Abstract
Robert Gildea, James Mark and Anette Warring, eds, Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013; xiv + 382 pp.; 9780199587513, £65.00 (hbk)
Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder and Joachim Scharloth, eds, Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980, Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2011; viii + 347 pp.; 9780857451064, $95.00/£55.00 (hbk)
Hara Kouki and Eduardo Romanos, Protest Beyond Borders: Contentious Politics in Europe since 1945, Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2011; x + 254 pp.; 9781845457471, $70.00/£40.00 (hbk)
Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton, Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present, Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2011; xii + 294 pp.; 9780857450784, $120.00/£75.00 (hbk)
The events of 1968 – among a host of others the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the French general strike and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia – pose problems for historians. At the time many believed it was the ‘dress rehearsal’ 1 for a first night which we now know has been indefinitely postponed. But was Edward Thompson right to dismiss it as a ‘rich kids’ revolutionary farce’? 2
1968’s historical proximity presents another difficulty. There were no resurrected sans-culottes to challenge Soboul or Furet. But a great many activists from 1968 are still walking and talking. Yet, as the four volumes under review reveal, there are now a large number of historians and social scientists, many not even born in 1968, studying the events and their context. There is even an academic area described as ‘1960s protest research’. Sheila Rowbotham, in her Foreword to the volume Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (hereafter E68) refers to her attempt to ‘avoid being the elderly grump expostulating, “But it wasn’t like that”’ (E68 v).
One solution, adopted in this volume, is the use of oral history. A team of researchers have collected testimonies from over 250 activists – a few well-known, mostly rank-and-file participants – and have arranged extracts around some loosely defined themes.
Oral history has its deficiencies. Few people have perfect memories, even fewer remember without regard to personal reputation or organizational loyalties. Nick Wright recalls a London Vietnam demonstration from 1968: ‘As the mounted police charged across Grosvenor Square my various ultra-left friends scattered to the four winds while the Hornsey Young Communists stood there with their steel banners, like at the battle of Agincourt, confronting the police’ (E68 110). Undoubtedly a genuine recollection – but one wonders if other participants remember the day in quite the same way.
But if the reader exercises due scepticism, the volume is a cornucopia of experiences and insights that help to create a total picture of 1968. A number of brief activist autobiographies show the various routes whereby individuals arrived at 1968. Pace Thompson, they were not all rich, and they took their politics very seriously. 1968 had its origins in the deep social conflicts, often violent, that had afflicted Europe. Most of the 1968 activists were born during, or just after, the Second World War, and knew what their parents had gone through. France was scarcely at peace between 1939 and 1962 – the German Occupation was followed by two bitter colonial wars, in Indochina and Algeria.
These autobiographies provide a rich picture. Petros Kounalakis, later an activist in West Germany, remembers his childhood during the Greek Civil War: ‘One evening, when he was sitting in a coffee shop with his uncle, a group of policemen showed up. They carried the head and arm of a famous guerrilla whom they had just killed, and they shook the dead man’s arm in front of his uncle’s face, yelling “Here is your friend”’ (E68 65). One of the things that made Giovanna Pala a feminist was the fact that, when she was less than two years old, her mother died from an illegal abortion (E68 35). At the age of twenty, Yvon Rocton was sent to Algeria as a conscript; when he spoke up against torture he was sent to a disciplinary battalion. A decade later, as a trade-union militant at the Sud-Aviation factory near Nantes, he was one of the main instigators of a factory occupation which sparked off a wave of occupations throughout France (E68 41, 110). (The fact that student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit was known all over the world, while few have ever heard of Rocton, is symptomatic of the way 1968 is often misrepresented.)
In the final section we get glimpses of what happened later to the 1960s activists. All had to come to terms with the fact that their hopes had been exaggerated. Some adopted a reactionary stance, others collapsed into disillusion. But a great many continued to fight for the same principles, albeit on a smaller scale, for example as trade unionists or local campaigners. It would have been good to have more examples of such people.
The other volumes are more austere. Collections of essays by academics from a range of disciplines, they contribute much information and illuminate many lesser known aspects of protest and subversion in Europe from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. Yet often they lack a sense of the passion which animated so many activists.
Between Prague Spring and French May (BPSFM) provides a series of studies, showing the roots of the 1968 events, their impact and their reception in the media. Holger Nehring studies the origins of the British New Left, limiting that term rather narrowly to the milieu around New Left Review. Timothy Brown compares the experiences of communes in East and West Berlin, while Niek Pas looks at the now forgotten Dutch Provo movement. Corina L. Petrescu examines the special role played by Romania in the Eastern bloc, and Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey traces Régis Debray’s encounters with the Cuban Revolution.
The other two volumes show that 1968 had deep roots in political and cultural currents going back to the Second World War. Indeed, one could complain that many of these studies, in explaining the long back-story of 1968, fail to convey just how surprising the events seemed at the time to a generation which had accepted the myths of capitalist stabilization, the ‘end of ideology’ and universal apathy.
In Protest Beyond Borders (PBB) several contributors make use of the concept of ‘framing’ – a frame being defined as ‘an interpretive schemata [sic] that signifies and condenses the “world out there” by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of action in one’s present or past environment’ 3 (PBB 2). Some readers may doubt how much this approach adds to more traditional accounts of ideology. But the book contains some valuable empirical material on such topics as the Roma in 1960s Czechoslovakia, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement and Spanish anarchism under Franco.
Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday (BAGE) deals with subversive politics in Europe from 1957 to the present. It covers violence, struggles over space and protest networks, and the importance of music.
The material collected in these four volumes is testimony to the international nature of 1968. If the French general strike and the Prague Spring were the most dramatic occurrences, every part of Europe was touched and a mood of rebellion was pervasive. There was a material basis for this internationalism. International travel was becoming more common; in 1960s Czechoslovakia hitchhiking was regarded with suspicion by the authorities, since its cultural meaning was ‘ascribed to a practice of dissent’ (BPSFM 36). They attempted, vainly, to regulate it.
Television was ever more widely viewed; the new satellite technology brought events from around the world to the screen within hours. The broadcasters controlled the agenda, but American setbacks in Vietnam and the assassination of Martin Luther King were transmitted around the planet. As never before citizens of Europe perceived themselves as part of a global community.
Much of the 1960s left could be described as ‘Third Worldist’, finding inspiration in the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnamese war for national liberation. Frequently expressions of solidarity brought campaigners into conflict with their own state. In the Netherlands demonstrators discovered it was illegal to carry placards describing US President Lyndon Johnson as a ‘war criminal’ because of laws forbidding insults to ‘friendly heads of state’. (‘Adolf Johnson’, awakening echoes of the German occupation of the Netherlands a quarter of a century earlier, was not forbidden.) In the end there were too many demonstrators to arrest, and eventually the law was changed (BPSFM 103–115).
The long violent struggle that opened up in Northern Ireland in 1968 is often seen as having its roots in historic conflicts within the Irish population. But it is also true that the young activists of the Civil Rights Movement acknowledged the direct influence of the civil rights struggle in the USA (PBB 131).
The internationalism that developed in the 1960s was carried forward into the 1970s. The movement on the Larzac plateau in France to defend land against the extension of an army base led to international contacts; in particular the Larzac campaigners developed close links with the indigenous Kanaks of New Caledonia, who were demanding independence from the French state; activists from Larzac visited New Caledonia (E68 186).
One theme that recurs is the division of Europe between East and West. It is arguable that the revolts of 1968 made a contribution to the processes which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Eastern bloc. There were many contacts and interactions between the dissident movements in East and West; West German student leader Rudi Dutschke visited Prague in the spring of 1968.
In the East, Marxism was the official state doctrine, often reduced to lifeless formulae which meant that many among the younger generation viewed it with lack of interest; surveys showed that few Warsaw University students were interested in Marxism or ‘ideology’ (BAGE 149). In the West, meanwhile, a new generation was rediscovering Marxism as a tool of analysis, especially in its alternative forms deriving from Maoism or the traditions of the Communist Left Opposition. Though dialogue was possible it was not easy; a Czech sociologist noted after Dutschke’s visit to Prague: ‘Rudi Dutschke… was not very successful with his visions of free, non-restrictive communist society, when he visited Prague during this spring. The arguments of French students and their red flags hanging don’t excite our students… I felt sorry for both sides because they restrict each other from confronting their own experience by providing illusions about the possibility of finding solutions on the other side’ (E68 151).
If the West had a long history of romanticizing Eastern bloc socialism, there were similar illusions in the East. One British student leader who visited Prague in the summer of 1968 recalls: ‘There’s a lecturer from Charles University on a platform…. saying that when workers go on strike in Britain they get paid until the strike is over. I said it’s bollocks, absolutely… so we got into an argument with this bloke who obviously idealized the West’ (E68 147).
Yet there was common ground between the young rebels of East and West. Both were profoundly dissatisfied with the societies they were growing up in, finding their structures authoritarian and their ideologies restrictive. In both cases their opponents could not win the battle of ideas without resorting to force – the riot police in Paris, Russian tanks in Prague.
A second recurrent theme in these studies is summed up by the old 1960s slogan ‘the personal is political’. The phrase bore a number of meanings. On the one hand it represented a critique of the traditional understanding of politics as consisting merely of electoral contexts and parliamentary debates between increasingly similar parties. At the same time questions like abortion and homosexuality, which had previously been seen as ‘moral’ rather than political matters, were taken up as campaigning issues. While to the older generation politics had been a potential career, for the young rebels it involved commitment to causes requiring a large investment of energy as well as possible danger, but with no obvious rewards.
The emergence of gender issues was a major aspect of the transformation of politics in and after 1968. This was not a simple matter. Many of the 1968 generation had deeply sexist attitudes. One East German activist quoted the slogan: ‘He who sleeps with the same woman twice already belongs to the establishment’ (E68 143). Yet it is clear that around the globe it was the events of 1968 that sparked off a revolt by women which developed into the feminist movement of the 1970s.
Culture, too, was of great importance. Being a revolutionary affected the clothes one wore, one’s hairstyle and the music one listened to. These volumes contain many studies – indeed one could argue that there is an overrepresentation – devoted to cultural and countercultural roots of the 1968 explosions.
Several essays point to the alleged influence of the Situationists on the events of 1968. It is indisputable that the Situationists had some acute observations about ideology in modern capitalism, as well as a gift for humorous epigrams. Whether there was any more to it than that is questionable. In particular there is some discussion of how influential Situationism was on the Angry Brigade in Britain, with one of the jailed members playing down the Situationist influence (BAGE 53, 236). The influence of Situationism on the French May is often taken as axiomatic, yet the actual evidence is rather thin. Certainly the French state did not perceive the Situationists as a danger; when various revolutionary organizations were banned in June 1968 the authorities seemed oblivious to the Situationist threat.
Far more influential, both East and West, was mainstream popular music. For every individual who was involved with a subcultural body like the Spur group in Munich or Sigma in the Netherlands, a thousand listened to Bob Dylan or Pink Floyd. In the East, Western music was greeted with fear and loathing. In East Germany in the 1950s the official line was that ‘present-day “Boogie-Woogie” is a channel through which the barbarizing poison of Americanism penetrates and threatens to numb the minds of the workers. This threat is just as dangerous as a military strike with poison gas.’ Elvis Presley was described as ‘featherbrained, dull and brutal’ (BAGE 94, 96). Despite some intellectual contortions in which progressive jazz was distinguished from reactionary rock, the East German regime was fighting a losing battle. And while Communist criticisms of Western commercialism were undoubtedly valid, rock music generally veered to the left. Timothy Brown has contributed an interesting study of ‘Nazi Rock’ in England and West Germany. But bands like Skrewdriver only reached a niche market, whereas anti-war and anti-racist records topped the charts.
The third significant theme is in fact largely an absence in all the books under review. 1968 opened up a remarkable period in European history. The French general strike was the biggest in human history. It was followed by the Italian ‘hot autumn’ of 1969, sometimes described as ‘May in slow motion’. In Britain in 1972 working-class action twice forced the government to retreat (with the mass picket at Saltley coke depot, and then the campaign to free the ‘Pentonville Five’). In 1974 further action by miners led to the fall of the Heath Conservative government. And in 1974–75 Portugal saw a period of revolutionary upheaval, with factory occupations and workers’ committees. This could be directly traced back to 1968. In 1968 there were many Portuguese workers in France; doubtless some communicated the experiences back to their homeland. Yet Portugal gets scarcely a mention in any of these books.
More generally, although there are brief accounts of strikes and workplace experiences, none of these volumes contains any systematic treatment of working-class organization and struggle. Timothy Brown describes Czech rebels going to work in factories ‘where they were quickly disabused of romantic notions about the political potential of the proletariat’ (BPSFM 137). Doubtless such romantic notions existed in many countries. But the French general strike of 1968 was an indispensable element in the process of radicalization. Only the most naïve could have believed that students alone could transform the world. But when it appeared that the working class was moving into action against the system, that seemed to transform social revolution from a countercultural utopian dream into a real possibility.
Failure to recognize the centrality of the working class distorts some of the analyses presented. Thus Maud Anne Bracke gives an interesting and well-documented account of the French Communist Party in 1968. But she argues that the decisive factor in determining the party’s strategy was its wish to conform with Russian foreign policy (BPSFM 75). Undoubtedly there is some truth in this. But it is also important to remember that the party’s overriding concern was to maintain its support among its industrial base. Hence its willingness to spread the strike, while at the same time ensuring that the movement remained firmly in its control.
This is particularly relevant to the discussion of terrorism. Sebastian Gehrig describes the situation in West Germany: ‘From 1969, the radical milieu in West Berlin discussed the formation of its own Basisgruppen (action groups), which were to agitate directly in factories… After Willy Brandt’s 1969 election campaign for the democratization of society, an increasing number of milieu members returned to their normal bourgeois life. As a result, some left-wingers concluded that violent actions by small groups were the only way to effectively uphold the fight against the state’ (BPSFM 234).
Maren Sell, a West German who went to Paris in 1968 and became a Maoist, explains the choices facing the left: ‘Because French activists, she argues, felt confident in mass support, which had manifested itself both in 1968 and during the wartime struggle against Nazi occupation, they saw their violence as a way of exposing political and social oppression, which would stimulate popular revolution. In West Germany, however, some of her German friends became involved in the RAF [Red Army Faction] or Baader Meinhof group because history had taught them that the workers, who had not resisted Nazism, would not now resist bourgeois democracy, and that they therefore had to be taught to be violent’ (E68 272).
Hopefully others engaged in ‘protest research’ will direct their attention to these lacunae. Nonetheless, there is a great dealt to be learnt from these four volumes, and all serious students of the 1968 conjuncture will need to refer to them.