It was a different time. I reckon the same acquisition, today, would not get approval from the much-beefed-up EU regulatory authority (i.e. the competition commissioner).
It's too late to fix the past, but we can avoid making the same mistakes in the future, if we continue to work towards federal structures.
We had one. Europay International was the "E" in the "EMV" smart payment card standard, and they used to dominate the European payment card industry.
They merged with MasterCard in 2002.