Ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the enthusiasm it inspired about the potential for European unity and democracy, it has become fashionable to see post-war European history in terms of convergence. Historians have researched the integration of the European continent into the global, in the context of the Cold War, decolonisation and economic globalisation. Internally, processes of convergence are seen to link the trajectories of nations on a continent where integration eventually trumped the divisions of nationalism, regionalism and the Iron Curtain. This story of an ‘ever deeper and wider union’ was also reflected in the ways in which the transformations of Southern and Eastern Europe were narrated. The idea of a so-called ‘return to Europe’ inspired histories that connected the fall of right-wing authoritarian regimes in the Southern European states of Portugal, Greece and Spain from the mid-1970s with the end of communism in Eastern Europe from 1989. This dominant account has presented Southern and Eastern European ‘peripheries’ moving towards the (Western) European core and its norms, values and models of liberal democracy. Even though some have raised objections to these teleological and Western-dominated narratives of transition they have remained strikingly potent in histories of post-war Europe. Only very recently have they received historiographical critique. Partly this is due to the enduring appeal of centre-periphery approaches that continue to influence intellectual debates about European identity and history. This is also because research on the transitions in Southern and Eastern Europe has for a long time remained rather insular. Historians have been slow to enter a research field that has been dominated by institutional and political approaches, and they have remained more focused on national histories. Where historians of either Eastern or Southern Europe have addressed the transnational or transregional aspects of transition, this has mainly focused on the appeal of the West or its Atlanticist dimensions.

For four decades Spain played an important role in debates over the future of politics, culture and economy in state socialist Hungary, particularly for the left: first as the fascist and underdeveloped ‘other’ against which the state socialist regime legitimised itself, then as a similarly peripheral country that had managed to integrate into global economy, return culturally to Europe and peacefully establish democracy. Close relationships developed between the Spanish socialists and Hungarian communists in the 1980s and offered the latter the hope they would survive any political transition. This article demonstrates the importance of Eastern–Southern European connections – both concrete and imagined – in sustaining, and then overcoming, Europe's post-war divides.

Ever since the collapse of the Greek military regime in 1974 European campaigns over human rights and democracy in Greece have been commonly understood within an anti-totalitarian narrative that has celebrated resistance against both communist dictatorship and right-wing authoritarianism as part of a common journey towards a democratic continent. This article analyses the little-studied history of European solidarity movements with Greece during the 1960s and early 1970s that stretched across both the West and East of the continent. In so doing, it suggests that these campaigns were a facet of the politics of détente and rapprochement that brought together Western and Eastern Europe. Communist peace movements played a central role in these human rights campaigns. This was far from a common anti-totalitarian movement; rather, campaigns for Greece were enmeshed within movements that worked on a wide range of issues – from support for Eastern European dissidents and anti-fascism to world peace and protest against the Vietnam War. Nor were they about ‘a return to Europe’: above all they thrived on common connections in East and West with the Third World.

The Spanish Communist Party (PCE), under the leadership of Santiago Carrillo (1960–1982), developed the path of Eurocommunism. This was in part a rethinking of communism's approach to Western parliamentary systems, as well as an indigenous strategy for adapting the party to the transition in Spain from dictatorship to democracy. However, the influence of Eastern European developments was clear not only in the development of the party's struggle against the dictatorship but also in its reaction to Eastern European dissidents and to Solidarność, when the PCE called for an aggiornamiento to align themselves to these new tendencies. This failed, and in the end more orthodox communists came to dominate the party. But the debates about the transformation in Eastern European communism played a major part in developing the new line of the Spanish communists, and in shaping their central role during the Spanish transition to democracy.

This article analyses the relationship between Portugal and Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1989, with a specific focus on the influence of the Carnation Revolution. This analysis includes the Portuguese communist migration to Czechoslovakia, the contact between the Portuguese and Czechoslovak communists during Portugal's transition process, a diplomatic incident in 1982 and the specific conditions within the Portuguese student community at Czech and Slovak universities. The article also explores the fact that Czechoslovak communists, despite hopes that southern Europe might ‘go socialist’, did in fact very little to support communist forces in Portugal after the collapse of the Caetano regime. Likewise, the post-dictatorial governments in Portugal did little to help Eastern European dissidence. Instead, political players in both countries saw each other much more in terms of economic advantage and realpolitik.

This article examines how Spain's tourism industry was developed using European Union (EU) grants in the 1980s and 1990s, and how this strategy was later deployed to post-socialist Europe (illustrated using the case of Bulgaria). The article shows that peripheral modernisation was an important mission in the evolution of the EU and urban development for tourism played a major role in two successive post-dictatorial societies. Tourism was considered a key economic sector that addressed the reality of deindustrialisation and also served as a useful metaphor for intra-European mobility and the symbolic power of the leisure economy.