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The concept of transition occupies an awkward place within scholarship on contemporary European history. Seemingly unable to decipher the complex factors shaping the processes of democratization, it risks appearing redundant as a framework for understanding recent and on-going political developments. In European Perspectives on Transition, Pablo Sánchez León and Agustín Cosovschi prove otherwise, offering a pioneering and much-needed conceptual history of transition from a comparative perspective. Bringing together eight case studies on transitional discourse, ranging from the so-called Third Wave of Southern Europe in the 1970s to the regime changes in Central and Eastern Europe, this volume models a vital new way for studying temporality and transition within Europe.
“[This] is a very welcome collection. Very little has been published on the concept of transition, as opposed to the practices conventionally associated with it, and the contributors to this volume provide a thorough historical treatment. The reader gets a critical analysis of this particular concept, and also a powerful example of how to study temporality in contemporary European history.” • Jonathan White, London School of Economics
“This [book] makes a valuable and timely contribution in addressing a pressing matter of concern: how to fill the space left empty (in both intellectual and policy terms) by the bankruptcy of the transitology approach to democratization which has risen to prominence globally during last half-century? In particular, what intellectual historians can do about it?” • Piotr Wciślik, Instytut Badań Literackich PAN
Pablo Sánchez León is a Distinguished Researcher at the Institute of Social History Valentín de Foronda of the University of the Basque Country, where he coordinates a team that works on the imperial cultures of the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans in comparative perspective in the transition to modernity. He has worked on the history of social conflicts and the construction of citizenship in the Hispanic world between the Early Modern and Modern Ages. He is the author of Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, 1766-1868. From Crowd to People (Palgrave, 2020).
Introduction: Transition: Conceptual and Comparative History of an Axial Political and Social Concept
Pablo Sánchez León and Agustín Cosovschi
Chapter 1. Between Civil War and Revolution: The Concept of Transition in Spain and Portugal to the Twenty-First Century
Pablo Sánchez León
Chapter 2. The Engineering of a Transition to Democracy in Portugal
Rita Luís
Chapter 3. The Languages of Transition in the Soviet Republics: Interpreting Perestroikain Estonia and Lithuania in 1985–89
Juhan Saharov and Justinas Dementavičius
Chapter 4. From Peaceful Revolution to the Search for Unity: Semantics of Transition in Germany since 1989
Benno Nietzel and Marcus Böick
Chapter 5. All Possible Futures: Social Sciences Thinking about Transition in Serbia and Croatia during the 1990s
Agustín Cosovschi
Chapter 6. The Semantics of the Transition to Democracy in Greece and Spain
Magda Fityli
Chapter 7. Legal Doctrine and Liberal Pedagogy. The Concept of “Transition” and Polish Lawyers
Michał Stambulski and Jakub Szumski
Chapter 8. Permanent Transition in Hungary
Adam Fabry and Zoltán Pogátsa
Concluding Remarks: A Common Semantic Framework for Transitions with Diverse National Conjugations in Southern and Central-Eastern Europe
Pablo Sánchez León and Agustín Cosovschi
Afterword: Time and Narrativity in “Transition”: An Afterword
Augusta Dimou