Romania and Bulgaria celebrate accession to European Union

Romanians and Bulgarians planned all-night street parties to see in the New Year and mark their countries' accession to the European Union on January 1st.

   The addition of Romania and Bulgaria the European Union's membership will grow to 27, almost half of them former communist countries once cut off from the West by the Iron Curtain.

   Starting 1999, when Romania was invited to start negotiations with the EU, there has been progress in the economic and institutional reform, but it was shy and did not go all the way. Romania came in last on the integration list because the entire political class nearly failed the European test and only took care of reforms under pressure and at the last minute, Mediafax news agency reports.

   Both Romania and Bulgaria also fear that they will suffer a national 'brain drain' of their skilled and specialist workforce, similar to that which the 2004 member state entrants are experiencing now and are already suffering of a lack of unspecialised workforce, especially in the constructions field.

   The major problem is that the "Most of the older EU nations have refused to open their borders completely to Bulgarians and Romanians but many central European countries welcome new entrants to their job markets." Reuters

   Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia are officially recognized as potential candidates.

   To varying degrees, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan have also expressed membership aspirations, though none have submitted formal applications and none are expected to in the short term.

   Morocco officially applied to join the EU in 1987 but was rejected on the grounds that it was not in Europe.

   The European Union (EU) is a supranational and intergovernmental union of 25 (27 as of 1st January 2007) independent, democratic member states. The European Union is the world's largest confederation of independent states, established under that name in 1992 by the Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty). However, many aspects of the Union existed before that date through a series of predecessor relationships, dating back to 1951.