A Collective Biography of Southern European Democratization: The Age of Transitions

How do different generations remember the democratic transitions in the post-authoritarian European South fifty years later, and why does that matter? A Collective Biography of Southern European Democratization shows how individual stories, family stories, and the histories of the three countries intersect in the light of the transitions to democracy in Portugal, Greece, and Spain. Memories of three distinct generations shed new light on the connection between past and present, illuminating how each wrestles to come to terms with the transitional legacy. Drawing on extensive empirical work to explore individual and collective biographies, this book introduces the crucial role of generational memory in shaping the political, social, and cultural developments not just of the transitions themselves but of the entire post-authoritarian period to date. The book dissects the 'memory wars' triggered by the Great Recession, as the political narratives and cultural politics of the transition years were deployed anew to address contemporary political challenges. Kostis Kornetis provides the first comparative historical analysis of how and why the memory of the 1970s has shaped the outlook of both current political conflicts and social movements in the European South. Alongside exploring the personal meaning of politics and the political meaning of private life, the book looks at how public acts of remembrance interact with private ones, and how the past, as a moment of political exaltation, comes into dialogue with the present, as a moment of political despair. In the light of the current crisis of Western democracy, A Collective Biography of Southern European Democratization demonstrates that, despite their particularities, the three countries are paradigmatic of similar memory battles across Europe and beyond.

About the Author

Kostis Kornetis is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. He has taught history at Brown, NYU, and the University of Sheffield. He was Conex-Marie Curie Experienced Fellow at Carlos III University and Santander Fellow in Iberian Studies at St Antony's College, Oxford. He has published extensively on authoritarianism, transitions, social movements, and memory in the twentieth century. His book Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the "Long 1960s" in Greece (2013) was awarded the Edmund Keeley Book Prize. He currently advises the Spanish government's commission "España en libertad. 50 años."