Southern Europe? – Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece from the 1950s Until the Present Day - Softcover

Baumeister, Martin; Sala, Roberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3593504820 ISBN 13: 9783593504827

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2016

Synopsis

According to mainstream discourse of the Cold War, post-1945 Western Europe was essentially a homogeneous historical space fully integrated into modern industrial society. But as Southern Europe? makes clear, Western European societies were in fact divided by deep political and economic inequalities. While nations in the north embodied consolidated democracies, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were at times all authoritarian regimes. Deeply afflicted with underdevelopment, these countries were cut off from the “economic miracles” other Western European states were experiencing. With its weak democracy, Italy held a contradictory position between the struggles of the Iberian and Greek peninsulas and the progress of its neighbors beyond the Alps.

Now, old inequalities long believed to be things of the past have resurfaced, and a new debt crisis appears to be splitting the continent apart along historic lines. This book raises the important question of whether studying the geopolitics and social history of southern Europe might be a valuable analytical tool for understanding these contemporary financial catastrophes.

About this title

About the Authors

Martin Baumeister holds the chair in contemporary European history at the University of Munich.
Stefanie Schüler-Springorum is director of the Institute for German-Jewish History and a lecturer at Hamburg University.

Roberto Sala is a researcher in the Department of History at the Universität Basel, Switzerland.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3593504820
• ISBN 13: 9783593504827
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280