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

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11 | Airbus
Sure, we know, the jewel of European industrial collaboration looks pretty scratched these days as the aerospace company's management weaknesses are exposed. And yes, "launch aid" for new planes is a taxpayer subsidy by any other name. But the weirdly cobbled together planes — wings made in Britain, tail fins in Germany — have at least ensured that there's some competition in the global commercial aviation market, and forced Boeing of the U.S. to raise its own game.

12 | Better Football
Started as the European Cup in 1955, dominated by Real Madrid in the early years, the Champions League now gets audiences from Minsk to Munster watching the same images, and the final each year has become Europe's Super Bowl. Plus: the Bosman case in 1995 — where the European Court ruled that players at the end of their contracts could move freely between clubs — enabled top teams to become the collection of international talents they are now.

13 | Erasmus
Since 1987, over 1.5 million university students have benefited from the Erasmus European exchange program and taken comparative knowledge of local beers to unimagined heights. The E.U.'s Lifelong Learning Programme has a $9 billion budget for the next seven years to develop areas such as cooperation in education policy, student exchanges and adult learning.

14 | Tabloid Heaven
British Euro-skepticism may irritate others, but let's be fair — it has much contributed to the gaiety of nations. What would the London red tops do without the constant supply of stories — most of them urban myths — about European standardization of everything from cucumbers to condoms? Our favorite: the widely reported claim that E.U. safety rules required circus tightrope walkers and jugglers to wear hard hats.

15 | The Fourth Movement of Beethoven's Ninth
To tell the truth, we find the "Choral" a bit crass, as symphonies go. But at least since Beethoven's tune was adopted as the E.U.'s anthem in 1985, kids learn at least one bit of classical music. It would be even nicer if they knew the words of Friedrich von Schiller's Ode to Joy. Plus: as flags go, those gold stars on a blue field make a pretty decent one.

16 | Clean Beaches
In 2005, 96% of Europe's coastal beaches were deemed clean enough for swimming, thanks to the 1976 Bathing Water Directive — toughened up last year — which set binding minimum water-quality standards. More than 200 pieces of E.U. environmental law, aimed at staunching toxic fumes, eliminating dangerous pesticides, phasing out cfcs, protecting birds and creating the European Environment Agency have generally made the place more pleasant.

17 | Safer Food
In 2005 French President Jacques Chirac was recorded unawares by a French journalist joking with the then German Chancellor and Russian President, "the only thing [Britain has] ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease." His point, surely, was that food scares such as bse had the salutary effect of speeding moves to set basic health and labeling standards. The European Food Safety Authority was established in 2002, and in 2006, food-labeling regulations were tightened to substantiate nutritional claims like "low-fat" and "lowers cholesterol."

18 | Taking Climate Change Seriously
Al Gore has been the Cassandra of global warming, but the E.U. was the driving force behind the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. As part of the Kyoto process, the E.U. set up its Emissions Trading Scheme, a market to trade pollution permits for carbon dioxide emissions. In recent months, Europe has aimed for even lower emissions standards through initiatives on cars and aircraft exhaust, and has already set minimum biofuel targets.

19 | A Reason to Go to Brussels
We would not go so far as to say that we love the place, but the Belgian capital deserves more respect than it gets. The food and beer are great, it's developed a nicely cosmopolitan flavor and it's more green than almost any other European capital. It is also the home of Magritte, Bruegel and Tintin, is a center of Art Nouveau and has enough Gothic architecture to do you for a lifetime.

20 | Eastward Look, the Land is Bright
There were times when it seemed bogged down in bureaucratic technicalities, but the decision after the fall of the Berlin Wall to offer membership to the former communist nations of Eastern Europe was a courageous and generous act of leadership. There are now 11 former Soviet republics and East bloc states in the E.U., and the boundaries of democracy and free markets have been decisively moved East.