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More powers have been given to the directly elected European Parliament, while national parliaments play a greater role, working alongside the European institutions. Decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen. The EU remains focused on making its governing institutions more transparent and democratic.

The EU aims to develop this huge resource to other areas like energy, knowledge and capital markets to ensure that Europeans can draw the maximum benefit from it. It enables most goods, services, money and people to move freely. The EU’s main economic engine is the single market. Every EU country must treat EU citizens in exactly the same way as its own citizens when it comes to matters of employment, social security and tax. All EU citizens have the right and freedom to choose in which EU country they want to study, work or retire. And it has become much easier to live and work in another country in Europe. Thanks to the abolition of border controls between EU countries, people can travel freely throughout most of the continent. 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. A name change from the European Economic Community to the European Union in 1993 reflected this.

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.

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Since then, 22 more countries joined (and the United Kingdom left the EU in 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 steps were to foster economic cooperation: the idea being that countries that trade with one another become economically interdependent and so more likely to avoid conflict. The predecessor of the EU was created in the aftermath of the Second World War. The European Union (EU) is a unique economic and political union between 27 European countries.