Fred Halliday: 1968 and All That
[Fred Halliday is professor of international relations at the LSE.]
"With the coming of the dawn, the promises of the night fade away". In politics, as in love, the old Spanish saying sounds a pertinent warning; not least in regard to the memorialisation and assessment which the events of 1968 (and particularly the Paris uprising of May of that year) are receiving on their fortieth anniversary.
Anyone who lived through those exhilirating and formative times - as I did at the age of 22 - can testify to the hurricane force of that year. Like every such phenomenon it carried multiple elements: in this case a generation's visceral rejection of the accumulated conformism of post-1945 Europe and north America; a heady encounter with new forms of music, art, thinking, and debate; and a many-centred solidarity with global movements of protest and revolt - be they in Vietnam and Latin America, in Czechoslovakia and Russia, or in the United States among African-Americans and anti-war protesters.
As one of the editors of the newly founded radical weekly Black Dwarf, I well remember the day in which we decided on the frontpage affirmation that to me encapsulated the aspirations and enthusiasms of that time more than any other: "Paris, London, Rome, Berlin. We shall fight, and we shall win!"
The problem is that, in many ways, we lost. 1968 was a wonderful time. It shaped the intellectual and moral framework of my adult years. It does not deserve the sneering, partisan dismissal of some of its unacknowledged beneficiaries (such as Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy). But it is equally ill-served by the kind of one-dimensional and (in the true sense) uncritical celebration that contemporary media, publishing and intellectual cultures too often regurgitate...
Read entire article at openDemocracy
"With the coming of the dawn, the promises of the night fade away". In politics, as in love, the old Spanish saying sounds a pertinent warning; not least in regard to the memorialisation and assessment which the events of 1968 (and particularly the Paris uprising of May of that year) are receiving on their fortieth anniversary.
Anyone who lived through those exhilirating and formative times - as I did at the age of 22 - can testify to the hurricane force of that year. Like every such phenomenon it carried multiple elements: in this case a generation's visceral rejection of the accumulated conformism of post-1945 Europe and north America; a heady encounter with new forms of music, art, thinking, and debate; and a many-centred solidarity with global movements of protest and revolt - be they in Vietnam and Latin America, in Czechoslovakia and Russia, or in the United States among African-Americans and anti-war protesters.
As one of the editors of the newly founded radical weekly Black Dwarf, I well remember the day in which we decided on the frontpage affirmation that to me encapsulated the aspirations and enthusiasms of that time more than any other: "Paris, London, Rome, Berlin. We shall fight, and we shall win!"
The problem is that, in many ways, we lost. 1968 was a wonderful time. It shaped the intellectual and moral framework of my adult years. It does not deserve the sneering, partisan dismissal of some of its unacknowledged beneficiaries (such as Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy). But it is equally ill-served by the kind of one-dimensional and (in the true sense) uncritical celebration that contemporary media, publishing and intellectual cultures too often regurgitate...