Transition to Democracy

Abstract

The arrival of the so-called third wave of democratisations – mainly in Europe but also in Latin America – determined processes of political, social and cultural change, whose analysis and conceptualisation were initially carried out by political science and sociology. The works by Juan Linz and O'Donelll and Schmitter laid the basis for later historical approaches, which established a narrative of these processes of transformation. The Spanish and Portuguese cases in the mid-Seventies and the end of the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships in the Eighties made possible the development of the political concept of ‘transition’, as defined by Rustow, which was applied to the above-mentioned processes of democratisation, as well as to the fall of real socialism in Eastern Europe. The interaction between the political, sociological and historical approaches has been fundamental to understand the evolution of the concept of ‘transition’ and its progressive substantivity as an instrument for explaining the complex and heterogeneous processes of social and political evolution in the period 1974–2020. Later on, other concepts such as ‘transitional justice’ and ‘historical memory’ were created, being the latter very ambiguous and controversial.