These increasingly amalgamated bodies grew, with their legal successor the EU, both in size through the accessions of a further 22 states from 1973 to 2013, and in power through acquisitions of policy areas.

This was expanded on by the 1941 Atlantic Charter, establishing the Allies and their common goals, inciting a new wave of global international institutions like the United Nations (founded 1945) or the Bretton Woods System (1944).

[36] By 1947 a growing rift between the western Allied Powers and the Soviet Union became evident as a result of the rigged 1947 Polish legislative election, which constituted an open breach of the Yalta Agreement.

Immediately following the February 1948 coup d'état by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the London Six-Power Conference was held, resulting in the Soviet boycott of the Allied Control Council and its incapacitation, an event marking the beginning of the Cold War.

Furthermore, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), the predecessor of the OECD, was also founded in 1948 to manage the Marshall Plan, which led to the Soviets creating Comecon in response.

West Germany eventually joined both the WEU and NATO in 1955, prompting the Soviet Union to form the Warsaw Pact in 1955 as an institutional framework for its military domination in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

In 1957, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany signed the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community (EEC) and established a customs union.

With further enlargement planned to include the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Cyprus and Malta, the Copenhagen criteria for candidate members to join the EU were agreed upon in June 1993.

In 2004, the EU saw its biggest enlargement to date when Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined the union.

[59] From the beginning of the 2010s, the cohesion of the European Union has been tested by several issues, including a debt crisis in some of the Eurozone countries, a surge in asylum seekers in 2015, and the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the EU.

[81] Of this, €54bn subsidised agriculture enterprise, €42bn was spent on transport, building and the environment, €16bn on education and research, €13bn on welfare, €20bn on foreign and defence policy, €2bn in finance, €2bn in energy, €1.5bn in communications, and €13bn in administration.

In November 2020, two members of the union, Hungary and Poland, blocked approval to the EU's budget at a meeting in the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper), citing a proposal that linked funding with adherence to the rule of law.

Member states retain in principle all powers except those that they have agreed collectively to delegate to the Union as a whole, though the exact delimitation has on occasions become a subject of scholarly or legal disputes.

Its leadership role involves solving disputes between member states and the institutions, and to resolving any political crises or disagreements over controversial issues and policies.

[96] The President retains, as the leader responsible for the entire cabinet, the final say in accepting or rejecting a candidate submitted for a given portfolio by a member state, and oversees the commission's permanent civil service.

The European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) is the prosecutory branch of the union with juridical personality, established under the Treaty of Lisbon between 23 of the 27 states of the EU following the method of enhanced cooperation.

[e] The direct effect and supremacy doctrines were not explicitly set out in the European Treaties but were developed by the Court of Justice itself over the 1960s, apparently under the influence of its then most influential judge, Frenchman Robert Lecourt.

Regulations become law in all member states the moment they come into force, without the requirement for any implementing measures,[h] and automatically override conflicting domestic provisions.

The high representative heads up the European External Action Service (EEAS), a unique EU department[120] that has been officially implemented and operational since 1 December 2010 on the occasion of the first anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon.

The SDGs recognise that all countries must stimulate action in the following key areas – people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership – in order to tackle the global challenges that are crucial for the survival of humanity.

[162] Over the past 50 years, an increasingly dense network of legislation has been created, extending to all areas of environmental protection, including air pollution, water quality, waste management, nature conservation, and the control of chemicals, industrial hazards, and biotechnology.

To prevent the joining states from getting into financial trouble or crisis after entering the monetary union, they were obliged in the Maastricht treaty to fulfil important financial obligations and procedures, especially to show budgetary discipline and a high degree of sustainable economic convergence, as well as to avoid excessive government deficits and limit the government debt to a sustainable level, as agreed in the European Fiscal Pact.

[213] In May 2022, the European Commission published the 'RePowerEU' initiative, a €300 billion plan outlining the path towards the end of EU dependence on Russian fossil fuels by 2030 and the acceleration on the clean energy transition.

It aims at achieving a global, continuous, autonomous, high quality, wide range Earth observation capacity, providing accurate, timely and easily accessible information to, among other things, improve the management of the environment, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change, and ensure civil security.

The five European Structural and Investment Funds are supporting the development of the EU regions, primarily the underdeveloped ones, located mostly in the states of central and southern Europe.

[227] The European Union has long sought to mitigate the effects of free markets by protecting workers' rights and preventing social and environmental dumping.

The new plan was expected to provide the European Union with greater flexibility to target and sanction those responsible for serious human rights violations and abuses around the world.

[254] The EU has 24 official languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish.

Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union[274] recognises the "status under national law of churches and religious associations" as well as that of "philosophical and non-confessional organisations".

[302] This followed lobbying by governing organisations such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, due to objections over the application of free market principles to sport, which led to an increasing gap between rich and poor clubs.