ABSTRACT
For over forty years, at the time the EU was being established, there were two Europes. There was a Western Europe centred on the six member states of the ECSC and then of the EEC. A number of other states were associated with this Europe through some combination of trading links with the Communities and/or membership of the alternative European Free Trade Area (EFTA), established in 1960 by seven states: Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. These were often called the ‘outer seven’, by contrast with the ‘inner six’, and three of them (Denmark, Norway and the UK, along with Ireland) also made an unsuccessful application to join the EEC. The UK’s application was finally vetoed in 1963 by the French President, General De Gaulle, who argued, with some justification, that the UK was subservient to the United States and would not be a satisfactory member. Portugal’s membership of EFTA is surprising, since it was still under the post-fascist dictatorship of Salazar, which had survived, along with Franco’s regime in Spain, the defeat of European fascism in 1945.
