More than 340 million EU citizens in 19 countries now use it as their currency and enjoy its benefits.
The EU has delivered more than half a century of peace, stability and prosperity, helped raise living standards and launched a single European currency: the euro. What began as a purely economic union has evolved into an organisation spanning many different policy areas – from climate, environment and health to external relations and security, justice and migration. Since then, 22 more countries have joined (the United Kingdom left the EU on 31 January 2020) and a huge single market (also known as the internal market) has been created and continues to develop towards its full potential. The result was the European Economic Community, created in 1958 with the initial aim of increasing economic cooperation between six countries: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The first step was to foster economic cooperation, based on the idea that countries that trade with one another become economically interdependent and so are more likely to avoid conflict. The EU that we know today has its roots in several treaties signed in the aftermath of the Second World War. The European Union (EU) is a unique economic and political union between 27 European countries.
