ABSTRACT
By the mid-1980s the Community had grown from 6 to 12 members. Following in the 1973 footsteps of Britain, Denmark and Ireland, Greece became a member in 1981 and Portugal and Spain in 198b. The applications from the three southern European states and their acceptance by the EC had been occasioned by revolutionary political change within each country. With the exception of the difficult case of Turkey, which also had expressed a desire to join the Community, it seemed in 1986 that the EC had, for the foreseeable future, expanded to its territorial limit. The remaining West European states, with the possible exception of Austria, appeared to be quite content with their involvement in EFTA, with the question of EC membership being either not seriously entertained or firmly rejected as an option. Further east, the countries of Eastern Europe were still firmly within the Soviet orbit and under Soviet tutelage. The suppression of the free trade union movement, Solidarity, in Poland in 1981, though carried out by the Polish army and not Soviet intervention, seemed to follow the pattern of events in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. There was to be no unravelling of the Soviet Union’s defensive structure, ideological hegemony and economic direction in Eastern Europe. Few, if any, at the time could have forecast the dramatic events of 1989 as one by one the Communist regimes of the east fell within the space of a few weeks.
