How do the legacies and memories of the transition to democracy impact the trajectory of social movements? This is the question explored in Legacies and Memories in Movements, a study of posttransition social movement politics in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece. Taken together, these four Southern European democracies are as good an empirical laboratory as anyone could wish for to explore the question laid out by the authors. On the one hand is the broad societal background that these nations share. Collectively, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece are thought to embody the so-called Mediterranean syndrome (p. 20), shorthand for socioeconomic backwardness and a tendency toward authoritarian governance, at least relative to their Northern European neighbors. On the other hand, as the first democracies to have emerged from the Third Wave, the cluster of democratic openings that took place in the twilight of the twentieth century, there is already a vast literature on the Southern European democratic transitions upon which to draw.

The main argument of Donatella della Porta and her coauthors is quite straightforward: transitions to democracy are “critical junctures” for setting the future course of social movement politics. As noted, “regime transitions can be seen as turning points. Consolidation phases then become founding moments in which institutional and normative codes are set” (p. 4). This contention builds upon a variety of literatures, especially “path dependency” and “historical institutionalism.” It also shares some theoretical affinity with an earlier generation of scholarship on the legacy of democratic transitions in South America, which contends that how democracy is introduced matters a great deal to the kind of democracy that consolidates. Terry Karl’s work on political pacts in Venezuela (“Petroleum and Political Pacts: The Transition to Democracy in Venezuela,” Latin American Research Review 22[2], 1987) and Frances Hagopian’s analysis of elite pact making in Brazil (“Elites, Political Pacts and Regime Transition in Brazil,” Comparative Political Studies 23[2], 1990) readily come to mind. In these works, Karl and Hagopian trace many of the pathologies found in contemporary Venezuelan and Brazilian politics to the proliferation of political pacts during the democratic transition.

Two typologies of democratic transition anchor the analysis: “participated pacts,” and “eventful transitions.” In the first typology, embodied by Spain, the transition is built upon intraelite negotiations that for the most part exclude participation from civil society, while in the second one, typified by Portugal, civil society movements take center stage in instigating the transition and in forging the architecture of the new democratic regime. Each transition path “matters to movements, even if not in a deterministic way” (p. 132). As noted: “Eventful transitions produce open and inclusive political opportunities, then reflected in an empowered civil society, with shared and positive memories of the founding democratic moment. Vice versa, participated pacts—with the mobilization of social movements that are then excluded by the pacts—are reflected in more closed and exclusive political opportunities, which disempower civil society, fueling a split memory (or even removal) of the transition” (p. 133).

There is a lot to like in this analysis. The theoretical scaffolding stands on its own as a contribution to the comparative study of democratic transitions; as such, it is ready to be exported to many other posttransition democracies in Latin America and postcommunist Europe. Of course, whether the authors’ contentions and conclusions hold outside of Southern Europe remains to be tested, but the works by Karl and Hagopian on the South American transitions appear to lend support. The book is also a genuine collaborative effort by five scholars who make ample use of their expertise on Southern Europe to tease out similarities and contrasts among the four cases under consideration. The very structure of the book, in which the individual chapters discuss all four cases simultaneously, underscores the highly collaborative nature of the book.

The book also does a terrific service to the scholarship on Southern European democratization by challenging dominant transition narratives. In particular, the analysis offers a much-needed fresh look at the now-iconic Spanish and Portuguese transitions. The Spanish transition, so widely praised by scholars during the 1980s and 1990s as a model of intraelite consensus and compromise worthy of emulation by other countries, today looks decidedly less appealing. A wrenching economic crisis, to say nothing of a direct challenge to the Spanish state by Catalan separatists, has taken the sheen off the case. Conversely, the Portuguese transition, traditionally maligned as chaotic (at least when compared to the Spanish transition) and unworthy of emulation, is today being reevaluated for its positive legacies for civil society activism and participatory democracy.

All of this said, the book has some analytical flaws and leaves something to be desired. For one thing, the research design is a bit problematic. Some might find it difficult to consider the Greek democratic transition as “approximating Spain as a negotiated one” (p. 20). In Spain, the Franco dictatorship reinvented itself as a democracy with the consent of the Left, and its leaders escaped any kind of accountability. In Greece, by contrast, the colonels’ dictatorship collapsed as a consequence of a foreign military venture, among other things. And as part of the transition, Greek military leaders were put on trial. Indeed, these developments make Greece look more like Portugal than Spain. In Portugal, civil society overthrew the dictatorship while the army was away in Africa fighting “colonial wars,” and as part of the transition, the old regime was subjected to an extensive purge. More importantly, I wonder if a more expansive look at the universe of social movements captured in the book would have cast some cases in a different light. Spain is a case in point.

Much of the attention to Spanish social movements in the book is given to antiausterity movements, such as Podemos (We Can) and the Indignados (the Indignants), which fit a dominant theme of the book—that democracies born via political pacts tend to foster more radical social movements. Yet in recent years, the country has also seen the extraordinary rise of the Spanish LGBT movement, which succeeded in making Spain only the third country in the entire world to legalize same-sex marriage when it did so in 2005. Spain’s Movement for the Recovery of the Historical Memory also comes to mind. A genuine civil society phenomenon, this movement has in recent years done more than any other analogous movement in Southern Europe to expose the human rights abuses of authoritarian rule in the region. And the same economic crisis of 2011–13 that gave birth to the “radical” Podemos also generated the centrist political party Cuidadanos (Citizens). It is hard to square the rise and success of these movements in a political system thought to be inauspicious to social movement activism.

Finally, there is always a tendency in books asserting the long-term consequences of “critical junctures” to oversell their case. They underestimate the capacity of democracies to recalibrate and the possibility that other critical junctures might create new opportunities for social movement activism and participation. My point is not that the legacies and memories of democratic transitions do not matter, but rather that their impact is not as deterministic as we often make it to be. A lot can happen in the wake of a democratic transition that can upend our best-laid theoretical assumptions.