Owlspotting

This week’s European Comission meeting (the one that supposedly was going to decide Romania’s European future) was pretty poorly covered by major American newspapers. But if you want the quick and dirty without swimming through Romanian media speculation or American media ignorance, just read the first two sentences of the Economist’s coverage of the result (which was near-perfect at 537 words):

ROMANIANS have a joke about driving to Greece. Tank up before you get to the Bulgarian border, lock the doors and windows, put your foot down and don’t stop until you reach the other frontier. Bulgarians say the same about driving north to Hungary. Other Europeans, it seems, would rather drive elsewhere.

Romania and Bulgaria are due to join the European Union on January 1st 2007. This week, the European Commission could have advised that they get the formal go-ahead. Instead it fudged. Preparations for admission should proceed, it says—but with a further review in the autumn of progress on reforms. If either country scores spectacularly badly then, its accession could be put off for a year.