Dossier: 1968 - A Critical Turning-Point

Only a detailed political analysis can reveal the extent to which 1968 – a year that characterized an era and made a break with all that had gone before – was embedded in global developments which have continued to cause ripples right up to the present day and still haven't been entirely deciphered.

One important, though not the decisive, factor that triggered the antiauthoritarian student revolts in West Germany was, as is commonly known, the police bullet which killed the student Benno Ohnesorg on 2 June 1967 in West Berlin. He had been taking part in a demonstration against the state visit of Reza Pahlavi, the "Shah of Persia". He (and particularly his wife Soraya) had captivated the German tabloid press, which regarded them as substitute monarchs, while the critical intelligentsia saw in Pahlavi a dictator and puppet of American imperialism in the Middle East. The widely-read paperback by Bahman Nirumand, an Iranian living in exile as well as the writings of Ulrike Meinhof, had helped educate and stimulate outrage among the students, who staged an entirely peaceful demonstration against the state visit, just as they had previously done in protest at the Vietnam war. This served as the catalyst for the international and transnational significance of the local student revolts.

Criticism of the USA as "protective power"

The people and politicians of Berlin reacted to these demonstrations with great irritation. The situation at the time in the divided city, which had been enclosed by a wall since 1961, was a very specific one: of all people, it was students of the Free University (which had been established by the Americans) who were rising up in the "Cold War's front-line city" against the "USA as protective power", which enjoyed unequivocal support from the then tone-setting Springer press. It claimed that the "small radical minority" (an accurate enough description) were fouling their own nest, and would be better off going "over there", i.e. to the part of Germany occupied by the Soviets, and to the "real existing socialism" of the GDR.

Nonetheless, there were growing doubts among the liberal bourgeoisie concerning the justification for the South-East Asian policy pursued by the United States, namely the war being waged by the country in Vietnam, while the distanced relations to Israel, which began with the settlement policy enforced in the occupied Arab territories – something which is still criticized today – deteriorated in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War which broke out on 2 June 1967. Support for Israel, which predominated in the Western world, gave way to solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement.

"Anti-Americanism" as trademark of the radical left-wing

The various strands of development, which merged in that dramatic week in June 1967, led away from the East-West conflict and decolonization to create new conflict constellations which can be tracked right up to the present day: the Islamist Mullah regime in Teheran, which ousted the Persian Shah in 1979, finds itself today in a state of bitter confrontation with the United States. In turn, the US is fighting its "war against terror" in two of Iran's neighbouring states, Iraq and Afghanistan, which in some respects represents the follow-up to and continuation of the armed struggle (which grew out of radicalized student movements) conducted by social revolutionary guerrilla groups against "US imperialism" in the 1970s. The Iranian president has rhetorically placed himself in the vanguard of an anti-American faction against the wavering US hegemony, a front line which – if it were not for the Islamic fundamentalists – some of the former 1968 activists could probably join. "Anti-Americanism" was a trademark of the radical left-wing: however, what at the time was little more than a marginal stance which was unable to weaken the "soft power" – the cultural power of persuasion - or pose any sort of challenge to the military power, has now come to stand for a global shift in attitude. The reputation of the USA is worse now than at any time since 1945, and the "last super power" is unable to find any effective means to combat the asymmetric manner in which its opponents conduct war.

Anti-authoritarian protest even in America

On the other hand, the sources of anti-authoritarian protest are to be found in the USA itself: it is widely known that the protest wave started on the American west coast (Berkeley) and – in terms of its content and form – took its lead from the home-grown protest at the Vietnam war. This included adapting the American subculture of "sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll", adopting different forms of protest (sit-ins, teach-ins, go-ins) and establishing a post-industrial and neo-spiritual protest which on the European continent was only quashed by Marxist-Leninist elements in an authoritarian backlash of the student movement.

The semi-official and private commemoration of 1968 is restricted to local and folkloristic aspects of lifestyle and self-awareness which were easy to incorporate into the change in values and modernization of post-industrial societies. Only a detailed political analysis can reveal the extent to which 1968 – a year that characterized an era and made a break with all that had gone before – was embedded in global developments which have continued to cause ripples right up to the present day and still haven't been entirely deciphered. Such an analysis would need to take into account what are supposed to be more marginal aspects of the student revolt in the West: the Prague Spring marked the beginning of the end of Soviet rule over Central and Eastern Europe (though not of internal and external Russian authoritarianism), while the Maoist "Three Worlds Theory", i.e. the battle of villages against cities, can be interpreted as the prelude to China's return (still under communist leadership) to the world stage. At the same time, other members of the 1968 movement (among them the founders of the first post-modern NGO "Médecins Sans Frontières") took a stand in Biafra in Nigeria against a bloody ethnic civil war, and the dictators in the Latin American and Mediterranean regions of the world collapsed under the pressure of the "third wave of democratization".

Between 1965/68 and the next landmark year of 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution, the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the Red Army and the rise to power of Ronald Reagan, world politics took a dramatic turn and adopted a form which can be explained by the events of 1989 and 2001: the dramatic loss of the United States' hegemony was only postponed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, and in its place has emerged a multipolar global society which, under the influence of politicized religious movements and non-governmental organizations is hardly likely to return to the ordered states of a "world order" which the conventional state system of international relations dictated.

International policy and transnational dimension

One recurring theme of this lengthy development is the increasingly critical attitude – even among Western nations – towards the USA (and Israel). Yet 1968 was by no means the starting signal for ruthless anti-Americanism; a good part of the anti-authoritarian Vietnam protest arose as a result of the disappointment of an entire generation of Americans and supporters of America over the way the United States betrayed its own Republican constitution of values. It was only the authoritarian wing of the student movement that directly embraced the more totalitarian traditions and excesses of the French and Russian revolutions and came to radically reject even the basic values of Western democracy and liberality. It is interesting to note in this context the continuities and breaks: while many remain faithful to the political-cultural approach to anti-Americanism, hating "America" in blanket terms for all that it is and represents (rather than criticizing US decision-makers specifically for what they do or fail to do), many critics of America have returned to their disappointed love and even affirm American values where they contradict themselves, such as in the Iraq war or in Guantanamo. In other words, the 1968 generation became both America haters and "anti-Germans" – forming a pool from which neo-conservatives and third-worldists alike are able to recruit support.

In the area of transatlantic relations, this resulted in a strange sort of "right or wrong, my America" philosophy on the one hand, namely among militant opponents of "Islamofascism" which they perceive in Iran and Al-Qaeda, while on the other hand many became strange bedfellows with the anti-hegemony faction led by caudillos (like Hugo Chavez) and fundamentalists (like Ahmadinejad).

Any political analysis or review of the year 1968 should, in other words, focus on the "foreign policy" and transnational dimension it had right from the start – and following on from this the future of the West. Some observers claimed that the Iraq war was the event that led to a Europe which was independent from the USA, while others saw in it an opportunity to do away with the traditional European resistance to the Empire. The fact that both predictions proved to be over-hasty underlines the need to rethink with deep historical insight the role that the European Union plans to assume as a global player in the political arena.