European Union Wikipedia

All in all, Europe enjoys a considerable and long-exploited resource base of soil, forest, sea, and minerals (notably coal), but its people are increasingly its principal resource. Among the alternative boundaries proposed by geographers that have gained wide acceptance is a scheme that sees the crest of the Greater Caucasus range as the dividing line between Europe and Asia, placing Ciscaucasia, the northern part of the Caucasus region, in Europe and Transcaucasia, the southern part, in Asia. Europe’s boundaries have been especially uncertain, and hence much debated, on the east, where the continent merges, without sundering physical boundaries, with parts of https://www.eusfs.eu/ western Asia.

The empire of ancient Rome, at its greatest extent in the 2nd century ce, revealed, and imprinted its culture on, much of the face of the continent. As a conceptual construct, Europa, as the more learned of the ancient Greeks first conceived it, stood in sharp contrast to both Asia and Libya, the name then applied to the known northern part of Africa. Indented by numerous bays, fjords, and seas, continental Europe’s highly irregular coastline is about 24,000 miles (38,000 km) long. Europe’s largest islands and archipelagoes include Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land, Svalbard, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the British Isles, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Crete, and Cyprus. Drivers and commuters have been warned to allow extra time for their journeys due to protests on roads. The explosion at a service station in Creeslough, County Donegal, on 7 October 2022 killed ten people.

Like many other parts of Eurasia, these territories were overrun by the Mongols. In the east, a resurgent Byzantine Empire recaptured Crete and Cyprus from the Muslims, and reconquered the Balkans. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Reconquista concluded with the fall of Granada in 1492, ending over seven centuries of Islamic rule in the south-western peninsula. Feudalism developed in France in the Early Middle Ages, and soon spread throughout Europe. During the High Middle Ages the population of Europe experienced significant growth, culminating in the Renaissance of the 12th century.

Three Greek MPs quit over EU farm subsidy scandal, state TV says

• The first recorded usage of Eurṓpē as a geographic term is in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, in reference to the western shore of the Aegean Sea.
• Likewise, the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is the fisheries policy of the European Union.
• Europe’s population increased from about 100 million in 1700 to 400 million by 1900.
• In March 1948 the Treaty of Brussels was signed, establishing the Western Union (WU), followed by the International Authority for the Ruhr.

Across the EU, belief was higher among women, older people, those with religious upbringing, those who left school at 15 or 16, and those “positioning themselves on the right of the political scale”. The most religious countries were Malta (95 per cent, predominantly Catholic) as well as Cyprus and Romania (both predominantly Orthodox) each with about 90 per cent of citizens professing a belief in God. Into the 21st century, many countries have experienced falling church attendance and membership. The other world religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism are also represented in the EU population. In 2009, the EU had an estimated Muslim population of 13 million, and an estimated Jewish population of over a million. Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union recognises the “status under national law of churches and religious associations” as well as that of “philosophical and non-confessional organisations”.

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27 European states are members of the politico-economic European Union, 26 of the border-free Schengen Area and 21 of the monetary union Eurozone. With the exception of Fennoscandia and northern Russia, few areas of untouched wilderness are currently found in Europe, except for various national parks. Europe’s most significant feature is the dichotomy between highland and mountainous Southern Europe and a vast, partially underwater, northern plain ranging from Ireland in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east.

France and Italy are also the only EU countries that have power projection capabilities outside of Europe. Since the withdrawal of the United Kingdom, France is the only member officially recognised as a nuclear weapon state and the sole holder of a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Following the Kosovo War in 1999, the European Council agreed that “the Union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and the readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises without prejudice to actions by NATO”.