Unsettled 1968 in the Troubled Present

Revisiting the 50 Years of Discussions from East and Central Europe

Aleksandra Konarzewska, Anna Nakai, Micha? Przeperski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000707076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Osteuropäische Geschichte

Why does 1968 matter today? The authors of this volume believe that it is a crucial point of reference for current developments, especially the 'illiberal turn' both in Europe and America. If we want to understand it, we need to look back into 1968 – the year that founded the cultural and political order of today's world.

The book consists of the following four sections: '1968 and transnationality', '1968 and the transformation of meanings', 'Artistic representations of 1968', and '1968 and the European contemporaity'. This is followed by an afterword from the significant keynote speaker at the conference Unsettled 1968: Origins – Myth – Impact in June 2018 in Tübingen, Germany: Irena Grudzinska-Gross, herself a Polish '68er', reflects upon the conference and leaves remarks on her 50 years of engagement with what happened in 1968.

1    1968

Myth and impact

Aleksandra Konarzewska and Michał Przeperski

The dominant historical narratives on 1968 regard this year as the marker that separates ‘before’ from ‘after.’ It was when the ‘old world’ – the first decades of the postwar years that were largely a continuation of prewar normatives – was renewed by means of revolving social structures. As such, 1968 symbolically divides the postwar era into two distinct periods, and, interestingly, this happened on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Without 1968, we would not have seen a detour from Soviet-style Marxism, the developments of various dissent movements and underground activities in Eastern and Central Europe, the strong awareness of other parts of the world (South Asia, Latin America), and the rise of radical fundamentalism mixed with terrorism. Its ephemera leave questions and mythical arguments (the singular sujet of the ‘68ers,’ for instance) to this day. However, whereas, in the Western collective memory, 1968 is associated with a long-lasting victory of emancipatory discourse in the public sphere, for the Ostblock this year marked the final disillusion with the socialist utopia.

In comparing the events of 1968 to the east of the Iron Curtain with those to the west, one has to acknowledge the gap between actors (activists, protestors, and thinkers) in the two Europes, which is especially visible in the context of the antisemitic purge in the People’s Republic of Poland and the Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. The legendary West German activist Rudi Dutschke (himself in exile from the German Democratic Republic), who became interested in Chinese and African revolutionary movements while being relatively untuned to the events right next to him, is perhaps the best example of how the Cold War division of Europe sealed the limits of political imagination even among those who objected to the postwar order. This is exactly why such phenomena as Korčula Summer Schools constitute a focal point of transnational studies on 1968. The impact of meetings on Korčula, a Yugoslav island in the Adriatic Sea where philosophy students from Zagreb and Belgrade could meet Herbert Marcuse and where Marxists from the East and West univocally condemned the military intervention in Czechoslovakia, is especially visible while discussing ‘the long 1968’ and post-1968 dissent theories from a global perspective.

The point of departure of the following volume is, partly, Marxism understood as a worldwide political agenda that required a correspondence between thought and practice. The various responses towards it – either for or against – in the late 1960s, if combined with the dynamics of ‘travelling theories’ (in the Saidian sense) of 1968, would be multiple ways to comprehend the role of mental mapping in the (non)working communications of the revolting societies at that time. The studies presented in the following volume, though focusing on different layers of mostly philosophical questions, claim that the phenomenon of 1968 was not a mere mimetic ‘cultural transfer’ from Western Europe to its Eastern part. At the same time, the first steps towards opening the boundaries between the West and the East influenced the social and intellectual developments in the Soviet Bloc. The case of Hungary is a clear example of this direction, where the very culture of post-1968, more pop-culturally oriented dissent, created entirely different intellectual scenes. The presence of cross-border links can also be traced on the theoretical level – for example, in the seminal works of Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, and György Konrád, and in the way in which their theories shaped oppositional activities in Central Europe. The period between 1968 and 1989 allows us to grasp the transnationality of their key political concepts. The anti-political stance, famously associated with Havel’s The Power of the Powerless (Moc bezmocných, 1978), could be interpreted as a part of a political disobedience tradition that was not regional but entirely global, being not far from the worldview of Herbert Marcuse or in some sense even of Ivan Illich. The fact that since the late 1960s and early 1970s, Michnik, Havel, and Konrád were not only public intellectuals but also influential policy-makers allows us to compare them with the American and Western European veterans of 1968 who later became a part of the establishment, such as Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

By the same token, the analyses of the phenomenon of ‘1968’ allow us to conceive of transformations of normalized concepts such as ‘politics,’ ‘public sphere,’ and ‘socialism,’ which suddenly revealed their negotiable characters as well as limitations both in the East and in the West. When juxtaposing the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ experiences, the structural similarities appear striking. Countercultural movements did spread rapidly in the West, but clearly had counterparts in the Soviet Bloc. The model of West Germany, where the antagonism between the establishment and protesting students was seminal in reshaping the modes of political participation, may be treated as an important case to follow. Those changes, such as the emergence of samizdat (now known as the effective creation of the anti-Communist counter-public sphere in the Soviet Bloc), could be observed in the Communist countries. At the same time, the logics of ‘Western’ influences in ‘the East’ could also be revisited, as the case of the Italian Left in 1968 proved. The geographical proximity of Italy to the Soviet Bloc and the attractiveness of Marxist–Leninist ideology for the Italian Left resulted in its close ideological affinity with and susceptibility to the echoes of the systemic reform efforts of the 1960s. The shock of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia certainly became a turning point for many, but not for the New Leftists in Italy. Some joined the ranks of the pro-Chinese Maoist groups, and others still accepted the policy of the Soviet Union as a counterbalance for the Western postwar order.

Sociocultural changes usually take place as the effect of informal negotiations among main groups within society. The case of 1968, however, is considered to be unique, because although it claimed to be a peaceful change, it often resorted to violent means. The ideas and ideals of ‘1968,’ although not homogeneous at all, seemed to play an indisputable role in founding the social and political reality after that year. According to the universal paradox of every successful revolution, the former activists became the elite members, whereas their initial ideals were adopted by the mainstream worldview. It is indeed surprising that the legacies of 1968 tended not be questioned in a significant manner for so many years. Even the neoconservatism of the 1980s did not challenge its optimistic paradigms concerning the individually defined ‘pursuit of happiness.’ Thus, the emergence of new political orientations 50 years later (often referred to as the ‘illiberal turn’) that are based on opposition to the social and political order may be seen as a belated counter-reaction to ongoing serious challenges in the spheres of culture, politics, and society. Did the events in Paris and Prague pave the way for today's populism, reviving some elements of the 1930s? Or was it rather a neoliberal ideology that profited from the culture of individualism and the right to self-expression and protest against such institutions as the state or traditional nuclear family? Whatever the final answer may be, the unsettled 1968 is worth reconsidering through the prism of the troubled present.

Part I

1968 and transnationality

2 Worlds of Praxis

1968, intellectuals, and an island in the Yugoslav Adriatic

Una Blagojević

‘1968’ as the year of European convergences and the ‘Missing Case’ of Yugoslavia

It has long been accepted that the experience of 1968 was a global and ‘transnational phenomenon.’¹ While the events of this fateful year occurred mainly in urban centers within national borders (Berkeley, Berlin, Tokyo, Paris, Belgrade, Warsaw, Prague), the contemporaries (intellectuals and students) believed that their actions were linked to a global revolt against capitalism and imperialism.² As Robert Gildea and James Mark write in the recently published book Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt:

[A]ctivists across Europe often had the sense of being part of a revolt that went beyond their own groups, country or region: many saw themselves as part of a common anti-authoritarian revolt for greater democracy, inspired by anti-imperialist politics globally.³

It is remarkable to see that scholarship on 1968 only started to integrate former ‘Eastern bloc’ countries into this historiography less than a decade ago. As the authors of Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt see it, Europe’s division until 1989 into two halves made it such that 1968 was approached as a solely Western European phenomenon. On the fortieth anniversary of 1968, Aleksander Smolar, Jacques Rupnik, and Jakub Patočka gathered to discuss the ‘the other 1968’ and agreed that 1968 deserves a trans-European reading.⁴ More recent literature has begun to include in ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ 1968 the East European experiences. But in the aftermath of the political reunification of Europe, as Gildea and Mark write, “many came to connect the fight for greater democracy in eastern Europe in 1968 with the collapse of communist dictatorship in 1989.”⁵ Thus a more positive narrative of Eastern Europe’s 1968 stressed that the protests during 1968 in the European ‘East’ made the democratic transitions in 1989 possible.

At the same time, overemphasizing convergence as the main marker of the transnational nature of 1968 runs the risk of ignoring differences and falling prey to teleological narration. As a consequence, this trend in historical narration is intertwined with contemporaneous politics. One could argue that European integration, in the atmosphere of the so-called failure of state-socialist regimes, aims to unify the history of both halves of the divided continent and present 1968 as the year of East–West convergence. However, the public debate that occurred during the fortieth anniversary of 1968 in 2008, according to Gildea and Mark, showed that

although the eastern European experience was increasingly included in collected or synthetic works on the 1960s revolt, and there was an increased interest in looking for cultural convergence across the blocs, the Prague Spring or the ‘Polish March’ were still by and large presented as ‘other 1968s’ or nationally specific phenomena.⁶

Instead of being an analysis of ‘international’ links and contacts between well-defined nation-states, a transnational approach allows us to “reflect on, while at the same time going beyond, the confines of the nation.”⁷ Approaching 1968 from a transnational perspective in a Cold War context would demonstrate how some ideas or processes moved across national borders—that is, how they were adapted, received, or rejected.

It is also interesting to note that while undermining the teleological nature of 1968 scholarship, the editors of Europe’s 1968 do not include any reference to the Yugoslav 1968. After all, the student protests in Yugoslavia were socialist-oriented, and ultimately, while the dissolution of Yugoslavia was understood to be a part of the general reordering of Europe following the end of the Cold War, it was an exceptional case. Put another way, violent wars in Yugoslavia accompanied the otherwise peaceful “victory of democratic forces over communist regimes.”⁸ Thus, in the reading of 1968 as a teleology of political convergence, the case of Yugoslavia does not fit into the mold of linear transitions from ‘Eastern Bloc’ to ‘European Union’ after 1989. According to James Mark and Tobias Rupprecht, 1989 represented a collective continental turning point in European history, and a year of democratic awakening, or a “high-water moment for peaceful democratization, and the end point of a series of transformations in the techniques of opposition and in the worldviews of communists that reflected changes in political practices both regionally and globally.”⁹ However, this was not the case with socialist Yugoslavia. Thus, the link tying the protest of 1968 to the peaceful transitions of 1989 excludes Yugoslavia from this model.

While inspired by a ‘transnational turn’ in historiography, this chapter problematizes the sharp dichotomy as well as teleological connotations of a ‘transnational 1968’ in the existing literature through the example of the Korčula Summer School in the Yugoslav Adriatic. The Korčula Summer School, founded by the Yugoslav philosophers around the Marxist Humanist journal Praxis, facilitated a need for face-to-face dialogue between these Yugoslav Marxist Humanist intellectuals and their colleagues from both the ‘East’ and the ‘West.’ Thus, the summer school is here approached as a space that gathered intellectuals and acted as a point of mediation through which actors from diverse contexts could—notwithstanding differences in their cultural and intellectual backgrounds as well as their respective experiences of 1968—think in an intertwined manner about the movements and protests of 1968. By looking at such a ‘transnational space’ of encounters, this chapter aims to move beyond the still dominant Cold War paradigm and proposes a diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• 1. 1968: Myth and impact
• PART I: 1968 and transnationality
• PART II: 1968 and the transformation of meanings
• PART III: Artistic representations of 1968
• PART IV: 1968 and the European contemporaneity
• Index