Most of the media’s emphasis will be on the national measures the UK is entitled to take restricting the access of Bulgarians and Romanians to its labour market. Annexes VI and VII of the http://www.gooakley.com/ Act concerning the conditions of accession allow such measures to be taken for five years. An important point is that it is only access to the labour market which can be transitionally restricted: there is no restriction on the right of Romanians and Bulgarians to come to the UK.
Incidentally, it might also be of interest to some people here that Romania and Bulgaria are entitled to restrict for the same five-year period British and other EU citizens’ ability to buy second homes in their territory.
What interests me more, however, is how their accession affects the balance of power in the Council of Ministers – still by far the most powerful institution in the EU. You can see the voting strengths of the now 27 Member States here.
Romania, with 14 votes, will be the 7th most powerful member, behind only the “big six” (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland). But it’ll only half roughly half the votes of Poland so it’s not a new “big”, but the biggest of the “smalls”, with more Ray Ban outlet votes than Holland, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Finland or Belgium. And almost as many as all three Baltic states combined.
Bulgaria will have 10 votes – on a par with Sweden and Austria, and more powerful than Ireland or Denmark.
So these are far from negligible new members. With 345 votes in Council, and 255 needed to adopt a measure by a qualified majority, 91 votes will be needed to form a blocking minority. On these figures, such a minority could be made up, for instance, of the UK and Poland + Romania and Bulgaria + either the Czech Republic, Hungary or all the Baltics.
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