This article examines how and when democracy entered the discursive politics of the Community to finally become one of the fundamental tenets of European political identity -and in the process influenced how decision-makers approached the question of enlargement. Building on multiple archival sources, the article traces how all three Community institutions (Commission, Council and the European Parliament) legitimized the expansion and continuation of the process of European integration through the discursive construction of democracy. It will focus on the debates elicited by the attempts of Southern European countries to accede to the EEC in the 1960s and 1970s: the rebuttal of Spain's initial overtures in 1962, the challenge of Greece -the Community's first Associate member -being taken over by a military dictatorship in 1967, the democratizing of Greece, Spain and Portugal after the fall of their respective dictatorships in the 1970s and finally the formalisastion of such democratic ideas in the Declaration

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