> So in practice the EEC was renamed to the EEA

It was not renamed to the EEA, in practice or otherwise. The EEA is a geographic part of Europe based on an agreement between the EFTA, the EU, and the various member states. The EEC was a supranational organisation with a whole internal structure (council, parliament, etc). They are not even the same kind of entity.

You can argue about the roles of these different bodies and how some of them were superseded by some others. Although non-EU, EEA member states are outside both the CPA and the CFP, which were cornerstones of the EEC. The EEA is not some mythical, ideologically pure version of the EU as it was back when it was only a common market (it never was). It’s a completely different thing. It was initially a way of functioning for countries that wanted to be close to the EC, but not too close. Saying that the EEA is the EEC renamed is plainly, factually wrong.

The EEC was renamed the EC and disappeared in 2009, at which point the EEA had been existing for 15 years.

Too late to edit, but of course

> both the CPA and the CFP

Should be “both the CAP [common agriculture policy] and the CFP [common fisheries policy]”.

> The EEA has much the same scope as the EEC.

The EEA had several significant exclusions compared to the EEC/EC at the time of its founding: agriculture and fisheries (although it has some application to trade in those products), customs, external trade, taxation, monetary policy. Furthermore, under the Amsterdam treaty (effective 1999) the EC gained responsibilities for immigration, visas, asylum, and judicial cooperation in civil law (which were transferred from the non-EC part of the EU), and the EEA was not extended to cover those new areas (although some of them apply to the EEA member states through their independent membership of Schengen). The EEA is also excluded from the scope of the EU trade mark (f.k.a. community trade mark) and EU unitary patents. The EEA agreement promises future negotiations on extending EU patents to the EEA, but thus far nothing much has happened there, in part because actually getting a common EU patent system up and running turned out to be very difficult and despite being first proposed in the 1970s it took until 2023 to actually become a reality (the biggest obstacle, but not the only one, has been Spain's objection to Spanish not being one of the official languages of the EU patent system–the ultimate solution was to effectively give Spain an opt-out from it)

> Furthermore, under the Amsterdam treaty (effective 1999) the EC gained responsibilities for immigration, visas, asylum, and judicial cooperation in civil law (which were transferred from the non-EC part of the EU), and the EEA was not extended to cover those new areas (although some of them apply to the EEA member states through their independent membership of Schengen).

Exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. So the EEA is a much closer successor to the EEC than the EC, which has a significantly expanded scope, is.

Exactly the reason you're wrong about this. If there is an official document saying that the successor to A is B, and 450 million people accept this as an "official document" and a fact, there is not much point in you saying that successor to A is rather C, because you THINK that would make more sense...

There's also the Council of Europe, which has an almost identical flag as the EU but is completely unrelated to it. Not to be confused with the European Council, one of the ruling bodies of the EU.