World Organizations

Association of South-East Asian Nations is primarily a trade-based grouping of 10 members: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. ASEAN has regular meetings with China and Japan, and has extended this to include South Korea, Australia, India and New Zealand. The group aims to create an Asian equivalent of the EU complete with common currency.

African Union, formerly the Organization for African Unity, comprises all of the countries on the African continent except Morocco.

The European Union has 25 member states: Austria, Belgium, Britain, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden. Bulgaria and Romania hope to join in 2007.
Website: http://europa.eu.int/index-en.htm
Not to be confused with the Council of Europe (http://www.coe.fr).
Note that Javier Solana's formal title is: high representative for common foreign and security policy.

North American Free Trade Agreement links together the US, Canada and Mexico.

• Belgium
• Britain
• Bulgaria
• Canada
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Estonia
• France*
• Germany
• Greece
• Hungary
• Iceland
• Italy
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Slovakia
• Slovenia
• Spain
• Romania
• Turkey
• United States

* France withdrew from the integrated military structure in 1966, but remains a member of the Atlantic Alliance.
Website: http://www.nato.int/

Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (formerly Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe). Membership of more than 50 countries from Europe, the former Soviet republics and North America.
Website: http://www.osce.org/

Organization of the Islamic Conference. Nearly all the world's Muslim countries are members (we do not call it the "Islamic Conference Organization").

World Trade Organization (successor to General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). Most of the world's trading nations are members.
Website: http://www.wto.org/

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Set up by the U.N. Security Council in 1993 to prosecute and try war criminals in The Hague. So far we have avoided the abbreviation "ICTY". Not to be confused with the International Court of Justice, a separate institution.
Website: http://www.un.org/icty/

Union of the Arab Maghreb
Members: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania.

Some international organizations such as NATO and the ILO (International Labour Organisation) use "s" instead of "z" in their name, but we stick to the "z" spelling.
If you do not have information on an organization, try an online finding aid such as The CIA World Factbook or the The Political Reference Almanac