The flags of CERN's member states in the parking lot next to the main entrance.

CERN has always had a global mission. Its twelve founding Member States may well have been European, but the setting-up of the Laboratory owed much to the United States, for example, which wished to see the re-emergence of a strong European scientific community after the Second World War. There were thus exchanges with the American scientific community from the very start, particularly for the design of the PS. Similarly, CERN rapidly engaged in exchanges with Soviet institutes, even at the height of the Cold War. The twelve founding Member States, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Yugoslavia (which left CERN in 1961), were joined by Austria (1959), Spain (1961, and again in 1983 having left in 1969), Portugal (1985), Finland and Poland (1991), Hungary (1992), the Czech and Slovak Republics (1993) and Bulgaria (1999)