Writing and researching Southern Europe as a symbiotic area has always presented a challenging task.Footnote ¹ Historians and political scientists such as Stanley Payne, Edward Malefakis, Giulio Sapelli, and Roberto Aliboni have studied the concept of Southern Europe and its difficult paths to modernity.Footnote ² They have been joined by sociologists and anthropologists who have debated the existence of a Southern European paradigm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the arduous transformation of the region's welfare systems, economic development, education and family structures.Footnote ³ These scholarly attempts to understand the specificities of Southern Europe date back to the concerns of Western European Cold War strategists in the 1970s, many of whom were worried about the status quo of the region in the aftermath of the fall of the dictatorships.Footnote ⁴ But this geographical and geopolitical definition of the area did not necessarily follow existing cultural, political and economic patterns.Footnote 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’.

Given the degree of attention the region has received in recent years, it is no surprise that academics have questioned the utility of bunching together Greece, Spain, Italy and other Southern European countries. As Effie Pedaliu has poignantly noted, ‘trying to define present-day Southern Europe as a region is not an exercise that lends itself to consistency, and exact or even objective criteria are hard to come by’.Footnote ⁶ Incessant media reporting has fixed a notion of Southern Europe that has become politically contaminated and historically debatable. The financial crisis created intra-European tensions that had negative effects in terms of intra-European solidarity, a process that was only exacerbated by the migration crises of 2015. Scholars have showcased in a convincing manner the normative and moral assumption of the term ‘Southern Europe’, which has been shaped by European power struggles.Footnote ⁷ The recent migration and financial crises, both of which directly affected Southern Europe, gave further ammunition to the emergence of different narratives about the region.

In this review of books we highlight how recent crises have influenced scholars who have shifted to focus more closely on networks, social histories and the people who inhabit Southern Europe, rather than the structures that act upon them. In the process, Western-dominated narratives of Southern Europe that emphasised dictatorships and transitions to democracy have been reconsidered, debunked and enriched by talented researchers from the region writing on different aspects of society, everyday life, emotions, material culture, sexuality, politics and culture, often drawing on sociology, history and political science.Footnote ⁸ While a definitional consensus on Southern Europe remains absent, the books under review attempt to use the term as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis and they identify both national and transnational structures that may not be congruent with geographical or contemporary political boundaries. Most authors currently seem to follow Pamela Radcliff's call for historians to provide a history of Southern Europe that encompasses economic developments, political reform and most importantly social transformations.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, much contemporary scholarship consciously or even unknowingly aims to ‘de-essentialise’ the region.Footnote ¹⁰ Interdisciplinarity, as well as imaginative transnational and interregional approaches, have given us the tools to reassess the uniqueness of ‘Southern Europe’ and show how its ‘intrinsic characteristics’ can be understood by situating the region within the wider global developments of the twentieth century. Moreover, by looking at countries at the periphery of Europe and focusing on their societal transformations, these books offer solid attempts to recast not only the history of the influence of non-hegemonic states on international relations but also the value of regionally grouped case studies.Footnote ¹¹ It is noteworthy, for instance, that the term Cold War is missing from the titles and cast aside as an interpretive framework for the evolution of these countries. For better or for worse, in ‘taking off the Cold War lens’, these historians have discovered different dynamics at play.Footnote ¹²

The Eurozone crisis, and the way the political elites handled it, brought to the fore concerns about the quality of democracy in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy. In all these countries there were calls of differing intensities to reassess transitions to democracy, which until then had been framed as national and, at times, idealised hegemonic narratives. Inevitably, a battle of historical memories occurred. Sensitive to this phenomenon, two interdisciplinary and comparative books, A Sombra das Ditaduras, edited by António Costa Pinto, and Rethinking Democratisation in Spain, Greece and Portugal, edited by Maria Elena Cavallaro and Kostis Kornetis, revisit the transitions to democracy of these countries.Footnote ¹³ A Sombra das Ditaduras analyses the authoritarian legacies in Southern Europe, taking a comparative look on the forms of transitional justice – meaning the judicial and non-judicial measures and actions implemented by political elites or civil society during the transition to democracy in order to come to terms with the authoritarian past – as applied in Italy, Portugal, Greece and Spain. The diverse forms of transitional justice found in these countries are understood as part of a wider interpretative framework, that of the politics of the past.Footnote ¹⁴ Rethinking Democratisation, in turn, explores the ways in which the multifarious European crisis has affected the interpretation of the transitions to democracy in Spain, Portugal and Greece. What makes this book innovative is that it compares diachronically past and present debates related to two issues: democratisation and Europeanism/Europeanisation. In addition, one section of the book is devoted to analysing the role of grassroots movements both in the past and in the present, a welcome shift of emphasis considering that research on the Southern European transitions has tended to focus on political elites.Footnote ¹⁵ Both books offer a complex picture that challenges two contrasting trends in the literature. On the one hand, by building on the idea that these countries followed common developmental patterns they contest the paradigm of uniqueness on which national narratives of democratisation are based. On the other hand, by taking a comparative look into the recent histories of these countries the two books show that, despite the similarities, there are also substantial differences. Thus, these volumes render problematic any uncomplicated attempt to delimit these countries in a single, homogeneous region.

A Sombra das Ditaduras underlines that the countries under scrutiny faced similar challenges when dealing with their authoritarian past. The priority of transitional elites was to establish democracy. However, they had to make difficult decisions about which elements of the former authoritarian regime should be punished, the severity of the punishments and the application of retroactive justice. Eventually, every country ended up applying different forms of transitional justice. These differences depended on the authoritarian legacies, the kind of democratic transition and the interests of the political parties involved. In the Italian case, where multiple national and international actors intervened, criminal and legal forms of transitional justice coexisted. This resembles more closely other transitions to democracy after the Second World War than countries of the ‘third wave of democratisation’,Footnote ¹⁶ as Costa Pinto points out.Footnote ¹⁷ In Portugal, during the revolutionary period (1974–75) there was also a combination of criminal and legal forms of justice, which makes this case similar to the post-1945 transitions to democracy. After the electoral victory of the Socialist Party in 1976 the purges of former collaborators with the regime ended and a new wave of political cleansing emerged, this time against the left-wing military and communists. In Greece, a rupture controlled by the political elites defined the first measures of transitional justice. In the context of strained relations with Turkey, the government of Karamanlis opted for the fast implementation of soft legal justice, as it did not want to alienate the military. However, this approach changed after the failed coup attempt of February 1975, when Karamanlis realised that he could not trust the military. The sentences were tougher than in the other countries analysed.Footnote ¹⁸ Finally, in Spain, where the transition to democracy was controlled by the authoritarian elites and the memory of the Civil War was present, an informal pact to forget the past between the former Francoist elites and the leaders of the opposition determined the characteristics of transitional justice. There was no punitive justice and the state apparatus was barely reformed. This case shares commonalities with Latin American and Eastern European transitions, despite the different international contexts in which they occurred.Footnote ¹⁹

The volume illustrates the usefulness of comparison in multiple ways. Besides helping to identify similarities and differences, it allows us to rank the authoritarian legacies in these countries from stronger to weaker in the following order: Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.Footnote ²⁰ Yet, this does not necessarily mean that the democratic transformation of Spain was more superficial than in the other countries under investigation. As Diego Palacios Cerezales shows in his comparative chapter, in the long run the reform of the police, for example, was more thorough in Spain than in Portugal. Although the volume is comparative, a greater focus on the international factors and actors influencing these transitions and on the possible transnational connections and/or reflexive comparisons between the transitional elites of these countries would have contributed to our understanding of these events and expanded the wider European and global relevance of these histories.

Rethinking Democratisation also offers a nuanced, comparative and, to some extent, transnational analysis of Greece, Spain and Portugal's recent pasts. It shows that in recent years the dominant narratives on the transitions to democracy have been widely questioned in all these countries. This has been especially so in Spain, where the 2008 crisis ‘blew consensual views of the past away’. Footnote ²¹ The hegemonic narrative on the transition has been criticised from academic, cultural and political corners, leading to the idea that, far from being a model, it allowed Francoist elites to perpetuate their power. As a response, there has been a ‘robust defence of the traditional benign representation of the transition to democracy’.Footnote ²² Several academics, politicians and popular pundits have been critical of the simplistic rejection of the traditional narrative. This edited volume also addresses the significance of Europe in these countries’ recent past. An important contribution is the argument that Europeanism in the three Southern European countries had a different impact than Europeanisation. The former is understood as a symbol associated with democratic values before and during the transitions, and the latter as a process of adjusting and transferring competences to the European Community.

Europeanism has been put to test in recent years in the three countries. It has proved to be resilient, although for different reasons. In Spain, the roots of Europeanism are deeper than in Greece and Portugal, and the strong positive connotation of Europe has not disappeared. As Cavallaro concludes, Ortega y Gasset's famous quote ‘Spain is the problem and Europe the solution’ is an idea that still resonates in Spain. In Greece, the link between Europe and economic prosperity has been particularly attractive. Unsurprisingly, this association was damaged after the imposition of austerity measures by the EU after 2008. However, Europe has other connotations, such as democratic stability, geopolitical security and cultural belonging to the West that continue to be powerful. Meanwhile, Europeanism in Portugal had a greater impact on the consolidation of democracy than in the transition, but Euroscepticism has increased among voters, if not among political parties. Finally, this volume shows that grassroots activism has been reinforced after the 2008 crisis, although with differences among the countries analysed. Interestingly, in Portugal the social movements are today weaker than in Spain or Greece. According to Carvalho and Ramos Pinto, this is a legacy of the Portuguese revolution. After the revolutionary period, Portuguese politics was significantly institutionalised, limiting the scope of political activism. Coupled with this is the fact that the labour movement is the best resourced and organised oppositional group, and it has tended to absorb and to exert a certain control over the demands of these movements.

Explaining social mobilisation in Southern Europe and its transformative impact on society and politics is the main object of inquiry of two books focused on Portugal and Greece. Guya Accornero's The Revolution before the Revolution: Late Authoritarianism and Student Protest in Portugal and Kostis Kornetis's Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the “Long 1960s” in Greece contribute substantially to our understanding of the importance of student movements and their role in the shift from authoritarianism to democracy. Both books fit into recent attempts to establish a more nuanced image of pan-European developments of the transformative ‘1968’ moment, one which also takes into account the repressive regimes in Southern Europe.Footnote ²³ By focusing on the Portuguese student movements from the mid-1950s until the demise of the Estado Novo in 1974, Accornero widens the chronological frame for interpreting the Carnation Revolution. She demonstrates that the intense wave of mobilisations which characterised the revolution ‘did in fact have a past’.Footnote ²⁴ Such an approach allows for a refreshing interpretation of how the Portuguese dictatorship was eroded and how social movements framed the expectations, agendas and actions of political and social actors during the transition to democracy. In the Portuguese case, this is crucial for understanding the apparently sudden radicalisation of the Carnation Revolution immediately after the collapse of the dictatorship.

Children of the Dictatorship constitutes a first attempt to reconsider the political, social and cultural history of youthful opposition to the Greek military dictatorship (1967–74). Kornetis puts the events in Greece, when the research allows, in a comparative context both with the parallel cases of Portugal and Spain as well as the May ’68 events. Not so empirically but theoretically the book follows closely the timeline offered by Scottish historian Arthur Marwick who has argued for a ‘Long Sixties’ that began in 1958 and continued until the international oil crisis in 1974.Footnote ²⁵ For Kornetis, the Greek student movement under the Colonels was one of the last manifestations of the political and countercultural dynamism of the ‘global sixties’. Relying mostly on oral testimonies, he investigates what accounted for student mobilisation in Greece. Factors included soaring university admissions and demands for better conditions, as well as the transnational flow of ideas such as tiersmondisme that encouraged generations of students to see anti-dictatorial activities as liberation struggles. Kornetis proves that, despite vastly different national conditions, activists were ideologically unified on a basic level through shared anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist tendencies, a distrust of both Western liberal democracy and orthodox Soviet communism and solidarity with liberation movements of the so-called third world.

The culmination of resistance mobilisation was the student occupation of the Athens Polytechnic in November 1973 that was crushed by the regime's tanks. The hegemonic role that this pivotal movement played and continues to play in Greece renders its close study of pivotal importance to an understanding of both the events themselves and their afterlives. Kornetis does not shy away from discussing the pitfalls of the memorialisation of the event in democratised Greece, but he also looks at the consequences for Greek society and the politics of the demonisation of the protests that took place in the post-2008 memorandum era. More than many others, his account succeeds in treading a path between idealising and demystifying a key event in the history of Greek grassroots mobilisation.

Similarly, Accornero analyses the emergence, development and path of Portuguese student contestation of the dictatorial regime using new primary sources from the historical archives of the Portuguese political police PIDE/DGS and from the Home Office, as well as press sources. The description of the evolution of the Marxist left in both the communist and the Western worlds since 1956 sets the tone for interpreting how student activism, which was actively promoted by the Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista Português; PCP) and new radical-left groups, grew within the legal student associations that existed in the Estado Novo. These associations were fertile ground for the coalescence of dissidence as they were self-managed. In the late 1950s student activists expanded their focus from exclusively educational issues to organisational and political questions that challenged the repressive nature of the authoritarian regime. Accornero shows that the combination of international and domestic factors, such as the increasing fragmentation of the international left from 1956 onwards and the presidential elections of 1958 in Portugal, resulted in a first cycle of mobilisations that disrupted the structures of both the regime and the main party of the opposition, the PCP. The students went beyond making demands of a corporate nature and started asking for democracy and social justice. Importantly, they also expanded their repertoire of actions. The occupation of university premises and hunger strikes were the main innovations introduced in the early 1960s. Accornero argues that these innovations passed from one movement to another into the Carnation Revolution. In the early 1970s the student movement became ideologically more complex, with communists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists and progressive Catholics dominating the scene. Since Accornero acknowledges how crucial the international factors were for the development of the Portuguese movement, it would have been very interesting to read more about the possible contacts between Portuguese students and their European counterparts or about how students’ organisations perceived and interpreted the European wave of protests in 1968. Accornero argues convincingly that the student movement played an important role in creating the conditions for mobilisation during the revolution. Thus, she disproves the assumption that these movements emerged spontaneously after the demise of the regime unleashed long-repressed tensions.

Young people are also the primary actors in Nikolaos Papadogiannis's monograph Militant Around the Clock?, which explores Greek societal transformations in the first post-dictatorship years until the rise of the Socialist Party (PASOK) to power in 1981. His work is innovative in placing the politicisation of leisure and sexuality at the epicentre of left-wing youth politics. By drawing on the abundance of recent research on youth, activism, leisure and politics, he brings these insights into investigating Greek society and sheds light on how the youth became a major battleground in post-authoritarian Greece. His volume unfortunately lacks a transnational comparative dimension, but his contribution enriches our scarce knowledge of the societal transformation on the ground that took place during Greece's democratisation. His bottom-up approach offers a novel way to comprehend Greek politics and society in the 1970s and explains the pervasive nature of leftist culture on Greek youth and the society more generally.

The focus in Militant Around the Clock? is on two communist youth organisations, of Greece: the Communist Youth of Greece (Κομμουνιστικό Κόμμα Ελλάδος; KNE) and the Rigas Feraios (RF). Papadogiannis convincingly argues for the need to ‘portray communism as a plural phenomenon’ with an impact on the cultural, personal and political life of these young politicised subjects. Footnote ²⁶ But he goes further, by delving into theoretical and conceptual discussions about the role of ‘emotionology’, ‘generation’ and ‘culture’. His empirical work draws from a rich tapestry of party material, pamphlets, journals, personal collections and interviews. It shows that in Greece ‘young activists did not depict their collective action in terms of generation but rather in terms of affiliation to a particular political group’.Footnote ²⁷ Unlike the rest of Western Europe, collective action in Greece followed a different path of periodisation.Footnote ²⁸ Gerd-Rainer Horn in his work has convincingly argued that the ending of a long 1968 period saw the decline of participatory democracy and the rise of ‘depoliticised individualisation’ for most Western European countries.Footnote ²⁹ In Greece however, Papadogiannis shows that left-wing mobilisation intensified in the mid-1970s up to the 1980s. This was partly attributed to what he calls the ‘dual militancy’ of citizens participating in both left-wing parties and novel protest actions autonomous that were independent of party organisation.Footnote ³⁰

Investigating the youth brings to the surface the importance of tradition. For young left-leaning dissidents, tradition was initially a way to question the monopoly of patriotism by the dictatorial regime. Progressively, however, left-wing patriotic discourse got enmeshed with anti-American sentiment. It guided not only activists’ ideological platform but also their ‘way of life’ and cultural activities. Embracing Geertz's anthropological definition of culture, Papadogiannis notes that ‘the Greek Left ‘approached culture in a bisemic way equating it simultaneously with the arts and behaviour patterns’. The Greek left claimed to represent the ‘genuine expression of the Greek nation’.Footnote ³¹ The importance of such cultural narratives rested on the simple fact that, although Greece was governed by a centre-right government, it was the left that prevailed in cultural politics and intellectual circles, playing a pivotal role in ‘the production, circulation and consumption of cultural patterns’ whose influence expanded beyond leftist circles.

In their monographs Kornetis, Papadogiannis and Accornero all place ordinary people as the subjects but also agents of the unfolding histories of these Southern European countries. History is told through a focus on the thoughts, idealism, actions, mobilities and even feelings of different individuals. While the authors deliver on these fronts, the dimension of transnationality that is claimed as important in understanding the evolution of these movements is at times missing. Further empirical research would shed light on the contacts between Portuguese, Greek, Spanish and European student movements. Besides a trans-European angle, was there an interregional exchange that would confirm a Southern European paradigm of protest? Through the comparative mirror of the southern European region, the Mediterranean or even the globe more could be learned about what Greek and Portuguese students in the long 1960s were saying.Footnote ³²

A volume which does engage with a transformative transnational phenomenon from a uniquely Southern European perspective is Matteo Albanese and Pablo Del Hierro's Transnational Fascism in the Twentieth Century: Spain, Italy and the Global Neo-Fascist Network. This significant, concise and clear co-authored transnational study explains the rise, context and content of fascism in Spain and Italy, and how it crossed borders, transformed and survived in different forms until the present day. The decision to compare Benito Mussolini's movement and the resistance to it as part of the Spanish Hispanidad generates new information on fascism, and the book in general makes accessible some new sources on Italian and Spanish fascisms.

One of the book's most significant contributions is its ability to explain the life of Spanish fascism after the demise of Mussolini's regime in Italy. It gives valuable background analysis for the particularities of Spain's democratisation after the death of Franco three decades behind Mussolini and underlines how, despite being punctuated by events, transformation is often a long-term process. It also describes how fascism continued across transnational strands beyond Italy and Spain after the Second World War. Reading about Ordine Nuovo – the extreme right-wing group formed as a response to Italy's entry to NATO – gives new credence to the regional context. If one looks to the east of Italy, the communist-led Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was officially an anti-fascist state. This seemed retrospective after the initial post-war years, as if the Yugoslav state were seeking a justification for wartime civil war and the fight against the Nazi regime. However, if the threat of transnational fascism continued during the Cold War – as this book suggests – then it gives greater legitimacy to Yugoslavia's long-standing anti-fascist discourse beyond mere communist propaganda. Another of the key insights in the book is to show how the 1960s were the age of radicalisation for transnational fascism, which culminated in terrorist acts such as the bombing of the FIAT stand at the 1969 Milan fair.Footnote ³³ The motivation for this neo-fascist violence was dissatisfaction with the economic conditions in Spain and Italy, the communist threat and uneasiness with the emerging détente. While Greek students drew inspiration from the global South, global communism (including its representations in Africa) threatened neo-fascist groups across the southern Mediterranean. The history of neo-fascism and its networks appears as one of individuals aspiring to violence, a dimension that barely emerges in other histories of European integration.Footnote ³⁴

The European Union is mentioned only once in the beginning and on the very last page of the book. As a supranational entity, it remains the elusive endpoint of transformation without much comment, except that integration had been going on simultaneously. The absence of the EU in this book points to a contradiction in the current understanding of Southern Europe. It is as if the European narrative only begins when the story of transnational ideological movement of fascism ends, even though we know they overlapped significantly. In much of the literature Europe appears to divorce Italy and Spain at the outset of fascism, after which the countries were welcomed back to the fold, this time as members of the EC. But, of course, this is not the case. This book points strongly towards the need to better understand and incorporate European institutions into Southern European history. As distinct stories we miss the interconnections that created today's reality.

Simone Paoli's monograph Frontiera Sud: L'Italia e la nascita dell'Europa di Schengen focuses on the topic of movement across borders as a transformative societal action. It marries the two subjects of national history and mobility to the EU. Paoli focuses on Italy's position as the epicentre of Europe's debate on immigration but also shows how a transnational phenomenon transformed Italy. His research proves without a doubt that the increase in irregular migration to Southern European shores was a consequence of the Schengen regime. Paoli creates a historic account of immigration and frames the question correctly and creatively in terms of European integration. This text is written neither in defence nor in favour of the abolishment of ‘fortress Europe’. Such arguments have dominated much of the recent historiography of the European South written from an identity and value politics point of view. Those current trends on the debate on migration stand contrary to the book reviewed here which is based upon empirical investigations of new sources.Footnote ³⁵ Paoli's book stands outside the two pro and contra boxes by researching what happened to Europe's southern border during the transformation of the European Communities into the European Union. His historical analysis of the rich data he has gathered help to move forward our debate about the role and position of Southern Europe within the EU as well the European border regime and shows what recent history research can contribute to current debate.Footnote ³⁶

The book's narrative follows the creation of the Schengen system of freedom of movement within the EU, a process which took place from 1985 to 1995. This freedom had profound economic, social, political and cultural implications for the EU countries involved, and therefore the volume's meaning becomes more expansive. Reading the text closely one discovers that progress was strongly tied to the Single European Act (SEA), a treaty which was drafted in the early years of the first Jacques Delors Commission and came into effect in 1987. It sought to unite and unify the European policy making bodies in advance of the memberships of Portugal and Spain and to create the single common market. The SEA coincided with and partly allowed for the integration of Southern Europe within the EC. When Delors became the transformative President of the European Commission in 1985 he took steps to make the Commission more influential in European affairs and the road for Schengen became possible.

Frontiera Sud underlines that many of the people close to Delors were aware of and commented on the limits and serious risks that the creation of the Schengen zone entailed.Footnote ³⁷ While the details of the Schengen system were being defined, Martin Bangemann, Commissioner for the Internal Market and Industrial Affairs, expressed fears that Schengen could become an alternative rather than complementary integration mechanism with respect to the community. Paoli describes how in 1993 the European Parliament, for its part, lashed out in no uncertain terms against a system that it judged would be lacking legal and democratic legitimacy, as well as damaging the rights and interests of migrants and asylum seekers.Footnote ³⁸ The book's approach of weaving in the story of European integration and power politics in Brussels and France alongside the question of demographic changes in Southern Europe shows how connected Southern and Western Europe have been in recent decades. It also reveals how many migrants from Italy have made their way to France via Schengen. In this process, the EU emerges as a transformative agent but only to an extent that is bound by limits set by state capacity to handle overwhelming flows of migrants and domestic responses to demographic change. Paoli's volume as well as others reviewed here demonstrate that Southern Europe and its current scholars should continue to reflect on Europeanisation beyond the recent Eurozone or refugee crises. Although the subject matter is the creation of the Schengen zone, which begun at a meeting of only five countries, the book does not draw borders on the European map. It presents a historical account of European integration which is shared between Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, West Germany, France and Brussels. The reader is invited to learn about the movement of people, its actual numbers and its context of European integration.

Migration questions are today rarely treated as open to investigation and are often predetermined along partisan lines. Paoli's account is different. Although he talks about politics and political procedures, leaders and structures, his work does not lose sight of the fact that at the heart of the migration debate are people moving across Europe. This wider perspective of history is neither completely political, nor completely national, but somehow also personal. For this reason, Paoli's book seems worthy of translation into other languages since it speaks to the other volumes reviewed here, showing Southern Europe as a subject rather than the problematic object of history. The societal, cultural and political perspectives of all these books engages and allows for wider and more inclusive conclusions about Southern Europe today. They show how diverse contexts of history of change – from colonialism and authoritarian dictatorship to democracy, and from democracy to deepening European Union membership – changed the prerogatives of different groups such as students, migrants and political leaders.

At the same time, by placing these actors at the epicentre of the analysis, these books provide a better understanding of how societies framed changing cultural norms, and what they thought about the nature of transformation in Southern Europe. None of these stories could be told without an understanding of wider transnational spaces since none of the political spaces were transformed in isolation from the regional comparative context of Southern Europe or the world. Grouped together, these books move beyond old clichés of Southern Europe without giving a definitive meaning. They do so by placing the people at the centre of their analyses. Such an approach provides valuable insights into how Southern European societies experienced, thought about and influenced regional transformations. Readers are given the opportunity to rethink this region by moving closer to the issue of what Southern Europe meant for its people. When read together, these books reveal that it meant different things to different people, from a space for social progress for young students looking towards a democratic future, to a space which would come to define how the European Union would progress as a political entity in the future. What is different in this recent literature is that Southern Europe is no longer approached from the starting point of a periphery, but rather as another centre of the European narrative of progress. Moreover – and perhaps surprisingly – these books remind us how people in Southern Europe continued to prioritise and emphasise the value of the nation. By placing social movements, migrants, transnational fascism and political elites at the heart of the analysis, the books reviewed here provide a rich picture that widens the scope for interpreting the transformation of Southern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.

While focused largely on national social movements, these volumes also show the significance of transnational connections and approaches for understanding this region. Continuing this tendency should be encouraged. Framing these books as a collected group of works strongly suggests that Southern Europe has been constituted through the interplay between different domestic, international and transnational actors and influences. Knowing more about this interplay would contribute to a better understanding of the evolution of this region and its wider international significance. Understanding the struggle and at times symbiosis between the national, inter-European and international spaces, as well as the context of change, should create a mutually inclusive paradigm of Southern Europe in which student movements, political changes, culture and society existed in overlapping contexts of modernisation, democratisation and European integration.