Introduction

Abstract The Introduction opens with the observation that what one generation feels keenly, another may ignore, forget, or mythologize. This tension between lived experience, indifference, and nostalgia provides the lens through which the book approaches the democratic transitions of Southern Europe. Beginning on 25 April 1974, when Portugal’s Carnation Revolution toppled decades of dictatorship, it situates the Portuguese upheaval alongside the fall of Greece’s Colonels’ Junta and the weakening of Franco’s Spain. Although the image of jubilant Portuguese, Greeks, and Spaniards celebrating together never occurred, it is captured allegorically in Nikias Skapinakis’s painting Delacroix on the 25th April in Athens (1975). The painting embodies both the exuberance and the explosive potential of the mid-1970s—a moment described as a condensed time, dense with possibility. Its romantic imagery symbolizes not only the end of authoritarianism but also the eruption of grassroots movements, cultural experimentation, and generational demands for radical change. The Introduction uses this composite image as an interpretive key: it foregrounds how transitions were experienced emotionally and politically, how expectations of democracy emerged, and how those memories were transmitted, contested, and reshaped across generations, becoming central to Southern Europe’s evolving political identities.