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Benelux
The Low Countries, and the small union that rehearsed the EU
The name is an acronym, coined in 1944 by three governments in exile who agreed to abolish tariffs between them before they had their countries back. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg had spent centuries being partitioned, occupied, and traded among larger powers; the customs union they signed in London, and brought into force in 1948, was an attempt to stop serving as the continent's doormat by binding themselves to each other. It worked well enough that the same three became founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community. The older name for the same ground is the Low Countries, and it is the more honest one, because the defining fact here is that so much of it lies below the sea.
Roughly a quarter of the Netherlands sits under sea level, held back by dunes, dikes, and the Delta Works, and the Dutch have been reclaiming land from water since the Middle Ages. The Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt all reach the North Sea through this single delta, which is why Rotterdam and Antwerp grew into two of the busiest ports on earth. Behind the polders the land rises gently across the Flemish plain and the Brabant sands to the wooded Ardennes hills of southern Belgium and Luxembourg, where the Signal de Botrange tops out at a modest 694 meters. It is the most crowded corner of Europe outside a city: about 30 million people in an area barely larger than Ireland.
Brussels, The Hague, and Luxembourg City between them host the European Commission, the Council of the EU, NATO, the International Court of Justice, and the European Court of Justice, an extraordinary concentration of institutions for three small states. Their wealth is old, built on the cloth towns of medieval Flanders, the banking and shipping of the Dutch Golden Age, and the steel of the Luxembourg basin. Their politics are consensual by necessity: Belgium alone divides between Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia, and a German-speaking east, and governs itself through one of the world's most decentralized federal systems. Luxembourg has meanwhile turned banking, funds, and EU institutions into the highest income per head on the planet.