Public Memory of the Transitions in Spain and Greece: Toward a Change of Script?

Abstract

The transitions to democracy in Spain and Greece in the mid-1970s have been hailed for quite some time as the ultimate success stories. Ever since the onset of the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, however, the two countries were strongly challenged by new social movements that sprang out of the crisis and by intellectuals close to them, pulling out foundational threads from these celebratory narratives. This chapter focuses on how the public memory of events in the two countries evolved over the past forty years. For this purpose, it briefly traces the dominant narratives (political, scholarly and popular) and their transformations over time. It further focuses on how social movements from below often acted as inter-generational carriers of revisionism regarding the supposed smooth, unproblematic and efficient nature of transitions—with movements themselves being often trapped within this complex memory work.