The European Union (EU) is an economic and political coming together of European countries. It is not a federation like the United States of America, nor does it operate as an international organization for political or military cooperation, like the United Nations or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Instead, the (sovereign) member nations have decided to pool their sovereignty and delegate some of their decisionmaking powers to common EU institutions, which act in the interests of all member states. This way, the EU member countries have gained economic and political power that they would be unlikely to achieve individually. In 2004, approximately 380 million people lived in the EU. The EU's large size and the shift in decisionmaking power from the national level to ...