Even more gold expected for smaller but unified EU team. Doesn't the high EU gold count just reflect the large number of competitors sent by all the individual EU nations? Not at all! It's quality, not quantity that matters. If the EU sent only its three best athletes per individual event, and only one all-star team per team event, the EU gold count would actually increase, since almost all individual events are won by one of the top three favorites (sending additional inferior athletes is usually in vain), and the unified EU all-star teams also would win many team events (4 x 100m relays etc) currently won by non-EU teams.

In fact, team events bias the Olympics towards large countries dominating certain fields, in particular, gymnastics or swimming, where competitions are highly correlated in the sense that single athletes frequently win several different events. The most highly decorated athletes are either Soviet gymnasts or US swimmers who collected many team medals (relays etc) in addition to several individual medals - impossible for a superb athlete from a small country such as Denmark, or for the lone "king of athletes" who wins the 10-event Decathlon, but nothing else.

Note that we can safely ignore silver and bronze medals used in (inofficial) IOC rankings to break the tie where gold counts are equal. (If we added the silver and bronze counts of individual EU nations, we'd overestimate what a unified EU would get, since in events with only one team per nation (e.g., handball) the unified EU could not win silver or bronze in addition to the gold.)

Per capita rankings have been traditionally dominated by Norway (e.g., Winter 1998: 10 golds / 5 million people = 2000 golds per billion capita) and East Germany (e.g., Summer 1980: 47 golds / 16 million people = 2900 gpbc, 1988: 2300 gpbc). In some Olympics very small countries with a single gold-winning athlete achieved even higher values, but not on a routine basis - these were statistical flukes.