Entangled Transitions: Eastern and Southern European Convergence or Alternative Europes? 1960s–2000s

Abstract

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. Historians have researched the integration of the European continent into the global, in the context of the Cold War, decolonisation and economic globalisation. 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. 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. 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. 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. Only very recently have they received historiographical critique. Partly this is due to the enduring appeal of centre-periphery approaches that continue to influence intellectual debates about European identity and history. 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.

Reconciliation: The Institutionalization of Memory in Post-Yugoslav Slovenia

“…If in the 1990s the Slovenian Parliament's main focus was state building, ensuring a break with the former regime, and moving toward Europe (changing laws and public holidays, holding open debates), the policies after the completed transition involved intense discovering, documenting, and marking the postwar killing sites-taking an active part not in ensuring an environment conducive to professional historical research and cultivating respect for its results, but instead revising the past for its own political gains. In the 1990s Slovenia at least partly understood itself as a bearer of the positive Communist legacy (e.g., the case of Slovenian economic transformation; Christiaens, Mark and Faradlo, 2017;Crowley and Stanojević 2011). However, after joining the European Union and electing its first right-wing government under the leadership of Janez Janša's Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka) in 2004, the balance of the left-and right-wing understanding of the past, already firmly divided, tilted heavily toward the right.…”

Connecting the East to the South. Eastern European Dissidents and Third World Activism during the 1970s

“…33 The rise of these references to the Third World among exiles and dissidents also became visible in the international campaigns that were staged on their behalf in the West, and which became focused on the idea of an anti-totalitarian struggle that equated Soviet communism with fascism and imperialism. 34 Pelikán and other Czechoslovak exiles could count on support networks in the West, which emerged in reaction to the normalization policy and trials in Czechoslovakia at the beginning of the 1970s. These committees were set up by left-wing activists, mostly situated within Trotskyite, Maoist, Eurocommunist, and social-democratic circles, and were often linked to campaigns on behalf of the Third World -especially on behalf of Vietnam and Chile.…”

Rethinking Southern Europe: Society, Networks and Politics

“…region in the aftermath of the fall of the dictatorships. 4 But this geographical and geopolitical definition of the area did not necessarily follow existing cultural, political and economic patterns. 5 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'.…”