With the arrival of 2007, Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union, increasing its membership to 27 states. Simultaneously, Slovenia adopted the euro, Europe's single currency, becoming the first former communist state to do so and the 13th member of the euro-zone. The accession of Romania, with a population of 22 million, and Bulgaria, with a population with 7.7 million, has turned the EU into a common market with a total population to 489 million.
When French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed EU constitution in 2005, the EU appeared to have suffered a setback. But the entry of the two Black Sea neighbor countries shows that Europe's integration process is going on unhampered, although there wasn't much fanfare worldwide as happened at the time of the official launching of the euro on Jan. 1, 2002, or the EU's expansion into Eastern Europe in 2004.
In 2004, the EU embraced Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia -- all formerly of the communist bloc. These countries plus Cyprus and Malta, which also joined the EU that year, brought more than 100 million citizens to the EU. The accession of Romania and Bulgaria, which discarded communism in 1989 and applied for EU membership in 1995, means that the reunification of Western and Eastern Europe is nearly complete.