Foreign Policy Analysis is an innovative tool within International Relations, which, like the
discipline itself, emerged after the Second World War, in a scenario of intense proliferation of
studies about the international reality. It was in this movement towards the affirmation of this
new discipline, accompanied by the growing relevance of foreign policy, both for States and
for IR, that the study of foreign policy itself developed and became autonomous, through the
emergence of the APE. Endowed with an innovative repertoire and seeking to carry out a
deeper analysis than the traditional approach, the APE moved the object of study to the
decision maker and to the causes that really led him to adopt a given decision. In this article
we will seek to expose the relevance of the Foreign Policy Analysis, and, for that, we will resort
to a case study: Portugal’s accession to the European Communities. Completed in 1986, joining
the EEC was the culmination of a long membership process that began in 1976/77, when the
First Constitutional Government, led by Mário Soares, sent the application for membership. It
is here, in sending the application for membership, that we find the center of the decision, and
therefore, it is here that our study will also focus. Using the APE, we observe that, behind this
decision, we do not find only national interest as a motivation, as a traditional analysis might
suggest, but above all pressures, perceptions and ideals that translate into the will of the
decision maker. In this way, Portugal’s accession to the EEC was, more than a result of the
structure, a result of the perception and idiosyncrasy of the agency, whose characterization is
presented in this article.