Abstract
In Legacies and Memories in Movements: Justice and Democracy in Southern Europe, Donatella della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, Tiago Fernandes, Eduardo Romanos, and Markos Vogiatzoglou marry the social movements literature and scholarship on collective memory. One might assume that these two subfields already have a long and fruitful marriage; but the authors point out that despite growing interest in memory and its obvious utility to social movements, there has been little theorizing about the consequences of significant events—and how they are remembered—on future generations of social movement activity.
To fill this gap, della Porta and her coauthors first present a precise and sophisticated analysis of the social movements and collective memory literatures and explain where the two can and should overlap. While social movements scholars have long studied the impact of earlier movements on contemporary ones, the authors argue that more attention needs to be paid to the “memory work” performed by “memory agents” and how movements both use memory as a tool for mobilization and are constrained by how events are remembered. Social movement activists may highlight their version of what happened, but they are subject to countermovement narratives as well. In this way, della Porta and her coauthors place collective memory at the center of their analysis.
The authors develop a comparative historical study examining the transition from dictatorship to democracy in four southern European countries: Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. They argue that these regime transitions are critical junctures, or transformative moments, with long-term effects on future social movements. The authors ask two questions. First, how does the type of path to transition that a nation takes affect later social movement activity? Second, how does the memory of regime transition act as both a resource and a constraint on future movements, such as the anti-austerity movements in the wake of the Great Recession?
The four countries selected for analysis are similar enough on a socioeconomic, political, and cultural level to be comparable, but they vary in how they transitioned to democracy. The authors chose two ideal-typical cases, Portugal and Spain. Portugal is an example of an “eventful transition” to democracy, characterized by abrupt mobilization from below. Spain is a clear example of a “participated pact” in which the elites within democracy movements make compromises with elites of the old regime. In this case, the masses have been demobilized. Adding complexity to the analysis, Greece and Italy fall in between these two ideal types, with Italy more closely resembling eventful democratization and Greece resembling a negotiated transition.
Empirically, the authors examine the effects of critical junctures during the transition to democracy (which vary from eventful transition to participated pact) and their subsequent impact on social movements. They conducted in-depth interviews with roughly one dozen social movement activists from the anti-austerity movements in each country to gather collections of memories associated with each transition. These interviews provide data on the attitudes, emotions, and beliefs of the activists. Next the authors collected and analyzed organizational materials such as websites, reports, signs, and images associated with the anti-austerity movements of each country. Then della Porta and her coauthors used existing secondary historical research to contextualize and add depth to each case.
The book is organized around four main findings. The first involves “transition paths.” In Portugal, the impact of the eventful transition produced a collective memory of the revolution shared by leftist social movements. In Italy, where broad mobilization led to elite compromise, social movements initially remained influential during the transition as the old regime (Nazis) remained powerful in some regions and still needed to be confronted. Despite this, however, leftist social movements were demobilized, leading to “contested memories” of the Resistance. Spain’s transition was the result of negotiation among elites, resulting in a less politicized narrative. The Greek case is similar to Spain, except that the memory of the transition is not ignored, but has been kept alive by leftist politicians and social movements.
The second main finding involves institutional legacies. The authors found that eventful transitions produced democracies with institutional structures and cultures more open to collective action and protest. Conversely, when transitions were largely controlled by elites, this produced “less institutional openness, fewer resources, and less recognition to protesters and social movement activists” (p. 77).
The third finding concerns movement legacies. Della Porta and her coauthors argue that the type of transition affects social movement practices and memory long after the transition has passed. In Portugal, the eventful transition produced social movements with strong cultures and networks, whereas Spain’s “participated pact” resulted in social movements with weak ties and little solidarity.
Finally, the authors look at contemporary anti-austerity movements and how they did or did not use memories of transition strategically to construct their own identities by connecting with previous, successful leftist movements. In Portugal, memories of the revolution are uncontested and, consistent with their argument, frequently relied on by activists. In Spain, contemporary activists only use the memory of transition selectively, but the authors argue that the negotiated transition is viewed with suspicion and has little resonance among activists. Contemporary activists use the memory of the civil war (a defeat) instead. In Italy and Greece, the story is much more complex, with the construction of fractured and even competing narratives due to a discontinuity with post-resistance institutions. The authors describe a betrayed resistance that challenges any continuity with the past.
Della Porta and her coauthors compare four similar southern European nations and demonstrate how social movements both shape and are shaped by memory. This book brings together the social movements and collective memory literatures in new and important ways, demonstrating how contemporary activists are constrained and enabled by the legacies of the movements that precede them. This book would be of interest to scholars of social movements, culture, collective memory, and comparative historical sociology.