Jim, I share some of your idealism, but the problem is that Juncker/the EU got way too far ahead of himself/itself.
Properly done, the EU and similar regional entities could end up merging into some kind of world government, let's say in a few hundred years. But the EU of the last 40 years made a hash of it, grabbing too much undemocratic power too soon.
The way it should work is that the higher the "authority", the wider the power but the shallower the power over individuals. A future world government should set very broad rules/objectives/direction, and the future world president should have very little centralised power over individual people; at the other extreme, your local (country or city) government should have more power over you personally, and likewise you have more power over voting them in and out.
In practice though, the EU seems to consider its role to be to protect its people from their local governments. In order to do that, it has to be more powerful than those local governments, and that's been the problem ...