journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

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Nicolau Andresen-Leitão
research. 2 The research project Portugal e a Integração Europeia: uma perspectiva
histórica, co-ordinated by António Costa Pinto and Nuno Severiano Teixeira, and some
doctoral theses in the making might shortly change the present situation. 3
Based on archival sources, this article will seek to provide a brief history of Portugal's
official European integration policy up to 1972. The article is divided into four sections
which will provide I) an outline of Portugal and Europe prior to the Treaty of
Rome, II) a presentation of Portugal's reaction to the Treaty of Rome, which resulted in
EFTA membership, III) an explanation of Portugal’s application for EEC association in
1962 with the objective of full membership, and IV) a survey on the period from French
President Charles de Gaulle’s veto to British EEC membership in January 1963 to the
signing of the trade agreement between the EEC and Portugal in July 1972. A conclusion
on Portugal's European integration policy during the period under consideration
will close this article.
I. Salazar and Post-War Europe, 1947-57
Small, peripheral, and set apart from the rest of continental Europe by Spain, Portugal
has rarely played a part in European contemporary history. If Portugal’s minor
participation in the First World War were momentarily put aside, we would have to
go back to the Napoleonic Wars to include the country in any European-wide context.
António de Oliveira Salazar, the country’s autocratic ruler from 1933 to 1968,
believed that geography had excluded Portugal from the main track of European
history by providing an ocean through which fulfil Portugal’s manifest destiny of
exploration, colonisation and migration. 4
This belief would even result in the initial refusal of Marshall aid in 1947, due to the
“prosperity” of the Portuguese economy, in the words of the Foreign minister, and
because being involved in the American-aid scheme was not in the “interest of the
2. The main sources of information on Portugal's relations with the European Community are the Lisbon-based
Arquivo Nacional - Torre do Tombo (ANTT), the Arquivo da Presidência de Conselho de Ministros
(PCM) and the Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático of the Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros
(AHD-MNE). The habitual thirty-year rule applies to Portuguese archives with the exception of the
AHD-MNE, where documentation may be consulted up to 1974. Other sources can be found in the archives
of the industrial associations of Oporto and Lisbon and in parliamentary records. Outside Portugal,
the main source of information is the Public Record Office (PRO) in London.
3. The project is compiling a bibliography, a guide of archival sources and an ambitious oral history
project in collaboration with the AHD-MNE. Doctoral theses are being prepared by the author at
the European University Institute, on Portugal and European Integration, 1947-1974. From the
Marshall Plan to Democracy, and by Sérgio Rodrigues at the Université de Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne,
on Portugal vis-à-vis the process of European integration in 1960-74.
4. “Circular sobre integração europeia, para as missões diplomáticas do Presidente do Conselho, de
6 de Março de 1953”, in: R.T. GUERRA, A.S. FREIRE and J.C. MAGALHÃES, Movimentos de
Cooperação …, op.cit., p.64.