Throughout the world, New Year's eve is celebrated with joyous revelry. The year 2006 was no exception. However, for EU, the New Year eve was special, this time, as it waited to welcome two new member countriesRomania and Bulgaria. The two former communist nations celebrated the night with added enthusiasm for their much sought-after entry into the big league, which fructified on January 1, 2007, ending 11 long, painful years of waiting. The euphoria was expected and palpable as the blue and yellow EU flags fluttered over the streets of Bucharest and Sofia, the respective capital cities of Romania and Bulgaria. With the dawn of 2007, Romanians and Bulgarians became proud citizens of the largest and most integrated community of liberal democracies in the world.
Earlier, in 2004, the two countries made futile efforts to join the EU. That time the EU initiated its expansion program to Eastern Europe and embraced 10 new nations out of which 8 were ex-communist nations. Ever since then, public mood started swinging against further enlargement as the more established nations forcibly resisted any hasty enlargement process and clamored for imposing stricter entry norms. In this backdrop, the inclusion of these two Balkan nations in the EU is of huge political and historical importance. |
