European Union, everything you need to know about the greatest democratic experiment

The world's most complex democratic experiment took shape 61 years ago, under the prolonged shadow of the world's greatest and most terrible war.

From those first six-member days, to the 28 members of today (very soon there will be 27, because Great Britain is leaving), it's all been like a carousel trip.

Once deeply divided, Europe is today much more united, undoubtedly richer.

Still controversial, however, how much of this success has come from the existence of the EU and the directives and regulations drafted in Brussels and adopted in Luxembourg.

Here are some of the highlights:

1957: Big bang
The six original states of Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg remake their coal and steel community, creating a customs union, as well as the beginning of a common market based on free movement of capital and goods. They do this through Rome's agreements, establishing the European Economic Community and the European Nuclear Energy Community. There are many Founding Fathers, but no Founding Mothers.

Delegations take part in the talks, ahead of signing the European Economic Community creation agreements in March 1957
1958: EU Jargon Birth
The Committee of Eternal Representatives (COREPER) is created. This is the beginning of six decades of European multilingual acronyms, made-up words, and other forms of language. Citizens everywhere, as far as they're concerned, are ashamed. From semesters to communology, from Antic to trilogues, Brussels citizens already face strange sentences like this: “The new MPCC for CSDP will be there at EUMS”. Officials receive nothing more than a 40% exemption from taxes in compensation for the difficulty.

1960s: A Strong Fight for Free Trade
Throughout 1960, EFTA exists as a stable rival to the new European community, and more members: Austria, Britain, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland. Its lower ambitions hold back the growth of the European Economic Community, which will later become the European Union.

1965-66: The Empty Carry of De Gaulle
Fifty years of relentless disputes over the Common Agricultural Policy, sovereignty, the taxation promoted by Brussels and the use of majority voting in the European Council, crystallized for the first time in 1965, when Charles de Gaulle, angry, withdrew his permanent representative from the ECE and refused to participate in the summit until his arrival.

French President Charles De Gaulle, 1966.
1973: Plus three, minus one
Fearing the weakening of their highly valued sovereignty, acquired and won back in Arctic conditions, Norwegians turned their backs on the euro's “tribue” in a referendum on membership. Several decades before the flame blazed, Norwegians moved to the left of the EC's profile, before they could get even a chance to get to know each other. It would take decades before a second date was set. The United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark had no such doubts -- perhaps because they overlooked the annoying part of the referendum -- and were thrown straight into bed with the ECE.

1979: Cherchez La Femme
Auschwitz's survivor, Simone Weil, becomes the leader of the first selected European Parliament, and Margaret Thatcher becomes prime minister of Britain. It will have to be another decade, before anyone will consider appointing a female commissioner, two others before having another female president of parliament, and three decades before Kathy Ashton and Catherine Day become, respectively, the EU's top diplomat and civil service chief. There has never been a female president of the Commission or Council.

1987: French Bulldog
Émie Nowell retires as secretary general of the Commission, after 30 years in office, since the first day of the new European Commission. Five people will hold the post in the next 30 years. The main legacy of the Noel bureaucratic marathon is the impact of French administrative methods and the widespread use of French on European institutions.

1989: The Berlin Wall's Fall
The dramatic moment brings Europe into a new era, where East and West convert. Not only that, it leads to Germany's reunification and the re-animation of the debate on how the rest of Europe should keep Germany on its feet. One of the solutions will be the euro, which is the size of the currency, as much as the cuff tool.

West Berlin residents in front of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
1985-1990: Thatcher across from Delors
The breakthrough of Jacques Delors, the EU's common market, is born, the peak of a six-year torture pregnancy, which began with the Common European Act. Although politics was partially inspired by Thatcher, that of “fought” Delores about it. Despite rising explosions and the fact that it was the pride of its <x2-primes”, the EU common market has suffered bans and development throughout the initial period. In her speech in Bruges in 1988, Thatcher vented “against a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels”.

1990s: Balkan bleeding
Yugoslavia breaks down and the war and genocide return to the doors of Europe. The EU, a body created to guarantee peace, sees helpless as its neighbours massacred among them in a series of atomic crises. The US intervenes to bring together Balkan leaders and negotiate peace agreements. Ethnicised conflicts die down only in 2001, and the EU starts to put the region under its wing.

Two Bosnian Croat soldiers pass by the body of a Bosnian Serb soldier killed during the Croatian attack on the town of Drvar in western Bosnia, August 1995.
1992-1993: Maastricht Treaty
This treaty, signed in a small, sleeping town, at the point between Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, is a culmination of Euro-optimism, laying the groundwork for the euro and the broader union. Maastricht sets clear rules for foreign and security policy, as well as justice and home affairs. The European Community officially became the European Union.

1994: 75 years after empire collapse, Austria and Hungary come
75 years after Austria lost its empire, it is accepted into the EU. Because it has been put in the group too late, Vienna's magnificent buildings cannot be used by the EU, and the Union is stuck in dreary Strasbourg and Luxembourg, like its “houses outside Brussels. The next day Hungary will become the first former Soviet satellite country to apply for membership.

1995: Borderless Games
The Schengen Agreement is concluded. No more border controls! No more fights! Europe will live life in VIP lanes, where borders are not. While the EU clings to popular imagination with this step forward, it is a shame that no one stops creating a coast guard, or a unified computer system to monitor those who enter and emerge in the continent's visa-free zone. (In a sign of what was to happen later, Britain ridicules Schengen and says no thank you).

The Schengen Agreement was closed in 1995.
1998: Central Bank's Fetish
With the creation of the European Central Bank, the EU enters the global race to establish central bankers in the status of almost gods. The move follows the rise of former US Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan, as well as the Bank of England's newly gained independence.

1999: Commission Rebels
Commissioners are massly attracted to charges of widespread fraud, including against Edith Cresson. The French commissioner paid her elderly boyfriend as a staff member and headed at a time when EU funds for research disappeared. Under attack, Cresson developed a newly found interest in civil rights, but failed in her attempt to create the right of political elites to sleep with their own people while the bill is sent to taxpayers.

Start of 2000: Cassandra predicts turbulence
The European Commission recommends that Greece become the 12th eurozone member, based on counterfeit economic indicators. Economists everywhere warn that the eurozone governance is incomplete, similar to a semi-built house that will not be able to cope with a Cyclone.

2002: Funny money.
Travelers everywhere celebrate that they don't have to pay for the exchange rate, thanks to Euros, which soon wins currency status No. Two in the world, after the U.S. dollar, you give yourself a minute with your money. Germany, which can afford the debt, borrows cheaper than ever to become a global export power that will dominate other European economies. Others borrow like Germans, but they forget to remember they're Spanish, Italian... or Greek.

2002 and beyond: Global Editor
The commission blocks a proposed union between US companies GE and Honeywell and confirms that it can determine the global agenda for competition policy. This angers Americans, who invented the field of antibodys and now see their companies become targets in Brussels. Fifteen years later, a series of fines of billions of euros, orders for atonement, and several-year-old investigations will leave large world companies, among them Microsoft, Apple, Google, Gazprom, Heineken and Saint Gobai.

2004: Size matters
There are scenes of celebrated celebrations in eight former Soviet states, as well as Cyprus and Malta, which join club ranks as part of the EU's largest enlargement effort. For the first time, more than half of European countries are members of Union. Old Europe starts getting nervous.

2005: “Delay period”
With much fuss, a new European constitution is drafted. Some of the authors hope it will become the European version of the US Constitution a model for democrats worldwide. But voters in France and the Netherlands destroy the dream, rejecting the constitution and introducing the Union into a “period of reflection”. The EU exits depression by drafting the Lisbon Treaty again rejected, this time by the Irish.

2008: Financial Disaster
The global financial crisis, which the EU initially blamed on American cowboys, hits hard. Europe oversees the rescue of a bank a day, it sees the common market put at risk, and unemployment increases greatly, while economic growth suffers a decline and some states seek humiliating bailouts. Many European governments have neglected to implement structural reforms that would have helped economies cope with shock waves, but find it easier to blame Wall Street, George Bush... and Brussels.

The EU was hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis.
2010-2016: European Savings
Union strengthens the arsenal by creating a rescue fund and banking union. It is ruthless in the slaps for countries that have violated EU budget rules and need a rescue, especially with Greece. But there are successes in Ireland, Portugal, and Spain that take bitter pills and regulate budgets.

Greece has suffered a lot to get out of the economic pit.
2015: Schengen stumbles
The EU has a visa-free zone, without a real migration policy or effective external borders. This becomes evident in the summer of 2015, as refugees and economic migrants flock to the EU, tear down fences at the border and headed to Germany. Merkel appears as the new face of global liberalisation by welcoming immigrants with open arms. Brussels is set aside as the governments of member states first reach an agreement on the distribution of their immigrants, but then refuse to comply.

2016: Is Brussels a spell?
The United Kingdom votes to emerge from a union that never fully embraced, causing a existential crisis among the 27-nation bloc. Britain's vote comes and symbolizes a series of nationalist populisms that endanger Union, ahead of a series of elections. As officials on both sides of the Canal quarrel over the logistics and the consequences of Britain's secession from Brussels, Brex turns into EU obsession, with negotiations that threaten to drag beyond the limit of the two years marking Article 50. / Politico.eu prepared: world.al