Flag of Europe different from flag of the Council of Europe
The Flag of Europe or European Flag consists of twelve golden stars forming a circle on a blue field. It was designed and adopted in 1955 by the Council of Europe (CoE) as a symbol for the whole of Europe.Since 1985, the flag has also been a symbol of the European Union (EU), whose 27 member states are all also CoE members, although in that year the EU had not yet assumed its present name or constitutional form (which came in steps in 1993 and 2009). Adoption by the EU, or EC as it then was, reflected long-standing CoE desire to see the flag used by other European organisations. Official EU use widened greatly in the 1990s. Nevertheless the flag has to date received no status in any of the EU's treaties. Its adoption as an official symbol was planned as part of the 2004 European Constitution but this failed to be ratified. Mention of the flag was removed in 2007 from the text of the Treaty of Lisbon, which was ratified. On the other hand, 16 EU members that year, plus France in 2017, have officially affirmed (by Declaration No. 5224) their attachment to the flag as an EU symbol.
The flag is used by other European entities, such as unified sport teams under the rubric Team Europe.Derivative designs
The design of the European flag has been used in a variation, such as that of the Council of Europe mentioned above, and also to a greater extent such as the flag of the Western European Union (WEU; now defunct), which uses the same colours and the stars but has a number of stars based on membership and in a semicircle rather than a circle. It is also defaced with the initials of the former Western European Union in two languages.The European Parliament used its own flag from 1973, but never formally adopted it. It fell out of use with the adoption of the twelve-star flag by the Parliament in 1983. The flag followed the yellow and blue colour scheme however instead of twelve stars there were the letters EP and PE (initials of the European Parliament in the six community languages at the time) surrounded by a wreath. Sometime later, the Parliament chose to use a logo consisting of a stylised hemicycle and the EU flag at the bottom right.
The flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina, imposed by High Representative Carlos Westendorp, after the country's parliament failed to agree on a design, is reminiscent of the symbolism of the EU flag, using the same blue and yellow colours, and the stars, although of a different number and colour, are a direct reference to those of the European flag.Likewise, Kosovo uses blue, yellow and stars in its flag, which has been mocked as a "none too subtle nod to the flag of the European Union, which is about to become Kosovo's new best friend as it takes over protector status from the United Nations".The flag of the Brussels-Capital Region (introduced in 2016) consists of a yellow iris with a white outline upon a blue background. Its colours are based on the colours of the Flag of Europe, because Brussels is considered the unofficial capital of the EU.