German reunification. Comecon and the Warsaw Pact were dissolved, and in 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Several countries which had been part of the Soviet Union regained full independence. Western European Union In 1948 the Treaty of Brussels was signed between Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It was further revisited in 1954 at the Paris Conference, when the Western European Union was established. It was declared defunct in 2011 after the Treaty of Lisbon, and the Treaty of Brussels was terminated. When the Western European Union was dissolved, it had 10 member countries, six associate member countries, five observer countries and seven associate partner countries. Modern divisions UN geoscheme classification The United Nations geoscheme is a system devised by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) which divides the countries of the world into regional and subregional groups, based on the M49 coding classification. The partition is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories. In the UN geoscheme, the following countries are classified as Western Europe: Austria Belgium France Germany Liechtenstein Luxembourg Monaco Netherlands Switzerland CIA classification The CIA classifies seven countries as belonging to "Western Europe": Belgium France Ireland Luxembourg Monaco Netherlands United Kingdom The CIA also classifies three countries as belonging to "Southwestern Europe": Andorra Portugal Spain EuroVoc classification EuroVoc is a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union. In this thesaurus, the countries of Europe are grouped into sub-regions. The following countries are included in the sub-group Western Europe: Andorra Austria Belgium France Germany Ireland Liechtenstein Luxembourg Monaco Netherlands Switzerland United Kingdom UN regional groups: Western European and Others Group The Western European and Others Group is one of several unofficial Regional Groups in the United Nations that act as voting blocs and negotiation forums. Regional voting blocs were formed in 1961 to encourage voting to various UN bodies from different regional groups. The European members of the group are: Andorra Austria Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Iceland Ireland Italy Liechtenstein Luxembourg Malta Monaco Netherlands Norway Portugal San Marino Spain Sweden Switzerland Turkey United Kingdom In addition, Australia, Canada, Israel and New Zealand are members of the group, with the United States as observer. Population Using the CIA classification strictly would give the following calculation of Western Europe's population. All figures based on the projections for