Ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the enthusiasm it inspired about the potential for European unity and democracy, it has become fashionable to see post-war European history in terms of convergence.Footnote 1 Historians have researched the integration of the European continent into the global, in the context of the Cold War, decolonisation and economic globalisation.Footnote 2 Internally, processes of convergence are seen to link the trajectories of nations on a continent where integration eventually trumped the divisions of nationalism, regionalism and the Iron Curtain.Footnote 3 This story of an ‘ever deeper and wider union’ was also reflected in the ways in which the transformations of Southern and Eastern Europe were narrated. The idea of a so-called ‘return to Europe’ inspired histories that connected the fall of right-wing authoritarian regimes in the Southern European states of Portugal, Greece and Spain from the mid-1970s with the end of communism in Eastern Europe from 1989.Footnote 4 This dominant account has presented Southern and Eastern European ‘peripheries’ moving towards the (Western) European core and its norms, values and models of liberal democracy.Footnote 5 Even though some have raised objections to these teleological and Western-dominated narratives of transition they have remained strikingly potent in histories of post-war Europe.Footnote 6 Only very recently have they received historiographical critique.Footnote 7 Partly this is due to the enduring appeal of centre-periphery approaches that continue to influence intellectual debates about European identity and history.Footnote 8 This is also because research on the transitions in Southern and Eastern Europe has for a long time remained rather insular. Historians have been slow to enter a research field that has been dominated by institutional and political approaches, and they have remained more focused on national histories. Where historians of either Eastern or Southern Europe have addressed the transnational or transregional aspects of transition, this has mainly focused on the appeal of the West or its Atlanticist dimensions.Footnote 9
This special issue on ‘Entangled Transitions’ posits that European post-war history has much to gain when seen from the vantage point of not only these so-called peripheries, but also the interconnections between them. Into our view come new geographies in which circulations and encounters between peripheries have significance not only in the transformation of the continent's East and South, but also in reshaping European institutions and broader notions of the continent's identity. Historical actors under recognised in our histories of Europe's late twentieth-century democratic and economic transformations are given agency: many contributions here point to the crucial mediating role of the left in transition. Moreover, histories of ‘alternative transitions’ are brought to light: the story of East–South interconnection was not simply one of liberal democracy, the journey to free market capitalism and the European Community's version of Europeanisation – this nexus gave rise to other ways of imagining both transformation and what it meant to be European.
Conceptualising the East and South
In order to grasp why such approaches have not gained prominence, one must address the history of how these regions have been conceptualised and related to each other both in public and academic discourse. The idea of two distinct ‘Southern’ and ‘Eastern’ regions, isolated and shorn of connection, was a product of the first decades of the Cold War.Footnote 10 The longstanding right-wing regimes of Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain, as well as the right-wing governments that ruled over Greece after the end of the civil war, presented themselves as the antitheses of those state socialist regimes that were established across Eastern Europe from the late 1940s onwards.Footnote 11 Western countries, too, saw them as a bastion against international communism and gave them a vital role in NATO, their military bases viewed as necessary to the ideological defence of the continent. Domestically, communist parties were outlawed and their members persecuted. In turn, communist-ruled Eastern European countries opposed what they dubbed ‘fascist’ regimes in Spain, Portugal and Greece, harbouring exiles, refugees and opposition movements in capitals such as East Berlin, Prague and Moscow, and launching international campaigns on behalf of democracy and human rights. Such divergence was reflected in the scholarship during the first decades of the Cold War, in which the two regions were dealt as entirely different ideological zones, with connections between them generally not noted.
Strikingly, distinctions between these regions were increasingly blurred in the 1960s in both intellectual and political discourses. One of the most potent frameworks was offered by the concept of totalitarianism, which equated Southern European ‘fascism’ and Eastern European ‘communism’, and opposed them both to a liberal democratic Western Europe.Footnote 12 In the first decade after the end of the Second World War, the concept of totalitarianism initially equated Soviet communism with Italian and German fascism and was widely propagated in the United States. However, it was only in the 1960s that similar frameworks became used widely by scholars in Europe. In this context, the social democratic political scientist Maurice Duverger went as far as to claim a direct link between the ‘dictatorship’ of the peoples’ democracies in the East and the threat Franco posed to democracy in Western Europe.Footnote 13 The totalitarian idea that fascism and communism were not opposites but rather shared many characteristics, and were interconnected phenomena, stimulated analysts to seek out common features between the regions: it became, for example, the story of Franco as another Stalin, or the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 as a replay of the repression of the left by the Colonels’ Coup in Greece one year earlier.Footnote 14 New left critiques brought both regions together as common victims of a broader imperialism, whether it be the Southern European regimes supported by United States or the Eastern European socialist rulers kept in power by Moscow.Footnote 15 From the late 1960s onwards world systems’ theorists connected these regions as European semi-peripheries which had chosen different variants of an autarkic authoritarianism as a development strategy to catch up with the continental core.Footnote 16 The rise of such comparisons in an era of East–West détente was not a coincidence: it offered the emerging new left ammunition to oppose the accession of a non-democratic Spain and Greece to the European Economic Community (EEC) – which was tied to their growing concerns about the closeness of Europe to the United States.Footnote 17 The highlighting of such equations of communism and right-wing authoritarianism in fact forced the European Community to distance itself from Southern European dictatorships.Footnote 18 Whereas anti-communism had once fostered the integration of Spain, Greece and Portugal into Western organisations such as the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), and inspired the NATO membership of Greece and Portugal, an authentic struggle on the part of a Western ‘democratic Europe’ against communism on behalf of human rights and democracy in the 1970s demanded a distancing from authoritarian right-wing regimes in the South too.Footnote 19 The struggle against communism and fascism became two sides of the same coin.
The collapse of authoritarian systems in both East and South between the mid-1970s and 1989 meant that these regions could be brought together as common zones of democratisation.The very concept of ‘Southern Europe’ was revived as a category of analysis among Western Cold War strategists in the 1970s as a zone that was losing its right-wing leaders, and was hence threatened by communism. Such a fear prompted US and European leaders to try to moderate the direction of the 1974 Carnation Revolution in PortugalFootnote 20 and helped garner support for the country's application for European Economic Community (EEC) membership in 1977. In Spain, communists turned from Stalinists into Eurocommunists,Footnote 21 embraced cooperation with social and Christian democrats and crumbled electorally. Social democratic governments were the beneficiaries of the triumph of democracy in Portugal, and in Spain and Greece in the 1980s. In sum, transitions in Southern Europe were not simply the end of right-wing authoritarianism but entailed the end of the communist alternative too.Footnote 22 Such understandings helped underpin later comparisons with the revolutions that shook Eastern Europe. Despite the fact that ‘1989’ had taken the West by surprise, writers were soon able to present events in Southern Europe as ‘a precocious forerunner of the largely peaceful transitions from authoritarianism to democracy’ that followed in Eastern Europe and in Latin America.Footnote 23
A common anti-totalitarian understanding of dictatorships in the East and South flourished after the end of the Cold War, as part of what has been dubbed ‘conservative revisionism’ in post-1989 Europe.Footnote 24 Memories of dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece that had been silenced in the late 1970s and 1980s were revived in the 1990s.Footnote 25 Alongside the influence of the German model of remembering the Holocaust, Southern European memory cultures were influenced by the totalitarian model of the communist past which was propagated in Eastern Europe after 1989.Footnote 26 The Spanish and Greek civil wars entered the ‘black books’ of Communism.Footnote 27 The repressive surveillance states in Greece, Spain and Portugal became understood by means of comparisons with communist security states, most notably with the East German ‘unconstitutional state’ (Unrechtstaat).Footnote 28
The two regions were also brought together as comparable forms of dictatorship in the efforts of so-called ‘transitology’, an emerging field which charted and compared the processes of transformation from authoritarianism to democracy across multiple world regions to develop models of democratic transition and consolidation. Such work conceived of Southern Europe as a regional unit of ‘transition’ that could be compared with Latin America, and, after 1989, Eastern Europe.Footnote 29 Setting the trend was Samuel Huntington's The Third Wave, which provides a rather teleological narrative of global transitions beginning with the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal, spiraling outward to Latin America and ending in the revolutions in Eastern Europe fifteen years later.Footnote 30 This work stimulated a plethora of comparative studies on post-authoritarian transitions, and the European integration process in both regions. Against the backdrop of an ever closer and wider European Union (EU), such works buttressed a rather ‘flattening’ and teleological account in which the economic modernisation of both regions was closely connected with their decision to escape their supposed isolation and ‘return to Europe’.Footnote 31 Democratisation, too, was usually equated with Europeanisation and the mediating role of Western European institutions.Footnote 32 At the dawn of the millennium, theories that connected lessons drawn from the ‘successful’ Southern European transitions to post-communist Europe jumped from academic textbooks into political discourse – with the prospect of Eastern enlargement of the European Union in 2004.Footnote 33 In particular, the example of Spain's integration in the Common Market played an important role in mollifying concerns about the impact of the Eastern enlargement among first and second generation member states.Footnote 34 Most of this literature found itself aligned with the memory politics of the European Union, which presented itself as the embodiment and protector of a democratic ‘third way’ that triumphed over Southern European fascism and Eastern European communism. The Nobel Committee awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union, employing exactly this narrative.Footnote 35
Despite such works that incorporate the East and South, we actually know strikingly little about the exchanges between these ‘peripheries’. This is not a complete absence: work on connections between Poland and Spain especially have a long tradition.Footnote 36 Yet even where links and entanglements are drawn out, observations remain indeed at a very general level.Footnote 37 Despite their claims about an interconnected ‘global third wave’, most works tell separate regional stories that illustrate – in parallel – a broader global phenomenon. There are many reasons for this. First, most of the work on these phenomena has been carried out by political scientists and transitologists whose work has focused on institutional aspects such as legal institutions, elections and party systems.Footnote 38 For the most part they have adopted comparative approaches that explain the range of variables necessary to democratisation to occur.Footnote 39 Second, most analyses have accepted core-periphery models, viewing transitions in both the South and East of the continent as essentially convergences towards the standards of Western democracy and economy. Literature dealing with the difficult pasts of European dictatorships has been dominated by similar methodologies: comparing, for example, Spanish and Polish ways of dealing with the past, rather than investigating the way in which approaches travelled between countries dealing with the legacies of different dictatorships.Footnote 40 Third, presentism has continued to hang over comparative research on transitions: research is updated with each regional political shift newly imagined as a transition, but with little questioning of the overall framework.Footnote 41 With these comparative or centre-periphery approaches to European history, not only the diversity of exchanges and crossovers across Europe has been lost but also often the agency and perspective of actors in these peripheries themselves.Footnote 42
In order to assess the importance of interactions between these European regions, the authors in this collection draw on multiple circulations involving a wide range of actors, institutions and societies. The role of exile and activism stands out, as Southern Europe became a refuge for anti-communist exiles from Eastern Europe, just as Spanish, Greek and Portuguese Communists found exile and support in the Eastern Bloc (Szobi). Others focus on political exchange, stressing the role of Communist Party links, social and Christian Democrats, as well as dissidents (Mark, Christiaens, Faraldo), in bilateral exchanges between states and international organisations and campaigns, or in relationships mediated through Western Europe. Still others explore the role of economics, either in terms of the international circulation of economists (Mark) or the role of business people or tourism firms (Holleran) in bringing ideas from South to East. Some examine why particular ideas travelled, addressing common questions of economic development, democratisation, European culture and human rights. Some articles also address the multiple ways in which media culture in either region imagined the ‘other’. Others explore the influence of such shifting imaginaries on which ideas could travel, and which could not.
Democratisations Beyond Europeanisation
This collection provides alternative ways of conceptualising democratisation in late twentieth-century Europe. In many contributions here, the political transformations of Eastern and Southern Europe are not, contrary to much scholarship, presented simply as convergences towards liberal democratic political systems. Instead, first, they suggest that the relationship with Western Europe was only one of many, and that in some cases solidarities, and intellectual and political ideas, circulated between these European peripheries with little mediation through the West. Second, some argue that such circulations were not based on fixed notions of (liberal) democratisation but were rather far more often messy explorations through a variety of democratic forms. At the same time, democracy was not the only game in town: the East–South connection often stimulated consideration of authoritarian transitions to the market or globalisation. Third, contributions here bring to the fore the role of actors, notably those on the left, whose roles are seldom given sufficient attention in accounts of the fashioning of a post-authoritarian Europe.
Several articles highlight the role that Eastern Europe played in the processes of democratisation in the South of the continent. They reveal the ways in which democratic socialists and communists played a pivotal role in creating bonds between the two regions. Christiaens emphasises that European support for the struggle against the Greek dictatorship was not led by liberal human rights organisations – a story, he notes, that fits too conveniently into a narrative of Europe converging on Western democratic norms – but rather by the solidarity organs of Eastern Bloc regimes, whose efforts helped stimulate bonds of solidarity across Europe. Political changes in the East also stimulated shifts in the South that were important on their road to democratisation. Even ‘left Falangists’ in Spain took inspiration from the technocratic, democratising and less rigidly ideological reform efforts in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania. This prompted important shifts in their worldview, notably undermining the Manichean vision of an ideologically divided Europe that had helped sustain the legitimacy of Francoism, whilst also stimulating their interest in slow, evolutionary technocratic reform. This would lead them to play a central role in the transition out of Francoism in the guise of reformers such as ex-Falangist Adolfo Suarez.Footnote 43 Faraldo and Szobi, by contrast, stress the important role that communists’ accommodation with multi-party democracy played in the Spanish and Portuguese transitions, and the importance of their encounter with the East in this regard. Faraldo notes the shock of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on Southern European communists, its impact magnified by the presence of Iberian communist exile groups in Eastern Bloc capitals, including Prague – ‘the Geneva of the East’.Footnote 44 However, he also cautions against the perception that dissidents were important in communicating a disillusionment with Eastern European communism. Rather, he argues that such movements were seen as culturally backward looking in Spain, noting that prominent figures such as Solzhenitsyn were supporters of Franco. He rather identifies the incapacity of Eastern European regimes to liberalise, and their elites’ increasingly close relationship with the Franco regime in the early 1970s, as crucial factors in the Spanish communists’ decision to distance themselves from Eastern European communism and to make their accommodation with the liberal democratic transition.
Some authors also highlight the lack of support from the East for a state-socialist future in Southern Europe following the collapse of their authoritarian regimes. Certainly, the hope was there in the early 1970s in Eastern Europe, as Mark points out. Indeed, to Western observers, too, communist forces seemed poised to make their move not only in 1970s Spain, Greece and Portugal, but also in Italy, a NATO member where Enrico Berlinguer's successful Communist Party loomed over an unstable democracy.Footnote 45 Yet in the event, as Szobi demonstrates, neither Moscow nor Prague were really committed to forcing the Portuguese Carnation Revolution – the Southern European transition most likely to radicalise – to ‘go communist’. Despite some financial support for the Portuguese Communist Party, and the missions of a few Czechoslovaks to organise collective farming in the countryside, Szobi notes that Eastern Bloc elites were in fact more invested in preserving East–West détente, and to opening up new markets in the independent countries that were emerging from the collapse of Portuguese Empire in southern Africa. Despite their rhetoric about the future of communism in the South, Eastern Bloc regimes helped to enable – through their reluctance to support leftist alternatives – such liberal democratic transitions.
The Southern European transitions were important for the East too. When this issue is addressed, scholars usually point to the impact of the Spanish consenso model on opposition to state-socialist regimes.Footnote 46 There is certainly some evidence of this: the iconic Polish dissident Adam Michnik, for example, termed the Spanish experience the ‘New Evolutionism’ in 1976 and saw the negotiation between regime and opposition as a possible way out for the impasse between state and society in mid-1970s Poland too.Footnote 47 The Eurocommunist parties of Southern Europe became an important point of orientation for Eastern European dissidents in their quest for recognition and support in Western Europe over the 1970s.Footnote 48 Yet support remained rather half hearted. The prominent Czechoslovakian dissident Jiří Pelikán reflected on his failures in the early 1970s whilst exiled in Rome to enlist support from Enrico Berlinguer – despite his efforts to encourage support for human rights campaigns on behalf of oppositionists in Spain, Portugal and Greece.Footnote 49 Similarly, Faraldo reveals the rather cool reception given to Eastern European dissidents by Spanish Eurocommunists. As Szobi argues in his contribution, the overarching figure of the Portuguese transition, the socialist Mário Soares, did not really ‘discover’ dissidence until 1989, whilst Papandreou and PASOK in Greece were highly critical of dissident movements in Eastern Europe. Only in Spain did such a culture of solidarity eventually develop, but even here it was a later development: as Faraldo notes, the declaration of martial law by General Jaruzelski prompted many Spaniards to make comparisons to their own recent coup attempt under Antonio Tejero in February 1981, which might have brought their own democratisation to an end. Yet over the course of the 1980s the idea of the South as a source of support or inspiration had fallen away for Eastern European dissidents.Footnote 50 Indeed, as Eurocommunists’ influence in Southern Europe rapidly ebbed away, they became much less interesting as interlocutors.Footnote 51 Their dwindling interest in Southern Europe was also due to the hardening relationship between oppositions and regimes in Eastern Europe – the consenso model seemed for some years no longer relevant.
Mark's contribution suggests that it was in fact reform communists in the Eastern Bloc that gained most from the relationships with, and models of transition derived from, the South. Amongst all the Southern European transitions, it was the Spanish that became the exemplar for them.Footnote 52 This is of course not surprising. The Greek dictatorship collapsed as a result of military failure in Cyprus, and the Portuguese transition was deeply unstable for its first two years: neither provided convincing material that could be used to construct a road map for transition elsewhere. By contrast, Spanish elites, particularly the socialist Prime Minister Felipe González, invested much energy in creating and then exporting the idea of a Spanish-branded planned consensual negotiated settlement, not only to Eastern Europe but also in Central and South America.Footnote 53 Yet we also need to address the question of reception: Mark explores the interactions between Hungarian reform communists and Spanish socialists from the early 1980s and explains how they saw in the Spanish transition a useful model with which to discipline a population into accepting evolutionary change from above, so as to ensure their own survival into a new multi-party democratic system. The lack of punishment or exclusion for those who had once led authoritarian rule in Southern Europe lessened the fear of punishment for communists in Eastern Europe too.Footnote 54 Even the head of the Soviet KGB initiated a dialogue with the Spanish security services in 1990 over how to draw a ‘thick line’ under ‘difficult pasts’.Footnote 55
In this sense, this issue revises a history of Europeanisation and democratisation which has remained largely centred on the enabling role of Western European social democracy.Footnote 56 The contributions here explore, for example, the importance of links between socialists in Greece, Portugal and Spain and the reform communists of Eastern Europe in engineering change in the 1980s. The rise of Southern European social democracy in the 1980s paralleled evolutions in post-Communist Europe, where major political formations that emerged in the 1990s were reform communist-turned social democratic parties, such as the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (Socjaldemokracja Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej; SdRP) (until 1999), or Hungarian Socialist Party (Magyar Szocialista Párt; MSZP): it was elites from these traditions who often played major roles in bringing their countries ‘back to Europe’.Footnote 57
Nevertheless, interaction between East and South did not always support the development of liberal democracy. Even those Spanish organisations which had been tasked with promoting the Spanish model of democratisation – such as the Institute of Ibero-American Cooperation (Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana; ICI) – were still populated with Franco-era technocrats who were ambivalent about democratic reform – as they believed that it strengthened those social forces which prioritised workers’ rights over economic efficiency and development. Indeed, Spain was of great interest in the East in part because of the Franco-era modernisation which had successfully opened up the country's economy to the world market. As Mark argues, the very fact that this opening had occurred under authoritarian conditions made it an attractive alternative route to globalisation in the 1980s for reform communists, who would be able to effect change whilst maintaining one party rule.Footnote 58 The authoritarian modernisation of the Bloc did not lose its appeal for some in the South either.Footnote 59
Nor was democracy promotion initially purposefully pursued by Western European institutions. The European Union would later claim democracy and human rights as the central pillars of its self-identity and crafted histories in which the role of its predecessor, the European Community, was crucial in overcoming authoritarian regimes in the East and South of the continent.Footnote 60 Yet this narrative concealed how Western European institutions were in fact rather reluctant to support political initiatives that might be disruptive. Certainly there is some evidence of engagement: Western European social democratic foundations played an important role in promoting parties that supported democratic transition on the Iberian peninsula, although they were often caught out by the course of events and late to engage.Footnote 61 Yet, over the past few years, historians have cast doubts about the extent of Western Europe's engagement with democracy on the continent's ‘peripheries’.Footnote 62 As Holleran notes in his contribution, European Community elites in the 1960s and 1970s were much more concerned about the economic development of Southern Europe and the long-term redressing of North–South inequalities than they were in democratisation per se. Western Europe's fascination with development, industrial growth and ‘expert societies’ in Eastern Europe, Portugal's Estado Novo and Franco's Spain over the 1960s and 1970s remains a story which has remained under researched and has still been overshadowed by self-congratulatory post-transition narratives.Footnote 63
It was in fact only in the last decade of the Cold War that the European Community began to understand democracy promotion as an important part of its mission. In particular, it was through the incorporation of Southern Europe into the European Community that an institutional identity was discovered beyond the economic.Footnote 64 In this sense the interaction with the periphery was central to the shaping of the institution itself.Footnote 65 It was the perceived instability of the Portuguese transition that was of particular importance to this story: fearing communist influence, economic support (loans) was offered in the late 1970s on the condition that democracy and the rule of law were consolidated according to certain criteria. Over the course of the 1980s the European Community increasingly saw itself as a community based around values of human rights and used ‘conditionality’ to enforce them. Such values were finally embedded in The Maastricht Treaty (1992) which introduced democracy and human rights into the primary law of what was now called the European Union (EU). Stable institutions, democracy, rule of law and human rights officially became then the political conditions required by any country applying for accession to the EU. This form of Europeanisation, shaped by the EC's encounter with the Southern European transition, led to the set of criteria that Eastern European states needed to meet to accede to the Union – demands for deep structural reform of political and legal systems which most Southern European states had not had to face during their earlier transitions.Footnote 66
East–South Détente, the ‘Third World’ and Alternative European Identities
Traditionally, the relaxation of the Cold War from the late 1960s has been seen as a critical element that allowed – or at least set a favorable background for – the political transformations that unfolded (for the most part) peacefully in Southern and Eastern Europe.Footnote 67 Détente, in this view, helped transform ‘revolution’ into the moderate form of ‘transition’. Yet until very recently these processes have been seen primarily as phenomena initiated in the West and followed in the South and East. Here, however, a number of contributions point to an important and specific East–South dimension to the ending of a divided Europe that cannot be reduced to a subset of East–West relations.Footnote 68 Indeed, the very creation of a divided Europe had an important East–South angle. Both of these European peripheries initially understood each other through the logic of the military and political confrontation of the early Cold War: their own countries’ political projects were on the ‘right side’ of a broader battle for ideological supremacy that spanned the continent and the world. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War General Franco had in fact initially been reluctant to allow radical Eastern European anti-communists to settle in Spain – as their presence might confirm for world opinion that his was a fascist state.Footnote 69 It was only after 1948, with the intensification of the Cold War, that such exiles were more openly welcomed: they now enabled Spain to become a refuge for Eastern European anti-communist refugees and to see itself as the advocate for the ‘enslaved’ half of Europe, its commitment proven by its origins in the struggle against communism.Footnote 70 Inversely, the ‘othering’ of Southern Europe provided legitimacy to communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Mark's and Christiaens’ contributions outline how Eastern Bloc states located their own origins in the civil war struggle against ‘fascism’ in Spain in the 1930s and Greece in the 1940s.Footnote 71 In this reading, the battles for Spain and over Greece were not distant events but rather part of a broader European struggle which had failed in Southern Europe but found its victorious realisation in the East. After the coup by the Greek Colonels in 1967 and the growth of ‘neo-fascism’ in 1960s Italy, domestic and international propaganda pushed the image of a fascist South of the continent, supported by US imperialism. Moreover, the expansion of right-wing dictatorship in Latin America led socialist theorists to posit the growth of a Hispanic ‘zone of fascism’ in Latin countries of ‘middling development’ that linked the Iberian Peninsula across the Atlantic.Footnote 72 The Communist Bloc presented itself in public discourse as a bulwark against this now globalising fascism. Socialist countries also contrasted themselves in economic terms in the first post-war decades: as both Mark and Christiaens argue, underdevelopment, poverty and (neo)colonialism in NATO countries such as Greece and Portugal that received Marshall Aid were an important part of Eastern European states’ arguments for their own legitimacy, as they compared the ‘other European periphery’ with their own high growth rates, levels of development, industrialisation and modernity.Footnote 73
However, this juxtaposition became blurred when, from the late 1960s onwards, East and South began to converge – both in political and economic terms. These shifts did much to reconfigure these earlier Cold War imaginaries and relationships. Mark explores the importance of Eastern European expert cultures: in particular, he explores how Hungarian economists began to imagine Eastern and Southern Europe as part of a common ‘semi-periphery’ that shared structurally similar positions in the European and global economies, and hence faced similar economic issues. Yet developmental hierarchies in this exchange were questioned: in the immediate post-war period, international organisations had used ideas about development tested in interwar Eastern Europe on the depressed areas of Southern Europe.Footnote 74 From the late 1960s, by contrast, Franco's apertura policies reached out to the Soviet Bloc and exported Spain as a model for development. Indeed, such a model looked increasingly attractive as Eastern Bloc states feared their displacement by Spain in Western European – and in particular West German – export markets. Holleran's contribution examines the growing links between the tourist industries across peripheries, linking them to later post-Cold War transfers from Spain to Bulgaria. Markets and trade links helped to undermine the ideological opposition of the early Cold War too. In his contribution, Szobi reveals how Czechoslovakia – despite criticising Portuguese fascism and imperialism in line with the rhetoric of African liberation movements it supported – nevertheless invested in brewing and mining industry, trucks and pavement works in Portuguese Angola.
From the late 1960s state socialist countries insisted on the inclusion of Southern Europe's authoritarian regimes in the Helsinki talks which came to herald the relaxation of tensions in Europe – and both East and South aligned themselves on several issues during the negotiations at the early 1970s.Footnote 75 The Portuguese, Spanish and Greek dictatorships’ anti-communism was now trumped by the pressures of economic modernisation and their desire for a counterbalance to the West – factors which inspired cooperation with state socialist regimes.Footnote 76 Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s East–South collaboration as part of the Helsinki/Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) process became part of the overall matrix of intra-European cooperation. Mark's contribution here outlines the importance of alliances between these regions in giving ‘peripheral’ (and often smaller) countries voice in the institutional processes of cultural Europeanisation of the 1970s and 1980s. He outlines how these alliances forged in international arenas spawned new bilateral links that addressed a range of cultural issues – from book translation, to film, to folk culture. Such initiatives helped give form to a revived sense of European culture, providing a framework in which countries belonging to different ideological worlds could now collaborate.Footnote 77
In these stories of East–South convergence, Western Europe often played a rather limited role. In the 1960s and early 1970s it was indeed disinterest from – or even marginalisation by – ‘core Europe’ that brought East and South together. Eastern European exiles who had been welcomed in Western Europe in the 1940s and 1950s were often relegated to the margins in the context of East–West détente and Ostpolitik in the 1960s: as embodiments of an earlier aggressive anti-communism they were no longer politically useful.Footnote 78 Faced with a diminution of status, they started to link their causes to Southern European issues. Social democratic Hungarian exiles in Western Europe, for instance, started to profess solidarity with the anti-Francoist opposition in Spain in the 1960s.Footnote 79 Southern European oppositionists faced a similar fate of oblivion in Western Europe until the collapse of their regimes.Footnote 80 As Faraldo notes in his contribution, the French government banned the Spanish communist opposition in exile in their country – and in doing so strengthened the political role of those exiles who had gone to Eastern European capitals.
Connections between East and South were also important in the creation of the idea of a common anti-totalitarian struggle that superseded the labels of anti-communist or anti-fascist. From the late 1960s onwards some recognised the political advantages afforded by trying to identify the similarities of their causes: the protest of Greek and Spanish opposition movements to the crushing of the Prague Spring or on behalf of Eastern European dissident movements was often instrumentalised on behalf of their own fight. In 1968 the Greek exile Andreas Papandreou was quick to flaunt his country as the ‘Czechoslovakia of the West’ to secure and strengthen Western European support. Christiaens argues in his contribution on campaigns against the Greek junta that Czechoslovak, Polish and Hungarian dissidents and exiles aimed to construct a common ‘anti-totalitarian’ struggle by linking their own cause with that of the anti-fascist struggle in Southern Europe. Using the anti-fascist language of their own regimes they sought to hold their systems to their own claims of human rights and democracy.Footnote 81 Likewise, the unofficial hymn of the Polish August in 1980 and the later underground Solidarność opposition was the song ‘Walls’ (Mury), based on the Spanish songwriter Lluis Llach's L'estaca, one of the iconic songs of the anti-Francoist movement. Yet these were often the product of distant imaginaries rather than of concrete connections. Greek exiles and solidarity movements directed against the Colonels’ regime were galvanised by the Soviet-Greek détente to construct a common cause with the plight of Eastern European dissidents; however, as Christiaens argues, the desire for shared struggle could not hide the major ideological differences between the movements.
The bonds that were forged between Eastern and Southern Europe continued – and in some cases even expanded – after the transitions to democracy in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s.Footnote 82 After the metapolitefsi, the Greek left's interest in Eastern Europe expanded, stimulated by new possibilities for travels, common borders, anti-Americanism and the continued presence of civil war refugees in Eastern Europe.Footnote 83 Links between Eastern and Southern Europe were promoted not only by newly legalised communist parties but also by the new democratic regimes that emerged in Portugal, Greece and Spain. A ‘Balkan détente’ was initiated in the 1960s and expanded under the post-authoritarian Karamanlis government in Greece.Footnote 84 It brought Balkan states together on themes such as tourism, environment and trade through the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 85
Relations between East and South also had an important extra-European dimension which is often missed in what are still very Eurocentric histories of Europeanisation.Footnote 86 In particular, identification with the Third World – as a site of revolution and as another ‘periphery’ – both inspired transformations in Eastern and Southern Europe and also enabled actors in both regions to come together. Such an identification was reinforced in worldviews in which Southern and Eastern Europe were seen not so much as regions of Europe but rather as constituent parts of the Third World and its associated problems – such as underdevelopment, dependency and neo-colonialism – as well as its solutions – national liberation and socialism.Footnote 87 Rejection by or disinterest from Western European-dominated institutions and social movements helped shift attention to alternatives outside Europe, both for regimes and the movements that opposed them. The rejection of the Spanish accession to the EEC, and Greece's forced withdrawal from the Council of Europe, turned these countries' regimes towards growing economies in the Third World, such as in Latin America, Gaddafi's Libya, Nasser's Egypt and Mobutu's Congo.Footnote 88 Cold War divides and ideological opposition were often trumped by attempts at economic development: as part of its apertura the Franco regime extended cooperation even to Allende's Chile.Footnote 89 Moreover, Eastern and Southern Europe were involved in each other's discovery of the Third World. Recent research, for instance, has revealed how the Greek left's interest in the Third World was mediated through Eastern European governments and Greek communists in exile, who translated documents and texts from Spanish and other foreign languages into Greek.Footnote 90 Likewise, as Christiaens argues, Portuguese, Greek and Spanish communists made contact with anti-colonial movements at the level of international communist organisations, such as the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions. In the early 1980s Spanish Christian democrats helped the fledging Polish trade union Solidarność to reach out to the Southern cone, whilst Spanish firms helped Hungarian enterprises, through joint ventures, to crack the Latin American market.Footnote 91
Importantly, these connections with the Third World illustrate how the transitions in Eastern and Southern Europe were also a quest for alternative ways of being European, and not simply an integration into seemingly hegemonic ideas that were being produced in the Helsinki process. There were a variety of imaginaries within the Soviet sphere of influence. For some countries of the Eastern Bloc, a return to the values of Western Europe became predominant in 1980s – this was a zone that included Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland and would become known as ‘Central Europe’. To their Southeast, however, alternative ideas of ‘being European’ were being promoted. The 1960s had seen the resurgence of a Southeastern European identity or the concept of ‘Balkan Europe’. This concept situated the Balkans as the ‘true Europe’ whose heterogeneity and liminality could now be celebrated as providing the continent's true values in a post-imperial world. In so being, they did not need to be defined by Western Europeans as peripheral any longer. Such a rhetoric drew on ideas of recognition for former peripheries from the vocabulary of emancipatory projects of decolonisation in the Global South.Footnote 92 In the mid-1970s there also emerged a new geopolitical notion of the ‘Mediterranean’ – a political imaginary that brought together Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal and Spain as semi-peripheral areas facing similar issues of underdevelopment regardless of their bloc affiliation. Often the notion of a ‘Mediterranean identity’ articulated an opposition to the Northern ‘capitalist’ EEC and aimed to offer an alternative for Euro-sclerosis and Westernisation, identifying with non-alignment and détente.Footnote 93 This idea of a Mediterranean unity of progressive and socialist forces could also include new economic powers in the Arab World – most notably Gaddafi's Libya and Socialist Algeria.Footnote 94 The latter backed the development of initiatives that saw the former fascist states of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece as a harbinger for East–West reconciliation and Third World liberation.Footnote 95
Western suspicions of such ‘Southern European passions’ led some of its leaders and observers to characterise Southern Europe as the continent's ‘Third World’, especially against the backdrop of the weakening of détente from the late 1970s onwards.Footnote 96 In the 1980s the economic crisis and the coming to power of socialist governments in Spain, Greece and France prompted right-wing and conservative critics to see Southern Europe as leading a new ‘Third Worldisation’ of Europe: González in Spain and Papandreou in Greece were seen as new Salvador Allendes, whose assumption of power would herald the end of Western European democracy, stability and autonomy.Footnote 97 Similarly, in Eastern Europe, dissidents and their supporters in the West framed their struggles in Third Worldist terms, touting the Jaruzelski government in Poland as another Apartheid or Pinochet regime.Footnote 98 The Polish exile and Christian democratic trade union leader Jan Kułakowski – who would become chief negotiator during Poland's integration into the EU over the 1990s – promoted a coming together of the Third World and Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s as common victims of colonialism.Footnote 99
These discourses interiorised Western narratives that established similarities between communism in Eastern Europe and colonialism since the 1940s.Footnote 100 This association between the European periphery and the Third World went into abeyance in the late 1980sFootnote 101 but resurfaced in Southern Europe in the context of the crisis of confidence in the European project after the financial crisis of 2008, particularly among a left that identified with the Global South, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain.
Conclusion: A Specific Historical Moment of Interconnection?
This special issue deals with a particular political moment – between the 1960s and 2000s – when two peripheries came together, and the interactions between them shaped not only the other, but also the history of the broader continent. These connections had not been prominent before this period – and came apart after it. Yet throughout this era debates about the nature of development, democratisation and Europeanisation brought actors and countries in both regions together. The most important mediating roles were played by the political left, compromising both social democrats and communists. However, there were even interconnections between those – such as conservative Catholics – who found common cause in their opposition to a social democratically-shaped transition across both regions.Footnote 102
These connections would continue even after the end of the Cold War, as both regions dealt with similar questions of memory and dictatorship, as Eastern European migration to Southern Europe increased, or, as Holleran notes in his contribution, EU-sponsored programmes transferred developmental thinking from the South to the East. The idea of ‘following the Spanish model’ still had power in the early 1990s when leftist elites attempted to build consensus for radical economic reform; however, the relevance of consenso disappeared as Eastern European polities became politically deeply divided by the middle of the decade. Invigorated nationalisms ‘spoke’ to each other across peripheries too. States and borders that were shaped by dictatorships and saved by transitions connected separatist movements in Spain and Eastern Europe.Footnote 103 Nationalists in Catalonia and the Basque country drew inspiration from the break-up of communist states such as Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González was well aware of the contagiousness of this reinvigorated nationalism from the East. More than any other Western political figure, he encouraged Gorbachev to keep the Soviet Union together; Madrid later refused to recognise the independence of Kosovo, whose citizens still cannot travel to Spain.Footnote 104
The interconnections that had deepened through parallel experiences of transition began to weaken over time. Indeed, the very names of these regions – often used as signifiers of economic or political peripherality – became less used, or were deliberately downplayed by agents from these regions. Seeking to distance themselves from an association with a backward East, a variety of elites in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia had referred to themselves as Central European from the late 1980s: such a term signalled their natural connection to core Europe and moved ‘Eastern Europe’ into the Balkans or the former republics of the Soviet Union. Likewise, with the successful integration of Greece, Portugal and Spain into European institutions in the 1990s, the term ‘Southern Europe’ was employed less and less.Footnote 105 Nevertheless, new forms of ‘othering’ kept these regional signifiers, and the connections they enabled, alive. Southern European politicians used Eastern Europe's relative backwardness to define the South's normality as part of a mainstream Europe – as they sought to escape from their peripheral ‘Third Worldist’ image of the 1980s. The European Union's association agreements with post-communist states sparked anxiety in Southern Europe. Eastern Europe had the potential to become a serious competitor for EU funding: this concern was made manifest in Southern European diplomatic initiatives against the rapid accession of the post-communist countries to the EU. In the early 2000s Spanish Christian democrats – including prime minister José Maria Aznar – ventured doubts about division of European cohesion funds, feared the migration of companies from Spain to Poland and opposed the opening of Central European labour and agriculture to the European market.Footnote 106
In the wake of the crisis of 2008 the concept of ‘Southern Europe’ returned, following the economic collapse and ‘re-peripheralisation’ of the so-called PIIGS (Portugal-Ireland-Italy-Greece-Spain), a group dominated by states from the South of the continent.Footnote 107 Indeed, ‘formerly Eastern European’ countries such as Poland, which had escaped the worst of the crisis and now saw themselves as financially compromised for what they considered the profligacies of the South, began to define themselves as ‘Northern European’, seeking to align themselves with core Europe in new ways.Footnote 108 Elsewhere in the former East, the validity of an EU model of development derived from the Southern European experience was called into question: Holleran's contribution here explores how the disillusionment with tourist development fed nationalist and populist movements in Spain and Bulgaria, which widened the gulf between East and South after 2008. As he argues, many of those involved in development policy started to question the economic and political capacity of the EU to assist Eastern Europe in the same way it had helped Southern Europe. From a contemporary vantage point, the erosion of the distance between East and South from the 1970s to 1990s, as these two European peripheries faced similar issues of political and economic modernisation, appears more and more as a very particular, bracketed moment in post-war European history.
