This article discusses the relations between the French, Portuguese and Spanish socialist parties during the transitions to democracy in the Iberian Peninsula (1974)(1975)(1976)(1977). It focuses on the attempt of these parties to establish a distinctive ideological trend, Southern European Socialism. The main argument is that the French socialists attempted to promote their ideological line-and predominantly the union between socialists and communists-in the Iberian Peninsula during the transitions to democracy. The Portuguese PS and the Spanish PSOE initially considered following this line. However, the radicalisation of the Portuguese Revolution in the sensitive context of Cold War détente, as well as the involvement of the European social democrats in both Portugal and Spain against the union of the left, prevented this model from being further considered by the PS and the PSOE. Nevertheless, all these parties showed interest in promoting a common Southern European Socialist identity that differed from European social democracy as well as from Soviet communism, considering it useful in the struggle for hegemony within the left.The aim of this article is to analyse the relations between the French Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste: PSF) and its Iberian counterparts the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español: PSOE) and the Portuguese Socialist Party (Partido Socialista: PS) in the mid-1970s, when both Spain and Portugal shifted from dictatorships to democracies. Focusing on the Portuguese Revolution and the Spanish transition, this article will examine the emergence and partial decline of the idea of Southern European Socialism, i and the ideological and political relevance that this trend, promoted by the PSF, had for all of these parties. The analysis here is based on documents held at the historical archive of the PSF, ii complemented by documents placed in the historical archives of the PSOE, iii documents available online from the Mário Soares Foundation and published sources.In the last two decades scholars of the Spanish and Portuguese transitions to democracy have paid particular attention to international factors. They have highlighted the role of the European social democrat governments and parties in promoting democracy in the Iberian Peninsula. iv Following this trend, historians working on Iberian socialism have considered international factors in order to explain how the PS and PSOE could play such a prominent role during the changes of regime in Portugal and Spain. v They have demonstrated the particular significance of the involvement of This is the accepted manuscript of the article, which has been published in Contemporary European History. 2019, 28(3), 390-408. https://doi.
Writing and researching Southern Europe as a symbiotic area has always presented a challenging task. Historians and political scientists such as Stanley Payne, Edward Malefakis, Giulio Sapelli, and Roberto Aliboni have studied the concept of Southern Europe and its difficult paths to modernity. They have been joined by sociologists and anthropologists who have debated the existence of a Southern European paradigm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the arduous transformation of the region's welfare systems, economic development, education and family structures. These scholarly attempts to understand the specificities of Southern Europe date back to the concerns of Western European Cold War strategists in the 1970s, many of whom were worried about the status quo of the region in the aftermath of the fall of the dictatorships. But this geographical and geopolitical definition of the area did not necessarily follow existing cultural, political and economic patterns. Once the Eurozone crisis hit in the 2000s these questions came back with renewed force but with even less conceptual clarity, as journalists and pundits frequently gestured towards vague notions of what they considered to be ‘Southern Europe’.
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