This talk aims to discuss the main ideological and (counter) cultural characteristics of the Greek, Spanish and Portuguese student mobilisations against the respective dictatorships during the so-called Long Sixties. It highlights their affinities, as well as their relation to the simultaneous protest waves taking place in Western Europe and the US around 1968. The paper will demonstrate that in these three cases similar governmental measures by the authoritarian regimes prompted comparable reactions by movements from below. At the same time, it will aim to highlight how the intellectual stimuli coming from the international 1968, including the transnational diffusion of revolutionary cultural manifestations, shaped an anti-regime protest culture with shared characteristics in Greece, Spain and Portugal. Lastly, the talk will focus on the differences and mainly on the absence of a culminating event in Spain and Portugal of the calibre of the Polytechnic uprising in Greece, which subsequently affected the culture of protest and the commemoration of events in the post-dictatorship years.
Kostis Kornetis teaches contemporary history at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). He has taught at Brown, New York University, and the University of Sheffield, and was CONEX-Marie Curie Experienced Fellow at Carlos III, Madrid, and Santander Fellow in Iberian Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Children of the Dictatorship. Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the ‘long 1960s’ in Greece (Berghahn Books, 2013) and co-editor of Metapolitefsi (Themelio, 2015), Consumption and Gender in Southern Europe since the “Long 1960s” (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Rethinking Democratisation in Spain, Greece and Portugal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is currently writing a book on the generational memory of the transitions to democracy in Southern Europe (OUP, forthcoming 2022).