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Millions of Romanians and Bulgarians revelled in their first day as citizens of the European Union on Monday, after a night of fireworks and street parties celebrating their countries’ entry into the bloc.

Deemed too politically and economically backward for membership during the EU’s first eastward expansion in 2004, the Black Sea neighbours were relieved to join in what political analysts say was the last enlargement this decade.

The accession of the poor, ex-communist duo raises the EU’s membership to 27 states, almost half of them former eastern bloc countries cut off from the West by the Iron Curtain until 1989.

“Bulgaria’s and Romania’s accession to the EU completes our historic fifth round of enlargement, which peacefully reunified Western and Eastern Europe,” EU President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement of congratulations.

Romania and Bulgaria will together boost the EU’s population by 30 million, to 490 million, but will add just 1 percent to its economic output.

Once ruled by two of the Cold War’s most hard-line regimes, the Danube pair stretch the EU’s borders from the Atlantic and Baltic in the west and north to the Black Sea in the southeast.

Their entry was marred by foot-dragging in Bucharest and Sofia on fighting graft and organised crime, exacerbating worry in some EU states that the bloc may have spread itself too far.

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