a Constitution indirectly rather than directly to the new European Union which it will establish, the Lisbon Treaty sets in place what Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt has called the "capstone of a European Federal State". 

For the Euro-federalist political elites who have been driving this process over decades this is the culmination of what started nearly 60 years ago when the 1950 Schuman Declaration, which is commemorated annually on 9 May, Europe Day, proclaimed the European Coal and Steel Community to be the "first step in the federation of Europe". The peoples of Europe do not want this kind of highly centralized Federal European Union whose most striking feature is that it is run virtually entirely by committees of politicians, bureaucrats and judges, none of whom are directly elected by the people.

The Constitutional Treaty setting it up has already been rejected by the French and the Dutch in 2005. As French President Nicolas Sarkozy has admitted, the Prime Ministers and Presidents have agreed among themselves on no account to have referendums on the Renamed Constitutional Treaty, for that would be rejected everywhere again. Only the Irish are enabled to have their say on it because of the constitutional case taken before the Supreme Court by the late Raymond Crotty. That action by that great Irishman stopped the State's politicians of that time from ratifying a previous European Treaty, the Single European Act, in an unconstitutional manner.