1st Edition
Dealing with the Legacy of Authoritarianism The “Politics of the Past” in Southern European Democracies
In recent years the agenda of how to ‘deal with the past’ has become a central dimension of the quality of contemporary democracies. Many years after the process of authoritarian breakdown, consolidated democracies revisit the past either symbolically or to punish the elites associated with the previous authoritarian regimes. New factors, like international environment, conditionality, party cleavages, memory cycles and commemorations or politics of apologies, do sometimes bring the past back into the political arena.
This book addresses such themes by dealing with two dimensions of authoritarian legacies in Southern European democracies: repressive institutions and human rights abuses. The thrust of this book is that we should view transitional justice as part of a broader ‘politics of the past’: an ongoing process in which elites and society under democratic rule revise the meaning of the past in terms of what they hope to achieve in the present.
This book was published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.
1. Introduction: The Authoritarian Past and Contemporary South European Democracies António Costa Pinto, ICS-University of Lisbon
2-Transitional Justice and Memory: Exploring Different Perspectives Alexandra Barahona de Brito, IEEI, Lisbon
3. Italy’s Authoritarian Past and Democracy Marco Tarchi, Università degli Studi di Firenze
4. Dealing with the "Double Legacy" of Authoritarianism in Democratic Portugal António Costa Pinto, ICS-UL, and Filipa Raimundo, EUI, Florence
5. Attitudes towards the authoritarian past in Spanish democracy Carsten Humlebaek, Copenhagen Business School
6. Repressive legacies and the democratisation of Iberian police systems Diego Palacios Cerezales, Complutense University, Madrid
7. The Authoritarian Past and Contemporary Greek Democracy Dimitris A. Sotiropoulos, University of Athens
8. Institutionalized Legacies of Authoritarian Rule in Contemporary Memory Politics: Maintaining Turkey’s Official Narrative of the Armenian Genocide Jennifer Dixon, Department of Political Science, University of California-Berkeley
9. The Politics of the Past: The Southern Cone and Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective Alexandra Barahona de Brito, IEEI, and Mario Szajder, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
10. Authoritarian legacies, politics of memory and quality of democracy in southern Europe: Open conclusions Leonardo Morlino, Instituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, Florence
Biography
António Costa Pinto is a professor of politics and contemporary European history at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. He is presently the President of the Portuguese Political Science Association. He has published extensively on fascism, authoritarianism, democratisation and transitional justice in Southern Europe.
Leonardo Morlino is professor of Political Science at Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (Florence, Italy) and President of the International Political Science Association in 2009-12. His main contributions are on change of regimes, consolidation of democracy, qualities of democracies with a special attention to southern and eastern Europe and Latin America.
"This is an especially valuable contribution to our thinking on how elites and institutions reflect, reconstruct and reconcile authoritarian pasts in new democracies. From its introduction to its conclusion, the collection teaches us important lessons that extend beyond southern Europe and even beyond comparative politics" – Nancy Bermeo, Nuffield Professor of Comparative Politics, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, UK
