Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion and Utopia

Introduction

VLaDimir tismaneanu Introduction The events of 1968 radically influenced the social, political, and cultural landscape of the post-1945 world. in the context of the Cold War, 1968 was a transnational moment of revolt against the status quo beyond the east-West divide.1 it represented a turning point in world history that brought about a sweeping axiological reassessment of politics .2 more than ten years ago, the editors of a collective volume about 1968 stated that “the memories of witnesses to the events of this annus mirabilis are still fragmentary and colored by partisanship, personal injury and defeat, or nostalgia for a heroic time, whereas historians have barely begun to treat ‘1968’ as a coherent historical phenomenon.”3 A decade later, the present contribution to the understanding of this historical “puzzle” provides some of the answers that might not have been available in the 1990s. it does not, however, claim to have found a resolution to the dilemmas raised by the topic discussed. Nevertheless , all the contributors agree that 1968 cannot be understood if it is removed from the context of both its aftermath and build-up. To paraphrase Charles maier’s statement in his article, the premise of making sense of 1968 is the admission that it was simultaneously pregnant with its future and haunted by its past.4 1 Gerd-rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney, eds., Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989 (Landham, mD: rowman and Littlefield, 2004). 2 on the 1968 as the redefinition of the ground of politics and the complication of the notion of the Left, see Geoff eley’s chapter “1968: it moves After All,” in Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York: oxford University Press, 2002), 341–366. 3 Carole fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, “introduction,” in Carole fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1. 4 immanuel Wallerstein offered an insightful formulation to the intricacies embedded in 1968: “World-historic events have lives of their own and they rei4 Promises.indb 1 2010.10.18. 14:30 2 Promises of 1968 from france to Czechoslovakia, from Germany to Poland, from spain to italy, from the United states to the soviet Union, the second half of the sixties was defined by the challenges of redefining oppositional politics, with varying degrees of participation and representation in the efforts to assert the awakening of society as a response to the perceived crisis of the state. The fundamental factor of differentiation among these movements was their attitude towards utopia with crucial consequences upon the re-conceptualization of the political in all these countries. if some were anti-ideological, others were against established structures of authority, but all were variants of an activism advocating the new societal differentiations developed in the aftermath of World War ii. The circumstances of bipolarism imposed, nevertheless, a significant difference in rationale: if in the West, the logic of 1968 was of politically emancipating spaces previously exempt from public scrutiny, in the east, it was about humanizing Leninism, breaking its ideologically driven monopolistic grip on society.5 in the soviet bloc, the crushing of the Prague spring, the march events in Poland, and the turmoil in Yugoslavia brought about the “death of revisionism” (michnik). in the West, the inability to articulate a coherent vision of an alternative order and the incapacity to sustain revolutionary action generated a departure from what Arthur marwick coined as the “Great marxisant fallacy.”6 Tony Judt accurately noted that despite the era’s claims of novelty and radical change, the sixties were still very much dominated by one grand master-narrative “offering to make sense of everything while leaving open a place for human initiative: the political project of sist any kind of simple capture. 1968 is no different.” immanuel Wallerstein and sharon Zukin, “1968, revolution in the World-system: Theses and Queries,” Theory and Society 18, no. 4 (July 1989), 431–449. 5 Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Vol. III—The Breakdown (oxford : oxford University Press, 1978) and Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (London: routledge, 1988). 6 marwick defined this concept as “the belief that the society we inhabit is the bad bourgeois society, but that, fortunately, this society is in a state of crisis, so that the good society which lies just around the corner can be easily attained if only we work systematically...