Luxembourg, 1978: Portugal opens its talks to join the EEC

On Tuesday 17 October 1978 Portugal's foreign minister, Correia Gago, faced the ministers of the nine member states of the European Communities in Luxembourg, where their Council was meeting that week. In the chair sat Klaus von Dohnanyi, a minister of state at the West German foreign ministry, because West Germany held the Council's rotating presidency.3 sources

Dohnanyi welcomed the Portuguese delegation and then set out the terms. Portugal would have to accept the treaties and every decision taken since they came into force, the body of law the Community calls the acquis communautaire. Any problems of adjustment, he said, 'must be resolved by transitional measures and not by a change in Community rules'.1 source

Correia Gago accepted all of it. He asked for longer transition periods for farming, said both sides would need transitional measures for the free movement of people, services and capital, and reminded the room that his country faced serious economic and financial problems. He presented membership as the only way to give full expression to Portugal's European commitment.1 source

Dohnanyi called the task facing the negotiators substantial. Greece's negotiations were already well advanced and Spain had also applied. The minister speaking for Portugal belonged to a government whose programme parliament had rejected the month before, so he spoke for a caretaker cabinet. The treaty he was negotiating would be signed almost seven years later.3 sources

The European Economic Community, the forerunner of today's European Union, had been building a customs union since 1958. Its founders called on other European peoples who shared their ideal of peace and liberty to join them, and the Commission later read that call as an invitation to states 'sharing the democratic ideal'. Portugal under António de Oliveira Salazar, whose authoritarian Estado Novo dated from 1933, did not qualify.4 sources

The dictatorship traded with Europe all the same. In 1960 Portugal was a founding member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), with Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. When Britain and Denmark left EFTA for the EEC, Portugal signed its own agreement with the Community in Brussels on 22 July 1972, dismantling tariffs on industrial goods and some farm products.3 sources

On 25 April 1974 a military uprising, the Carnation Revolution, swept the regime away. The months that followed, known in Portugal as the PREC (Processo Revolucionário em Curso, the 'ongoing revolutionary process'), ended only on 25 November 1975. Banks and much of industry were nationalised, large estates in the Alentejo were taken over under an agrarian reform, and the officers and civilians who had made the revolution split over how far it should go.4 sources

Decolonisation was rapid. Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese came back from Africa, above all from Angola and Mozambique; they became known as retornados. The Commission put the figure at half a million in 1978; Le Monde's Lisbon correspondent wrote of almost 700,000 in 1985. A large number of young men were demobilised from the colonial wars at the same time, and Portugal lost an important market.2 sources

Democracy took root regardless. A Constituent Assembly elected on 25 April 1975 drafted a constitution adopted on 2 April 1976. Mário Soares, the Socialist leader who had been forced into exile in France and West Germany, became prime minister of the first constitutional government on 23 July 1976, and Portugal joined the Council of Europe that September.3 sources

Soares made Europe the centre of his politics. In 1976 he brought leaders of Europe's main socialist and social democratic parties to the Palácio de Cristal in Porto under the slogan 'A Europa connosco', Europe with us. Membership, he argued, would guarantee that Portugal's turn to democracy held.2 sources

As foreign minister and then prime minister, Soares travelled the length and breadth of Europe to argue Portugal's case. In a speech on 11 March 1977 he called membership a challenge for Portugal, 'because we in no way ignore our weaknesses', and a challenge for Europe, which would widen the economic gap between its south and north if it ignored the changes there (translated from Portuguese).2 sources

At 14:30 on Monday 28 March 1977, Portugal's head of mission to the Communities, Siqueira Freire, handed three letters to Sir Donald Maitland, chairman of the committee of member-state ambassadors, at the Council's General Secretariat in Brussels. They were Portugal's applications to join the EEC, the Coal and Steel Community and Euratom, sent by Soares to the British foreign secretary, David Owen, who presided over the Council.1 source

The Commission, the Community's executive, delivered its opinion on 19 May 1978. It was blunt on both counts. 'Democracy in Portugal is now an established political fact,' it said, and the Community should give 'an unequivocal yes' to opening negotiations as soon as possible.1 source

The difficulties were large. Portugal had 3% of the population of the Nine. Twenty-eight per cent of its workers were still on the land, producing only 14% of output, and industry leant on textiles, footwear and food processing, sectors in trouble across the world. The current account had swung from a surplus of 350 million dollars in 1973 to a deficit of 1,500 million by 1977, about 10% of GDP. On 6 June 1978 the Council gave the application a unanimous yes.2 sources

After the ministers' opening session, the detailed work passed to their deputies, senior officials who negotiated chapter by chapter in a conference between the Communities and Portugal. Their first session was set for 1 December 1978 in Brussels. Dohnanyi had suggested starting with the customs union and external trade, where the 1972 agreement had already done much of the work.2 sources

Spain had applied on 28 July 1977 and opened its own talks on 5 February 1979. The Community promised to judge each candidate on its merits, but the two Iberian files soon moved together. In November 1981 the European Parliament voted for both to join in January 1984, and the next month the Commission's president, Gaston Thorn, argued that they should enter at the same time.3 sources

Farming, where Correia Gago had asked for longer transitions from the start, was one of the hardest chapters. Fisheries, the free movement of workers and the budget were the other main issues in the final political agreement of March 1985. Textiles and footwear made up much of Portugal's exports to Europe, and in 1981 the Community proposed that Portuguese textile exports be kept under a system of administrative cooperation after accession.4 sources

Meanwhile Portugal's economy lurched from crisis to crisis. It agreed stand-by arrangements with the International Monetary Fund in April 1977, June 1978 and October 1983, though it drew nothing under the 1978 one. They came with austerity: a 15% cap on wage rises in 1977 cut real wages by nearly 10%, the Commission noted.2 sources

The current-account deficit shrank after the 1978 programme, then grew to 3.25 billion dollars by 1982. Soares, back as prime minister from June 1983, applied a second hard programme that cut it to 0.52 billion dollars in 1984. Governments came and went so often that Le Monde counted sixteen since April 1974.3 sources

The Community softened the wait with money. On 18 December 1980 Portugal and the EEC signed a pre-accession agreement, and the Council backed a programme of 'common actions' with 150 million European units of account (the forerunner of the ECU) in European Investment Bank loans and 125 million in grants. On 24 October 1984 in Dublin, Soares, the Irish prime minister Garret FitzGerald and the Commission's Lorenzo Natali signed a declaration naming 1 January 1986 as the target date for entry.3 sources

The last deals on agriculture, fisheries, social affairs and the budget were struck at the end of March 1985, with a political agreement on 29 March between the Ten and both candidates.2 sources

The Treaty of Accession was signed on Wednesday 12 June 1985 in the cloister of the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém. The European Commission's photograph of the ceremony shows Soares with his deputy prime minister, Rui Machete, and his foreign minister, Jaime Gama. Spain signed its own treaty in Madrid the same day.2 sources

The speakers at the ceremony were Soares, the Italian prime minister Bettino Craxi, whose country held the Council presidency, the Italian foreign minister Giulio Andreotti and the president of the Commission, Jacques Delors.1 source

Le Monde's Lisbon correspondent, José Rebelo, found Soares openly optimistic. 'Five years hence, the country will be radically different,' the prime minister told him. Farmers and many small industrialists were less sure, and Rebelo summed up the choice facing farmers as 'adjust or go bust'.1 source

Soares did not lead Portugal in. On 6 November 1985 Aníbal Cavaco Silva replaced him as prime minister. Portugal left EFTA on 31 December 1985 and joined the European Communities, together with Spain, on 1 January 1986.3 sources

Money came quickly. From 1986 Portugal had access to the European Regional Development Fund, and in the Commission's later reckoning EU net transfers averaged about 3% of Portuguese GDP a year between 1986 and 2002. The Commission's economists wrote that the money helped upgrade infrastructure and train workers, and that foreign direct investment was an important catalyst for modernising industry.2 sources

Much of the investment went into transport, which the Commission's economists called the main priority of Portugal's infrastructure policy. Mainland Portugal had 196 km of motorway in 1985 and 3,113 km by 2021, according to PORDATA. The biggest single jump came in 1998, when the network grew from 797 km to 1,252 km.2 sources

Portugal adopted the euro from its launch on 1 January 1999, and euro notes and coins went into circulation on 1 January 2002.2 sources

Incomes closed some of the gap. Measured in purchasing power standards, a unit that removes differences in price levels, Portugal's GDP per head rose from 55.4% of the EU-15 average in 1986 to 68.8% in 2002, by the Commission's calculation in 2004. That was faster than Spain or Greece over the same years, and much slower than Ireland.1 source

Against today's 27-member EU, which also counts the poorer countries that joined from 2004 onwards, Eurostat puts Portugal at 81% in 1995 and 85% in 1999 and 2000. Then the line stopped rising. On 7 April 2011 Portugal asked the EU and the IMF for help and received a €78 billion programme, which it left in June 2014. GDP per head fell to 75% of that EU-27 average in 2012 and 74% in 2021, then rose to 82% in 2024.3 sources

The European Commission's own timeline of Portugal in the EU goes straight from the Council's yes in June 1978 to a pre-accession agreement in December 1980, without the session in Luxembourg. That session set the method, though. Portugal took the Community's rules whole and bargained only over the time it needed, product by product and sector by sector.4 sources

The gap the Commission described in 1978 has narrowed without closing. Portugal stood at 81% of the EU average in Eurostat's provisional figure for 2025, close to where it was in 1995 on the same measure. Dohnanyi had warned in 1978 that 'mere accession is not in itself a panacea for the economic problems facing Portugal'.3 sources