What Is the European Union (EU)?
The European Union (EU) is a political and economic alliance of 27 countries. The EU promotes democratic values in its member nations and is one of the world’s most powerful trade blocs. Nineteen of the countries share the Euro as their Official Currency.
The EU’s members are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden. The United Kingdom, which had been a founding member of the EU, left the organization in 2020.
History of the European Union (EU):
After the First World War, but particularly with Second World War, internationalism was gaining, with the creation of the Bretton Woods System in 1944, The United Nations in 1945 and The French Union (1946–1958), the latter directing decolonization by possibly integrating its colonies into a European community.
In this light European integration was seen, already during the war, as an antidote to the extreme nationalism which had devastated parts of the continent. The Ventotene prison Manifesto of 1941 by Altiero Spinelli propagated European integration through the Italian Resistance and after 1943 through the European Federalist Movement.
Winston Churchill called in 1943 for a post-war “Council of Europe” and on 19 September 1946, at the University of Zürich, coincidentally parallel to the Hertenstein Congress of the Union of European Federalists, for a United States of Europe.
What Is the Purpose of the European Union?
The European Union was created to bind the nations of Europe closer together for the economic, social, and security welfare of all. It is one of several efforts after World War II to bind together the nations of Europe into a single entity.
Timeline:
Since the end of World War II, sovereign European countries have entered into treaties and thereby co-operated and harmonised policies (or pooled sovereignty) in an increasing number of areas, in the European integration project or the construction of Europe (French: la construction européenne). The following timeline outlines the legal inception of the European Union (EU)—the principal framework for this unification. The EU inherited many of its present responsibilities from the European Communities (EC), which were founded in the 1950s in the spirit of the Schuman Declaration.
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