A Collective Biography of Southern European Democratization

Abstract How do different generations remember the democratic transitions in the postauthoritarian European South fifty years later? This book shows how individual stories, family stories, and the history of 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 postauthoritarian period to date. It dissects the ‘memory wars’ triggered by the economic crisis of the 2010s, as the political narratives and cultural politics of the transition years were deployed anew to address contemporary political challenges. It 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, this 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, this book showcases the three countries as paradigmatic of similar memory battles across Europe and beyond.