When Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia joined ASEAN, they had no trouble acceding to the 1980 ASEAN-EC Cooperation Agreement. However, the EU refused to let Myanmar sign the agreement. The result was that, as recounted in Chapter 3, ASEAN and the EU had to go into diplomatic contortions so as to allow Myanmar to be present at the meetings of the Joint Cooperation Committee while enabling EU members to claim that Myanmar was not really participating; there were to be no national flags and no country name plates, and Myanmar representatives could not speak unless their country was directly alluded to.