Member state of the European Union
 | It has been suggested that this article be merged with List of European Union member states. (Discuss) Proposed since April 2007. |
A European Union member state is any one of the twenty-seven countries that have joined the European Union (EU) since its inception in 1958 as the European Economic Community (EEC). From an original membership of six states, there have been five successive enlargements, the largest occurring on May 1, 2004, when ten member states joined.
With the addition of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, the EU's membership is now twenty-seven. Negotiations are also underway with other states. The process of enlargement is sometimes referred to as European integration. However, this term is also used to refer to the intensification of cooperation between EU member states as national governments allow for the gradual centralising of power within European institutions. In order to join the European Union, a state needs to fulfill the economic and political conditions generally known as the Copenhagen criteria. That basically requires a secular, democratic government, rule of law and corresponding freedoms and institutions. According to the EU Treaty, each current member state and also the European Parliament have to agree to any enlargement.
Bulgaria and Romania comprise the second part of the EU's fifth enlargement and joined the EU on January 1, 2007. This date was firmly set at the Thessaloniki Summit in 2003 and confirmed at Brussels on June 18, 2004. The country reports of October 2004, and in the final report on September 26, 2006 also affirmed the January 1, 2007 date of accession for both Bulgaria and Romania. Bulgaria and Romania signed their Treaty of Accession on April 25, 2005 at Luxembourg's Neumünster Abbey.
List of member states
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1 On 3 October 1990, the constituent states of the former East Germany acceded to the former West Germany, automatically becoming part of the EU.
2 Greenland left the Community in 1985
3 Saint-Barthélemy and Saint Martin left the EU in 2007.[citation needed]
See also
Lists of European Union member states
Column-generating template families
The templates listed here are not interchangeable. For example, using {{col-float}} with {{col-end}} instead of {{col-float-end}} would leave a <div>...</div> open, potentially harming any subsequent formatting.
| Type | Family | Handles wiki
table code?† |
Responsive/ mobile suited |
Start template | Column divider | End template |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Float | "col-float" | Yes | Yes | {{col-float}} | {{col-float-break}} | {{col-float-end}} |
| "columns-start" | Yes | Yes | {{columns-start}} | {{column}} | {{columns-end}} | |
| Columns | "div col" | Yes | Yes | {{div col}} | – | {{div col end}} |
| "columns-list" | No | Yes | {{columns-list}} (wraps div col) | – | – | |
| Flexbox | "flex columns" | No | Yes | {{flex columns}} | – | – |
| Table | "col" | Yes | No | {{col-begin}}, {{col-begin-fixed}} or {{col-begin-small}} |
{{col-break}} or {{col-2}} .. {{col-5}} |
{{col-end}} |
† Can template handle the basic wiki markup {| | || |- |} used to create tables? If not, special templates that produce these elements (such as {{(!}}, {{!}}, {{!!}}, {{!-}}, {{!)}})—or HTML tags (<table>...</table>, <tr>...</tr>, etc.)—need to be used instead.