Asensio Robles

“Uncharted Mediterranean” sets out to offer a regional and global overview of the demise of the Greek, Portuguese and Spanish dictatorships in the mid-1970s. It centers on three interrelated questions: how did three distinct authoritarian regimes collapse within a span of nineteen months? Was this simultaneity a matter of coincidence, or the result of broader global forces? And how can this experience be situated within the wider transformations of the 1970s?

As a working hypothesis, the project argues that the Mediterranean played a pivotal role in the crisis of these regimes by drawing them into interrelated processes of decolonization, globalization, and Cold War détente. Through this lens, “Uncharted Mediterranean” seeks to illuminate not only the history of Southern Europe, but also the world (and the sea) around it. From the Middle East oil crisis and African decolonization to the rise of Eurocommunism, it presents the Mediterranean as a single unit of study by highlighting the interdependencies it created at a critical time of globalization.

Interweaving currents

A combination of geographical and thematic fragmentation has hindered scholars from examining Southern Europe’s democratic transitions from a Mediterranean perspective. Interdisciplinary studies of economic interdependence and North–South relations have placed the Middle East and the Arab oil-exporting countries at the heart of new globalization narratives. Yet, while the global economic influence of this topic is now well established, its regional reverberations across Southern Europe remain insufficiently explored.

Conversely, historians of Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Greece) have predominantly pursued internally driven or Western-centered interpretations of the 1970s. Although the role of economic forces is widely acknowledged, much of this scholarship has emphasized elite-driven political reform, grassroots mobilizations, Cold War constraints and European integration.

This project seeks to offer a fresh perspective by channeling these distinct currents into a unified narrative. Taking Southern European democratization as its focus and the Mediterranean as its setting, “Uncharted Mediterranean” explores how global disruptions and regional interdependencies interwove Southern European democratization, decolonization, and the Cold War together.