ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how and when democracy entered the discursive politics of the Community to finally become one of the fundamental tenets of the European self-image - and in the process influenced how decision-makers approached the question of enlargement. It also focuses on the debates elicited by the attempts of Southern European countries to accede to the European Economic Community (EEC) in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the rebuttal of Spain's initial overtures in 1962; the challenge of Greece, the Community's first Associate member- which was 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. Finally, the chapter analyses how these ideas were formalised in the Declaration on Democracy issued in 1978.
