"On New Year's Day, the silent empire expanded again," the Guardian wrote in a commentary of the accession of Bulgaria and Romania.

"Its new colonies celebrated their incorporation as a liberation - which, for most individual Romanians and Bulgarians, it will be," the Guardian wrote in a commentary.

The author Timothy Garton Ash says that twenty years ago, the people from the two countries were the impoverished subjects of dictatorships.

"Now they are citizens of the largest, most integrated community of liberal democracies in the world."

The article comments that as it grows to 27 countries, the European Union is the most successful example of peaceful regime change in our time.

"More than half its member states were dictatorships well within living memory. Their advance towards liberal democracy has gone hand in hand with their advance towards membership of what is now the European Union. In every corner of the continent most people are better off and more free than they were half a century ago."

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