I first became interested in EFTA when I started teaching undergraduates contemporary European history in Manchester in 1972. In a survey course on European post-war economic development, at that time, I devoted one lecture to EFTA and one lecture to the European Community (EC), just to keep some balance. Later, as I became increasingly involved in researching the EC's history, I became ever more aware that ‘European integration’ no longer referred to increasing cooperation and interdependence within Europe, but had become a term that had almost entirely been taken over by the European Union (EU). The problem with this definition is that there is a tendency, when dealing with the EU, only to look at other, non-member, countries when they actually take the decision to join it, and that the only history of these other countries, therefore, that is worth studying is their pre-history to accession. For the rest, they simply do not exist. Greece, Spain and Portugal pop up on the scene only because their revolutions allow them to be considered for European Community (EC) membership. Then Austria, Sweden and Finland crop up, all of a sudden, towards the end of the Cold War – no concern, however, about their thirty or forty year history that gets expunged at the same time. To be honest, on refl ection, I feel that EFTA is also partly responsible for selling itself too short, and that it contributes to its own invisibility and its own non-history. One unfortunate consequence is that the political scientists, who see ‘European integration’ as synonymous with the history of the EU and its current performance, lose many opportunities for comparative research.

Throughout the world now there are many attempts by groups of countries to integrate their economies – for example, ASEAN and APEC and various other experiments in Asia, Mercosur in Latin America and SADEC in South Africa, to name but a few. In the available literature, almost all of the publicists and propagandists for these experiments genufl ect before the altar of the European Union. The EU is often represented as the inspiration for what they are trying to do and, not infrequently, it is even portrayed as the model for what they are trying to achieve.