Introduction
Questions of democracy, legitimacy and shared values in Europe have existed long before the genesis of the European Community (EC). All of these questions essentially amount to a single, overarching quest to define what ‘Europe’ is.Footnote 1 Assumptions about shared cultural and religious values have always underpinned the idea of European integration – certainly in the eyes of the founding fathers of the EC.Footnote 2 Nonetheless, over the course of its history, and in fits and starts, the European Community has aspired to develop what is first and foremost a community of values. This has been particularly true every time a new aspiring member state lodged its application to join the EC.Footnote 3 Ever since the United Kingdom's ill-fated application in 1961, the question of enlargement has been intrinsically linked to the question of European identity: deciding which countries had the right to become members of the EC or European Union (EU), and on what basis, played a crucial role in the emergence and evolution of the existing organisation's identity. The definition of what European identity amounts to is extremely controversial and cannot be addressed here: what this article focuses on instead is the way in which EC actors – the Council of Ministers (Council), the European Commission (Commission) and the European Parliament (EP) – progressively defined a general concept of ‘being European’ for the specific purposes of joining the Community.
This analysis seeks to unravel a specific – and crucial – aspect of this identity: the democratic elements underpinning its political values, as defined by the key political and institutional actors involved in the enlargement of the Community to southern European countries in the 1960s and 1970s. It does so by focusing on how and when democracy entered the discursive politics of the European Community to finally become one of the fundamental tenets of the European self-image – and in the process how it influenced decision-makers’ approach to the question of enlargement. The analysis of newly released documents of major member states and EC institutions and of the untapped source of EP debates shows how, in response to states seeking EC membership, the Commission, Council and EP slowly – and at times grudgingly – used references to ‘democracy’ to legitimise the expansion and continuation of the process of European integration. From a general discussion in the EP in the 1960s, the idea slowly percolated through to the policy-makers, influencing their response to the requests presented by the newly democratic southern European states in the 1970s. The concept of democracy used in this context was closely associated with the idea of ‘respect for human rights’ and the rule of law: to a large extent, democracy was understood to signify a system based on the respect and protection of the human rights that the Community wished to uphold. The two concepts were often conflated into an all-encompassing idea of democratic principles in the institutional and political discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than tracing both as separate ideas, the article will look at the overarching articulation of the EC's political identity. It will focus on the debates elicited by the attempts of southern European countries to accede to the EEC in the 1960s and 1970s: the rebuttal of Spain's initial overtures in 1962, the challenge of Greece – the Community's first Associate member – being taken over by a military dictatorship in 1967 and the difficulties of dealing with the democratising of Greece, Spain and Portugal after the fall of their respective dictatorships in the 1970s.Footnote 4 Finally, it will analyse how these ideas were formalised in the Declaration on Democracy issued in 1978.Footnote 5
Political scientists have claimed that the debates around the question of enlargement gradually shaped a political identity based on the idea of democracy, which had not originally been part of the EC's self-image. For instance, Daniel Thomas's analysis of the reaction to Spain's bid for association in 1962 suggests that the identification of Europe as a promoter of fundamental democratic principles did not start with the ‘drafting of a treaty or the crafting of a court opinion’ but was instead gradually and commonly articulated through the enlargement process.Footnote 6 Frank Schimmelfennig uses the idea of ‘rhetorical entrapment’ to describe the way in which the norms, values and collective identity constructed through discourse can be used strategically by political actors to advance their interest.Footnote 7 Uli Sedelmeier reprised this analysis in his work on the European Union's eastern enlargement.Footnote 8 Thomas Diez goes even further, arguing in his analysis of language in the construction of the European Union that the terms used to describe the EU by politicians and academics alike are not merely descriptive, but influenced the way in which the EU developed in the first place.Footnote 9 Thus, the general consensus in political science is that discourse, including that of the media, EC political and institutional actors and leaders and politicians of the aspiring member states, is important for understanding ideas and self-images of Europe that exist within the European political arena.Footnote 10 However, no thorough historical examination of this claim has been put forward. Only a historical approach that looks at change over a protracted period of time makes it possible to understand how this discourse emerged, was articulated and adapted over time as the EC's political and institutional actors sought to shape their policy towards applicant states.
The EP Introduces the Idea: The Birkelbach Report
Far from always being a dominant feature of European political discourse, democracy was in fact not mentioned anywhere in the Treaties of Rome. Although the preamble makes general references to ‘liberty’ and article 237 states that any European nation ‘may apply to become a member of the Community’, this does not in any way make democracy a prerequisite for membership or even mention it as one of the fundamental values underpinning the movement towards ‘closer union’.Footnote 11 In fact, Daniel Thomas has claimed that the omission of democracy and human rights from the Treaties was a deliberate shift away from the ‘constitutionalisation of democracy and human rights’ previously found, for instance, in the 1948 Brussels Treaty or the 1949 Statute of the Council of Europe.Footnote 12 Rather than being an original tenet of the construction of ‘Europe’, democracy was slowly introduced and built into the core political value of European identity over more than two decades.
The initial impetus for what would become the Community's political identity discourse came in 1962 with the European Parliament's response to Spain's increasing overtures towards the Community and its open interest in associating itself with the EC with a view to becoming a member. In fact, when the United Kingdom had first applied the previous year, nobody thought to question its democratic credentials, any other objections notwithstanding. Spain, on the other hand, was still in the grips of the Francoist regime and was not even a member of the Council of Europe. The possibility of an application led German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Willy Birkelbach, a member of the socialist group, to draft a report on the political and institutional aspects of accession (adhésion) or association with the Community.Footnote 13 Based on the work undertaken by the Political Affairs Committee between November and December 1961, the Birkelbach Report formed the basis of the first general debate on the principles of enlargement held by the European Parliament.
The report put forward an interpretation of the Treaty of Rome according to which states wishing to join would have to fulfil certain conditions and affirmed the EP's intention to engage in the definition of the political and institutional aspects of accession in general terms. The stated aim was not to pass judgment on the specificities on any particular membership application but to establish the general principles under which an accession should take place. In addressing the political conditions for eligibility, the report asserted that the political regime of an applicant state should ensure that the new state would not be a ‘foreign body’ (corps étranger) among the existing states, which the document explained as the ‘guarantee of the existence of a form of democratic state’ as a condition for accession.Footnote 14
It defined this democratic state as a state in which governments enjoy democratic legitimation and the people take part in decision making either directly or through directly elected representatives.Footnote 15 It also stated that applicant states should be required to recognise the principles indicated by the Council of Europe as a condition for membership, especially the rule of law, human rights and fundamental freedoms (art. 3 of the Statute of the Council of Europe).Footnote 16 In presenting the report to the EP, Birkelbach affirmed the desire to establish ‘guidelines’ (lignes directrices) for accession and association. He highlighted the fact that democracy, defined as the respect of fundamental rights and freedoms, was to be considered an essential requirement for Community membership.Footnote 17 The same ideas were expressed by his colleagues in the ensuing parliamentary debate.Footnote 18 In January 1962 the EP was a largely symbolic institution and would have had no formal role in any enlargement process. Its members, however, were seeking ways to carve out a role for their institution within the framework of the European Community. The prospect of a membership request from a country that was under dictatorial rule and did not share any of the democratic make-up of the EC's existing member states proved the ideal opportunity for the EP to both define the EC as a political actor and to highlight the concept of democracy as its fundamental value, without having to go into the detail of what this ‘democracy’ would look like. The debate surrounding the Birkelbach report, albeit hypothetical at this stage, was thus significant for introducing three concepts: that the EC had a political identity, that this identity was based on the democratic principle, as respected by its existing member states, and that any state wishing to join should adhere to the same principle in order to be eligible. Over the following two decades these ideas would be honed by the European Parliament and, increasingly, the Commission and the Council, as they defined the terms of the expansion of the EC to new member states.
A scant month after the EP's approval of the Birkelbach report, in February 1962, the Spanish government made a formal request for talks,Footnote 19 with the clear intention of negotiating association and eventual integration into the Community.Footnote 20 Birkelbach's reaction was immediate. On behalf of the socialist group in the EP, he posed the first oral question to the Council ever asked by a representative of the parliament – whether the Council and the Commission would find it appropriate to consider an application from a country whose ‘political philosophy’ was in complete opposition to the ‘conceptions and structures’ of the EC. He then quoted the reference to ‘freedom’ in the Preamble of the Rome Treaties and linked it directly with human rights and fundamental democratic liberties, giving an interpretation based on the values shared by the Six founding members and, thus, one that it would be hard for them to reject. In doing this, he explicitly reinforced the interpretation of these words already favoured by trade unions across the Six, who emphasised the ‘non-democratic character’ of the Spanish government as ‘in contradiction with the fundamental principles of the Community’.Footnote 21
The EP directly questioned the Commission and the Council on the place of democracy within the EC – and both were left wrong-footed by this move. The Council's written reply simply stated that it was, for the time being, unable to provide an answer. Commissioner Jean Rey, responsible for external relations and thus a key actor in the multiple applications, provided a rather vague reply during the debate of 29 March. While stating that the preoccupations of Parliament were important, that the Commission had debated the Birkelbach report with interest and that the Commission aimed to devise some ‘general principles’ on association and enlargement that would enjoy Parliament's consent, he would not go any further in his assessment of Spain's political eligibility.Footnote 22 At the same time, EC member states were also grappling with the request; while Germany and France seemed open to the possibility, the reaction of the Benelux countries was ‘frosty’.Footnote 23 Spain's request did, indeed, raise some fundamental political questions about the identity of the Community and its values.Footnote 24 Such concerns were not limited to Community actors and the governments of the member states but were also considered pressing by trade unions and transnational political movements.Footnote 25 In fact, the EP served as the main conduit into the European Community's institutional system of concerns that existed quite widely within European society but would likely have been ignored by both the Council and the European Commission, in which the political left, who felt these concerns most acutely, was much less well represented than in the Parliament. Eventually, this first Spanish attempt came to naught, but the ripples caused by this initial debate on political values continued to reverberate.
Greece's 1967 Coup and the Reaffirmation of the EC's Democratic Principle
The debate on the role of democracy within the political identity of the Community came back to the fore in 1967 when the Colonels’ coup in Greece gave rise to a new problem: how was the Community to react to such a crisis in the first European state to have signed an Association agreement with the EEC?Footnote 26 The 1961 Athens Association agreement was uniquely privileged in comparison with later agreements in that it had been specifically designed to lead to full membership.Footnote 27 According to Hans-August Lücker, ‘Greece's application for association. . .was greeted with enthusiasm in Europe’, especially by Walter Hallstein. The first President of the Commission revelled in the idea that the country that was ‘the cradle of European democracy, the Greek spirit that had made Europe great, wanted to come and be a member’.Footnote 28
The military coup in Greece rekindled the debate on the Community's stance on issues of democracy. On 8 May 1967 Edoardo Martino, chairman of the EP's Political Affairs Committee, addressed an oral question to the Council in which he expressed the committee's anxiety about the suspension of civil and political rights in Greece and its incompatibility with the founding principles of the Community, which also formed the basis of the Association agreement. He also affirmed that Parliament considered itself the ‘democratic guarantor’ of freedom in Europe and that it would do everything in its power to facilitate the return of democratic legality in Greece.Footnote 29 In the ensuing debate, Dutch Christian Democrat Wilhelmus Schuijt explicitly asked for the freezing of the association agreement with Greece until parliamentary democracy was restored.Footnote 30 He justified this request by referring to the political nature of the Association agreement with Greece, claiming that the joint parliamentary commission between the European Parliament and the Greek Parliament represented the embodiment of this political relationship. Based on this understanding of the Association agreement as an essentially political one, Schuijt argued that the suspension of the powers of the Greek parliament by the military regime and the consequent suspension of the joint commission denied the nature of the agreement. Depriving the Greek parliament of its crucial role as the representative of the people also deprived the Association agreement of its ‘most important political element’.Footnote 31 Fellow speakers from the socialist and liberal groups echoed these sentiments.Footnote 32 While in 1962 Spain's potential accession was only a hypothetical possibility, the EC-Greece Association agreement established clear institutional and legal links, which the dictatorial regime now threatened. It also was a clear precursor to full membership for Greece, and the EP asking for the agreement to be suspended showed once again the cross-party consensus on the idea of democracy as a condition for membership.Footnote 33
Initially, the Commission and the Council both gave cautious responses to the European Parliament's pressures. The differences likely reflected the diverse nature of the three institutions involved – as the EP took an immediate and clear stance against the regime in public, behind closed doors the debates in the Commission and Council showed the warring opinions and concerns harboured by the member states. There was immense pressure within the circles of the Commission, as many worried that a failure to take a clear stance on the question would be interpreted as support for the new regime.Footnote 34 Meanwhile, on 5 June 1967, the Council could not even reach a consensus on issuing a declaration on the establishment of the Greek dictatorship, deciding that a prudent stance of wait and see was the most suitable course of action. However, France and West Germany opposed any open condemnation of the Colonels’ regime. They underlined the strategic importance of Greece for NATO following the Soviet penetration in the Mediterranean – thus highlighting the wider geopolitical repercussions on the Cold War chessboard.Footnote 35
In the case of the Greek junta, the Council had manifested the innate contradiction which characterised the EC's dealings with third parties: its rhetoric on human rights and democratisation was repeatedly undermined by the strategic and economic interests of its member states, thereby providing the Greek regime some – albeit limited – room for manoeuvre.Footnote 36 In their authoritative works on French and German policies towards the Greek dictatorship, Lorenz Plassmann and Mogens Pelt have documented the close relationships that both countries maintained with the dictatorial regime through supplying military equipment and financial assistance.Footnote 37 There was no coordination of bilateral and multilateral relations towards Greece. At the same time as the EC was moving to freeze the association, France was furnishing the junta with arms in its effort to create a third pole in the Mediterranean, while West Germany, Greece's second largest supplier of arms and the United States's closest ally vis-à-vis Athens, adopted a very lenient policy.Footnote 38
While the Council grappled with these difficulties, new Commission President Jean Rey was pressed by German Socialist Ludwig Metzger to clarify the Commission's position during a parliamentary debate in September 1967. Rey stated that the Community would maintain the daily management of the agreement but – crucially – it would not negotiate on new issues (agricultural harmonisation and a new financial agreement) as originally envisaged,Footnote 39 ‘until the democratic and parliamentary structures are restored in Greece’.Footnote 40 The Community's financial aid was also suspended. Only 69 of the 125 million dollars’ worth of credit made available to Greece under the first financial protocol had been used up.
Thus, while the EP, Commission and Council had very different initial reactions to the Greek developments, the three did to some extent converge toward a similar stance on the issue. In fact, a Commission paper stated that three factors made it necessary to take a clear position: firstly, the worsening of the domestic situation in Greece; secondly, the totalitarian tendencies of the new regime and, thirdly, the stances taken by the different European governments and the unequivocal position of the Council's consultative assembly, which reinforced the thesis put forward by the EP.Footnote 41
The actual impact of the freezing of the Association agreement on the dictatorial regime remains an open question, although most studies so far have reached a negative verdict in term of concrete results.Footnote 42 Nonetheless, its symbolic impact could not be ignored: even the dictators were troubled by the blow dealt by the EEC decision to the regime's legitimacy and tried to lift the freeze by threatening the European Commission with legal action while, at the same time, trying to dispel perceptions that they were diplomatically isolated. In refusing to reconsider the suspension of the Association, the European Community was demonstrating that a lack of democracy was, and would be, the principal hurdle to any further integration. This contrasted with the position of the United States and NATO, widely perceived to be indifferent or even tolerant of the new Greek regime.Footnote 43 As Greece emerged from the dictatorship years later, this perceived contrast would play an important role in the transition strategy of the country's political elite. A parallel response from the Council of Europe led the Greeks to withdraw before a vote could sanction their exclusion in 1969. Thus, in the eyes of the Greeks, the EC and the Council of Europe were the two organisations that had, at least symbolically, denounced the dictatorship – unlike the transatlantic allies.Footnote 44 Taking this stance also proved important for the EC itself. The debates and even disagreements in the EP, the Commission and the Council over Greece's Association enhanced the idea of the European Community as a community of values with both the right and the duty to uphold democracy within the European continent – regardless of the fact that this may have been an unintended consequence of discussions that had started before they could actually be thought to have concrete policy implications.
The EC as the Promoter and Guarantor of ‘European Democracy’
In the 1970s, as the dictatorships of Greece, Spain and Portugal collapsed and the three countries set their sights on EC membership, the Community no longer merely intended democracy as a requirement prior to accession, it also set itself up as a ‘guarantor of democracy’. In the discourse of the applicants and in that of the EC, enlargement was identified as a way of anchoring the new Mediterranean democracies to democratic western Europe.Footnote 45 Many historical studies of the applicant states show that they themselves interpreted accession to the European Community as a confirmation of their successful transition to democracy and an official acceptance back into the fold of the ‘true’ Europe.Footnote 46 Tsoukalis shows how there was a widespread consensus among Spain’s political elites, and indeed its population at large, that EC membership was a way to stabilise the volatile political situation,Footnote 47 while in Greece the pro-membership elite saw membership as a way to consolidate democracy and used the freezing of the Association agreement and the EC's denunciation of Greece's military regime to support this argument.Footnote 48 Moreover, the Community's focus on democracy stood in marked contrast to the attitude of NATO and the United States, who had not denounced the dictatorship in the same way.Footnote 49 This strengthened the claim that by joining the Community, Greece would be joining a pole of democracy. Likewise, Spanish political and social forces agreed that European integration was necessary in order to engineer the socio-economic modernisation and full democratisation of the country after the collapse of Franco's dictatorship.Footnote 50 This consensus was shared by Spanish public opinion, which was based on an idealistic, and rather vague, understanding of ‘Europe’ coupled with the desire for international recognition.Footnote 51 Charles Powell also focused on the idea of democracy as an essential aspect of Spain's desire to join the EC.Footnote 52
Applicants’ perception of the EC as a champion of democracy makes it all the more compelling to ask why democracy also became a crucial concept for the Community actors themselves. After all, the practical functioning of the EC was hardly a model of democratic practice: at the time of the southern European applications, the European Parliament was not yet directly elected and talk of the democratic deficit was beginning to emerge. In 1973 the established democracies of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark joined the EC without raising any questions about democratic practice within Community discussions.Footnote 53 Their accession did, of course, introduce new voices with strong national democratic traditions in the Community arena.Footnote 54 However, the sense of crisis remained and led EC actors to seek a new raison d’être for the project of European integration. In the early 1970s, the international economic structures established after the Second World War were in crisis with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the repeated oil crises, while the geopolitical order was also being called into question by the Vietnam War, the multiple crises in the Middle East and the changing dynamics of superpower relations linked to detente. As the United States focused on these broader issues and detente led to the ‘amplifying and aggravating [of] local and regional tensions’,Footnote 55 the political developments in southern Europe presented the EC with the need to address what was potentially a destabilising change on its immediate periphery. It was in this context that EC actors converged on the emerging self-image of the EC as a champion of democracy.Footnote 56
The general sense of international crisis was compounded by the Community's own sense of internal crisis, as initiatives such as European Monetary Union (EMU) unravelled and disagreements persisted about the economic and even institutional shortcomings of the EC. A new catalyst was needed if the EC was to find a new common direction. Ongoing discussions about the political nature of European integration and its democratic character presented an opportunity to find just such a rallying cry. At the same time, this internal quest took place as human rights emerged as a vital new element of the international political discourse, of which the Helsinki Act in 1975 was but one example.Footnote 57
At the end of 1973, there had been an attempt to give European integration a more explicitly political dimension with the Declaration on European Identity:
sharing as they do the same attitudes to life, based on a determination to build a society which measures up to the needs of the individual, they are determined to defend the principles of representative democracy, of the rule of law, of social justice – which is the ultimate goal of economic progress – and of respect for human rights. All of these are fundamental elements of the European Identity.Footnote 58
The southern European applications for membership, and in particular the first, lodged by Greece in June 1975, presented the ideal opportunity to refine the EC's identity beyond the rhetoric articulated in the previous decade, and the challenge of translating it into policy when faced with hard-edged economic and political considerations.
The Greek Case: Converging Rhetoric
The suspension of the Association agreement after the coup, coupled with the forced withdrawal of Greece from the Council of Europe in 1969, contributed to the erosion of domestic approval for the junta and frustrated the attempts of the dictators to gain support from important European political elites.Footnote 59 In Greek eyes, the Community became associated with liberal democratic values after the decision to freeze the Association created ‘an interesting phenomenon where the process of European integration was identified with the defence of democratic values’.Footnote 60 This enabled Greece's leader during the transition, Konstantinos Karamanlis, to use the EC link to positively influence Greece's political trajectory and its international positioning by reintroducing Greece into the western family of democracies.Footnote 61
The positive view of the EC was important when confronted with the strong anti-Americanism that permeated Greek public opinion during and after the dictatorship, which derived from the US failure, as perceived by the Greeks, to oppose the junta.Footnote 62 This led Greek foreign minister George Mavros to explain in a discussion with Helmut Schmidt, the German chancellor, that ‘every Greek [is] convinced that the Greek dictatorship was supported by the USA’.Footnote 63 This sentiment reached its height with the double Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the perceived lack of reaction from either the United States or NATO, which led to Greece's withdrawal from the military wing of the transatlantic alliance. Karamanlis would later comment that ‘the withdrawal from NATO was not only justified but necessary. The fury of the Greek and Cypriot people was so great at that time that the only alternative would have been war’.Footnote 64 In this climate of volatile and heightened public sentiment, the Greek perception of the Community as the symbol of liberal democratic values presented a vital option to Greek policy-makers during transition – compounding the longstanding choice to move closer to the EC already made with the Association agreement in 1958.Footnote 65
The EC's response to Greece's application was mixed, if not in public, then certainly behind closed doors. The Commission and the member states were fully aware of the largely political reasons that had guided the Greek request; although positive in their official response, they were much less enthusiastic in private, given the serious political and economic implications of a possible accession. The Commission's Opinion, published on 28 January 1976, understood fully the political importance of supporting the Greek application, but at the same time, considered that enlargement called for speeding up the process of integration.Footnote 66 The suggestion that was made to have a pre-accession period stemmed from several considerations.Footnote 67 It presented an opportunity for the Community to reform its institutions and at the same time to develop a substantial programme for economic aid that would enable Greece to overcome its structural weaknesses and adapt more easily to the Community's obligations and mechanisms. Moreover, a preparatory period seemed to reflect the desire of some member states to delay Greece's accession without causing a political rebuff.
Despite the problems it had raised, the Commission's Opinion concluded that ‘it is clear that the consolidation of Greece's democracy, which is a fundamental concern not only of the Greek people but also of the Community and its member states, is intimately related to the evolution of Greece's relationship with the Community. It is in the light of these considerations that the Commission recommends that a clear affirmative reply be given to the Greek request’.Footnote 68 Therefore, notwithstanding serious misgivings about the challenges of a Greek accession, the Commission concluded that democratic concerns overshadowed all others when it came to providing a rationale in favour of accepting the Greek application. Both the Commission's lukewarm opinion and the ambivalent responses of member states are testament to the Community's attempt to walk the thin line between the need to welcome a recently democratised Greece and manage the impact that its accession would have on the EC's institutional and economic structures. Two weeks after it had been submitted, the Council unanimously rejected the Commission's Opinion – an unprecedented and unexpected decision. At a press conference following the Council meeting, Gaston Thorn – Luxembourg's prime minister, speaking on behalf of the Council – stated that ‘for the nine delegations there could be no trial period or political considerations attached to Greece's accession’.Footnote 69 Finally, after eight months of deliberations, the Community had decided to open negotiations for Greece's potential membership.
The promises that the Community had made to Greece both when the Association agreement had been frozen and when the dictatorship collapsed gave Karamanlis the opportunity to push for the argument that democratic obligations should trump economic concerns. In the face of this, the Community could do little else but be persuaded by the combined force of its own rhetoric and the Greek claims that only by being accepted into the EC fold would their transition succeed and avoid the potential destabilisation that a relapse into authoritarianism – or a detachment from the western camp – would bring.Footnote 70
Underlying strategic imperatives laid at the root of the second enlargement: as the southern European states emerged from the dictatorships and turned to the EC with the aim to become full members, the Community found itself in the position of having to respond to two interconnected problems. The first was to ensure that the transition to democracy remained on course; the second, that the international alignments on the Cold War game board remained at the very least unaltered by the regime changes.Footnote 71 In formulating their response to these demands, the Community actors found that the principles voiced over the previous decade, and their reception by the applicants, would provide them with the ideal means to bring Greece, and then Spain and Portugal, into the western European institutional fold.
In order to meet these twin goals, the Community used the democratic norms it had been building up as its core political identity to justify enlargement through the rhetoric of democratic norms and values. In doing so, it could both reinforce its internal evolving self-perception and maintain the southern European countries on the course of democracy and, crucially for the wider Cold War context, help them to align with western Europe through participation in its political and economic institutions at a time when NATO was unable to bind them together.
Democracy as the New Binding Principle of European Integration
Greece's approach proved all the more successful because it resonated with the Community's perception of itself and how this had evolved during the 1970s. Internal talk focused not only on how to tackle the Community's economic and institutional problems, but also on its future trajectory and on ‘defining Europe’. This led to the attempt to give European integration a more explicitly political dimension with the December 1973 Declaration on European Identity,Footnote 72 followed in January 1976 by the Tindemans Report, which appeared just a few days before the Commission's Opinion on Greece. In this document Leo Tindemans, the Belgian prime minister, sought to compile an overview of the EEC which set out a common concept of a European Union.Footnote 73 His report stated that the Community ‘had lost its guiding light, namely the political consensus between our countries on our reasons for undertaking the joint task’Footnote 74 and that the Community must find a new raison d’être in order to push European integration forward. What had once been its key appeal – the pursuit of economic interdependence – was no longer sufficient, and in any case the general economic crisis did not make it likely that the Community would be able to make any significant economic advance. The other driving motive behind the Treaties of Rome, namely the pursuit of peace and stability in western Europe, was, by the 1970s, considered to have been attained.
However, if these two forces had lost momentum, the advancement of ‘democracy’ could offer the Community a new way forward.Footnote 75 Thus, enlargement potentially offered the opportunity to shape the Community's political dimension.Footnote 76 In the words of Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German Foreign Minister, the decision to welcome the poor southern countries showed that ‘Europe had emerged from the stage of an economic community, today being a political community’.Footnote 77 Such sentiments were echoed in the communiqués of the recently formed European Council, which identified the process of European integration with the defence of democratic values.Footnote 78
Thus, the central legitimising strategy that had originally moved the project of European integration forward, that of promoting peace, found its complement in the Community's new obligation to promote democratic ideals.Footnote 79 Thus Greece's request to enter the EC as a means of strengthening its own nascent democracy resonated with the Community's efforts to promote itself as a protector of democracy. In the Greek case, the discussions over enlargement affected the EEC's self-image while, in turn, this evolving self-image positively influenced the attitudes of the existing member states towards Greece. This created a sort of reciprocal relationship which meant that the manner in which the Nine member states (the Nine) responded to the Greek application would be the test case for the Community's own credibility in formulating a policy that was consistent with its newly self-proclaimed identity. The EC's emphasis on the importance of democracy for gaining membership essentially amounted to an explicit articulation of the fundamental characteristics of its new identity along with its new goals.
The fact that Greece was widely perceived to be the cultural ‘cradle of democracy’ only served to strengthen this process. The French President, for example, eventually described Greece's entry as a ‘return to the roots’Footnote 80 and wrote in his memoirs that ‘it was impossible to exclude Greece, the mother of all democracies, from Europe’.Footnote 81 Moreover, accepting Greece's application made it all the more difficult for the EC to deny the same request from Spain and Portugal in 1977, provided they also continued along the path of democratisation.
The discussions of enlargement to include the southern European countries provided the essential context for the Nine's idea of subscribing to a Declaration on Democracy in 1978. As all three southern Mediterranean applicants claimed that joining the Community would help them to consolidate their nascent democracies, the time seemed ripe for a declaration on the fundamental principles on which the Community was based. In addition, the decision to hold the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979 heightened the need to find a way to ‘establish a link between the practice of pluralistic parliamentary democracy and membership of the Community’.Footnote 82 The declaration was to clearly commit the Community to democratic principles, which could then be reflected in the Acts of Accession of each new member state. However, the meeting of the European Council of December 1977 rejected the idea of incorporating such a declaration in the preamble of the eventual accession treaties,Footnote 83 concluding instead that the Declaration would be sufficient, as it would form part of the acquis to which acceding states would have to subscribe.Footnote 84 What mattered the most was to find the right moment to implement it without raising suspicions.Footnote 85
The European Council of 7–8 April 1978 adopted the Declaration on Democracy at the same time as the announcement of the date for the European Parliament's first direct elections was made. The text of the declaration drew heavily on the 1973 Declaration on European Identity and it also included references to the Community's Joint Declaration on Fundamental Rights adopted under the UK Presidency on 5 April 1977. Its most crucial innovation was to include a final paragraph declaring ‘that respect for and maintenance of representative democracy and human rights in each member state are indispensable for membership of the European Communities’.Footnote 86 Ultimately, the Nine were not particularly interested in giving more specific definitions of democracy. Indeed, steering clear of a more specific definition allowed them to find convergence on the principle without having to address the question of how much and how far this idea of democracy would be realised in practice. As democratic practice varied considerably amongst the Nine, attempts to agree a clear set of democratic norms might have aroused strongly divergent opinions and led to disagreement.
Roy Jenkins, the then Commission President, commented on the declaration that ‘a directly elected European Parliament will introduce a major new democratic dimension to the institutions of the Community. And for this reason, it was entirely appropriate that we should also adapt at this European Council a declaration on democracy, for our system of pluralist parliamentary democracy lies at the very basis of the Community's existence’.Footnote 87 The Commission was very pleased with this development, seeing it as part of a bigger plan that would allow enlargement to take place without diluting the Community. Specifically, when Jenkins spoke about the emerging European Monetary System (EMS), direct European Parliament elections and enlargement, he revealed that these three developments were powerfully interrelated: ‘we could not envisage monetary union without a European direct democracy. What better way of underwriting democracy in the three applicant countries than by inviting them to a new shared parliament? What better way of assuring that enlargement does not dilute the integration of Europe than by resuming the move towards EMU?’Footnote 88
The Declaration on Democracy was thus an effective way of formally tying the ideas that had been developed over the previous two decades with the process of enlargement to southern Europe: it formally set democratic principles as the basis for a shared political identity, which the new members would have to accept as part of the acquis.
Conclusion
The evolution of the EC's democratic tradition was hardly linear, and it would be inaccurate to suggest that the course followed – uneven as it was – would inescapably lead to the formal constitutionalisation of democratic values in the 1993 Copenhagen criteria. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify how the different institutions of the Community developed a discourse of political identity in the 1960s and 1970s, introducing the idea of the Community as a political entity based on shared values and then articulating these values around the concept of democracy in a way that became significant not merely in purely rhetorical terms, as a means of self-identification, but also as a framework within which policies had to be formulated. The prospect of enlargement served as a catalyst for the identification of the Community's mission and goals. As Spain, Greece and Portugal underwent momentous political change, their leaders turned expectant eyes to the EC, clearly demanding a political response. This, in turn, called for a definition of the shared political values binding the Community together. As part of this search, different actors within the EC came to identify democracy as a fundamental requirement for membership of the Community – starting with MEPs, who managed to turn the existence of their at the time near powerless institution into a symbol of the Community's commitment to democracy. Once the idea had been introduced into the public discourse, it became very difficult for the Council and the Commission to not engage with it on some level, in the same way that they had to contend with realpolitik considerations when formulating their approach to their relations with the southern European countries throughout the period.
Through subsequent reinterpretations of the Treaties of Rome, and in particular its Preamble, adherence to democratic principles in a country's governing institutions was first introduced as a requirement for any country seeking Community membership, as a means to preserve the allegiance to the fundamental political values shared by all member states. Once this criterion had been established – even if not formally enshrined in law – a further articulation of the relationship between EC membership and democracy added additional meaning to the EC's commitment to democratic values, by bestowing upon the Community the role of guarantor for the democratic commitment and practice of its member states – thus providing an anchor for the democratic transitions of Greece, Spain and Portugal away from dictatorship. Finally, the 1978 Declaration on Democracy made the commitment to democratic values part of the acquis.
It may thus appear as a paradox that, as MEPs, Commissioners and even Council spokesmen and these institutions’ official documents elevated democracy to the highest political value of their shared identity, all of them refrained from actually providing a definition of what democracy actually entailed. The term was ubiquitous but vague, and even the 1978 declaration on this very subject stopped short of specificity. By analysing the way in which democracy was spoken about, one can see that it was used in general and interchangeably as part of a ‘triptych’ alongside the protection and respect of human rights and the rule of law.Footnote 89 However, no definition was ever provided beyond this. Nonetheless, rather than as a paradox, this may also be understood as a general desire to converge on a broad common principle in a group composed of states whose specific historical and political traditions of democratic practice were often rather different from one another. A general political commitment to democracy as a fundamental value avoided any clashes that may have come from attempts to define what such adherence would look like in practice, while still providing a sense of belonging to a shared political community.
The 1980s would see the EC focus on other issues – even in the context of enlargement, once the political principles of the basis of which the applicants were to be accepted were established, attention would turn to practical matters. The Single European Act was dedicated to institutional reform and moving forward towards a single market. Yet the idea of democracy remained at the heart of the EC's identity, and by the end of the decade the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the unravelling of the Cold War framework brought it back into the limelight in full force. As countries in central and eastern Europe also started on the path to democratic transition, their demands for the Community's support had much to do with the seeds that had been sown in the 1960s and 1970s.
