Countries in the EU and EEA

It was introduced in 2009 with the Treaty of Lisbon, which formally enshrined fisheries conservation policy as one of the handful of “exclusive competences” reserved for the European Union. Likewise, the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is the fisheries policy of the European Union. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the agricultural policy of the European Union. Günter Verheugen, the European Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry, has stated that even though the EU is “a world leader in the technology”, it was “being put on the defensive by the United States and Russia and that it only has about a 10-year technological advantage on China and India, which are racing to catch up”. Of the EU members that are not part of the Schengen Area, one—Cyprus—is legally obligated to join the area in the future; Ireland maintains an opt-out, and instead operates its own visa policy.

There are about 150 regional and minority languages in the EU, spoken by up to 50 million people. Luxembourgish (in Luxembourg) and Turkish (in Cyprus) are the only two national languages that are not official languages of the EU. The most widely spoken language in the EU is English; the language is spoken by 50 per cent of the population and studied by 95 per cent of school students, although following the withdrawal of the United Kingdom only 2% of the population speak it natively. Even though language policy is the responsibility of member states, EU institutions promote multilingualism among its citizens.j Paris is followed by Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin, the Ruhr, Milan, and Rome, all with a metropolitan population of over 4 million. Around 1.9 million people immigrated to one of the EU member states from a non-EU country during 2020, and a total of 956,000 people emigrated from a member state to go to a non-EU country during the same year.

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This natural decrease in population is reduced by the fact that more people migrate to Europe from other continents than vice versa. This is slightly more than one ninth of the world’s population.v The population density of Europe (the number of people per area) is the second highest of any continent, behind Asia. In 1999, 12 of the 15 members of the EU joined the Eurozone, replacing their national currencies by the euro. The European Union, a political entity composed of 27 European states, comprises the largest single economic area in the world.

• Member states retain in principle all powers except those that they have agreed collectively to delegate to the union as a whole, though the exact delimitation has on occasions become a subject of scholarly or legal disputes.
• From around 50 million years ago, rising and falling sea levels have determined the actual shape of Europe and its connections with continents such as Asia.
• The 20 EU member states known collectively as the eurozone have fully implemented the currency union by superseding their national currencies with the euro.
• Also in Asia, Europeans, especially the Spanish are an influential minority population in the Philippines.
• Further east, Volga Bulgaria became an Islamic state in the 10th century, but was eventually absorbed into Russia several centuries later.
• Two of the original core objectives of the European Economic Community were the development of a common market, subsequently becoming a single market, and a customs union between its member states.

The total population of the EU has been slightly decreasing for several years, contracting by 0.04 per cent in 2021. The population density across the EU was 106 inhabitants per square kilometre, which is more than the world average. Demographic transition to a society of ageing population, low fertility-rates and depopulation of non-metropolitan regions is tackled within this policies. The five European Structural and Investment Funds are supporting the development of the EU regions, primarily the underdeveloped ones, located mostly in the states of central and southern Europe.

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Europe’s continuing economic achievements are evidenced by its high standard of living and its successes in science, technology, and the arts. Slavic-based civilization dominates much of the territory occupied by the former Soviet Union from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific Ocean. Inhabited plains, with only the minor interruption of the worn-down Urals, extend from central Europe to the Yenisey River in central Siberia. Furthermore, the Mediterranean coastlands of North Africa and southwestern Asia also exhibit some European physical and cultural affinities.

To complement this framework, there is also a European Systemic Risk Board under the responsibility of the central bank. Free movement of capital is intended to permit movement of investments such as property purchases and buying www.eusfs.eu of shares between countries. In 1992, having negotiated the structure and procedures of a currency union, the member states signed the Maastricht Treaty and were legally bound to fulfil the agreed-on rules including the convergence criteria if they wanted to join the monetary union. Of the top 500 largest corporations in the world measured by revenue in 2024, 90 had their headquarters in the EU.

As a whole, Europe’s GDP per capita is US$21,767 according to a 2016 International Monetary Fund assessment. In addition, there is new impetus from the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative across the Suez Canal towards Africa and Asia. The trade between East and West, as well as towards Asia, which had been disrupted for a long time by the two world wars, new borders and the Cold War, increased sharply after 1989. The model of the Blue Banana was designed as an economic geographic representation of the respective economic power of the regions, which was further developed into the Golden Banana or Blue Star. This includes Åland (an autonomous county of Finland), two autonomous territories of the Kingdom of Denmark (other than Denmark proper), three Crown Dependencies and two British Overseas Territories. More recently, the Eurasian Economic Union has been established as a counterpart comprising former Soviet states.

The empire of ancient Rome, at its greatest extent in the 2nd century ce, revealed, and imprinted its culture on, much of the face of the continent. As a conceptual construct, Europa, as the more learned of the ancient Greeks first conceived it, stood in sharp contrast to both Asia and Libya, the name then applied to the known northern part of Africa. Indented by numerous bays, fjords, and seas, continental Europe’s highly irregular coastline is about 24,000 miles (38,000 km) long. Europe’s largest islands and archipelagoes include Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land, Svalbard, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the British Isles, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Crete, and Cyprus. Drivers and commuters have been warned to allow extra time for their journeys due to protests on roads. The explosion at a service station in Creeslough, County Donegal, on 7 October 2022 killed ten people.

The treaty assured mutual assistance in the event of future military aggression against either nation. By 1947, a growing rift between the western Allied Powers and the Soviet Union became evident as a result of the rigged 1947 Polish legislative election, which constituted an open breach of the Yalta Agreement. In 1943 at the Moscow Conference and Tehran Conference, plans to establish joint institutions for a post-war world and Europe increasingly became a part of the agenda. This was expanded on by the 1941 Atlantic Charter, establishing the Allies and their common goals, inciting a new wave of global international institutions like the United Nations (founded 1945) or the Bretton Woods System (1944).

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