Public Memory of the Transitions and Social Movements in Spain and Greece

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 economic crisis of 2009/10 that struck the two countries at about the same time, however, they were strongly challenged by the so-called "new" new social movements that sprang out of the crisis and by intellectuals close to them, pulling out foundational threads from these celebratory narratives. This paper briefly traces the dominant narratives (political, scholarly and popular) in the two countries 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.