How do we look back at the fifty years since these societies’ transition to democracy? What kind of democratic practice has been established since in Greece, Spain, and Portugal? What is the political heritage of those intense times? Do traumas instigated by dictatorships and their aftermath linger on? If so, for how long? This talk looks at the evolved memory of these real or supposed smooth transitions to democracy and how they were eventually challenged during the years of the Great Recession (2009-2015) when an array of actors regarded transitions as easy scapegoats for the financial crises or as unfinished business.
Professor Kornetis teaches contemporary history at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). He has taught at Brown University, New York University, and the University of Sheffield, and was a CONEX-Marie Curie Experienced Fellow at Carlos III, Madrid, and Santander Fellow in Iberian Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford.