Journal of European Integration History – Revue d'histoire de l'

114Fernando GuiraoConcerning the aspect of discrimination, the timing of the request to open negotiationswith the EEC can also be explained by the success in devising a CommonAgricultural Policy (CAP). The Spanish officials rapidly recognized the discriminatorynature of any Europeanization of agricultural markets. 33 Spain's dependenceon the EEC as its primary export market for agricultural products and the impact ofagricultural exports on its economic development provided the final and compellingreasons to seek direct negotiations with the Six to determine the form thatbilateral relations should take. 34 The official motivation for the new policy was theessential agricultural character of exports, which financed domestic economicdevelopment. In fact, the CAP would render more difficult any increase in agriculturalexports to the Six, while the industrial take-off expected to emerge from theimplementation of the first development plan would significantly increase theimport bill. The overall effect would be an increase in balance-of-payments difficulties.The latter, the authorities knew well, could cause social and politicalupheaval with unforeseeable consequences.Spain's EEC policy was not limited to avoiding trade discrimination. It also hadto consider the full implications of any obligation to reduce the different mechanismsof domestic protection, mainly tariffs and quantitative restrictions, which anyinstitutional linkage to the EEC would have entailed. As a matter of fact, expertscalled into the ad hoc interministerial commission found it impossible to considerthe EEC question until they could properly assess the implications of the associationagreement signed with the OEEC in January 1958, of membership of the InternationalMonetary Fund and the World Bank, which Spain finally obtained in September1958, and of the process of tariff updating imposed by the impendingcommitment to both import trade liberalisation on the basis of the OEEC – sponsoredquota removal and by future GATT tariff negotiations. 35Following accession to the OEEC in July 1959 Spain progressively liberalisedits import controls, less dramatically than would have been necessary vis-à-viseither the EEC or EFTA. With the publication of the sixth list of liberalised goodsto take effect from mid-February 1962, approximately seventy five per cent of thequotas on imports from the OEEC area (on a 1950 base-year) were removed andbilateral quotas substituted for global ones on all but ten per cent of the importsfrom these countries. 36 From this perspective, the government did prefer an associationwith EFTA, despite the evidence from trade statistics that the potentialities forSpanish exports to the British market might already be saturated and that the rest of33. They had learned the lesson of the so-called Green Pool experience; F. GUIRAO, “Spain and the‘Green Pool’: Challenge and Response, 1950 to 1955”, in R. T. GRIFFITHS and B. GIRVIN (ed.),The Green Pool and the Origins of the Common Agricultural Policy, London 1995, pp. 261-87.34. MAE, Leg. 6658, exp. 3: “Razones que han movido al Gobierno español para solicitar negociacionescon la Comunidad Económica Europea” by the Director for Economic Cooperation, 2 February1962.35. See minutes of CICE´s 3rd and 4th plenary sessions, 6 March and 7 July 1958, MAE, Leg. 5746,exps. 14-15, respectively.36. The Economic Development of Spain. Report of a Mission organized by the International Bank forReconstruction and Development, Baltimore 1963, p. 140.