How National Histories Shaped the Politics of Crisis: South European Contrasts

This paper delineates several fundamental crisis-era contrasts between the cases of Portugal, Spain and Greece, arguing that the prior divergence in their national political histories – especially during the region’s transitions to democracy in the 1970s – largely accounts for the pattern of variation. Both in the road to crisis and in the handling of its effects, the countries of southern Europe have followed markedly different trajectories reflective of forms of political practice rooted in the democratization pathways which initiated the ultimately global “Third Wave”.  The paper argues that large cross-case differences in the pathway followed to democracy in the 1970s – alongside several ‘critical antecedents’ in the countries’ political histories – put in place enduring differences in predominant forms of political life, a pattern of dissimilarity that has manifested itself with special clarity in the nature and place of public protest in democracy’s institutionally recognized ‘conversation’.  The analysis shows that nationally distinctive relational patterns of encounter between institutional office-holders and protesters in the streets exerted a large impact on various socio-political and policy outputs. I argue that these nationally distinctive forms of democratic practice – each marked by a repertoire of political practices – in turn conditioned numerous policy decisions that shaped crucial crisis era outcomes in the economic, cultural and political arenas. Thus despite the partially similar exogenous pressures and challenges felt by the southern European cases during the crisis, this paper argues that their strikingly different political histories led to major elements of variation in crisis-era outcomes.