It is prohibited to prohibit. Liberty begins with one prohibition: that against harming the liberty of others.
Graffiti in Paris, May 1968
Do not be indifferent to the day when the light of the future was carried forward by a burning body.
Daubing on the Wenceslas Statue, Prague, January 1969, following the self-immolation of Jan Palach in protest at the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia
During the second half of the 1960s Europe, west and east, experienced a period of political turbulence greater than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Both sides of the Iron Curtain, in quite different ways, faced challenges to their systems of rule. In Western Europe it came to a head in the student protests of 1968. In Eastern Europe the ‘Prague Spring’ in the same year sent shock waves through the Soviet bloc. By the early 1970s the turbulence was subsiding again, though its legacy was multifaceted and long-lasting.
The turbulence, transitory though it proved to be, mirrored profound transformations in social and cultural values, most obviously marked among the generation of the post-war ‘baby boom’, by this time in or reaching early adulthood. The values and behavioural patterns of an older generation, schooled in the discipline imposed by living through world war, were by the mid-1960s being subjected to fundamental challenge. Authority, obedience, duty – these were, for the young, values redolent of the past. The young especially became more individualistic in their appearance, habits and lifestyles, less ready to accept the often staid conformity and authority of their elders. And in certain circumstances they were ready to rebel.
In 1960 the American sociologist Daniel Bell had announced ‘the end of ideology in the West’. The great ideologies, especially Marxism, that had developed in the nineteenth century and dominated the first half of the twentieth century were, he argued, over and would play no major role in the emerging technocratic society. The 1950s had seen the ‘exhaustion’ (as he called it) of political ideas and the redundancy of fundamentalist ideologies. Even given historically unusual, relatively high levels of political consensus in European countries, this was a peculiarly American assessment. And within half a decade it was already appearing to be a strange misjudgement.
For by the middle of the 1960s the earlier relatively quiescent domestic scene was giving way to a more disturbed political era in which the ideological clash between Marxism and capitalism played a central role. Nor was this clash solely or even mainly related to the entirely opposed social and political systems across the Iron Curtain. For the most part, in fact, it was an ideological conflict within Western society, between Western forms of Marxism and capitalist liberal democracy. It found articulation in the political protest, reflecting a more extensive sense of alienation in much of the younger generation, which became more widespread after the middle of the 1960s. For many participants it was an explicit generational revolt. ‘We were a new generation that was seizing power’ was how one former activist retrospectively described the heady atmosphere (and its inbuilt illusions). Some found inspiration in the demonstrations and protests that were having a major impact in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. In Europe as well as in the United States the poetically lyrical music of the American singer Bob Dylan, notably ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ and ‘Masters of War’, became anthems of protest for young people. Above all, the unfolding horror of the Vietnam War – the first war that could be followed on television screens – offered a cause that, transcending national boundaries, bound together vehement denunciation of unbridled materialism, imperialism, colonialism, American power and Western capitalism with idealistic notions of rebuilding society along neo-Marxist classless lines. The protest became reflected, too, in the new expressions of political violence, extreme manifestations of alienation often inchoately directed at what was regarded as the political establishment.
Protest exploded spectacularly in 1968. But unrest had been seething for some years before it reached boiling point. ‘1968’ is the symbol for a phenomenon that straddled that year, a rejection and subversion of the underlying values of the time. Students, with educational advantages, increasingly with contacts abroad, and with the opportunities to turn the radical ideas they absorbed into forms of collective action, spearheaded the generational revolt. What has been described as a ‘global protest’ movement found expression in the United States and Japan, in various parts of Western Europe (even under the authoritarian regime in Franco’s Spain), and it resonated, too, in certain ways – differing, however, from their manifestation in the West – in parts of the eastern bloc, notably in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Within Western Europe the protest movement was at its most acute and most dramatic in Italy, West Germany and France. It had in each case some specific characteristics, though there were also common features.
At its most basic, the protest was an outburst of student discontent at the conditions within universities. The rapid growth of student numbers in the 1960s had led to grossly overfilled lecture halls and seminar rooms. And there were not nearly enough university teachers. Professors were remote, aloof and authoritarian figures. Not for nothing were they known in Italy as baroni. Student numbers there almost doubled to half a million in the 1960s. The University of Rome, designed for 5,000 students, had 50,000 by 1968. Many students left without qualifications. Even those who graduated often found difficulties in getting jobs. This was just an extreme example of a general pattern in most Western European countries. In West Germany there were nearly four times as many students as there had been in 1950 – though the numbers of university teachers and the available facilities had far from kept pace with the speed of the expansion. The administration of universities was reactionary and restrictive in the eyes of many students. The soulless concrete jungles of new university campuses intensified the anomie. Social disaffection became endemic. For some it became a total rejection of existing society. ‘We don’t want to find a place in this society,’ commented an Italian student in 1968. ‘We want to create a society in which it is worthwhile finding a place.’
Although each manifestation of protest reflected specific national conditions, growing ease of communication and travel facilitated the swift transmission of grievances across borders. Anger and resentment smouldered within the student body. The tinder-box was ready to be ignited by firebrand student leaders such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit (‘Danny the Red’) in France and Rudi Dutschke in West Germany, who were adept at transforming specific student grievances into a challenge to all forms of authority in the ‘bourgeois state’. The recent past, most plainly in Italy and West Germany, offered a ready basis to invoke continuities between the former fascist regimes and current capitalist society. Max Horkheimer’s adage, that anyone not wishing to speak of capitalism should keep quiet about fascism, was frequently cited.
Antifascism was a central component of the mood of protest in West Germany and important, too, in Italy. A channelling of protest into mass fascist movements, as had happened in the 1930s, was, therefore, explicitly ruled out. Fascism was anathema. This was overtly a rebellion from the left. Marxism provided the intellectual inspiration. The ‘New Left’ as its adepts called themselves, seldom, however, looked to Moscow and the Soviet model – its image irreparably tarnished after the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising in late 1956. Instead, they found their heroes, somewhat incongruously for young citizens of industrialized Western Europe, in the leaders of peasant revolutions and the guerrilla struggles in the Far East and Latin America. They looked admiringly to Mao Zedong (unaware of, or prepared to overlook, his own responsibility for immense crimes against humanity), the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, the Cuban head of government Fidel Castro (the face of opposition to American imperialism) and, most especially, the romanticized figure of Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary shot dead by Bolivian troops in October 1967.
They explored Marx’s early writings and admired those, like Rosa Luxemburg and, most especially, Leon Trotsky, excluded from the orthodox Leninist canon or excommunicated from the faith. The work of Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist theorist of fascism who had died while languishing in one of Mussolini’s prisons, was especially revered. They were inspired by contact with Marxist intellectual gurus in and outside Europe. These included the French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser (an increasingly strange and mentally disturbed figure and opponent of attempts to relate Marxism to humanism) and Michel Foucault, whose work emphasized the repressive power and controlling discipline of social institutions and agencies. Among the most prominent influences on student radicals was Herbert Marcuse, the German-born American critic of ‘late capitalism’, who saw contemporary society as dehumanizing, advocating revolution and the total rejection of the false gods of a Western consumerist culture. Marxist ideas in different guises served to fire the imagination of the generational rebellion of a relatively well-educated and articulate social group, driven by an urge to create a better world, to produce a fairer, more egalitarian society. A political revolution was not enough in their eyes. The entire belief systems and social structures that they underpinned had to be destroyed and society created anew.
The issue that most gripped young people – and not only them – across national frontiers was the worsening Vietnam War. This polarized political and ideological differences, inflamed emotions, and turned the attitudes of many young people against the country that had since the Second World War usually been held up as the model of democratic values, freedom and prosperity: the United States.
The Americans had been increasingly sucked into a widening and intractable conflict in Indochina (comprising Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) since the French had started to withdraw in 1954–5. The aim was to contain the spread of communism throughout Indochina. To this end, Washington had come to depend upon a corrupt, puppet government in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. By the early 1960s the United States was starting to pour increasing amounts of weaponry into Vietnam, without coming any closer to defeating the fight for national independence of Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese forces, which were intensifying their guerrilla campaigns in the south. As the danger grew that the conflict was being lost, President Lyndon B. Johnson, the successor to John F. Kennedy (assassinated in November 1963), took the fateful decision in 1965 to commit American ground troops to the fight in Vietnam.
By the end of the year there were 184,000 American soldiers in Vietnam; within two years the number had grown to 485,000. Protests at the American involvement in Vietnam had already begun at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, and rapidly widened in the coming years, led by the Students for a Democratic Society, an organization inspired by the ideas of the New Left. In April 1967 a gathering of 200,000 people in New York protested against the war. Over the following months the war escalated, its horror epitomized by the increased use by US forces of terrible napalm bombs. Public opinion in the USA turned against the war as young Americans in increasing numbers were conscripted to serve (and die) in what seemed – and was – an unwinnable conflict. Many were conscripts from poor white or black families. Richer or well-connected families often seemed somehow to avoid having their sons drafted. The protests grew in size and intensity. Their message crossed the Atlantic. Major demonstrations against American involvement in Vietnam soon took place in West Germany, France, Italy and other Western European countries.
Without the growing protest against the Vietnam War, student unrest about university conditions, however well justified, might well have remained just that. As it was, Vietnam converted the disaffection into a far wider manifestation of political and social protest, sometimes involving violent clashes with the police. It turned discontented students – some of them, anyway – into would-be revolutionaries.
But in this role they were mere dilettantes – not the real thing. Only briefly, and only in France in May 1968, when some ten million workers engaged in strikes and factory occupations as forms of protest against the Gaullist state, did the established order seem seriously threatened. Once the spontaneous strike-wave in France subsided and the heady atmosphere sobered up, the intensity drained from the student protests. They gradually fizzled out with some improvements in university governance being the only tangible gain. But for many of those involved, the adrenalin flow and excitement of the action had carried them along, and left indelible memories.
The ’68ers saw themselves as a ‘special’ generation. But much of the population either disapproved of or was indifferent towards the protest movement. The great majority of young people in European countries were not students. Many of them, indeed, already employed in hard and badly paid manual jobs, regarded students as a privileged elite – which was not far from the truth. And most of the students themselves were primarily interested in what directly affected them. Many opposed the wider aims of the left-wing protesters. The organization of conservative students in West Germany, the Christian Democratic Student League, was, for instance, only marginally smaller than the left-wing body, the Socialist German Student League. A majority of West German students in an opinion survey of 1967 favoured the emergency laws (to limit personal freedoms in a declared state of emergency) that the government wanted to introduce and which the left-wing student activists so vehemently opposed. And student views on the conservative-led coalition government were split down the middle between critics and those who approved. In any case, the minority that harboured utopian ideals of revolution to destroy capitalism completely lacked the capacity to pose a fundamental challenge to well-established and stable democratic systems, or to mobilize wide sections of society which had experienced years of full employment and unprecedented prosperity – and stood vehemently opposed to Marxism.
Student protest spread across Italy during 1967 in a wave of demonstrations and strikes at universities. The simmering discontent over university conditions had gathered momentum when a student of architecture, Paulo Rossi, was killed in a fight with neo-fascist students in Rome in April 1966 and declared to be ‘a new victim of fascism’. There was much opposition, too, to plans for government reforms of higher education (later abandoned), which were criticized by students as the subordination of learning to the demands of the capitalist economy. By early 1968 the mood of protest had deepened. In late February the police evicted students who had been occupying buildings in the University of Rome. When the students tried to recapture one of the buildings on 1 March it resulted in a pitched battle with the police – dubbed ‘The Battle of Valle Giulia’. The police baton-charged the crowd of around 1,500 students. The students retaliated by setting a number of cars on fire. By the end forty-six police and hundreds of students were left injured. Up to then the student movement had been relatively peaceful. From now on clashes with the police were invariably violent. Gradually, however, as some concessions were made to student demands, the unpopular reform legislation was dropped, and public support for the students waned, the intensity of the conflict as it related specifically to conditions within universities declined.
After ‘Valle Giulia’ the student movement changed its character. Spontaneous protest turned into organized revolutionary agitation. A radical minority of students who belonged to a variety of revolutionary groups, determined to learn from the swift splintering of worker and student interests in France, now turned to mobilizing the discontent in Italy’s industrial working class. Many factory workers had come from the impoverished south of the country and formed a sub-proletariat. They were badly paid, frequently employed at piece-rates on production lines, exposed to soulless working conditions and authoritarian management, and unaccustomed to the discipline of trade unions and political parties. Articulate, radical students found as they went into the factories to encourage the workers to rise in protest that their message often fell on receptive ears.
Some 7.5 million workers took part in around 3,800 mainly ‘wildcat’ strikes from the latter part of 1968 to autumn 1969. This pushed the trade unions into action, and at the end of what was dubbed the ‘hot autumn’ by December 1969 they had successfully negotiated major improvements in the workplace and gained substantial pay rises – double those of other Western European industrial countries on average over the following years, though not matched by similar levels of increased productivity. Trade unions emerged greatly strengthened, and able to exert substantial power at the national level to improve conditions for the Italian working class. Worker militancy became a part of Italian life. Italy was the strike capital of Europe. Four and a half million workers participated in industrial disputes in 1972; over six million in 1973. But the unions wanted concrete material improvements, not utopian political ideas. Student radicals’ hopes of a revolutionary momentum were therefore disappointed. And meanwhile the government, though frequently changing in composition, introduced between 1969 and 1971 a number of political and social reforms – the raising of pension levels, some expansion of social housing, legislation to provide the right to divorce, and the introduction of regional government – that were at best partial remedies but were sufficient to prevent social unrest from developing revolutionary potential.
As any genuine expectation of revolution evaporated, however, protest turned ugly. Radical militants – on the right as well as on the left – began to resort to extreme forms of violence, remote from the earlier conflicts between students and police, to try to destroy Italy’s political and economic system. The aim, certainly from those on the neo-fascist right, was to create a permanent sense of panic that would lead to clamour for an authoritarian regime to impose order through force – thereby destroying the constitution. Someone dubbed it a ‘strategy of tension’ (strategia della tensione). It was not clear who invented the label. But it stuck.
In April 1969 dozens were injured when two bombs exploded in Milan. A bomb on a train in August caused injuries to a further twelve people. And in December, in the worst atrocity, a bomb in a bank at Piazza Fontana killed sixteen people and injured eighty-seven. A crowd estimated at 300,000 people gathered in the centre of Milan out of sympathy for the victims of the outrage, an indication of the revulsion felt by most Italians. Anarchists were swiftly held responsible and a number of them arrested for the incidents. One, Giuseppe Pinelli – subsequently cleared of any involvement in the crime – mysteriously fell to his death from the fourth floor of the Milan police headquarters in circumstances never satisfactorily clarified. Evidence later emerged that implicated with a high degree of probability not the anarchists but a group of neo-fascists who, disturbingly, had connections with a colonel in the Italian secret service. Investigations dragged on for years, amid much foot-dragging by the political establishment and judicial authorities, and the case was ultimately left unproven. Terrorist attacks by radical right-wing groups – in all around 6,000 of them, resulting in 186 killed and 572 injured – continued through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, the worst of them the bombing of Bologna railway station in August 1980 that killed 85 and injured more than 200 people.
Terrorism soon manifested itself on the left as well as on the right. The myriad revolutionary organizations that had emerged from the protest movement of the late 1960s were losing momentum, plainly failing in their hopes of destroying the capitalist state. Recognizing this, the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) came into existence – a small but deadly organization that replaced agitation with armed struggle, based on the urban guerrillas of South America. The Red Brigades were founded in 1970 by former student activists Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol together with Alberto Franceschini, all of whom came from committed anti-fascist and communist families, and Mario Maretti, who had emerged from a middle-class right-wing background and had taken no part in the 1968 student protests. The Brigades were soon carrying out bombings, assassinations and kidnappings. It is estimated that 336 attacks by the end of 1974 – though killing only two people – can be attributed to left-wing terrorist groups. The worst was still to come. In a campaign that punctuated the 1970s, the most notorious outrage perpetrated by the Red Brigades was the kidnapping and, fifty-four days later, murder of the former Christian Democratic Prime Minister Aldo Moro in the spring of 1978. This stung the government into tougher action. Stringent anti-terrorist laws and the creation of a specialized police unit led to the arrest of most of the terrorists by 1980. The Red Brigades continued in existence into the 1980s, though the movement, socially isolated, was in evident decline with by now no more than around a dozen active members.
Student protest in West Germany, unlike that in Italy and France, did not incite any wider unrest or gain support from industrial workers. It did not relate, in any real sense, to class conflict. It was nevertheless more ideological than anywhere else, framed in good measure by the burden of the Nazi past. ‘This whole generation was of course anxious and angry about what our parents had backed,’ one female activist later recalled. That Konrad Adenauer’s government had effectively drawn a line under the Nazi era, and that many deeply implicated in the crimes of Hitler’s regime had prospered in West German post-war liberal democracy, encouraged the view, grossly mistaken though it was, that this political system and the capitalist economy upon which it rested were actually the continuation of fascism in a new guise. The existence of big industrial firms and banks that had been mainstays of the Nazi regime and, though newly constituted since the war, had benefited from the rapacious exploitation and slave labour of the Hitler era, was taken to underline this interpretation. The apparently authoritarian tendencies of Adenauer’s style of ‘Chancellor democracy’, the attempted inroads into press freedom in the ‘Spiegel affair’ of 1961, and the planned legislation for a state of emergency that seemed an eerie reminder of the descent into Nazi dictatorship in the early 1930s, all pointed in the eyes of the New Left to continuities with fascism.
The Eichmann and Auschwitz trials had highlighted the gross inhumanity of the Nazis. For one activist in the student protests this created, along with feelings of horror and shame, ‘the loss of a childlike basic trust in the society from which we had come and in which we had grown up’. But a focus on the Holocaust itself – the term was not yet widely used – and the centrality of racial antisemitism to Nazi ideology would have to await a still later generation. For now, National Socialism remained largely understood by student radicals and other followers of what was generally coming to be labelled ‘the New Left’ as the most extreme manifestation of capitalism. (‘National Socialism’ was, in fact, an appellation consistently decried by the New Left, since ‘socialism’ was viewed purely in positive terms and therefore could not be allowed to be brought into association with the evil of the Third Reich. Instead, Nazism was invariably labelled ‘Hitler-Fascism’, or simply ‘Fascism’, to indicate that it was merely the German radical manifestation of an international phenomenon inextricably rooted in capitalism.)
Continuities with the Nazi past appeared more than ever confirmed when a former Nazi, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had joined the party as early as 1933 and had served during the war as Foreign Minister to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, became Chancellor in December 1966. Kiesinger headed a ‘grand coalition’ comprising the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Social Democrats (effectively, therefore, a national government), the product of the more disturbed political conditions that had followed the end of the Adenauer era. He had come to the Chancellorship at a worrying time in Germany, with exaggerated fears flowing from what amounted to a minor recession and slight growth in unemployment. These fears and discontents had led to growing support for a neo-Nazi party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD, National Democratic Party of Germany). Electoral support was confined to a small minority of the population. Even so, the NPD won nearly 8 per cent of the vote in the Hesse regional election in November 1966 and attained its best result, almost 10 per cent in Baden-Württemberg in April 1968, gaining seats in seven regional parliaments between 1966 and 1968. This lent further sustenance to the belief on the left that Germany might be returning to its dark past.
In the eyes of the New Left there was no possibility of meaningful parliamentary opposition to a government that represented all the major parties in parliament. In any case they saw no differences of substance between parties that could so readily enter into a coalition with one another. This prompted the founding of what was called an Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (Ausserparlamentarische Opposition, APO), led by the Student Federation (which had been excluded from the Social Democratic Party in 1960). The APO won many recruits on account of the government’s declared intention to promulgate highly controversial laws that extended the executive powers of the state and limited citizens’ rights in a national emergency, for which the necessary two-thirds majority could now be found in parliament. Beyond this, the Federal Republic’s close relationship with the United States – prosecuting a terrible war in Vietnam and for the New Left the very face of capitalist imperialism under whose aegis Germany stood as prime candidate for nuclear annihilation in the event of a superpower showdown – served to mobilize student protest.
The visit to West Berlin on 2 June 1967 by the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, provided the flashpoint. Since a coup instigated by the CIA in order to consolidate American oil interests in the region had installed bolstered his power in 1953, the Shah had presided over a brutally repressive dictatorship. The day of his visit had already seen protest demonstrations and been filled with tension before the Shah arrived at the West Berlin opera house that evening to see a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He was greeted by a torrent of abuse, and his entourage had to run the gauntlet of a bombardment of tomatoes thrown by a crowd of a thousand or so demonstrators, activated by the Student Federation. The West Berlin police, encouraged by their superiors to take a tough line with the demonstrators, acted without restraint in the beatings they meted out to the protesters. Then, as the crowd tried to disperse, a shot rang out and a student, Benno Ohnesorg, a bystander not a radical agitator, fell dead. The protesters now had a martyr, killed by a police bullet.
It only transpired many years later that the policeman who fired the shot, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was an informant of the East German state security service, the Stasi. No evidence of any East German order to Kurras to kill a protester, conceivably in an attempt to destabilize West Germany, has ever come to light (though much of the documentation has meanwhile disappeared or been destroyed). The motive for the shooting remains a mystery. But it was carried out not by a proto-fascist policeman, as was presumed by the student protesters, but by a committed supporter of the East German regime.
The Student Federation had about 2,500 members at most. But some 7,000 students and their teachers attended Ohnesorg’s funeral. The protest now became an attack on all forms of authority in what was viewed as a quasi-fascist state. A central target of student attacks was the West Berlin headquarters of the newspaper empire of Axel Springer, publisher among other titles of the Bild-Zeitung, the widely read daily that had castigated the demonstrators as left-wing stormtroopers, thereby deliberately evoking memories of the Nazi takeover of power. The Student Federation, whose leading spokesman was the charismatic sociology student Rudi Dutschke, demanded the expropriation of the Springer concern and called for ‘direct action’ in the struggle against the ‘terror’ and authoritarianism in West Berlin. But the Springer press was not alone in its condemnation of the Marxist left and the escalating radicalization of the student movement, which was unquestionably intolerant of any critical or oppositional opinion. No less a figure than the eminent philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, who in many respects sympathized with the students, described the increasing intolerance of the student movement as ‘Left Fascism’.
Over the next months Dutschke became something of a media star in West Germany, seldom out of the limelight, and constantly preaching the need for a ‘revolutionary will’ in a whirlwind of mass meetings. But on 11 April 1968 he was shot in the head and seriously wounded in an attack by a young neo-Nazi. He narrowly survived, but his career as a student leader and agitator was over. The attack prompted a further upsurge in violence, with the West Berlin headquarters of the Springer press, which was believed to have provoked the attack on Dutschke, a particular target. Influenced by Marcuse’s ideas, the question of the use of violence to accomplish revolutionary aims had already turned into a central issue of debate. Days before the attempt on Dutschke’s life two department stores in Frankfurt am Main, the nerve hub of West German business, were deliberately set on fire as a protest against the ‘terror of consumerism’. Among the arsonists were Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, later leading lights in the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction), an organization that specialized in the extreme violence of self-styled ‘urban guerrillas’.
In this heated atmosphere West Germany’s Federal government, now confident of the necessary majority support that had earlier been lacking, prepared the ground to promulgate the highly controversial emergency legislation. Tens of thousands – far from confined to the ‘usual suspects’ in the Student Federation – took part in a march on the government capital, Bonn, in mid-May 1968. Unlike the situation in France, however, the trade unions demonstratively distanced themselves from the student protest and held their own rally in Dortmund. It was to no avail. On 30 May more than three-quarters of the members of the Federal Parliament backed the legislation – which included, in the event of a declared state of emergency, limits on the secrecy of postal and telephone communications.
The passing of the emergency legislation turned out to be the turning point. Those on the fringes of the student movement lost interest in an extra-parliamentary opposition that on the crucial issue had proved ineffective. The continued efforts of the hardcore, in what increasingly seemed to many a pointless mission directed towards ultimate revolution for unclear utopian goals, fell ever more on stony ground. Further episodes of violent attacks on the police served only to alienate potential support. And as the Social Democrats, distancing themselves from their conservative Christian Democratic partners in the unpopular grand coalition government, started to make significant gains among students and young academics, the radical Student Federation struggled to retain its following, splitting into various factions, then eventually in March 1970 dissolving itself.
By that time, following the general election of September 1969, the moderate left under the appealing figure of Willy Brandt (who became the new Chancellor) for the first time since 1928 found itself in a position to form a government – now in coalition only with the liberal Free Democrats. An indication even so that the upheavals of the late 1960s had left their mark on West Germany’s conservative middle class was the readiness of Brandt’s coalition government to bow to pressure from the Christian Democrats and in 1972 to introduce a ‘Radikalenerlass’ (‘Radicals’ Decree’). This made loyalty to the constitution a prerequisite for state employment – a broad category that included postmen and railway workers as well as civil servants and teachers. Hardly more than 2 per cent of potential employees were in practice rejected. It sent a sombre signal, even so, that the state distrusted its citizens. The legislation was abandoned by the Federal government in 1976 (though some, but not all, state governments repealed it only at later stages). By then the heady days of the student movement in West Germany were well and truly over.
But as in Italy, a tiny minority of fundamentalists, who had emerged from the disturbances of 1968 without playing any notable role in the West German student protests, turned to extreme violence and outright terrorism. What called itself the Red Army Faction but was generally better known as the ‘Baader-Meinhof Group’ (named after its most prominent figures Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, both of whom, like other prominent members, came from solid middle-class families), saw itself as part of an ‘urban guerrilla’ movement and formed links to other revolutionary formations across Western Europe and elsewhere, also to anti-Zionist organizations in the Middle East. From 1970 onwards the militants engaged in what they claimed was an ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ against a West German state that supported the American war in Vietnam. Over the following years they carried out numerous robberies and bombings, aimed ultimately at the overthrow of what they saw as an oppressive capitalist and fascist state.
The episodic but serious violence continued even after the arrest and imprisonment of Baader, Meinhof, and a number of other leaders of the Red Army Faction in 1972. It reached a climax in the ‘German autumn’ of 1977. On 13 October a Lufthansa airliner was hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and flown to Mogadishu in Somalia. The hijackers demanded the release of the imprisoned Red Army Faction leaders. However, the eighty-six hostages were freed when the plane was stormed by German counter-terrorist police troops. Within the Federal Republic itself the kidnapping and eventual murder of the leading industrialist (and former SS man) Hanns-Martin Schleyer the same month followed prior shootings of prominent victims earlier in the year. The leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Group themselves met violent ends. Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her cell in Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart in May 1976. And during the night of 18 October 1977, as news of the freeing of the hijack hostages in Mogadishu came through, Andreas Baader was discovered shot dead and Gudrun Ensslin hanged in their cells. Jan-Carl Raspe (another prominent member of the group) died next day of gunshot wounds and a fourth member, Irmgard Möller, survived serious stab wounds. According to official reports – though there were many doubters – there had been a suicide pact.
As in Italy, the terrorist violence deployed by the militant groupuscules in the 1970s had at most only an indirect relation to the student protest movement. It emerged even so as the most extreme expression of the deep sense of alienation felt among wide swathes of the younger generation in Europe towards the social values, the materialist culture and the military power of the Western world. According to opinion surveys, around a quarter of West Germans under the age of forty were said to sympathize with the Baader-Meinhof Group. Most young West Germans, like other members of society, were nevertheless repelled by what they saw as senseless violence incapable of altering the West German state and guaranteed, in fact, only to solidify popular backing for measures to uphold order. Most older Germans probably shared the views of Franz Göll, by this time a pensioner (born in 1899), who had earlier been employed in a number of lower-middle-class jobs. Göll valued personal freedom, as long as it did not disturb or threaten social and political order. He favoured harsh treatment of the terrorists of the Red Army Faction. ‘It is as if a virus had infected their brains, blocking normal thought,’ he wrote in his diary. The writer Heinrich Böll, with pardonable exaggeration, stated that the campaign of the Red Army Faction was a ‘war of six [people] against 60 million’.
Curiously, perhaps, the events of 1968 in France, which more than anywhere else elevated the student revolt of that year to near legendary status in popular memory, left no legacy of terrorist violence equivalent to that in Italy and West Germany. Nor did ‘Vichy’ play anything like the role that the legacy of fascism did in Italy, let alone that of Nazism in West Germany. Still, it was there in the background. Hostility to a parental generation that had complied, or even sympathized, with the Vichy regime was part of the intellectual ferment stirring the younger generation in France. It was interwoven with the lingering cult of the Resistance, of admiration for those who had actively engaged in the fight to defeat fascism. There was a more direct link to the very recent Algerian War. As one student activist later explained: ‘Our parents had not risen up immediately against fascism . . . We saw fascism arriving in Algeria . . . We fought straight away and those who trained us were the generation of the Resistance.’ A further ingredient was the deep antagonism towards what was perceived to be the autocratic presidential regime of Charles de Gaulle. By 1968 the atmosphere was combustible. In May that year student protest came closer than anywhere else – if only for a very short time – to undermining the power of the state.
The ‘May events’ in France marked the culmination of unrest that had been germinating for some years. The explosion of protest was triggered by the high-handed reaction of university authorities to student unrest about conditions in the recently established extension (for its arts and social science faculties) of Paris Nanterre University, an unappealing campus with hardly any social amenities to the northwest of the French capital. Factory-like buildings, overcrowded lecture theatres, and paternalistic forms of authority out of touch with the changing attitudes of a younger generation contributed to the potential for radicalization of a rapidly growing student population – nearly quadrupling within three years – on the Nanterre campus. Among student demands for reform was the abolition of gender segregation in student accommodation. The threat to expel the leading spokesman for this demand, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a sociology student of German-Jewish descent who had been strongly influenced by the growing protests of the student movement in West Germany, led to student strikes and a retraction of the expulsion threat. But the problems at Nanterre continued, prompting in March 1968 the occupation by students of the administrative buildings and eventually the temporary closure of the campus in early May. By this time Paris was taking over as the centre of the disturbances.
Just possibly, the disturbances might have been confined to Nanterre but for the fact that the disciplinary hearings against eight students accused of insulting Nanterre professors were held at the Sorbonne. When the centre of the trouble moved to Paris it sparked violent clashes between students and the police, resulting in the temporary closure of the Sorbonne for the first time in its long history on the evening of 3 May 1968 and the arrest of nearly 600 students. The following week, during the night of 10–11 May, students erected barricades in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Hans Koning, an American novelist of Dutch descent who witnessed the events, described ‘a wild excitement in the air’, an atmosphere of elation, not fear. ‘It was astounding to watch the students being unafraid of the police with tear gas and CS gas, concussion grenades, nightsticks, pistols, helmets, visors, shields, grenade rifles and the famous leaded capes . . . The fight was so unequal, the police so brutal that you had to be a very determined Law & Order person to feel sympathy for the authorities . . . When dawn came, the last barricades fell to the police, and the remaining young men, and some young women, were dragged, often clubbed, into the police vans.’ Another eyewitness reported a young girl ‘rushing out into the street practically naked’, being mishandled by the police, ‘then beaten like the other wounded students’. Public sympathies sided with the students. The sympathies of workers, particularly younger workers, swiftly translated into direct action. The wanton assault on the protesters was the signal for the trade unions to proclaim a twenty-four-hour nationwide general strike for 13 May out of solidarity. This at once turned the disturbances in France into more than a student revolt.
The clashes with authority highlighted growing anger, frustrations and grievances that had smouldered for some years, not all of them confined to students or the issue of university reform. The disturbances swiftly turned into a wave of protest across France, extending to embrace millions of workers calling for the right to manage themselves.
There had been mounting industrial unrest in 1967 as the economy temporarily slowed and unemployment rose. But the worker action in 1968 was far from any move towards organized revolution. It had a spontaneity that differed from more familiar industrial disputes and was reminiscent in some ways of the elated atmosphere in 1936 at the formation of the Popular Front government. The ultimate goal of the protesters, if they had one, was unclear. And the interests of students and industrial workers were naturally disparate. What temporarily bound them together was the rejection of traditional authority – of employers and managers who dictated rather than consulted, of university administrators keen to keep students in their place and of professors unwilling to yield power in the hallowed halls. The leaders of the French Communist Party, still closely bound to Moscow and anxious to retain their control of the trade-union movement, scorned what they saw as would-be revolutionaries – motley groups of Trotskyites, Maoists and Anarchists who lacked any coherent strategy for challenging, let alone toppling, entrenched state authority.
Yet, for a short time, the Gaullist Fifth Republic did wobble. The upsurge of demonstrations, riots, strikes, and occupation of workplaces briefly threatened the stability of the French state. The political order seemed under threat. De Gaulle himself remained imperiously aloof from the disturbances until nearly the end of the month. Apparently imperturbable, he even left for Romania on 14 May for a four-day state visit. Television showed pictures of him watching folk-dancing while France struggled to avoid chaos. However, he was sufficiently unnerved to disappear – without even informing his Prime Minister of his movements – across the German border for a few hours, on 29 May. He had gone to make sure that he had the support of his armed forces. In Baden-Baden his resolve was stiffened by the reassurance of General Jacques Massu, the head of the French forces in West Germany, that he had the military’s backing. Reinvigorated, the President addressed the nation the following day in a defiant radio broadcast. He announced new elections, threatened to take emergency powers if there were to be no quick return to order, and warned that France faced the danger of dictatorship. Soon afterwards an orchestrated demonstration of half a million de Gaulle loyalists marched through the centre of Paris while de Gaulle himself warned in a televised address of the dangers of communism.
These moves did the trick – in the short term. The tide turned. Offered substantial pay increases and other concessions by the Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, most workers returned to their places of employment (though big strikes recurred the following month and for the last two weeks of June public services were almost paralysed). The police broke up student occupations of university buildings. And urgent university reforms to widen participation in faculty management were introduced, taking the heat out of the immediate issue that had underpinned student protest. The disturbances subsided. The heady atmosphere of rebellion evaporated. Order was gradually restored. The explosive protest that had lasted for most of May was over. A month later the elections provided a massive vote of confidence in de Gaulle.
It proved a pyrrhic victory for the French President. De Gaulle proposed regionalization of government as a step towards decentralization of the state. But the move backfired. Many people interpreted it as an attempt to bolster the position of the President at the expense of parliament. When put to the test in a referendum on 27 April 1969, the proposals were rejected. De Gaulle immediately resigned. The chaos that some had predicted should he be defeated did not, however, materialize. The general’s time as ‘saviour’ of France was over. He was the face of the past, not of the future.
Nowhere else in Western Europe did ‘1968’ produce the level of turmoil experienced in Italy, West Germany and France, though the generational and cultural revolt that lay behind the unrest did find expression elsewhere. Already by the mid-1960s an ‘alternative culture’ – strongly anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, opposed to existing standards of social morality – had emerged strongly among Amsterdam’s younger generation. But there it was non-violent and liberal in tone. It was also attuned to campaigning for practical social improvements – bicycles provided by the city for free public use to combat Amsterdam’s traffic problems, for instance, or occupying empty property to deal with homelessness – rather than dogmatically pressing for utopian political transformation. The Vietnam War played no great role in mobilizing students in the Netherlands. Nor was 1968 an especially eventful year. Nevertheless, the pressure to improve conditions in universities – in its most direct expression through the occupation of Amsterdam University buildings in 1969 – probably had more concrete results than in France, West Germany and Italy, where the disturbances had been far greater. The government quickly responded to the pressure and in 1970 a law was passed to democratize Dutch universities and end the archaic hierarchies that had previously dominated them.
Britain, too, experienced little of the enormous unrest within universities that had formed the backcloth to the huge student-led protests of 1968. Although student numbers had rapidly expanded in the 1960s in Britain, as elsewhere, they were still relatively small and far more closely regulated than in continental Europe by a restricted system of entry. The ratio of students to teaching staff was kept remarkably low. Oxford and Cambridge students still enjoyed one-to-one tutorials in colleges that provided a privileged higher education for students who came disproportionately from Britain’s elite public schools. Elsewhere, too, however, lectures and seminars were small, and contact between students and their teachers was close and frequent. There were, therefore, few objective grounds for massive discontent such as was experienced on the continent. Sit-ins, occupation of university buildings and protest demonstrations of one kind or another did take place in some universities (notably in the London School of Economics and, perhaps more oddly, at the new University of Essex), though for the most part they amounted to no more than a minor backwash of what was happening in continental Europe. Young lecturers often sympathized with the students in their demands to democratize the way in which faculties were run and to dilute professorial power, and in this the protest actions attained some success. Overall, the scale of disturbance within universities was small, and the energies of the protest soon dissipated.
Where the protest was more marked and significant was in the political arena. Protests about the Vietnam War had taken place in universities across Britain since 1965. The London School of Economics – distinctly left-leaning and internationally renowned for the study of political economy, history and sociology – became the magnet for more wide-ranging student opposition to the Vietnam War and support for liberation movements in what was then called ‘the Third World’.
Opposition to the Vietnam War, however, went far beyond a student core. It united students, religious leaders, labour organizations and – mostly left-wing – political activists. From 1966 the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, with a distinct Trotskyite flavour, campaigned for the victory of North Vietnam. Big protest demonstrations took place in London in 1968. In March tens of thousands took part in what had been a peaceful demonstration in central London until several hundred demonstrators broke away from the protest march and headed into Grosvenor Square, location of the American Embassy. There they found a phalanx of police, some on horses, waiting for them. ‘It was one of the most exciting moments of my life,’ recalled The Times columnist, David Aaronovitch, then a thirteen-year-old boy. ‘But once we were in the square it became more frightening than exhilarating.’ The resulting clash left hundreds of police and demonstrators injured in the worst violence on the streets of London for decades. ‘The talk among the departing demonstrators was all of police brutality. People had been whacked over the heads with truncheons, ridden down by horses and kicked with regulation, iron-shod police boots. But the next day the papers were full of an image of a policeman, bent, his face contorted as a desert-booted demonstrator kicked him in the face.’ Subsequent demonstrations, including one of an estimated quarter of a million in October 1968, avoided a repeat of such serious violence. Protest at the war continued. But 1968 was its high point. And the scale of violence involved was very low in Britain when compared with that in Italy, West Germany and France.
What did ‘1968’ in Western Europe amount to, ultimately? The protest movement had been so multifaceted that specific conclusions about its impact are not easy to draw.
Some improvements in the structures of university governance that brought a modicum of democratization were certainly made. Professorial power was to some extent curtailed – perhaps more so in Britain, oddly enough, where student protest had been mild, than in much of continental Europe. Conditions for those studying improved as steps were taken to lessen the overcrowded lecture halls and libraries. Students began to be treated as adults, not least with regard to their sexual behaviour on campus – an issue that had helped spark the disturbances in France. Universities, as part of the general social change that saw the age of majority reduced from twenty-one to eighteen in many European countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ceased to assume moral responsibility for students.
But the drama, excitement and memory of ‘1968’ were not in the main evoked by the modest changes within universities. Changing the world – or at least their own societies – was the ambition that had galvanized thousands behind the protests. There had been talk of worker ownership of the means of production, factory democracy, work that made for contentment, not alienation, learning that was fulfilling, not channelled towards the needs of the capitalist economy, and above all peace, not violence.
The achievements fell well short of these lofty goals. The protesters had everywhere to come to the realization that they had underestimated the resilience of the existing state systems. Plenty of contemporaries thought the ’68ers had been little more than dreamers, naive romantics whose utopian hopes were merely illusions, bound to come to nothing. Such views were understandable, and not completely unjustified. They were harsh, just the same. The legacy of 1968 was more indirect than direct. It was nevertheless real.
The huge wave of opposition to the Vietnam War in Europe was an important international extension to the more significant protest movement in the United States, which itself contributed to the growing readiness of the American administration to seek a way out of such an unpopular and unwinnable war. In a more directly tangible sense, within Europe itself the industrial unrest that had flowed from the student protests in Italy and France (though not in West Germany) resulted in substantial improvements in working-class pay and working conditions. The power of the trade unions was strengthened as a consequence. Talk of building a ‘new society’ was overblown. But governments, whatever their colour and with varying degrees of success, attempted to defuse industrial confrontation through corporate forms of negotiation involving management and unions. They tried, too, often again with limited success, to combine economic modernization and technological improvements with social reforms – such as improved pensions and better housing – that would improve the quality of life for the majority of citizens.
The date ‘1968’, immediately acquiring epic status for those who had participated in the demonstrations and strikes, came to symbolize an era of changing cultural values, not just the events of a single year. Although the actual disturbances of 1968 soon faded, their legacy had no definitive end date. The anti-authoritarian, egalitarian and libertarian attitudes of the ’68ers had a lasting impact. They fed into the partial democratization that some (though not all) organizations experienced in the following years. The protest movements captured and accentuated generational and emancipatory impulses that pre-dated 1968 and continued long after the drama had subsided. They were instrumental in the moves towards less authoritarian education. They also opened up moves for gender equality. Women still faced widespread discrimination in education, in the workplace, and in most other spheres of social interchange. The feminist movement was as yet in its infancy and women’s liberation played only a subsidiary role in the protests of 1968. Nonetheless, the pressure for equal rights for women and racial minorities – drawing on the Civil Rights movement in the United States – and for sexual freedom (including women’s rights to have an abortion) and gay rights, even if those rights only bore fruit gradually (and partially), owed more than a little to the impetus provided by ‘1968’.
The peace movement – the American hippie slogan ‘make love not war’ had crossed the Atlantic – gained new sustenance from the post-1968 atmosphere and underlay the revitalized anti-nuclear protest of the 1980s. The legacy of 1968 also helped to foster the emerging ‘Green Movement’ that would become increasingly voluble in defence of the environment in the later twentieth century. Some ’68ers even became prominent members of the Greens. Joschka Fischer, a one-time student militant and advocate of communist revolution who had been involved in street battles with the West German police, later became a member of the Federal Parliament for the Green Party and rose to become Foreign Minister, no less. Daniel Cohn-Bendit – ‘Danny the Red’ – was later a member of the European Parliament and leader of the French Greens.
The ’68ers retained vivid – frequently rose-tinted – memories of the heady days when they thought they were overturning the established order. They still felt many years later that they had been involved in a heroic struggle. Many of them nonetheless became conventional ‘model’ citizens, some – like Joschka Fischer, or Lionel Jospin, a Trotskyite in the 1960s who three decades later became Prime Minister of France – even members of the ‘establishment’. Nonetheless, the young protesters and would-be revolutionaries of 1968 took their values with them as they grew older into their daily lives and into often mundane occupations. The attitudes that had shaped the revolt of the young that year had a lasting, indelible effect. Some, it is true, consciously depoliticized their lives and detached themselves from their radical past. Disillusionment with a revolutionary movement that did not produce revolution was not uncommon. But others sought to continue ‘the struggle’ in one way or another by deploying their reformist zeal in their adopted professions – sometimes as journalists, lawyers, human-rights activists and social workers. Those who became teachers at different educational levels often inculcated the values they had absorbed in 1968 in the new younger generation. These were the ‘multipliers’ who ensured that the changing values did not die with the protest movement itself.
A spectacular challenge to the existing order – more dramatic, and with greater immediate significance than the events in Rome, West Berlin, Paris and elsewhere – was meanwhile threatening to undermine Soviet power in Central Europe. But the ‘Prague Spring’ – ‘1968’ in Czechoslovakia – had very little to do with the wave of student protests that year in Western Europe. Its causes, character and consequences were quite different.
Echoes of what was happening in the West were nevertheless heard across the Iron Curtain. Student protest occurred in differing intensity in a number of countries. It entailed considerable courage to protest in the eastern bloc. The prospects of success were non-existent, and protesters had to reckon with severe retaliation by the state. Other than in the unusual circumstances of Czechoslovakia they also faced a high degree of social isolation; their shows of political non-conformity were opposed, or at any rate not backed, by most of the population – unsurprisingly unwilling to risk the venom of the regime and dependent upon the state for employment, educational prospects, housing and other necessities of everyday life. The motives for the protest also differed significantly from those in the West. One Polish activist later succinctly characterized a key difference: ‘For us democracy was a dream – but for them it was a prison.’ A Czech student leader in 1968 subsequently remarked: ‘We wanted just freedom . . . they fought for a different type of society . . . I used to say, “Oh, please, your poverty – look at how it seems compared to our poverty.”’ And despite his personal magnetism, Rudi Dutschke’s visits to activists in East Berlin and Prague did not result in a meeting of minds. ‘The love lasted, but the problem with Dutschke was that he only talked nonsense, leftist, stupid 68er nonsense,’ a GDR dissident, arrested in 1968 for protesting against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August that year, later wrote. A Czech activist encountered similar difficulties: ‘Rudi Dutschke (personally, I liked him) was not very successful with his visions of free, non-restrictive communist society, when he visited Prague this spring [1968]. The arguments of French students and their red flags hanging don’t excite our students.’
Activists travelled into Eastern Europe surprisingly often in the late 1960s, while the partial liberalization of the communist systems in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia permitted some movement at least in the opposite direction. Nearly 700,000 citizens, many of them students, travelled from Czechoslovakia to the West during 1968 and early 1969. The Hungarian ‘Windows to the West’ policy from the mid-1960s provided an exposure to Western popular music and cinema – as long as it was seen to be critical of capitalism. The German Democratic Republic was far more restrictive. After the building of the Berlin Wall the regime at first experimented with a policy of relative tolerance, but decided in 1965 that this had been mistaken and then clamped down heavily on Western cultural influences. Although they were unable to travel to the West, most East Germans could by then, however, receive Western television and radio channels, and many young people – 200,000 of them in 1968 – travelled to Prague, where the more liberal climate provided an opportunity to hear Western pop music or watch Western films. The Stasi reported in March 1968 that some East German youths were regularly receiving Western-style clothes, records and publications ‘supplied by contacts in West Berlin’ and then circulated among friends.
Some of the group under surveillance were later that year arrested for protesting about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. This, rather than any substantial echo of the ‘May events’ in France or the disturbances that had rocked West German and Italian universities, prompted spontaneous outbursts of protest in the GDR. Leaflets were clandestinely circulated and walls daubed with slogans supporting ‘freedom for Czechoslovakia’, attacking the Soviet Union and criticizing the GDR’s leadership. Compared with some other parts of the eastern bloc, however, such protests in the GDR were small in scale. Most of the protesters were young. But relatively few students appear to have been involved. In all, 1,189 East Germans, three-quarters of them under the age of thirty, were punished by the authorities for their support for Czechoslovakia. But the vast majority were young workers; only 8.5 per cent were students or school pupils. Earlier in the year the student protests in West Berlin had left no mark of note on the other side of the Wall. State security was too tight, repression too substantial. But in addition most East German students and intellectuals, either opportunistically – with an eye on career opportunities – or from commitment, were too bound up with the regime to become involved in open dissent. And unlike the far more serious difficulties the regime had faced in 1953 there was this time no sign that the scattered and isolated protest might turn into organized opposition. Most significant of all, there was no split within the party leadership. There was just repression.
In Poland it was a different matter. Polish students and intellectuals, recognizing the climate of protest in Western Europe and the mounting demands in Czechoslovakia for a liberalization of the system, raised their hopes of greater freedom of expression, already voiced by leading writers. Their hopes were peremptorily dashed when, in March 1968, the Soviet ambassador insisted on the closure of a Warsaw theatre that was staging a play, Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), by Adam Mickiewicz, the pre-eminent national poet, which criticized the conditions in Russia in the early nineteenth century. The clumsy action sparked angry protests that reached a high point on 9 March 1968, when 20,000 students marched through Warsaw shouting ‘Down with Censorship’ and ‘Long Live Czechoslovakia’, to be met by brutal police repression. Undeterred, the students demonstrated in front of party headquarters two days later. The police response with water cannon and tear gas led to a street battle that lasted several hours. The protests spread to other Polish universities. In Cracow workers showed their support for the students before being dispersed by police dogs. But, crucially, the students failed to gain widespread support of the workers while public opinion, fed by the regime’s press organs, was hostile. Repression did the rest. Parts of Warsaw University were closed by the police; a number of courses were terminated; and students made up a quarter of the 2,700 persons arrested (their teachers a further 10 per cent). Hundreds of students were conscripted into the army. A prominent figure among the academics who were dismissed from their posts was the already distinguished (later to become world-renowned) philosopher and critical analyst of Soviet orthodox communist theory, Leszek Kołakowski.
By early April the upheaval had subsided. One side-effect of the unrest had been the regime’s unleashing of anti-Zionist rhetoric – claiming that ‘Zionists’ had stirred up protest among politically naive students. The result was the effectively forced emigration, under the pressure of the anti-Zionist campaign, of around 13,000 Jews (including hundreds of intellectuals) – most of those who had still remained in post-war Poland. The regime was assisted in its suppression of the serious Polish disturbances in 1968 by the events in neighbouring Czechoslovakia. The crushing of the Prague Spring through Soviet armed intervention concentrated minds in Poland. Władisław Gomułka was able – for now – to reassert his authority. But Poland’s problems had not gone away.
Demonstrations had already taken place in Czechoslovakia in autumn 1967, sparked by the poor living conditions in Prague’s student halls of residence and provoking heavy police retaliation. There, however, the protests blended into a growing pressure from wider sections of the population for more democracy and liberalization of the system. Generational revolt that played such a notable part in Western Europe was far less important in Czechoslovakia. Protest there attracted support across the social and age spectrum, largely prompted by widespread economic discontent. The Communist Party’s own report, in April 1968, was a damning indictment of its own dismal record. It condemned the ‘catastrophic state of housing’, the stagnation of living standards, transport deficiencies, and the poor quality of goods and services. The planned economy was failing miserably to provide even basic necessities – and this in one of the most advanced industrial economies in the eastern bloc.
Most importantly, the pressure for radical reform was led not from the outside, but from within the ruling Communist Party, in fact from close to its centre. For Alexander Dubček, who became the face of the demands for change, reform was a necessity. Not just, or even mainly (at least at first), from idealistic conviction; he increasingly saw reform as the only way to ensure that the party retained its control. Western protesters (at least their most radical spokespersons) wanted to overthrow capitalist society and replace it with some utopian form of communism. Eastern European protesters, who lived under ‘real existing socialism’ (as their brand of communism was usually described), did not for the most part want to replace it, but to reform it. Few preferred Western capitalism; their aim was to make communism more democratic and liberal. The Prague Spring put an end to such illusions once and for all. Its ultimate lesson was that liberal freedoms and democracy were incompatible with the existence of the communist state. Where they threatened the power of the ruling Communist Party and endangered as a consequence the unity of the Soviet bloc, attempts to spread them would be crushed by armed force.
What turned into the Prague Spring had its background five years earlier, in 1963, in pressure for greater autonomy for Slovakia, which had been systematically reduced under the centralizing constitutional changes of 1960. The Slovak Communist Party was in practice subordinated to the Czech Party, which was controlled by the veteran Stalinist, Antonín Novotný, its First Secretary and, since 1957, President of Czechoslovakia. In the wake of Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization measures in the Soviet Union, Novotný felt compelled to make corresponding moves in Czechoslovakia. Symbols of the changing climate were the removal (and subsequent cremation) of the embalmed body of the former leader Klement Gottwald and the destruction of the immense statue of Stalin that towered over Prague. In early 1963 Novotný also felt obliged to establish a commission of inquiry into the show trials of Rudolf Slánský and others that had been carried out in the 1950s. The commission’s report rehabilitated those convicted and exonerated them of charges of treason, though it did not restore full party membership to the Slovak victims of the purges who had been condemned as ‘bourgeois nationalists’. The findings of the commission, however, posed an implicit threat to Novotný. For Alexander Dubček, a member of the commission, knew that Novotný himself had in fact supported the show-trials.
As First Secretary of the Slovak Communist Party from May 1963, Dubček – trained in Moscow and a party loyalist for fourteen years – appears to have put this knowledge to advantage to enable him to introduce greater freedom of expression and to reduce press censorship in Slovakia. He used the changes to air Slovak grievances against Prague and to demand a new commission with the aim of rehabilitating the Slovak victims of the purges entirely. Czech writers and journalists took note of the loosening of controls in Slovakia, and Novotný, under pressure because of a significantly worsening economic situation, reluctantly conceded some limited freedom of cultural expression for Czechs too. Dubček, continuing to champion Slovak grievances and even tacitly condoning the national feeling that the discontent aroused, maintained the pressure on Novotný by implying the need for reform throughout Czechoslovakia, not just in Slovakia. The further implication was that he, Dubček, was the man to lead it. By 1967 the gulf within the top echelon of party functionaries between the reformers and those opposing change was becoming unbridgeable. It was at this juncture, in October 1967, that the student demonstrations in Prague about the poor conditions in their halls of residence occurred.
Criticism of the force used by the police against the students stretched deep into the party membership, further weakening Novotný and the reactionary old guard while advertising the need for a new broom to sweep clean. The factional split within the party leadership crystallized in the mounting power struggle between Dubček and Novotný. Once the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, withdrew his support, Novotný’s fate was sealed. In January 1968 Dubček replaced him as First Secretary of the Party. Two months later Novotný also resigned as President and was succeeded, on Dubček’s nomination, by Ludvik Svoboda, widely popular as a war hero and a victim himself of the 1950s purges. By this time the Prague Spring was turning into full bloom. Censorship scarcely existed, and attacks on leading figures in the party multiplied in the press – to the growing consternation of communist leaders in Moscow and in the Soviet satellite states.
The ‘Action Programme’, aimed at ‘Socialism with a Human Face’, that the Presidium of the Party approved on 5 April 1968, provided a searing condemnation of the failings of the Novotný years. From now on, it stated, the Communist Party would guarantee ‘rights, freedoms and interests’ and would be prepared to amend directives and resolutions to meet popular demands. Plainly, such a level of democratization was incompatible with orthodox communist belief in the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. With the installation of a new government the following day, led by Oldřich Černík, Dubček and his fellow reformers occupied all the key positions in party and state.
The atmosphere was exhilarating. ‘Suddenly you could breathe freely, people could associate freely, fear vanished,’ recalled the playright Václav Havel, who two decades later would become President of Czechoslovakia. At the May Day parade in Prague’s Wenceslas Square that year flowers were thrown at the rostrum where Dubček watched in delight, cupping his hands to shout out greetings to well-wishers in the procession. ‘This is the spring of our new existence,’ reported the party newspaper, Rudé právo, next day.
However, Dubček – an indecisive, uncertain individual, and unsure about the real levels of popular support for socialism – was no longer able to control the pressure for radical reform that he had been largely instrumental in unleashing. He was himself carried along on the wave of the zeal for change that had spread outwards from the party to much of the population. His own popularity posed a quandary. He had to sustain the momentum of reform. At the same time he had to prevent it from being seen to endanger the interests of the Soviet Union and its close allies. Weakening communist rule in one country could easily have a domino effect.
The fear that this might happen posed a grave danger to the Czech reformists. For the leaders of the Soviet Union and of the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland – members of the Warsaw Pact – were meanwhile becoming increasingly anxious about developments in Czechoslovakia. In mid-July they published what amounted to a warning to Prague to put an end to what it portrayed as a ‘counter-revolution’ against the socialist system that imperilled ‘the socialist commonwealth’. In early August Brezhnev’s demands to reinstate censorship, dismiss some leading reformers, and generally put the Czechoslovak party’s house in order again brought some half-hearted measures to restore ‘democratic centralism’. But Dubček’s turn for support to Yugoslavia and Romania, the two communist countries whose own independent stance had meant an uneasy relationship with Moscow, was not guaranteed to calm nerves among the Warsaw Pact countries. On 17 August the Soviet Politburo took the critical step: it decided to intervene militarily in the domestic affairs of another socialist state in the name of ‘international proletarian solidarity’. During the night of 20–21 August 1968 up to half a million Warsaw Pact troops from five countries backed by 7,500 Soviet tanks and a thousand planes began their invasion of Czechoslovakia.
On the orders of the Czech government, there was no armed resistance. But television and radio – until the stations were brought into line – carried vivid reports of the opposition to the invaders and the mass support for Dubček, soon shown in huge crowds that began to gather in Prague and Bratislava in protest at the invasion. Dubček, Černík and four other party leaders were taken into custody and flown to Moscow (where Dubček seems to have suffered a nervous collapse). Alongside President Svoboda and a number of leading figures in the party who had joined them in Moscow, they were subjected to intense pressure to denounce the liberalization programme. On 26 August they caved in and signed their agreement to accept a Soviet ultimatum, reversing the Prague Spring reforms in return for the withdrawal of the occupying forces (almost all of which left by the end of October). ‘Fraternal relations’ were restored – under duress. The agreement was framed under a new, ominous premise, later known as the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’. This laid down a ‘common international obligation’ to defend socialist countries against ‘counter-revolutionary forces’. From now on, then, Warsaw Pact states had an explicit duty to intervene where any member was adjudged to be stepping out of line.
The process of ‘normalization’ took several months. But it was a one-way street. The Czechoslovak delegation at the ‘negotiations’ in Moscow returned to Prague during the night of 26–27 August. Public dismay at what was widely viewed as a capitulation in Moscow was assuaged by a moving broadcast appeal by a sobbing Dubček – like the other Prague Spring reformers still immensely popular – for the realistic acceptance of inescapable ‘temporary, exceptional measures’. Inexorably, however, the pressure for ‘normalization’ intensified. The leaders of the Prague Spring were all gradually ousted from their positions. The process was hastened by signs of continued mass discontent. When Jan Palach, a Prague student, set fire to himself in protest at the reversal of liberalization, his funeral on 25 January 1969, organized by students, was attended by an estimated 100,000 people with a further 200,000 watching from the pavements. And huge anti-Soviet demonstrations followed the victory by the Czechoslovakian ice-hockey team over the USSR in world-championship matches in March. The disturbances swiftly led to Soviet intervention to ensure the removal from office of Dubček (replaced as First Secretary of the Czech Communist Party by another, more compliant Slovak, Gustáv Husák). He was expelled from the party in 1970 and dispatched into obscurity as a minor forestry official in Slovakia. Others associated with the Prague Spring were gradually replaced. Three sweeping purges of the party membership were undertaken between September 1969 and June 1970. Thousands of trade union officials, teachers, academics, journalists and others who worked in the mass media and cultural sphere were dismissed.
By the end of the process Czechoslovakia had been ‘normalized’. ‘The Russians have finally achieved what they call normalization: a nasty and brutish police state’, was the bitter verdict of a disaffected Czech surgeon, Dr Paul Zalud, writing during an authorized visit to West Germany in 1969 to a British communist, Leslie Parker. Order had been restored. The advances of the Prague Spring had been reversed. Censorship, travel restrictions and unassailable rule by the Communist Party had been reimposed. The population was reduced to sullen compliance. Political nonconformity declined. A tiny number of writers and other intellectuals continued in a variety of ways to register their protest. Such ‘dissidents’ (as they came to be called) were, however, in the immediate aftermath of the Prague Spring little more than an irritant to the regime.
In the eyes of the West the crushing of the Prague Spring marked a further heavy blow, after Hungary in 1956, to the prestige of the Soviet Union and the ‘socialist’ system of rule, which once more, as was only too clear, could be sustained only by armed force. For many communist supporters in Western Europe the Soviet Union had abdicated all moral authority through its action in Czechoslovakia. None of this mattered much to the Soviet leadership. It was a small price for keeping the alliance of socialist countries intact. Soviet power had prevailed.
With the threat from the liberalizing tendencies in Czechoslovakia eliminated, fundamental alteration to the structures of rule in the political systems of the Warsaw Pact states was ruled out. For the population of those countries it meant general dull public conformity, acquiescence in the confines of political orthodoxy and limited ‘niche’ spheres of private life beyond the prying eyes of the surveillance state and its armies of informants.
There was nonetheless movement in the communist state systems. Nowhere was a retreat to full-blown Stalinism possible. Significant differences within the Soviet bloc continued to exist. The pressures for liberalizing change were generally higher in those countries with some exposure to Western cultural influences, a sizeable intelligentsia, and an industrialized economy with an organized working class (even in the absence of free trade unions). The suppression of the Prague Spring sent a plain message that any liberalization had to be kept closely in check. But as long as there was no threat to the integrity of the Soviet bloc (as there had been in Czechoslovakia), the Kremlin was prepared to grant some latitude. The evident problems of the command economy in several eastern bloc countries, in some cases necessitating sizeable Soviet subsidies, meant Moscow was open to attempts within the system to modernize production. Especially in the more industrialized economies the Stalinist command system – which of course had originally been introduced in an overwhelmingly agrarian Soviet Union – was singularly ill equipped to satisfy basic consumer needs let alone compete with the rapid economic advances in the capitalist West. So a sort of uneasy balance had to be struck – in somewhat different ways, and with varying degrees of success – between a regimented political system under the control of a monopoly party and the innovation and competition needed to liberate economic, social and intellectual resources.
In the Soviet Union itself strong economic growth in the late 1960s meant there was no recurrence of the industrial unrest and extensive discontent of Khrushchev’s last years in power. The grip of the regime was tightened and, in the wake of the Prague Spring, ideological orthodoxy reinforced. When a small group protested in Red Square after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, its members were swiftly arrested, and subsequently sentenced to three years in prison camps. Dissidence continued, and sullied the name of the Soviet Union still further in the West. But it could not remotely shake the firm hold of the regime over its own citizens.
Bulgaria was the closest of any of the satellites to the Soviet Union, and in any case its high economic dependency made it unlikely to deviate much from Moscow’s line. The coercive force of the police state, a still predominantly rural population and a small intelligentsia all militated against the pressures for liberalization that had arisen in Czechoslovakia. There was much rhetoric about economic reform; but little in practice materialized. Towards the end of the 1960s there was even some retreat to rigid neo-Stalinist orthodoxy from the limited economic reforms and cultural thaw that had been introduced in the earlier part of the decade.
Hungary went in the opposite direction. Janos Kádár’s ‘goulash communism’ permitted a level of limited exposure to market forces that gave the population the highest standard of living in the Soviet bloc. The ‘New Economic Mechanism’ introduced on 1 January 1968 was a genuine innovation in the economies of Soviet satellites. Central state planning was reduced essentially to long-term investment projects, fiscal policy and regulation of prices for basic essential products. Beyond this, firms could make profits and operate commercially. Foreign trade with the West increased, agricultural production was stimulated, and the shortages of basic commodities that were endemic in other parts of the Soviet bloc disappeared. Kádár also showed himself to be enlightened enough – or at any rate sufficiently ready to learn lessons from 1956 – to allow some freedom of expression and even openness to Western pop music, without loosening the reins to an extent that was likely to cause tension with Moscow. In consequence, Hungary, which in 1956 had been the most rebellious, turned into the most contented country among the Soviet satellites, with little political dissidence.
Poland, on the other hand, under the leadership of Władysław Gomułka, had become a classic case of a system that, from seeming to embrace reform in 1956, had hardened into unbending orthodoxy, alienating much of the population in the process. Gomułka’s regime had kept tight controls on dissent, had ruthlessly quashed student protest, and had avidly backed the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It presided, however, over a sharply deteriorating economy. The regime’s crass response was to announce in the very run-up to Christmas, with effect from 13 December 1970, an immediate increase in the price of food ranging from 12 and 30 per cent. This tipped the already welling discontent into a torrent of angry protest. Huge demonstrations, starting in the Baltic shipyards in Gdańsk, Szeczecin and Gdynia, but swiftly spreading to Warsaw and other cities, took place the following week. When a train carrying workers to the Gdańsk shipyard was attacked by armed state militia, all hell broke loose. Workers marched on party headquarters. Shops were looted. A training centre for the militia in Słupsk, near the Baltic coast, was burnt down. Militia men were physically attacked by mobs and some killed. There were big clashes with police. Tanks crushed some demonstrators. The death toll numbered 45, almost 1,200 were injured, and 300 arrested. When police opened fire on striking workers in Gdańsk, Gomułka had gone too far. He was forced to resign a week after the explosion of unrest.
His replacement, Edward Gierek, a former miner with a good sense of worker needs, immediately announced improvements in pay and conditions, then, amid continued strikes and backed by a loan from the Soviet Union, a freeze on prices at their earlier levels for twelve months. He visited the shipyards, addressing the workers directly and bluntly, admitting failings in the party. He abolished the forced deliveries to the state, detested by farmers, and increased payments for food purchases. Non-state employees were now admitted to free medical care. Censorship and restrictions on foreign travel were somewhat relaxed. Morale improved. The first period of Gierek’s leadership went down as the ‘belle époque’ of the communist years in Poland. Earnings rose by 11 per cent in 1971. A huge housing programme made a million more apartments available – not enough, but a big improvement on Gomułka’s time. Practically everyone experienced better living standards as economic modernization was directed, in contrast to earlier years, towards consumer needs. But the economic problems had not gone away. To bring about the necessary stimulation of the economy and to repay the loan from the Soviet Union, Gierek borrowed from the West to the tune of $6 billion. This bought off the immediate problems. But he was simply storing up trouble for the future. The oil crisis hit Poland hard after 1973 and further Soviet assistance was needed to cope with it. By the late 1970s serious problems were once again mounting.
The German Democratic Republic was a special case among the countries of the Soviet bloc. The Berlin Wall, the GDR’s sense of being an ideological showcase for ‘real existing socialism’ in competition with its capitalist neighbour, and a particularly pronounced anti-fascism provided East German society with a distinctive flavour. The building of the Wall in 1961 had given the regime new confidence and strengthened its power. A wave of arrests had followed as the ideological struggle against ‘the enemy within’ was enhanced. Intimidation, repression and pressure to conform were now a part of life in the GDR. However, as its leaders recognized, the system could not function on repression alone – especially if it was to attain its stated goal of overtaking West Germany economically by 1980.
The New Economic System, introduced in 1963, was an attempt to overcome the deteriorating state of the economy, which had led to shortages and indications of discontent reminiscent of those a decade earlier. Alongside levels of decentralized management and incentives to increase output – though still within the framework of a centrally imposed economic plan – went an increased propaganda effort to mobilize the active support of the population. New emphasis was placed upon technology, knowledge and rational organization, underpinned by a drive to produce a highly educated population. In 1951 a mere 16 per cent of pupils had spent more than eight years at school; by 1970 this had climbed to no fewer than 85 per cent, while entry to higher education was widened, and a number of new universities and polytechnics were built. Productivity rose by 6–7 per cent, national income by 5 per cent in 1964–5. The standard of living began to rise appreciably – though not as fast as was hoped, and lagged far behind that of West Germany. Still, televisions, washing machines and fridges were no longer possessions only of a small minority of the population. The signs of improvement were accompanied by a degree of cultural relaxation. Statues of Stalin disappeared; 16,000 political prisoners were amnestied.
Party leaders were, however, far from happy at yielding some of their control over the economy, which in any case was still hampered by innumerable constraints and unable to overcome an intrinsic lack of competitiveness. And once Khrushchev’s reforming zeal had given way to Brezhnev’s emphasis on stability, the trend towards modest liberalization ceased. More stringent controls over the cultural sphere were introduced in December 1965 and the New Economic System was revised the same month. There was a renewed emphasis on centralized planning, with disproportionate financing directed towards electronics, the chemical industry and engineering. With increased resources also provided to expand the army and security service (the Stasi), consumer industries were again neglected.
The Prague Spring offered confirmation to the GDR leadership that they had been right to quell the liberalizing cultural tendencies that could only have led to political destabilization. But the inherent problems of an economy directed by a single party with complete power over the running of the state were laid bare. Shortages and blockages in the supply of basic provisions, let alone consumer goods that were taken for granted in West Germany and shown nightly on television, once more began to cause unrest. Party bosses were increasingly uneasy about Walter Ulbricht’s leadership, and the neglect of urgently needed consumer products in favour of technological projects that would only bear fruit in the distant future. In addition, Ulbricht’s hopes of closer economic cooperation with West Germany ran completely counter to Moscow’s wishes. Ulbricht’s personal arrogance did the rest. In late 1970 a majority of the party leadership voted for a change of economic course. Soon afterwards they asked Brezhnev to replace Ulbricht as leader. Brezhnev complied, and on 3 May 1971 Ulbricht resigned. His successor, Erich Honecker, was a long-serving high functionary whose impeccable anti-fascist credentials derived from his involvement in the communist resistance movement under Hitler’s regime and ten years of incarceration in Nazi prisons. He now oversaw a restructuring of the economy, with greater prominence given to consumer production. He never, however, veered from lap-dog allegiance to Moscow.
Communist rule was meanwhile developing in a different fashion in the Balkan countries. Albania, throwing in its lot with China after the Sino-Soviet split, continued its ideologically self-determined path into political isolation and dire economic poverty – the worst in Eastern Europe. Depriving itself of Soviet aid, Albania was unable to make good what it had lost through trade agreements with China. Its own version of the ‘cultural revolution’ that China was enduring in the mid-1960s brought attacks on intellectuals, teachers and religious belief. The split with the Soviet Union was completed when Albania left the Warsaw Pact after the invasion of Czechoslovakia – though in truth it had long been no more than a nominal member. Cutting itself adrift from Moscow, but simply too far from China to develop close links with Beijing, Albania’s fossilized system remained an oddity, stuck in a cul-de-sac of its own making.
Romania, a member of the Warsaw Pact, was also increasingly going its own way, though taking care not to push relations with Moscow to breaking point. Albania’s choice of China over the Soviet Union indirectly benefited Romania. The Kremlin was aware that it could not further diminish its influence in the Balkans by adding Romania to the loss of Albania and the independence of Yugoslavia. So Romania was permitted its semi-detachment. Nicolae Ceauşescu, who had succeeded the brutal Stalinist Gheorge Gheorgiu-Dej in 1965 as head of the Communist Party (and in 1974 also became President of Romania), gained plaudits in the West by opposing the invasion of Czechoslovakia and by building a form of Romanian ‘national communism’ – a brand of nationalism within a communist framework – that insisted upon not dancing to Moscow’s tune. He was able to exploit the widening split between China and the Soviet Union to establish, against the Soviet line, foreign relations with West Germany and Israel. He cultivated Romanian national pride. And economic growth, providing sufficient supplies of foodstuffs and other necessities, sustained his early popularity. At first there was a degree of cultural loosening, too, which allowed some access to Western media (though this altered after he visited China, North Korea, Mongolia and North Vietnam in 1971, returning to introduce his own form of cultural revolution, with new stringent ideological controls on what was permissible expression). The Romanian deviation from Soviet orthodoxy was set to continue.
Yugoslavia’s brand of communism, resting on decentralization and industrial management at the base, seemed to many Western admirers to offer an attractive alternative to the stultifying Soviet system. The population benefited substantially from greater exposure to the West than any other country in Eastern Europe. The Dalmatian coast was promoted as a tourist venue in the 1960s, swelling the state coffers by millions of dollars – hard currency that helped to provide necessary imports and ensure a relatively good standard of living. Half a million Yugoslavs were meanwhile finding employment as ‘guest workers’ in West Germany and subsidizing the economy by the money they sent home to their families. Frequent contact with the West opened the country to its cultural influences. Yugoslavia was the most liberal of the communist countries of Eastern Europe. However, by the late 1960s the economic failings of the state were plain to see. Productivity was falling far behind the rise in average income, inflation was increasing, national debt was becoming a serious problem, inequalities were growing, and unemployment was rising sharply. This was the background to the emergence of centrifugal tendencies in the Yugoslavian state.
Croatia was the most prosperous part of Yugoslavia. But Croatians were resentful that much of the income gained from foreign tourism was distributed to less well-developed regions of the country. Croatian agitation for greater autonomy started to grow and feed into the beginnings of revitalized nationalism. An early expression was the demand, backed by 130 intellectuals in 1967, that Croatian (and not what they saw as the state-imposed language of Serbo-Croat) be used in schools. Conversely, Serbians thought economic prosperity had disproportionately benefited Croatia, and in the eyes of powerful factions liberalization – most advanced in Croatia and Slovenia – had gone too far. For students, however, it had not gone far enough. At the beginning of June 1968, prompted by events in France, the first mass demonstrations since the war took place when students in Belgrade protested about overcrowded universities, the privileges of the party oligarchy, increased consumerism, and economic conditions that forced many of them to leave the country to find employment. Marshal Tito, anxious to contain the unrest, promised to accommodate student demands. Apprehension about possible Soviet intervention following the invasion of Czechoslovakia – which provoked strong protest from the Yugoslavian government – worked in favour of the authorities and the unrest died down. It flared up again in 1971, this time in Zagreb, and posed a greater threat to the integrity of the Yugoslavian state.
What became known as the ‘Zagreb Spring’ built upon growing nationalist demands for greater autonomy for Croatia. Croatian party bosses, figures in the media and student representatives spoke in favour of independence. They saw national identity under threat – diluted by the loss of the large numbers of Croats who had left in search of work abroad and by the influx of Serbs and others. The Croatian party leader Savka Dabčević-Kučar expressed in 1970 her concern ‘that Croatia has become more the home of Serbs and other nationalities than of Croats themselves’, while Franjo Tudjman – later to become President of an independent Croatia – claimed ‘the existence of the Croatian people’ was under threat from assimilation. There was a widespread feeling that Croats were under-represented in the bureaucracy, the police and the officer corps of the army, and that Croatia was being bled dry economically by other parts of Yugoslavia and turned into little more than a colonial dependency of Serbia.
In July 1971 Tito, himself a Croat, summoned the leaders of Croatia to Belgrade, where he berated them for permitting the resurgence of nationalism. He warned obliquely of the danger of internal disorder that might provoke Soviet intervention. Nationalist feeling remained unabated, however, and found expression in the student occupation of Zagreb university buildings in November and calls for a general strike as thousands marched in huge demonstrations under the slogan: ‘Long live the independent state of Croatia’. This time Tito acted by purging the party leadership in both Zagreb and Belgrade, expelling hundreds from the party, and having nearly 200 people arrested. Any suspected of nationalist tendencies were also removed in Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The purges extended to those who favoured greater liberalization, while a new law in 1972 imposed greater restrictions on press freedom.
The repressive measures succeeded in calming the situation. Tito was aware, however, that repression was not enough. A new constitution of 1974 sought to accommodate reformist demands by establishing a better-balanced confederation, decentralizing power, and devolving a greater degree of relative independence to the various republics. In practice, however, the new constitution promoted, rather than undermined, nationalist and separatist tendencies, enhancing ethnic distinctions. Tito’s immense authority – that of the war hero, national saviour and subsequent embodiment of unity – was the single most important entity in keeping the increasingly ramshackle foundations of the Yugoslavian state together. But Tito was eighty years old in 1972. What would be the future of Yugoslavia after his death?
By the early 1970s in Europe, east as well as west, the troubles of the previous few years were for the most part fading. The Soviet bloc had been ‘normalized’ again after the upheavals of the Prague Spring. Dissidence existed, but was easily contained. ‘Real existing socialism’ in the communist countries seemed destined to last indefinitely. In Western Europe, beyond the southern belt (see Chapter 7) where democracy existed only at the behest of the military (Turkey) or did not exist at all (Greece after 1967, Portugal and Spain), systems of government remained intact and were generally resilient. Politics, it is true, were starting to become more volatile. Political violence was more overt than at any time since the Second World War. Not just the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Group in West Germany, but nationalists in Northern Ireland and separatists in the Basque Country were using terror as an intrinsic part of their campaigns. But nowhere was there a radical, let alone revolutionary, momentum. The underlying consensus that had developed in the post-war years, on the central role of the state to provide for the welfare of the population and to ensure constantly rising living standards, still held in its essentials.
In fact, Social Democrats, the most staunch champions of the ‘big state’, under which high government expenditure (and taxation levels) paid for social welfare and improved living conditions for the poorer sections of society, generally gained ground in the 1960s and early 1970s. Sometimes this occurred alongside other left-wing parties, and it was usually at the expense of conservative and Church-aligned parties.
In Britain the Labour Party (representing the British variant of social democracy) had narrowly won the 1964 election and the Labour government under Harold Wilson greatly increased its ruling majority in 1966. Worsening economic problems and industrial conflict provided the backdrop, however, for a surprising Conservative victory under Edward Heath at the 1970 general election and still greater difficulties to come (see Chapter 7).
Conservatism, as already noted, had been losing ground in West Germany to rising expectations of reform since the end of the long Adenauer era in 1963. The Christian Democrats found themselves after the 1969 general election out of office for the first time since the foundation of the Federal Republic with the formation of a new coalition led by the Social Democrats under Willy Brandt, one of the towering figures of the post-war era. Brandt, a politician with great personal appeal, had impeccable socialist credentials. Born in illegitimacy as Herbert Frahm, he had fled to Scandinavia at the beginning of the Nazi era, from where he had been involved (changing his name in the process) in working-class resistance to Hitler’s regime. So the shift from a government headed by a former Nazi, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, appeared to symbolize the onset of a new era. Coming on the heels of the student demonstrations and the troubled political scene in 1968, the Brandt coalition seemed like a breath of fresh air in a stale room. The atmosphere changed. There was new expectancy and hope, most of all among the young.
Neighbouring Austria also moved in the later 1960s towards reforming social democracy. There was little in the result of the 1966 election, when for the first time in the post-war history of the country the conservative Austrian People’s Party won an absolute majority, to hint at what was to come. Splits within the Socialist Party, and the fears that it might be prepared to work with the small Communist Party, had been part of the background to the conservative victory. But after the leadership of the Socialists had passed in 1967 to the formidable Bruno Kreisky, who put forward a far-reaching programme of social and economic reforms, the Socialist Party started to gain ground. It became the largest party in the elections of 1970, allowing Kreisky to form a minority government. New elections the following year saw Kreisky’s party win an absolute majority and form a stable Social Democratic government that dominated Austrian politics for the following decade..
In the Netherlands a main change in the 1960s was the gradual eclipse of the ‘pillarization’ (vertical, mainly denominational sub-cultures and their political representation) that had traditionally shaped the Dutch form of liberal democracy. In the wake of increasing secularization, support for the Catholic People’s Party dwindled, while promises of social reforms helped the Labour Party gain ground. It emerged from the 1972 elections as the largest party and the following year its leader, Joop den Uyl, became Prime Minister at the head of a coalition government. Belgian social democracy faced greater problems because of the deepening linguistic and cultural division between Flanders and Wallonia, which led to corresponding splits in the major parties. In the bewildering myriad of parties that formed Belgian governments, the Socialist Party and the conservative Christian People’s Party were easily the largest, though backed in each case by little more than a quarter of the popular vote. Still, the widespread anti-conservative direction of politics was present here, too, marked by the emergence after 1968 of ‘green’ ecological parties.
Social democracy had been the basis of political stability and welfare reform in Scandinavia since the Second World War. It continued to enjoy the support of around 40 per cent of voters in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, though the Norwegian Labour Party’s long domination suffered erosion during the 1970s not from the right, but from growing support for the Socialist People’s Party on the left. Finland’s politics were, as ever, complicated by the need to remain on reasonable terms with the Soviet Union next door. Governments were invariably coalitions involving numerous parties. The Social Democrats (with slightly over a quarter of the vote) formed the largest party, followed not far behind by a more radical party of the left, the Finnish People’s Democratic League (dominated by Finnish communists). Together they garnered over 40 per cent of the popular vote, though the extinction of the Prague Spring in August 1968 harmed the Democratic League. It split those who continued to support the Soviet Union from those who denounced its actions and moved towards forms of communist thinking and organization seen as more relevant to Western Europe, which were gaining support especially in Italy, France and Spain and coming to be called ‘Eurocommunism’.
Even where conservatism continued to dominate government, as it did in Italy and France, it had to take account of the demands of the left – though often more in rhetoric than substance.
In the morass of Italian politics there was a significant gap between the far-reaching reforms promised and those actually implemented. Some changes at the end of the 1960s in employment law, improvements to the health system, and the widening of pensions provision were steps towards a more encompassing welfare state. But much more never left the drawing board. For many on the left, for neo-Marxist intellectuals, and for the rapidly growing numbers of students, what was achieved was far from enough.
The Socialists had been incorporated in an ‘opening to the left’ in 1963 in Aldo Moro’s government – led as always by the largest party, the Christian Democrats, though their proportion of the vote had slipped beneath 40 per cent for the first time in the election that year. The Socialist Party split over involvement in a conservative-led government, then reunited in 1966. But the real beneficiaries of the ‘opening to the left’ were the Communists, critical of Moscow – especially after Czechoslovakia – and, profiting from their exclusion from government, turning into a reformist, not revolutionary, party. After declining in the early 1960s, the Communist Party’s membership and voter support started to increase significantly. Its proportion of the popular vote rose from 25 per cent in 1963 (compared with only 14 per cent for the Socialist Party) to 34.4 per cent by 1976, not far behind the Christian Democrats and easily outstripping the Socialists as the main party of opposition.
In France the departure from politics of the national hero Charles de Gaulle in 1969 – he died the following year – produced neither chaos nor a void, but continued conservative domination under his successor Georges Pompidou. Gaullism without de Gaulle brought no seismic changes. But Pompidou, having won a massive victory in the 1969 presidential election, was, initially at least, more reformist in his short term of office – he died, prematurely, in April 1974 – than most people had expected. The events of May 1968 had been a shock to France, and especially to French conservatism. When the turmoil died down it had left behind an urge for social change. Demands for greater rights for women – politically, and also over their own bodies – were one lasting outcome. But promises of a ‘New Society’ were soon exposed as mainly empty. Conservative opposition proved too strong. Modernization under Pompidou was largely directed at industrial and technological development – and was dependent, too, upon continued high rates of economic growth that were about to evaporate.
The French left, meanwhile, was changing in character. Numerous Marxist – mainly Trotskyite or Maoist – splinter groups had emerged from 1968. Their agitation and pressure for change continued. But they stood outside the mainstream, even on the left. The Communist Party, which since the war had been supported by around a quarter of the electorate and had been closely aligned with Moscow, suffered what proved to be terminal damage from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Accepting that it could not gain power alone, through revolution, it became more reformist, aiming at long-term transformation of society. This was bound to lead to disillusionment among its followers. But its turn towards reformism coincided with the needs of the socialists, licking their wounds from their devastating defeat in the presidential election of 1969 (when their candidate, Gaston Defferre, had won a mere 5 per cent of the vote). Under its new leader, François Mitterrand, the party moved towards reformist modernization, laying out a programme to decentralize and make nationalization and state planning more democratic. In 1972 the Socialist and Communist Parties presented a Common Programme for Government, advanced as a reformist route to profound change in society. But the wind was in the sails of Mitterrand’s Socialists, now starting to eclipse the Communist Party as the main party of the left.
The pluralist political systems of Western Europe had everywhere to accommodate pressures for reform in the later 1960s and early 1970s. They obviously did not adjust in uniform fashion, since politics within individual nation states were heavily conditioned by domestic agendas. But when the evident diversity is taken into account, similar patterns of change affected most of Western Europe. It was hardly undiluted harmony. There was nonetheless an extensive level of stability in Western Europe, and every expectation of continuing prosperity nearly everywhere.
There were even rays of hope in the international arena. In 1970 Willy Brandt took his country in a new direction with far-reaching consequences by reversing policy on Eastern Europe. Until now West Germany had refused to recognize the German Democratic Republic and had laid claim, in the event of reunification, to the 1937 borders of the German Reich (which included land beyond the Oder–Neisse line that since 1945 had formed part of Poland and even the western tip of the Soviet Union). Brandt’s bold initiative won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971. His ‘Eastern policy’ (Ostpolitik), a term that Brandt actually disliked, was at first deeply divisive – applauded by the left, bitterly opposed by conservatives and representatives of those expelled from Eastern Europe after the end of the war. Brandt aimed in the first place to replace alienation by cooperation in relations with the German Democratic Republic. His strong belief was that Ostpolitik could only be successful if West Germany remained firmly anchored in NATO and fully integrated into Western Europe. As Brandt himself put it: ‘Our Eastern policy has to begin in the West.’ There were worries, at home and abroad, that Ostpolitik would lead to dangerous concessions to the Soviet bloc and eventually turn the Federal Republic away from its Western moorings. But it proved an increasingly popular political breakthrough.
The new Ostpolitik established over the following three years formal relations with the German Democratic Republic, normalized those with Czechoslovakia, and recognized in the Treaty of Warsaw in 1970 the reality of Poland’s western border along the Oder–Neisse Line, which it accepted could not be changed by force, thereby in practice conceding the permanent loss of Germany’s former eastern provinces. (Final, unconditional recognition of the German–Polish border at the Oder–Neisse line would come only in the process of German Unification in 1990.) The momentous shift was symbolized in December 1970 when, on a visit to Warsaw, Brandt spontaneously fell to his knees at the monument to the Ghetto Uprising of April and May 1943 in a personal show of expiation for the murder of the Jews.
Brandt’s change of direction in West German foreign policy matched an apparently promising change in superpower relations. In May 1972, after talks over the previous three years, Richard Nixon, the President of the United States, and Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, signed an agreement arising from what was known as SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), aimed at improving mutual security by restricting anti-ballistic missile systems. This was followed the next year by a further Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, with the ambitious objective of removing ‘the danger of nuclear war and the use of nuclear weapons’ altogether. The moves suited both major parties – the Soviet Union concerned about the rapprochement between the USA and Communist China (cemented by Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972), the USA about the diplomatic damage caused by the Vietnam War. What became generally known as ‘détente’ defused superpower tensions and held out the highly welcome potential of lasting improvements in relations between the biggest nuclear powers. It seemed that Europe – and the world generally – could start to breathe a little easier. That was before the economic and political repercussions that followed the oil crisis of 1973.