The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (review)

The relatively stable world of the 1950s, with its postwar reconstruction and the clear-cut confrontation of the Cold War, underwent a period of transition during the 1960s when the expectations of the “affluent society” (Kenneth Galbraith) proved to be overly optimistic, when societal hierarchies still stemming from the prewar world were questioned, and when the dangers of the Cold War impasse became apparent. Broadly speaking, responses to these challenges took one of two forms. Each was supposed to create change, albeit to a much different degree from the other. The reformers wanted to adapt the existing order to the new circumstances of the 1960s and to civilize the East-West conflict by pursuing a policy of détente. This did not satisfy the more radical protesters who followed the slogan, “Run forward Comrade, the old world is behind you.” Horn’s book is about the latter position. He does not aim only at its description and at a narrative “of what happened and how it happened” (p. 231). His goal is also to depict the more radical position as a promising answer to the “transnational moment of crisis and opportunity” (p. 4) that had emerged in many parts of the world. Altogether 56 countries were affected by the “Spirit of ’68,” among them the United States and Canada, 14 countries in Latin America, 22 in Europe, 10 in Asia, and 8 in Africa. In a way that is certainly risky for any professional historian, Horn identifies himself with the “68ers” and wants to “rescue these experiments in ‘participatory democracy’ and the corresponding social struggles from historical distortion and condescension to which much recent historiography appears to condemn the promising era of revolt” (pp. 1–2).

Driven by this impetus Horn has written a lively account of what he calls “the spirit of ’68.” In accordance with recent research the calendar year 1968 appears in a wide context. Horn starts in the 1950s when nonconformists prepared the terrain. He differentiates between an “intellectually vibrant preparatory period” (p. 229) from 1956 to 1966 and the main period of the “spirit,” which lasted until 1976. Horn traces the “spirit” in North America, Scandinavia, and Western and Mediterranean Europe, thereby tackling his topic in a comparative and transnational approach. What makes the book a special read is Horn’s extensive treatment of worker protest in various countries, a subject that is usually missing from the literature of the 1960s. Horn is well known as a specialist on the history of socialism and the working classes in Europe, so this approach does not come as a surprise. However, I am not convinced that the struggle for wages and better working conditions was, with the exception of Italy (and there only for a short period), really part of the “sociocultural paradigm shift” (p. 231) of the 1960s. Horn provides the reader with a thorough study of events in the United States and gives much attention to Belgium and Italy and, to a lesser degree, to France and the Iberian Peninsula. He looks closely at the Dutch Provos who turned Amsterdam into a pilgrimage site for many American and European rebels. West German and French students’ activities are “consciously not a focus” (p. 3). Horn selects “countries, locations, movements and cultural trends” that, in his view, are a “representative sample” (p. 3). But he fails to give any criteria for his selection. What is really deplorable is that Eastern Europe is totally ignored even though the cracks in the Soviet empire and within the Warsaw Pact states should be seen as an important element of the “spirit” that is under review in this book.

Horn bemoans the failure of “1968.” But one can argue that with respect to the effects of, for example, the Prague Spring and, as a consequence of the Final Act of Helsinki in 1975, of the Charta 77, an international as well as transnational “spirit” transformed the East...