The European Union

After two world wars fought partly over the Franco-German border region rich in coal and iron, French planner Jean Monnet and foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed in 1950 to pool French and West German coal and steel production under one authority. If no country could privately stockpile the raw materials of war, no country could secretly prepare for one. This became the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, with six founding members: France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The same six signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, creating the European Economic Community. From there membership widened in waves: Britain, Ireland, and Denmark in 1973, Greece in 1981, Spain and Portugal in the 1980s, a large wave of former communist states in central and eastern Europe after 2004, reaching twenty-seven members today.

The Union runs on institutions that balance national and shared power. The European Commission proposes laws, the Council of the European Union represents national governments, and the European Parliament is directly elected by citizens; a directive becomes binding law only after Commission proposal and approval from both Council and Parliament. The single market, completed in stages through the 1980s and 1990s, went past tariff removal to harmonize product standards and professional licensing and to open free movement of capital, services, and workers, dissolving the non-tariff barriers that still split national economies.

That expansion looked irreversible until 2016, when Britain voted to leave, becoming the first member ever to exit rather than join, formally departing in 2020 after years of negotiation over trade and borders.