ABSTRACT
During the Portuguese Revolution, Henry Kissinger, then US Secretary of State, 'never doubted that Portugal would fall definitively in the communist orbit’.79 ‘La politique du pire’ did not win in Portugal because Mário Soares, European Socialists, and the US ambassador in Lisbon, Frank Carluci, fought it, but it was a hindrance for the institutionalization of democracy. Portuguese accession to the EU took place in a climate dominated by the intensification of the cold war. On the other hand, Eastern revolutions
and democratic institutionalization took place during a period of international détente and generalization of representative democracy. Both economic and international political factors played against Portugal’s transition and for eastern Europe’s.
