European Union

The most far-reaching voluntary pooling of sovereignty in history, built deliberately out of coal and steel because those were what wars were made of. The project began in 1951 with six countries placing their coal and steel industries under a common authority - a technical arrangement chosen precisely because it made a Franco-German war materially impossible rather than merely undesirable. The Treaty of Rome in 1957 created a common market, and successive treaties added a directly elected parliament, a single market in goods, services, capital and people, a common currency from 1999, and a court whose rulings take precedence over national law - the feature that makes the union genuinely different from any other international organisation. Enlargement took it from six members to twenty-eight, most consequently in 2004 when eight former communist states joined, which anchored democratic and market reforms across central Europe. The Schengen agreement removed internal border checks for most members. The euro crisis after 2009 exposed the difficulty of a shared currency without shared fiscal policy, and austerity in Greece became the sharpest test of the arrangement. Britain voted to leave in 2016 and did so in 2020, the first member ever to withdraw. The union responded to the pandemic with joint borrowing for the first time. It received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. Its regulatory reach extends well beyond its borders through market access. Twenty-seven states are now members. The union was established under that name by the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. Brussels hosts the Commission and Council and Strasbourg the Parliament. Its members hold around 450 million people. Twenty countries use the euro.

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