Objective/Context:

This historiographical introduction, as well as the articles published in this special issue of Historia Crítica entitled “The Chilean Way to Socialism” from a transnational perspective, aim to highlight how this approach helps us to overcome the limitations inherited from the existing historiography on the Unidad Popular (up), which tends to adopt a national framework of analysis.

Methodology:

It consists of critically analyzing and summarizing the contributions of the research carried out on the up from 2003 to date.

Originality and Conclusions:

We found that the transnational dimension of the “1970-1973 cycle” has been absent or marginal in much of the historiography about the period. The national approach to the political process of the up is generally accompanied by the conviction about the alleged exceptionality of the “thousand days” of Allende. Based on the historiographical discussion of the present essay and the contributions of the articles in the dossier, we show that the transnational approach to the up allows its complete understanding by inserting it in a broader context than the national one. The regional approach makes it possible to demonstrate that the up is one of the numerous projects of “democratic revolution” that marked the “Inter-American Cold War,” while the global approach shows that the impact of the up was not only due to its exceptional nature but also to the resonance of the “Chilean road to socialism” project, with the long-standing debates on revolutionary paths and models of society that agitated the world political lefts throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The focus on the “peripheral spaces” of the Cold War allows us to think of the Allende government as an additional case of the successive efforts to find an alternative path to Soviet socialism and u.s. capitalism.

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