On March 18, the group of research in Recent History(GIHRE) of the University of Navarra organized the seminar "Businessmen and Europe. The employers' organizations before the accession of Spain to the EEC (1962-1986)" which addressed the Spanish-EU negotiatingprocedure opened in the sixties, and that ends on January 1, 1986 in the accession of Spain to the European Communities, by analyzing the intervention and influence in this lengthy process exercised by Spanish businessmen through organizations that assumed the defense of their interests.

speaker Guillermo García Crespo, who holds a PhD in History from the UAB and is a member of CEFID, explained his doctoral thesis , which is based on the idea that economic means operated directly, continuously and with heterogeneous results, in the negotiation process. This influence took place in a multilateralframework where Spain, the Community bodies and the governments of the Member States were present. This certainty points to a series of implications for the processes of community enlargement, in such a way that their nature may be altered by the interference of economic means. 

Focusing on the Spanish case, the accession of our country to the EEC raises questions about the effective direction of the process, so it is essential to know the strategy assumed by the employers' organizations, analyzing the attitudes assumed by the business community in the successive stages of Spain's approach to the Community project . One of the facets of business action that must be present in the study of the ways of penetration of private interests in modern technified societies, where the control of information is a competitive advantage.

García Crespo's research is based on a chronology determined by the main milestones in the process of Spain's integration into Europe: from the initial application of the Franco Regime in 1962, which culminated in the signature of the agreement Preferential in 1970, to a second stage led by the democratic governments, which ended with the signing of the Accession Treaty in June 1985. One of the relevant aspects of this research is the possibility of characterizing three different periods in the recent history of this country: the Franco dictatorship, the transitional process and the democratic period.

The main hypothesis that has guided his work is the recognition of the action deployed throughout the Hispanic-EU negotiating process by Spanish businessmen. This negotiating framework was also influenced by the pressure exerted by the economic sectors of the member countries, which presented a heterogeneous position and, on occasions, confronted each other in the face of the enlargement of the Community.

The study of businessmen and their representative organizations in our historiography continues to present glaring gaps despite the progress made in recent decades. The consolidation during this stage of an "epistemological pluralism" in the field of social sciences has prompted a growing issue of researchers to open the field of vision to new actors present in public life, a thematic diversification that has attenuated, at least slightly, the prominence traditionally given in social historiography to the workingclass .