A "New International History" of the 1960s

Jeremi Suri.Power & Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. viii + 355 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

In Power and Protest, Jeremi Suri shows us the future of international history. Demonstrating a superlative skill for asking the right question, Suri has constructed a comparative analysis of 1960s domestic unrest in the United States, West Germany, France, the Soviet Union, and China. Blending "high" and "low" political and cultural analysis, he explains the workings of détente as a conservative response to global disruption. After examining the wellsprings of disillusion feeding a new "language of dissent," Suri argues that threatened leaders "colluded to stabilize their societies and preserve their authority," not only by refraining from attacking one another, but also by engaging in summit meetings and arms control agreements designed to enhance their images as leaders and make themselves seem indispensable. Power and Protest sheds new light on a pivotal era by reframing détente as a defensive reaction to domestic conditions, reinforcing traditional political boundaries and legitimizing and further entrenching the Cold War.

Suri's framing is skillful in other ways as well: He is equally clear about the questions he is not asking—he is not interested in why the protests ultimately failed to effect widespread change, for instance. His book takes its place beside Daniel Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), Jessica Gienow-Hecht's Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (1999), David Reynolds' Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-1945 (1995), Mark Philip Bradley's Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 (2000), and the recent work of Thomas Bender, including his edited volume Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002), as a shining example of the so-called "new international history."

Power and Protest stands at the confluence of three streams of scholarship, and its freshest contributions are the insights resulting from these sometimes startlingly original juxtapositions. First, the book draws on a venerable line of Cold War studies analyzing the politics and diplomacy of the postwar international order, particularly as reflected in the work of Marc Trachtenberg, Raymond Garthoff, and Suri's own dissertation advisor at Yale, John Lewis Gaddis. The second scholarly stream feeding Suri's analysis is the voluminous diplomatic history of Vietnam and détente, mixing the traditional "high politics" of elites with a domestic, sociologically oriented consideration of protest. Suri is much less interested in student culture than former participants have been, such as the scholar and commentator Todd Gitlin and the journalist Paul Berman.(Who could forget Berman's evocations of what it was like to sit through a marathon SDS meeting?) Yet Suri successfully works at the seams of elite politics and what might be called grassroots sociology to find a mutually supportive analytical balance. By contrast,Berman and others, using a more "bottom-up" approach, sometimes seem to be trying to explain Vietnam protest marches without LBJ.What clinches Suri's analysis is that he goes on to conduct the same persuasive synthesis with regard to the politics of protest in France, Germany, and China, and to a lesser extent, in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, as well.¹

The third stream Suri navigates is the less-charted tributary of international history: analysisbased on the assumption that "nations lie enmeshed in each other's history" and that the nation-state as a unit of analysis is best treated as a "semi-permeable container, washed over by forces originating far beyond its shores."² Suri's own working definition of international history is instructive here: while the subfield is related to traditional diplomatic history, it is also distinct, combining a multidisciplinary orientation with multilingual, multiarchival research. Such a multipronged approach suggests a constitutive, iterative relationship between ideas, institutions, and individual personalities, giving readers some real explanatory purchase on how...