Between Decolonization and the Cold War: Transnational Activism and its Limits in Europe,1950s–90s

Following the collapse of state socialism in Europe in 1989–91, and the great enthusiasm that it provoked regarding the potential for ‘global civil society’ to play a key role in social transformation both within individual countries and across borders, interest in transnationally connected social movements grew swiftly across the humanities and social sciences. ¹ This shift was reinforced by a broader ‘transnational turn’ in the humanities from the 2000s, in which scholars – not for the first time – critiqued the reliance on the nation-state as a unit of analysis. Rather, they emphasized the need to look afresh at the transnational connections and circulations of ideas which explained the spread of ideologies in the modern world. ² In Europe in particular, against the backdrop of a politically and economically unifying continent that was overcoming its Cold War divisions, a range of political and intellectual groupings looked back to the mid-twentieth century for the histories which anticipated the seemingly ‘post-national’ present: the anniversaries of ‘1968’ in 1998 and again 2008 both sought to locate the origins of the unification of Europe in the youth, social and political movements spawned around that year. ³

The aim of this collection is to engage critically with this growing body of work on the transnational character of political and social movements more broadly, and the transnational character of political activism in Europe in the mid- to late-twentieth century more specifically. Here transnational history is understood as ‘the past lives and events shaped by processes and relationships that transcended the borders of the nation-state’. ⁴ We examine a wide range of both new and revived transnational practices and phenomena: the establishment of movements that shifted political attention away from national centres and towards cross-border networks; the construction of newly ‘imagined solidarities’ across borders which inspired both new internationalisms and forms of domestic politics; the creation of what Ludgar Pries has termed ‘transnational societal spaces’ ⁵ – sites which acted as ‘glocal’ hubs that made the local global; the role of mediating groups – intellectuals, exiles and so on – who translated political concepts between societies and regions; together with already transnational institutions such as the Catholic church that played a role in the establishment of new activist politics.

For the most part, we address the political and social movements of the European left. This does not mean that transnationalism was only found at this end of the political spectrum, although such an image often remains in popular consciousness: many powerful conservative and right-wing ideologies of the twentieth century also had transnational roots, and scholars explore the cross-border flows which helped form these movements too. ⁶ Nevertheless, this collection focuses on the New Left, radical Catholics, feminists, anti-nuclear campaigners, Trotskyists, ‘Third World’ solidarity promoters, peasant activists, anti-racists, fighters for ‘national liberation’, and champions of a more sustainable relation between man and the environment. We address how new forms of leftist politics from the 1950s constructed political and activist movements that, variously, attempted to transcend the borders of the nation state, or mobilized on the basis of transnational visions through which they understood themselves as part of much broader movements that spanned Europe or the globe. Such left activism across borders of course has a longer history in the modern world – one that runs through the transnational connections of revolutionary movements around 1848, the internationalist working-class First International of the mid-nineteenth century, women’s movements at the turn of the century, the humanitarian response to Empire, campaigns for disarmament in the interwar period, or anti-Fascism in the 1930s–40s. ⁷ The transnationalism that emerged in left movements following 1945 was in many cases – knowingly and often unknowingly – based on such earlier experiences. However, we argue that it was new in some regards, in particular as it responded to the specific global and local contexts of the time: the Cold War, the disintegration of the European empires, and the postwar national political settlements, which in some cases were unconsolidated and highly unstable. In the period under examination here, a new leftist transnational challenge was instrumental in questioning the status quo of the postwar settlement in Europe: one in which the division of a continent appeared fixed, politics appeared to be intensely nationalized, and alternative public spheres were stifled. The story that emerges here – about how the European left, broadly defined, reinvented its transnationalism – is also an account of the destabilization of postwar politics, and a revived questioning of what democracy meant in the western, eastern and southern parts of the continent. In the context of the Cold War and decolonization, new ways of imagining European, American, Third World and global political and social change became central to new forms of leftist activism that challenged the power of established communist, social democratic and socialist parties, and trade union politics. These movements would become pivotal in the reshaping of political forms and messages, as they propagated ideas about the appropriate levels of civic participation at home, opened up new areas deemed political, questioned the divisions of Cold War Europe, challenged dictatorships, and redefined Europeans’ relationship with political knowledge produced elsewhere in the world.

Although some works have highlighted the transnational nature of political activism in Europe in the 1960s–70s, ⁸ they often address this topic either through a small number of high profile (mainly) Western European demonstrations of transnationalism, deal with only a limited time frame, and emphasize the potential of new transnational linkages over their limitations. Indeed, some have commented that an uncritical search for transnationalism has been the product of an insufficiently reflective celebration of globalization of culture and economy in the contemporary world. ⁹ The aim of this collection is to bring together a range of detailed case studies of transnational activism in a greater range of national and political settings, and over a longer timeframe, in order to explore the often complex relationships between the transnational, national and the local in activism, and how these shift over time. The contributions focus as much on tension and conflict as they do on connections and unity, or interrogate the asymmetric relations of power shaped by the geopolitics in which these connections and transfers are inscribed. By thus critically investigating the complexities of transnational connections, the present collection tests the (often insufficiently examined) assumptions regarding the ‘automatic’ transnationality of modern societies. While the question of ‘limits’ is methodologically introduced at the end of this introduction, we first situate the collection’s geographical and chronological range.

This collection deliberately brings together case studies from the different political regions of Europe. By incorporating studies of activism from societies behind the Iron Curtain and under the Mediterranean dictatorships, alongside those of liberal democratic western Europe, we are able to interrogate the common assumption that modern transnational social and political movements can only truly emerge in liberal-democratic contexts, and that their transnational character is contingent on the openness of borders and thought which is assumed to characterize these polities alone. A central claim of this collection is that we should – contrary to certain interpretations ¹⁰ – incorporate these other regions into our accounts of the post-1950s transnational story of activism: the contributions here uncover important stories of border crossing and physical meeting and exchange, the flow of texts and images across the divides between democracies and dictatorships, and the importance of imagined solidarities even where borders appeared impermeable. In the socialist east of Europe, we find states which attempted to create their own official transnational cultures and claimed the mantle of global solidarity: an ideological position that could simultaneously shape, and be contested by, activists in these countries. New forms of transnational politics could destabilize dictatorships as much as liberal democracies. Although the local contexts of transnational activism are very distinct, we argue that they are not differentiated to the point that they cannot be studied together. Instead, incorporating these different contexts allows us to re-think the very definitions of transnationalism, activism and its relationship to the state, and how political environment shapes the practices, strategies and effectiveness of international activism.

Second, we trace the different directions in which activists looked beyond Europe. Some contributions note the importance of links across the Atlantic, whether examining the impact on US feminist texts in Italy (Bracke), the impact of Black Power on the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (Prince), or the way in which socialist states in eastern Europe carefully selected out, and imported, US anti-war culture for propaganda purposes (Mark et al.). ¹¹ The contribution of Christiaens and Goddeeris notes the absence of ‘Third World’ agency in many studies of activism in the ‘West’, and highlights the benefits of studying how campaigners from Latin America and Africa came to Europe and helped shaped new forms of transnational political expression. One major theme explored here is the importance of Europe’s relations with (former) colonies in Africa, the Middle East and Asia across the whole of the European continent. Whilst most works on ‘Third Worldism’ focus on its growth in western European democratic contexts, this collection highlights just how large a role it played with both the socialist east and the Mediterranean dictatorships. ¹²

A collection that brings together studies of activism over four decades also enables us to draw broader conclusions about the changing meanings of transnational activism over time – how it emerged in leftist politics, its high points, its limitations, and the story of both its reformation and decline in the face of neoliberalism and powerful conservative forces from the late 1970s.

More precisely, some contributions highlight that it was not the late 1960s, but rather the second half of the 1950s, and the acceleration of decolonization, that was the most important trigger moment for the take-off of postwar transnational activism. Pre-1960s forms of transnational thought and campaigning deserve more attention than they have received so far. Skinner draws attention to the new forms of linkages between western European and African activists that emerged in the 1950s, and highlights how these drew on older traditions of religious humanitarianism that dated back to the interwar period or even the late nineteenth century. Gildea and Tompkins stress the role of the Algerian War in the late 1950s in shaping a new global imagination for French activists. New anti-imperialisms in Africa, Latin America and south-East Asia also shifted political cultures in socialist eastern Europe, where their struggles for independence and non-capitalist paths to development prompted Soviet bloc regimes to establish movements that encouraged citizens’ transnational solidarities with movements fighting the disintegrating French or British Empires, or opposing a new US ‘imperialism’ across the world. (Mark et al.). Other contributions emphasize that much cross-border activism in the 1950s remained within Europe. Dols and Ziemann stress how before Vatican II most Dutch and German Catholic activism was focused on exchanges across western European borders, and showed little sense of ‘global solidarity’. Others highlight how in the 1950s the idea of anti-imperialism was not discovered abroad but rather at home: Kornetis, for example, stresses the role of Cyprus and anti-British sentiment in re-radicalizing the Greek left. ¹³ Thus, ‘global solidarity’, while emerging at this time as a powerful idea, was constrained by local contingencies that defined how far political imaginations in different locations stretched.

More in line with established research, the second half of the 1960s emerges in other contributions as the next substantial turning point in the history of postwar transnational activism. It was at this moment that connections with the ‘Third World’ not only vastly broadened the international imagination of European activists, but also began to reverse previous hierarchies of knowledge: the political experiments of Cuba, China or Chile, or the struggles of the Algerians or the Vietnamese, came to provide inspirations for new forms of political and social activism at home in Europe. ¹⁴ Yet for the most part, this did not mean close contact between European activists and those in extra-European anti-imperial struggles; rather, many contributions here highlight that the inspiration drawn from third world revolutionary struggles – or indeed, from other countries more generally – was powerful exactly because it was imaginary, decontextualized and often only limitedly aware of the situation in those countries. ¹⁵ The prime importance of these struggles lay in the ways in which their messages were domesticated and harnessed for local or national struggles within Europe, vital to the shaping new forms of progressive political expression, including new vocabularies (‘liberation’), and forms of street action.

Alongside western radicals who looked to Mao or the struggles of the Vietnamese, this collection uncovers the importance of these linkages both in socialist dictatorships and the right-wing authoritarian regimes of southern Europe. Kornetis explores how a language of struggle derived from Cuba and Vietnam provided an ideological framework through which Spanish and Greek activists could re-imagine themselves as fellow anti-imperialist fighters who also struggled against dictatorships supported by US imperialism. It was in this same period that in Eastern Europe visions for an alternative society, inspired by global developments, flourished. Mark et al. explore how the new mass cultures with ‘transnational imaginations’ that some state socialist regimes built, whilst initially aimed at legitimizing state socialism through appeals to an official anti-US anti-imperialism, nevertheless also provided a language of struggle through which activists could articulate leftist criticisms of their own states’ abandonment of revolutionary ambition, or which could be used to attack another ‘great power’ imperialism – the Soviet – in their own backyard. ¹⁶ Indeed, internationalism and Third Worldism was particularly powerful as a source of identity for political activists in the socialist East precisely because they were for the most part heavily restricted in their cross-border travel, and such imagined connections substituted for real global connections. Interestingly too, the ideology of anti-imperialism was often more important in forging links between eastern European activists and those from western Europe and north America than it was in creating links to movements in the decolonizing world: Yugoslavia, as a non-aligned country, became a particularly important site where critics of both Soviet and US imperialism could meet and exchange ideas, and where a common culture of Vietnam solidarity between East and West took shape.

‘Third Worldism’ was also vital for religious actors in this period: Dols and Ziemann emphasize that the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) was pivotal in the development of western European Catholicism not only because it encouraged dialogue with the secular world, but also because often it promoted a new ‘globalized Catholicism’, opening up reforming Europeans’ programmes to inspiration from Latin American theology, in particular. Further, Prince demonstrates the rich transatlantic exchanges between Northern Irish and North American radicals in the same period, thereby challenging the local focus of most studies of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. He explores how the US Black Power movement’s idea of anti-imperial struggle inspired Republican ‘Catholic power’ against the British state.

Contributors highlight that it was not only activists who thought transnationally – states too began to fear the power of transnational anti-imperialist appeals to violence drawn from inspiring models in Cuba, Uruguay or Vietnam, to name a few, and attempted to counter them by ‘learning from examples’ in other countries. Prince in particular highlights how the British state began to view the struggle in Northern Ireland not as a localized affair, but rather as the product of a broader anti-imperialism, and looked for methods to control new forms of urban violence that stretched from ‘Derry to Detroit’. ¹⁷ In a very different political context, Mark et al. highlight the fear that violent struggles for socialism in the ‘Third World’ might disrupt socialist construction at home in Europe: this was particularly conceived as a threat in Hungary, where the scars of the violent 1956 Uprising were still raw, and authorities sought to present a transnational solidarity with responsible revolutionaries and criticized those that embraced excessively violent revolution. ¹⁸ Conservative hierarchies within the Catholic Church, too, took a transnational approach in opposing the spread of radical ideas within the ranks, as Dols and Ziemann argue.

The late 1960s also saw the emergence of new possibilities for exchange between democracies and dictatorships in Europe. ¹⁹ Mark et al. critique the idea of a closed East, demonstrating the variation in levels of openness between different eastern European countries: they explore Yugoslav activists’ links to both a capitalist and radical West, Hungarian activists’ access to a radical West alone, and address Poland’s much more closed system. Von der Goltz and Mark et al. present Berlin and Belgrade respectively as two immensely important sites where forms of youth activism were shared between east and west; to these examples we can add Prague, where thousands of western activists travelled prior to the suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968. ²⁰ France was an especially important site for exiles from the southern European dictatorships: Kornetis’ work highlights the importance of Paris as a ‘Mecca of Revolution’ where the state showed a surprising toleration for ‘Third Worldist’ radicals, and Spanish and Greek activists were exposed to new ideologies and formed movements to combat their dictatorships. Others highlight how barriers between activism in dictatorships and democracies were still very real: Dols and Ziemann show us the obstacles that the Franco regime placed in the path of radical Catholics meeting their equivalents in Germany and the Netherlands. Mark et al. explore an interesting case of how such barriers could be constructed within activists’ own mental worlds. Polish activists refused to believe that popularly supported Vietnam solidarity movements existed in the West, so convinced they were that these phenomena were only the product of the imagination of their propaganda state: some were shocked to discover the reality of the transnational struggle when forced into exile.

This collection’s timeframe enables us to trace the legacies of this activism into the 1970s and 1980s, an approach which draws out some of the complexities and limits of late Cold War transnationalism. Christiaens and Goddeeris’ contribution explores not only how western European Christian and conservative organizations took the lead in organizing support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, but also how social democratic and other leftist groups shied away from expressing equally enthusiastic solidarity, disquietened by the Polish trade union’s links with neoliberal and conservative allies elsewhere. Von der Goltz warns us off narrating only a story of increasing dissidence and connection across the Iron Curtain, explaining that such stories, although popular and compelling, fit too neatly into a dominant late twentieth century teleological narrative in which Europeans came together, defeated Communism, and moved towards political and economic unification. ²¹ Her contribution provides a counter-example, demonstrating how East German radicals who engaged with the transnational revolt of the late 1960s, later rejected both the western lifestyle revolution and the politics of the New Left, as they turned towards a national project of reforming socialism at home. Such studies should warn of overly deterministic narratives which retrospectively consider the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 as the moment marking the general, European shift away from ideas of the reformability of socialism, heralding the ‘victory’ of capitalism and liberal democracy. ²²

Others revisit the idea that anti-imperialism or Third Worldism was on the decline from the mid-1970s, tracing its legacies, impacts and reformulations in localities and political movements. Gildea and Tompkins explore how a local struggle on the Massif Central in France against ‘internal colonization’ by the state, the industrial north and the European Community still linked itself with struggles in Northern Ireland, Palestine and Chile, and sought to export its inspiring message of peasant resistance to activists both in Europe (Germany) and across the world (from Japan to Tahiti to North Caledonia). Kornetis addresses the vestiges of anti-imperialism in the Basque nationalist organization ETA in Spain and leftist political party PAK in Greece: both regarded the democracies that followed the fall of their respective right-wing dictatorships as simply the changing of an imperialist and capitalist guard, and continued their ‘Third Worldist’ contacts and thinking. Taking Italy as a case study, Bracke makes visible the afterlives of 1960s anti-imperialism in 1970s feminism, addressing how it took a language of liberation from both anti-colonial movements and Black Power in the US, and in doing so sidelined a politics of equality. The word ‘liberation’ was powerful because of its adaptability in new contexts. Here, it allowed for the opening up of political horizons and the shaping of new utopian agendas, based on an intimate connection between the transformation of social reality and the radical re-invention of the self. This was characteristic of not only second-wave feminism but also, for example, anti-racist and ecological movements of this period. ²³

Other contributions stress a more familiar account: that, from the late 1970s, it was increasingly human rights networks, rather than other anti-imperialist solidarities, which provided the framework for cross-border activism in Europe, and beyond. ²⁴ Christiaens and Goddeeris highlight that transnational solidarity movements in fact continued in the so-called ‘second Cold War’ of the 1980s, although those based on older leftist radical networks and conceptions of social or economic struggle – such as support for the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua – were on the wane. Rather, it was solidarity movements with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, based on a liberal conception of individual human rights, that had a greater hold over the world’s media and developed a wider basis of support in western societies. Whilst other studies have emphasized the importance of new links between western Europeans and eastern European dissidents on the basis of human rights ideology – such as between French Maoists turned liberals and the Polish solidarity movement from 1979 ²⁵ – the contributions here point in another direction. Christiaens and Goddeeris’s examination of Belgium shows how Solidarity with Poland was supported through ‘old left’ trade union links, although these often failed to achieve broader societal mobilization, as newer rights-based ideologies could.

This collection seeks to contribute theoretically too. In methodological terms, the articles here showcase a range of strategies for dissecting the emergence and development of transnational activism in the mid- to late-twentieth century. On the basis of their detailed case studies, contributors were asked to consider the following issues: which ideas travelled; how and in which settings they were received; cases of misinterpretation across borders; the tension between transnational phenomena and local specificities; the conflicts that emerge when imagined solidarities became real connections; and the relative importance of the different forms of transnationalism – imagined solidarities, network building across borders, the role of transnational institutions such as international trade unions or the Catholic church – in the creation of new forms of political expression. It is from such detailed and systematic investigations that conclusions about the different forms, and limitations, of transnationalism can be drawn.

Many case studies aim to investigate precisely what role local agents play in translating discourses, texts and social practices found in other national contexts. The contributions all stress that such processes are, as Sean Scalman aptly put it, never ‘automatic, self-evident or a-cultural’. ²⁶ Appropriating, re-contextualizing and re-shaping transnationally travelling ideas and practices is deeply embedded in immediate – national and sub-national – contexts. ²⁷ While some of the historiography has limited itself to mapping simple transfers and borrowings of discourses, practices and texts across national borders, we argue that such transnational processes are extremely complex, specifically in the way in which locally acting agents adapt, re-interpret, re-contextualize, and in some cases, to use Gayatri Spivak’s term, ‘betray’ ideas found elsewhere. ²⁸ Using oral history, memoirs, media and local organizations’ archives, many contributions here illustrate the advantages of detailed in-depth studies of the strategies adopted by activists and intellectuals – that is to say, those mediators ‘who select, translate and incorporate globally circulating concepts into their societies’. ²⁹ Bracke, for example, examines how the specificities of Italian feminism – often distinct from women’s movements elsewhere in the Western world – were strongly shaped by their re-interpretations of both US and French feminist thought and practice. ‘Women’s liberation’, a slogan that was adopted from US groups by Italian feminists in the 1970s, was given by the latter a rather different meaning, better suited to a political context more strongly marked by Marxist debates. Such a complex understanding of transnational transfers helps to question some of the myths around the simple adaptation of the US counterculture by West European radicals in this period.

This collection also highlights the importance of studying local, as opposed to national recontextualization, and the need to carefully distinguish between these levels of analysis and of transfer. ³⁰ Some of the recent scholarship on the transnational character of post-1968 social and political movements has employed the notion of ‘national re-contextualization’. Paradoxically, in the attempt to go beyond the nation-state as a unit of analysis there is a tendency to reinforce it, by focusing on transfers between country A and country B. ³¹ Prince’s contribution investigates the very distinct local contexts that shape the re-articulation of transnational sources. Focusing on the strategic appropriation of symbols, practices and ideas from the US Civil Rights movement and Black Power, it sheds new light on the start of the Troubles around 1970 by considering how the events in Northern Ireland were framed as part of a transnational uprising by supporters across the Atlantic. A number of contributions point to the importance of this approach for studying the 1970s, a period when many activists withdraw from direct political confrontation with the state and into community action and localized attempts to shift the practices of everyday life. In this context, transnational flows occurred as much between localities as through capitals or power centres: these cases contribute to the story of the rise of the ‘glocal’. The contribution by Gildea and Tompkins demonstrates how a highly specific and localized site of political action, namely the Larzac plateau in south-western France where the building of a military base was contested, found itself at the centre of a web of transnational action and debate, spread through Comités Larzac to French gauchistes, peasant farmers in many countries, west German anti-nuclear campaigners, and those fighting for indigenous rights as far away as Canada and Japan. Bracke’s contribution on Roman feminism goes one stage further, demonstrating the importance of combining an analysis of the politics of local reception – where local groups reinterpret transnationally travelling ideas to make them resonate with local concerns – with an understanding of the continued significance of the national framework. In particular, those social movements and activists groups engaged in national political debate and campaigning to change national legislation, re-shape transnational ideologies into languages and codes that can be given meaning in national political discourse. When aiming to influence institutional-political processes, social movements often look at practices and discourses in other countries, as can be seen from the analysis of the battle for abortion legislation in 1970s Italy. The way in which Italian feminists ‘learnt from’ their French counterparts in this context was foremost a matter of (national) self-perception as the less ‘modern’ nation compared to France. Once again, the interpretations of developments taking place elsewhere was strongly a matter of strategic and selective appropriation.

Contributors also reflect on the way in which transnational encounters were limited by the heavy weight of national and local cultures. ³² Skinner and Gordon, for example, offer critical, alternative interpretations to the sometimes naive views on transnational solidarity of their political campaigners. Showing the complex forms of local as well as transnational embeddedness of such campaigns, the two authors present key contributions to a more sophisticated understanding of the rise of anti-colonial, and later anti-racist, opinion in Europe, highlighting not only transfers across borders but also cases of miscommunication and failed encounter. Skinner highlights how overly optimistic expectations of solidarities between western anti-nuclear campaigners and West Africans fell apart when the divide between Europeans’ internationalism and anti-colonial fighters' nationalism became apparent. Gordon’s work explores the very particular mental geographies of European anti-racist movements in this period. Despite links with activists in former colonies across the globe, they remained very national and insular within Europe itself, and only very sporadically looked to collaborate with activists in other countries who addressed issues associated with post-imperial immigrant populations. In their mental worlds, ‘Black Europe’ remained much more distant than the Black Caribbean, Africa or America. Moreover, many contributors here stress that internationalism was often domesticated not as an expression of a newly globalized political imagination but rather as a form of nationalism: the Commandoes in Poland, Hungarian populists, Spanish Maoists and Greek radicals addressed here recognized the struggles of the Vietnamese or Cubans as the expression of ‘progressive nationalism’ against ‘imperial regimes’ backed by Washington or Moscow, from which they took inspiration mainly for their own domestic struggles.

Attention is drawn to the asymmetric power relations on which these transnational connections are etched. Ideological or cultural hierarchies could be re-inscribed in the process of cross-border transfer. In this sense, processes of cultural transfer need to be looked at as situated in the context of geopolitical relations of power. Scholarship informed by postcolonial critiques in particular has usefully questioned the naivety of accounts that suggest a new equality of close interconnectedness, and has pointed at the way in which global relationships of power and hegemony affect progressive activism too. ³³ Although many activists looked to the ‘Global South’, and some eastern European activists looked West, interest did not travel in other directions. Very few western activists looked to the ‘other’ Europe in the 1960s, seeing struggles in eastern Europe as less advanced or relevant to the questions of modern civilisation. Von der Goltz explores the tensions between a desire for cross-Iron Curtain activism between activists in west and east Berlin, and the realities of the divisions they discovered in the cold light of real contact, highlighting the way in which west Berlin radicals constructed their eastern counterparts as backward, helpless, passive, uninspired and ‘petty bourgeois’. ³⁴ Kornetis reflects on how little French activists were shaped by revolutionary exiles from the East and South in their midst. Gordon too notes how British anti-racists' refusal to look to Europe was based on, ‘a deep Europhobia, justified by the proud, almost Whiggish belief in the progressive superiority of British anti-discrimination provisions and multicultural tolerance’. ³⁵ In some cases, the rhetoric of a country’s backwardness in relation to others could be used by activists to call for greater commitment to political change. Bracke highlights how those in favour of the legalization of abortion in Italy used arguments around Europeanization and the perception of Italy lagging behind other West European countries such as France and the UK, both in terms of cultural modernization and an active civil society.

This could of course change over time. In following the evolution of transnational connection we can discern the ways in which cross-border imaginations and ideological hierarchies could shift over time. By 1980, for instance, some western activists, having ‘discovered’ the anti-Soviet struggle in eastern Europe and re-evaluated their activism of the late 1960s, came to view central European dissidents as the true bearers of radical change in Europe. This could lead them to reject the west-east hierarchies which had been inscribed on their 1960s activism. Rudi Dutschke came to reflect in 1978 that:

I have very little to say about May ‘68 in France: in the first place, because I happened to be in the hospital, but above all because, in retrospect, the great event of ‘68 in Europe was not Paris, but Prague. But we were unable to see this at the time. ³⁶

As Christiaens and Goddeeris’s article shows, some western European activists began to valorize trade union and rights-based struggles in the eastern bloc by the late 1970s.

To understand the prehistories of increasingly globalized social movements in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we cannot simply tell a teleological story of increasing interconnectedness dating back to the late 1950s or 1960s. The re-emergence of transnational activism in the postwar period was the work of activists creating specific linkages across certain boundaries, and not others; it was also a story of exclusion as much as inclusion, of the radical reworking of global activism in national environments to the point that activists found it difficult to communicate across borders, and the disintegration and re-nationalization of some networks over time. It also involved actors who are seldom considered in this account, such as state socialist elites, and activists in Europe’s southern dictatorships. In this sense, a geographically diverse set of detailed case studies that examine not only the opportunities, but also limitations and exclusions that characterized mid- to late twentieth century European activism, provide an important contribution to this broader history.