Europe

Europe is compact in land area but dense in sovereign states — 44 UN-member countries packed into a continent smaller than several single Asian countries — which is exactly why "match the country to its capital" is such a productive question type here: there are simply more countries per square kilometre to confuse. Four European countries — France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom — are G7 members, and the same four plus the European Union itself also sit in the G20, making Europe the only continent represented by both a bloc (the EU) and multiple individual member states in the same higher-level grouping simultaneously.

Europe — Capitals and Currencies

The European Union and the Eurozone

The European Union (EU) has 27 member states since the United Kingdom's withdrawal (Brexit, formally completed 31 January 2020, with a transition period ending 31 December 2020) — the UK's departure is the single most-tested "which country left a bloc" fact in this whole book. Of those 27, 20 currently use the euro as their official currency — this group is the eurozone: Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain. Croatia is the newest eurozone entrant, adopting the euro on 1 January 2023 and dropping its old currency, the kuna, in the same move that also saw it join the Schengen passport-free travel area.

The seven EU members that do NOT use the euro are Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Sweden — each retains its own national currency (lev, koruna, krone, forint, złoty, leu, and krona respectively) either by treaty opt-out (Denmark) or because they haven't yet met the entry criteria or chosen to adopt it. Beyond the EU's own membership, four non-EU European micro-states use the euro unilaterally through formal monetary agreements — Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City — and two more use it without any formal agreement at all, Montenegro and Kosovo, both of which adopted the Deutsche Mark and later the euro as a practical response to their own currency instability, without EU membership or a currency union.

Memory hook — "27 in the club, 20 share the wallet": the EU has 27 members; only 20 of them use the euro. The seven holdouts (Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Sweden) each keep a national currency of their own — remember them as "the seven that said not yet."

Practice Recall: Name the year and month the UK's EU withdrawal transition period fully ended, list the seven EU members that don't use the euro, and name two non-EU European micro-states that use the euro without any formal monetary agreement.

Landlocked countries in Europe form the continent's largest landlocked cluster after Africa: Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Czechia, Hungary, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Moldova, North Macedonia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Switzerland, and Vatican City — fifteen in all, with Liechtenstein the standout as one of the world's only two doubly landlocked countries. Notice how many of these fifteen are also the continent's smallest states by area or population (Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Vatican City) — landlocked status and micro-state status overlap heavily in Europe specifically because a small European state historically survived by being wedged between larger neighbours rather than by controlling its own coastline and trade routes, unlike, say, small island states elsewhere in the world. Island and peninsular nations worth flagging separately: the United Kingdom and Ireland (a shared island plus Northern Ireland's land border complicates the "is the UK an island nation" question, since the UK includes Northern Ireland on the island of Ireland), Iceland, Malta, and Cyprus. Micro-states — Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City — are a closed set of five worth memorising together, since exam questions often ask which of a list of small European countries is genuinely sovereign (the answer is usually "all of the above," since Europe's smallest states are unusually numerous and unusually stable as sovereign entities compared to micro-territories elsewhere in the world).