What's so great about an ever closer union anyway?

1 | No Kidding, Peace
It was the Americans — with the Marshall Plan, and then nato — who laid the groundwork, but the E.U. has helped to give Western Europe its most peaceful 60 years since records were first kept. Here's the big picture: France and Germany had fought a war in each of the three generations before the Treaty of Rome. Twice Europe's wars had sucked in the rest of the world. By locking together economies, societies and political structures, the E.U. has made such horrors unimaginable. For that alone, give thanks.

2 | The French Countryside
There has to be something to be said for the Common Agricultural Policy, and indeed there is. The timeless contours of la France profonde — at least south of the wheat and beet belt — are a testimony to the long subsidy of French farming. The cap may offend free-trade purists, but on a summer morning somewhere in the Dordogne there's something to be said for impurity.

3 | Easier Travel
The Oresund Bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö; the Channel Tunnel; high-speed rail links snaking out from France — all have done their bit to knit the Continent closer together than ever before. But perhaps above all it is the growth of budget airlines — stimulated by regulations that came into force in 1997, allowing an airline from one member state to operate a route in another — that has made easy travel around Europe available to all.

4 | Ireland's Revival
E.U. structural funds aren't the only reason that the Emerald Tiger roars, and Ireland isn't the only place where money from Brussels has helped build a modern infrastructure. But there's something about the scale of the transformation of Ireland's economy since membership in 1973 that boggles the mind.

5 | That Burgundy Passport
Remember the days when your passport got scrutinized by some suspicious official on even the most straightforward trip from Innsbruck to Bolzano? Some of us do. But since the signing of the Schengen Agreement in Luxembourg in 1985, the free movement of people has become more than an aspiration — and an attribute of modern Europe, remarkably, that has survived the struggle against terrorism of the last decade.

6 | GSM
You may not know that it stands for Global System for Mobile communications, but the E.U.'s decision in 1987 to adopt a common standard for digital mobile telephony gave both the telecoms and handset manufacturers like Ericsson and Nokia the security of knowing that there was a huge single market for their products. The consequence: a whole new appreciation for the virtues of the opposable thumb.

7 | Work Where You Want
It took years for the Treaty of Rome's dream of a single labor market to come to fruition, but now — cue joke about Polish plumbers — the right to live, work, and indeed retire, in another Union country is established, and such freedoms will gradually be extended to citizens from the 12 countries that joined since 2004. This means working to the same rules, too; though national legislatures had taken the lead, the Treaty itself enshrined the principle of equal pay for equal work for men and women, while the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights proclaims workers' entitlements on issues from labor mobility and collective bargaining to equal opportunities.

8 | Good News for Galicia
And Wales, Sardinia and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. For regions on the periphery of their nations, with proud cultures and traditions of their own, the E.U. has been a godsend. The Committee of the Regions provides a political voice while the E.U.'s regional policy has channeled funds for projects aimed to tackle economic and social disparities within member countries. The consequence? Not a Europe homogeneously harmonized, but one that is more diverse than ever before.

9 | Cern
Since 1954 the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the outskirts of Geneva has been in the forefront of advanced particle physics, figuring out what stuff we're made of. Bonus: Tim Berners-Lee was on the staff there when he developed a new way for scientists to share information over the Internet — the World Wide Web.

10 | The Euro
The single currency — introduced on Jan. 1, 2002, and now used by 315 million people in 13 countries — did more than eliminate those tiresome collections of small coins that we used to bring back from vacation. By making prices transparent, the euro made the single European market a reality.