European Perspectives on Transition: A Comparative and Transnational Approach to the History of a Political and Social Concept

The concept of transition occupies an awkward place within scholarship on contemporary European history. Seemingly unable to decipher the complex factors shaping the processes of democratization, it risks appearing redundant as a framework for understanding recent and on-going political developments. In European Perspectives on Transition, Pablo Sánchez León and Agustín Cosovschi prove otherwise, offering a pioneering and much-needed conceptual history of transition from a comparative perspective. Bringing together eight case studies on transitional discourse, ranging from the so-called Third Wave of Southern Europe in the 1970s to the regime changes in Central and Eastern Europe, this volume models a vital new way for studying temporality and transition within Europe.

Pablo Sánchez León is a Distinguished Researcher at the Institute of Social History Valentín de Foronda of the University of the Basque Country, where he coordinates a team that works on the imperial cultures of the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans in comparative perspective in the transition to modernity. He has worked on the history of social conflicts and the construction of citizenship in the Hispanic world between the Early Modern and Modern Ages. He is the author of Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, 1766-1868. From Crowd to People (Palgrave, 2020).

Agustín Cosovschi is a postodoctoral scientific researcher at the École française d’Athènes. Dealing primarily with the political and intellectual history of the Cold War in Southeast Europe from a global and transnational perspective, he has published articles in French, English, and Spanish in journals such as The International History Review, Cold War History, Comparative Southeast European Studies, and Balkanologie. Additionally, he has published two monographs; Les sciences sociales face a la crise (2022, Paris, Karthala), on the transformation of social sciences during the crisis and breakup of Yugoslavia, and the co-authored Nueva historia del comunismo en Europa del Este (Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires and Madrid, 2024).