EU

EU

The European Union, abbreviated as EU, is an economic and political union of 28 European countries. The EU was established on 1 November 1993 by the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty)

On 31 December 1994, the EU had 12 Member States: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom

From January 1995, the EU added three Member States: Austria, Finland and Sweden

In May 2004, 10 more countries joined the EU: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia. On 1 January 2007, Bulgaria and Romania became members of the EU. The latest country to accede was Croatia, on 1 July 2013

The EU has a surface area of 4 413 844 km_, 505 701 172 inhabitants (January 2013, provisional) and 24 official languages. The EU Member States are as follows (alphabetical order, first row down, then second row down, etc.):

Austria (AT) Estonia (EE) Italy (IT) Portugal (PT)

Belgium (BE) Finland (FI) Latvia (LV) Romania (RO)

Bulgaria (BG) France (FR) Lithuania (LT) Slovakia (SK)

Croatia (HR) Germany (DE) Luxembourg (LU) Slovenia (SI)

Cyprus (CY) Greece (EL) Malta (MT) Spain (ES)

Czech Republic (CZ) Hungary (HU) Netherlands (NL) Sweden (SE)

Denmark (DK) Ireland (IE) Poland (PL) United Kingdom (UK)

EU and Europe

There is an entry on eu in the European legal encyclopedia.

Eu

EU and the European Union

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See Also

• European Union

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See Also

Further Reading

• Information related to eu in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Law(MPEPIL), Germany, United Kingdom

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See Also

Further Reading

• Entry “EU” in the work “A Concise Encyclopedia of the European Union from Aachen to Zollverein”, by Rodney Leach (Profile Books; London)

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Further Information

Europa – The official website of the European Union

See Also

Candidate countries

Council of the European Union

EU enlargements

European Commission (EC)

European Parliament (EP)