Red Flags And Velvet Revolutions: The End Of The Cold War, 1960-1990

Why is 1968 sometimes called "the turning point that didn't turn"?

It was, by any measure, a remarkable year. Student protests broke out throughout the west, in France, Germany, Britain, Italy, the United States, Latin America. What did they have in common? Well, a student movement is difficult to interpret in many ways but maybe one theme they had in common was an attack on the promise of capitalism itself, the idea that material prosperity is enough.

This had been the assumption of their parents' generation. In Europe, the people who had set about the task of rebuilding Europe after the destruction had worked very hard to create a new economy and they measured their success based upon what they had accomplished in this domain. The fact that they now had refrigerators and cars, the fact that European society seemed to have made a transition into a modern era were all sources of pride.

For the 1960's generation, however, this seemed like an unimaginative or unsatisfying vision of a future. They looked around them and they saw a society that was still marked by injustice. Students in Western Europe saw the presence of American troops in Germany and were aware that American troops were also being used in Vietnam.

Sometimes this generational struggle could take on different forms in different countries. German students in 1968 were incensed when they discovered the participation of their parents' generation in the crimes of Nazism, that many of the most respected figures of the establishment had continued to work during the Nazi period. And there was an argument here. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of independent West Germany, had someone on his staff who had helped pen the Nuremberg Laws in the 1930's. These were the laws that defined Jews as non-citizens under the Reich.

In the United States the student moment also took a particular flavor. There was a tremendous anger about the persistence of segregation in the United States that seemed to undermine any claim that the country could have to be a representative of liberal values, of democracy, of equality. It seemed to them that this was a hypocritical system that needed to be rejected wholeheartedly.

This movement developed on university campuses and in some places, the goal of student protestors was to reach beyond the campuses and ally themselves with other groups in society that might help them make a real revolution. In Paris, in May of 1968, it looked briefly for a moment that this might happen.

What makes 1968 so striking is not only that there were these student protest movements in Western Europe and the United States but there was also a movement to confront the Soviet Union and its power over Eastern Europe. In particular, we should look at the emergence of Alexander Dubcek in Prage, who attempted to articulate a new vision of an independent socialist society in the east and called it "socialism with a human face." In some sense, these were the very kinds of reforms that Gorbachev entertained later, to experiment with a new formula of openness, to not stifle dissent. Unfortunately for Alexander Dubcek and his followers in Czechoslovakia, the Soviets had none of this and within the space of several months, troops invaded and this opportunity for a new opening in the east was lost.

So why is it the turning point that didn't turn? Well, the revolution didn't happen, either in the east or in the west. There wasn't a new version of socialism in the east that looked different from the one being propagated in the Soviet Union. And the movement to erect some sort of new society that would reject the consumerism in the west also trickled out. The greatest indication of this is that the posture of rebelliousness itself becomes a commodity in the 1970's and the 1980's. In Rock n' Roll culture, even in something like Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, he's capitalizing on this image of the rebel. But it becomes part of the way you sell records. Later in the 1980's you see death metal bands propagating some of the same postures of critique, but it's been incorporated into a consumer society.

Of course, the real political result of 1968 was the conservative backlash that was evident in France and Britain, the emergence of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in 1980. They both found a core constituency among the electorate, among voters, who were horrified by what they saw as the disorder of these revolutionary goals propagated by student movements in the 1960's.