The Architecture of the European Union

Six nations pool coal and steel production and, almost as an afterthought, create the ECSC's Common Assembly and Court of Justice, the seeds of everything that follows.

That Common Assembly grows into the European Parliament, taking its current name in 1962 and, in 1979, becoming the only EU institution voters elect directly.

The ECSC's Court, seated in Luxembourg from the start, becomes the Court of Justice of the European Union, the institution that keeps EU law uniform across every member state.

In 1965 the six agree to stop running three separate sets of institutions and merge their councils and commissions into one each.

The single Council that results, one minister per member state across ten policy areas, is today's Council of the European Union.

The Maastricht Treaty, in force 1993, formally creates the European Union itself, the body every institution in this trail now belongs to.

The European Commission, the Union's executive arm since the original 1958 EEC Commission, proposes the legislation Parliament and Council adopt.

Above them all, heads of state and government had been meeting informally since 1974; the European Council itself waits until 2009 to become a formal institution.

That 2009 moment is the Treaty of Lisbon, which also gives the Court its current shape and confirms the Central Bank as a full EU institution in the same stroke.

The European Central Bank, set up in Frankfurt in 1998 to run the euro, is the youngest of the institutions in this trail and the only one with a currency to answer for.

Zoom out past the Union entirely: in the UN General Assembly, where every state sits as an equal, the EU itself holds only observer status, one voice at a much larger table.