European Union countries - list

Which countries are part of the European Union? Good question. If a country decides to become part of the European Union, it needs to have the agreement of the EU nowadays. Than, it becomes what they call a 'member state', which is the EU's difficult language for 'EU country'. So here's a map to see the expansion throughout time:

This map is made by Kolja21 with this license.

Actually, European integration began before 1957. In 1951, the six 'founding members' started the European Coal and Steel Community. Basically, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg and Germany decided 'let's work together on coal and steel!'. The plan was to prevent Germany from arming itself again by creating a common market for coal and steel, which are necessary for producing weapons.

Fun fact: Algeria was part of the European club once, since it wasn't independent yet. You can see it's still part of France in 1957.

The first expansion occurred in 1973, when the United Kingdom, Denmark and Ireland joined. By then, the name had changed into European Communities. Greenland was still part of Denmark at that time, you can see it on the map. In 1981, Greece joined the club, but blocked the accession of Spain and Portugal until 1986.

In 1990 Germany became one, and the Eastern part of Germany got membership as an extra. Two years later, the name changed again in European Union, which Austria, Sweden and Finland joined in 1995. 9 years later, a very large number of new Member States at the East of the EU were welcomed: the Baltic states Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia; Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary. 2 islands were joined at the same time: Cyprus and Malta.

In 2007, Bulgaria and Romania joined as well as Croatia in 2013. Which adds up to 28 Member States.

You may wonder: who's next? There's a few official candidates: Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. Bosnia-Herzegovina has applied, but is not an official candidate, meaning the procedure was started to become part of the EU. Norway, Iceland and Switzerland are countries that do not want to be part of the EU. Read more about the candidates here.