Glossary:European Union (EU)
The European Union, abbreviated as EU, is an economic and political union of 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, Czechia, 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.
On 31 January 2020, the United Kingdom left the EU.
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) |
| Czechia | (CZ) | Hungary | (HU) | Netherlands | (NL) | Sweden | (SE) |
| Denmark | (DK) | Ireland | (IE) | Poland | (PL) |