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It is clear that when we talk about Europe we talk about the continent: a geographically delimited cluster of territories. But when other political concepts come into sight, such as “European Union”, “Schengen” or “Eurozone”; the definition and the differences among them is not so clear. Let’s try to unwrap them to understand better.

The European Union is mainly an economic and political union of some – right now, twenty seven – of the Nation-States that are part of Europe as a continent. The EU takes its origins in some treaties signed after World War II, whose main goal was to stimulate economic cooperation with the objective of avoiding further conflicts. The EU has been growing and growing since then, expanding its members and competences to topics outside economy, such as health, justice or environment, to name a few. 

The European Union is founded over some shared values that govern the Community. These are listed in the second article of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU): The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail. 

These are values connected to the concept of democracy, which is the base of the EU. The Union is founded on the representative democratic principle, since the citizens are represented by the European Parliament and the States are represented by the European Council and the Council of the European Union. 

The citizens of the European Union, who are at the same time citizens of their home State, are granted some specific political rights, such as voting for their representatives and presenting themselves as european candidates. Another kind of rights that they are granted is the free circulation among the member States of the EU, which also implies the freedom to work in any of them. This is possible thanks to the Schengen Agreement, which leads us to the next concept.

The Schengen Agreement was signed in 1985 and it eliminates the controls in many of the internal borders of the EU, which is what allows citizens to move around freely. The peculiarity of the Schengen agreement is that it does not affect all of the State Members of the EU and, at the same time, it does affect some States that are not members of the EU. In the first group, we find Bulgaria, Ireland, Croatia, Cyprus and Romania; and in the second we find Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. 

A similar situation happened with the Eurozone. The Eurozone is the set of State Members that adopted the euro as their official currency, forming a monetary union. But not all twenty-seven Members are part of the Eurozone, only twenty of them are, even though all of them are supposed to adopt it in the future (all except Denmark, which signed for an exception).

After these concepts have been explained, some questions may arise. For example, when talking about the European Union, it is common to wonder who is in charge of deciding and carrying out policies, since both Member States and the Union itself have legislative, executive, and judicial competencies. The first thing we have to understand to answer this question is the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is the autonomous and complete power over a territory, and it resides in the State Members. When they enter the European Union, they voluntarily transfer part of their power and competencies to the Union, even though the sovereignty itself remains in the State Members (because they are the ones that decide to cede these competencies, which we call the “attribution principle”). There are mainly three kinds of competencies: the ones that remain under the power of the Member States, the shared competencies between the Members and the EU, and the exclusive competencies of the Union.

It is also common to wonder about the organs and the powers of the Union. The EU has all of three main powers: legislative, executive and judicial. The legislative and executive mainly remain in the European Parliament and the Council, which usually have a balance of power when it comes to legislating. This means that they need to agree on the content of the policies to carry them out. 

In the matter of judicial power, the EU has as its institution The Court of Justice of the European Union. The main competencies of this Court are to assure that the application and interpretation of European law are correct, to control the legality of the acts of the European institutions, and to assure that the State Members are respecting and complying with the Treaties. National judges also can ask this Court to interpret European law in case of disagreement or to achieve clarification.

As we can see, the structure and functioning of the EU are not easy, as its existence implies the cooperation of many different territories with their own political and legal systems. What the project of the EU tries to achieve is to bring them closer to standing in a common democratic ground and to facilitate the life of the citizens living in it.

➡This article was written in the framework of the project "Questioning Migrations", a Key Action 2 project, which is co-funded by Erasmus+ and the European Union. For the project, there is a collaboration between Hellenic Youth Participation (GR), E-graine (FR), Babele odv (IT), SOS Racismo (ES) and Coconut Work Luxembourg (LUX).