Bulgaria and Rumania in the EU: Game over or stumbling blocks ahead?

On 1 January 2007 Bulgaria and Rumania are expected to join the EU. Thus, they will become the latest –26th and 27th– members of the Union. Some people have rightly worried that the inclusion of such a large number of small, relatively poor and post-autocratic countries during the fifth enlargement would be too much of a burden for the unreformed institutional structure of the EU. The concern has been particularly serious in the case of Bulgaria and Rumania –the allegedly least prepared of the CEE former communist states–. This paper tries to shed light on the issue whether the two South-East European countries would be ready to assume the responsibilities of membership, as well as whether their inclusion in the Union would create too many problems for the current member states. Moreover, although the present analysis deals primarily with the pre-accession phase, it also casts a glance at the post-accession situation of Bulgaria and Rumania when, presumably, limited conditionality and international monitoring of selected policy areas could also be applied. Finally, the experience of both South-East European countries talks directly to candidate and potential member states aspiring to join the Union in the not-so-distant future.