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Making a Long Story Longer: Eastern Europe and 1968 as a Global Moment, Fifty Years Later

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2019

Judit Bodnár
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Abstract

The article proposes an extension of the understanding of 1968 in a threefold manner: an extension of the timeframe of the events (the action in ’68), a further extension to include the legacy of 1968, and a spatial-geographical expansion to make the analysis global. By elaborating on these extensions, the article considers 1968 as a global moment in which diverse histories converge and then diverge again, while the synchronicity of events generates an enhanced consciousness of the world, making the outlines of larger structures and connections more visible. Seeing 1968 in this way, the article argues, can provide a more adequate grasp on eastern Europe's ’68 and its variegations.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: 1968
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , Winter 2018 , pp. 873 - 880
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to the IWM (Institute for Human Sciences) in Vienna, where my term as Visiting Fellow allowed me to think about ’68 more globally, discuss it with some of the authors of this Critical Forum, and write this essay.

References

1. The “unofficial” War of Attrition (1967–70) that followed the Six Day War expanded with the Egyptian bombardment of the Israeli front line in the Suez Canal in June 1968.

2. The significance of the New Economic Mechanism came to be overwritten in Heller’s personal recollections by subsequent events during the year, but the NEM still remained a defining moment of economic history, see http://www.c3.hu/scripta/beszelo/97/11/13.htm (last accessed October 1, 2018).

3. The New Economic Mechanism represented “the most radical postwar change … in the economic system of any COMECON country.” It was heralded as a major shift to decentralization and a mixture of market elements and central planning under the unquestionable aegis of planning, see Granick, David, “The Hungarian Economic Reform,” World Politics 25, no. 3 (April 1973): 414–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 414.

4. See some of the slogans that were painted on the walls of Paris, especially the following: “When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have ‘problems’?” or “Down with consumer society,” at http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm (last accessed October 1, 2018).

5. Müller, Jan-Werner, “What Did They Think They Were Doing? The Political Thought of (the West European) 1968 Revisited,” in Tismaneanu, Vladimir, ed., Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia (Budapest, 2011), 75Google Scholar.

6. Kundera, Milan, Preface to the French edition to Josef Skvorecky’s Mirakl (Paris, 1978), 4Google Scholar.

7. Jacques Rupnik, “1968: The year of two springs” Eurozine (May 16, 2008), available at https://www.eurozine.com/1968-the-year-of-two-springs/ (last accessed October 1, 2018). Originally in Transit 35 (Summer 2008): 133.

8. The Situationist International was an organization and movement of avant-garde artists and revolutionaries in Europe from 1957 to 1972. Critical of capitalism, they were interested in developing tools for the liberation of everyday life, which included urban tactics such as détournement and dérive. Guy Debord was a founding member and a leading theoretician of the group.

9. Bodnar, Judit, “What’s Left of the Right to the City?” in Alinder, Jasmine, Aneesh, A., Sherman, Daniel, and van Dijk, Ruud, eds., The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives (Bloomington, 2013), 73–90Google Scholar.

10. “Reforme et contre-reforme dans le pouvoir bureaucratique,” Internationale situationniste #12, Paris, September 1969, trans. Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 2006. No copyright. Cited in Bodnar, “What’s Left of the Right to the City?”

11. Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar; Horn, Gerd-Rainer, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar; A Grin without a Cat. Directed by Chris Marker. Paris: Dovidis, 1977.

12. Maier, Charles S., “Conclusion: 1968—Did It Matter?” in Tismaneanu, Vladimir, ed., Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia (Budapest, 2011), 417Google Scholar.

13. Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Eve, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London, 2005 [1999])CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Claus Leggewie, “1968: Power to the Imagination” New York Review of Books, May 10, 2018, 4–6.

15. Hobsbawm, Eric, “1968–A Retrospect,” Marxism Today 22 (May 1978): 130Google Scholar.

16. See for example, Horn, Gerd-Rainer and Kenney, Padraic, eds., Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989 (Lanham, 2003)Google Scholar.

17. Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton, 2016).

18. Correspondence with Ranabir Samaddar, May 31, 2018.

19. Quote in Agnes Heller, “The Year 1968 and Its Results: An East European Perspective” in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., Promises of 1968, 159.

20. Dirlik, Arif, “The Third World in 1968” in Fink, Carole, Gassert, Philipp, and Junker, Detlev, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Washington, D.C., 1998) 296Google Scholar.

21. Charles S. Maier, “Conclusion: 1968–Did It Matter?” in Tismaneanu, ed., Promises of 1968, 421–22.

22. Wallerstein, Immanuel, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-system (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 65Google Scholar. In a somewhat similar vein, George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston, 1987) extends the understanding of the New Left beyond the west as a world-historical movement, and makes it the defining feature of a global ’68.

23. On the latter, see Derluguian in this forum.

24. Gherao is a tactic applied by Indian labor activists; they surround their employer and prevent him from leaving the premises until their demands are met. The tactic has been so widespread that the originally Hindi term came to be included in the Oxford Dictionary in 2004.

25. On the artistic and social critique, see Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. Their geographical distribution is my argument.

26. Horn, The Spirit of ’68, 238.

27. On the world connected by the Cold War, see Suri, Jeremi, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)Google Scholar.