The first serious attempt to improve relations was initiated by Greece in the 1980s, during the government of Andreas Papandreou. In 1984, during a speech in Epirus, Papandreou declared that the inviolability of European borders as stipulated in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, to which Greece was a signatory, applied to the Greek-Albanian border. The most significant change occurred on 28 August 1987, when the Greek Cabinet lifted the state of war that had been declared since November 1940. At the same time, Papandreou deplored the "miserable condition under which the Greeks in Albania live".