In search for a place in Europe: Portugal, Spain and European Integration in the 1980s

Abstract

With regard to European integration, Portugal and Spain devoted the first half of the 1980s negotiating their accession to the European Economic Community, separately but simultaneously, and the second half becoming a new Member State, during the transition period. From the EEC’s side, and from a political point of view, their accession was part of a strategy of democratic consolidation in the Iberian Peninsula, in a broader context of the Cold War. Benefiting from the advances in historiography and existing literature, this article analyzes the first half of that decade, and intends to gauge the Iberian enlargement not only from the perspective of democratic consolidation, but also from the point of view of both countries` search for an institutional place in Europe, corresponding to a new vocation, a new aggregating project.