As pointed out previously, there is clearly room for new historical perspectives that challenge the narratives of national exceptionality. Opposing the traditional national focus of historical writing has been one of the strongest trends within the discipline for the last 10 to 15 years. Global and transnational perspectives have been seen as one possible way to ensure that history as a discipline is not overly influenced by national exceptionalism or even political nationalism. While far from easy to implement, dealing with several national cases simultaneously is definitely one way of achieving this. Nevertheless, one must bear in mind that these perspectives can also be an indication of present political and cultural
81 Thomas 2003, 9.
82 Wittner 1998.
trends, so their historicity should be taken into account. For instance, when looking at the broader context of 1960s studies, there are some traditions that seem to over-emphasise the role of transnational phenomena.
This study is therefore not the first to subject the topic of Sixties’ activism to such an approach. Because of the simultaneous protests of 1968 and the self-declared internationality of the movements at that time, transnational, and global approaches have seemed like the natural way to explain the peculiarities of the period. The global level of radicalism at this time has perhaps been somewhat exaggerated, however, in some cases to the point where different national movements have been depicted as a single global entity.83 Jeremy Suri, for example, points to similarities between protests in both Cold War blocks, thus merging vastly different national and international dissident movements under the catch-all concepts of a “global wave”84 and “counterculture”85. Such an approach seems to be yet another example of “breaking historical eggs to make sociological omelettes.”86 In these generalisations, studying the historical connections between different movements and their agents has become a case of, not so much comparing, but rather just emphasising the similarities between different movements, despite the varied political, national, and local contexts in which they operated. This generalising tendency is at its clearest when an evident western bias dominates the global interpretations. Indeed, narrowly defined features of the social movements in Western Europe and the US have often been identified as ‘global’ without proper attention to the national contexts in which these global connections were adapted.87 Even more notably, the globalising emphasis has been dominant in studies that otherwise focus on strictly national contexts; but the superficial similarity of different national protest movements should not be automatically equated with meaning there were any real connections between them. Sometimes protests that closely resembled each other were actually not even aware of one another.88 Correlation does not mean causation, and transnational connections can only be validated by making them a properly investigated subject of historical research.
The theoretical concept of ‘transnational’ is supposed to be one way of overcoming this problem of over-generalisation. While at the same time acknowledging certain historically significant differences between nation-states,89 the concept has been a useful tool for historians who want to question the otherwise predominant role of nation states,90 and to pinpoint the exchanges and entanglements between them, without getting bogged down in overtly
83 see Katsiaficas 1987.
84 Suri 2003, 2, 164.
85 Suri 2009. Suri’s definition of counterculture includes everything from student protests to ‘unfulfilled’ young mothers.
86 Expression used by sociologist Ronald Dore, and cited in Burke 1992, 147.
87 Hilwig 1998, 322.
88 See, e.g., Kraft 2015.
89 Haupt 2007.
90 Cohen & O’Connor 2004, xiii; Saunier 2013, 15.
universalist explanations.91 Despite significant attempts to define the way transnational history should be practised, academic definitions of ‘transnational’
have nevertheless remained rather flexible. One of the more common definitions has been that ‘transnational’ should focus on the interactions of non-state actors, while ‘international’ is used to cover state-to-state connections.92 From a conceptual history point of view, however, this approach is rather limiting as both transnational and international are concepts that are seen to have their own temporal and political layers.93 While acknowledging the historicity of analytical concepts is important, it should not deem them unusable. In other words, transnational and global were not concepts actively used by Nordic Sixties' activists, and hence I will be talking about transnational perspective throughout this study to refer to the analysis of texts, agents and discourses that crossed borders.
Even though transnational studies came about with the aim of challenging the extremes of uncontested globalism and restrictive nationalism, the subject may still exaggerate global connections by accentuating the potential for interconnectedness. At worst, an uncritical study of transnationalism may seek out limitless and ubiquitous entanglements and, in so doing, celebrate today’s globalism as a fatalistic, indisputable sign of progress.94 Every now and then, the concepts of global and transnational are mixed up in a way that suggests insufficient attention is given to local variations,95 or the practical aspects of transnational entanglements. Generalisations downplay the role of local political traditions in many ways. Focusing on key global moments like the protests of 1968 may overshadow and thus obscure continuities and traditions that would otherwise challenge the ahistorical novelty and apparent global unity of the so-called ‘new’ social movements.96 Although the movements of the Sixties were often defined by their agents as being completely new political entities, some of their agents had operated in already well-established political movements for decades. The decision to step aside and form or join a new movement was not necessarily spontaneous, but involved often gradual and sometimes even painful personal decisions.97 The central role of activists and agents from differing political backgrounds confirms the continuity of political traditions, and the need to analyse the use of words like ‘new’ in their particular historical context – the
91 Despite the initial contradictions between comparative and transnational research traditions, these juxtapositions have greatly subsided, and most scholars admit that these traditions are not rivalries but should be merged instead. Kocka 2003, 42-44;
Haupt 2007, 712; Levine 2014, 335.
92 Klimke, Pekelder & Scharloth 2011, 2.
93 Debating Internationalisms: A European History of Concepts Beyond Nation States, Forthcoming (Berghahn books, 2021).
94 Bracke & Mark 2015, 405-406; c.f. Iriye 2013.
95 Evans 2009, 333.
96 Östberg 2002, 21; Nehring 2014, 167. The concept of “new” social movement has been highly influential, especially in the field of social sciences. for an overview, see f.ex.
Rucht 1994.
97 Nehring 2011, 17-18.
need to define something as ‘new’, ‘global’, or as a ‘movement’ is always a political act to begin with.
At the same time as transnational studies have entered the field of history, another tradition that goes under the label of global history has emerged. The founding of the Journal of Global History in 2006 is a clear sign that this tradition has now become established.98 While there exists multiple ways in which global history can be defined, one of the most important for this study is that it is a critique of the western focus in history, which is also apparent in the field of transnational studies. While this study does not explicitly focus on the global repercussions of Nordic Sixties’ activism, I do seek to emphasise the role of non-European agents whenever relevant. This is important not only because it helps to relativise the source of political influences in the Nordic sphere, but because it is also a way of drawing attention to the national and intellectual focus of current research traditions.99 As Quinn Slobodian has argued, the process of reminiscing tends to remove historical agency from non-national actors.100 Traditions that emphasise the role of certain New Left philosophers, especially from the Frankfurt School, follow similar traits of transposing political agency from the grass-roots level to a select set of western, white, and male agents.
When detailed interconnections between specific Sixties’ movements have been studied from a transnational or global history perspective focusing on detailed historical trajectories, it seems that transnational entanglements often emphasise the differences between participating national and local movements.
This has challenged the imagined sense of global community and connectedness, as well as the global rhetoric of radicalism transmitted via the media.
Comfortable ideas of a radicalist global community have become superseded by the image of bickering partisans facing acute political dilemmas. Consequently, these connections have been shown to have actually not resulted in any significant transnational cooperative organisations. The supposedly spontaneous nature of the radical movements has been further challenged by looking more closely at the specific contexts in which the entanglements between different national agents occurred. These international entanglements were not always based on networks that existed between the radical organisations; in many cases they were only made possible by the official programmes of Cold War cultural propaganda. The young, purposefully defined in as loose terms as possible, were a special target group for the propaganda of American cultural diplomacy.101 Exchange programs were set up by state authorities with the clear pedagogical intention of promoting western goodwill and cooperation within the boundaries of the Cold War.102 While these structures could be used for other purposes, they hardly represented a radical or new instrument for overturning societal structures, much less the framework of the Cold War.
98 The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, published in 2018, is another example of this.
99 Klimke & Nolan 2018.
100 Slobodian 2012, 5-13.
101 Klimke 2011, 101-103, 145-151.
102 Schildt 2006, 154; Jobs 2009, 379.
Despite the obvious appeal of globally unifying explanations, the tools of transnational and global history can also be used to reveal the different ways in which these connections, texts, images, and discourses were adopted at the local level by social movements. According to Timothy Scott Brown, studying these local contexts demonstrates the “global at work”, i.e., how local agents reacted to their transnational connections and the political models, arguments, and concepts transmitted through them,103 illustrating the interconnectedness of local and global levels of radicalism.104 One of the most common ways to do this is to study the agency of the people who imported and translated texts, ideas, and political practices across national borders and language areas. Whether public intellectuals or exchange students, these were the agents responsible for the practical implications of these transnational entanglements.105 The political opportunities available had a profound impact on which foreign texts and ideas were selected,106 and because these mediating agents were so important, the adaptation process was mostly dependent on the political context and needs at the receiving end.107
Studying these local adaptations and the use of international comparisons and examples in political argumentation at this time indicates that ‘international’
(and other concepts derived from it) was crucial in defining the political position of radicalism. Despite its central role in radical activists’ argumentation, many seemed to have quite a limited understanding of global economic, diplomatic or ideological structures. A few key events, like the Vietnam War, took up a disproportionate amount of space in the debates, while important but less dramatic processes like the nuclear détente were all but excluded.108 One must thus remember that conceptualisations of international foreign affairs were mostly used as arguments in domestic political debates, and so be contextualised accordingly.109 Only rarely did the radical debate take on explicitly transnational forms – this was when important political innovations occurred – and these are the moments of paramount importance to this study.
Similarly, expressions of solidarity towards third world countries functioned predominantly as political arguments in the local context where the expressions were made. Previous landmark studies by Quinn Slobodian (in the West German context) and Tor Sellström (in the Swedish) point out how dramatically these entanglements with the Third World changed during the Sixties. Many of the original protests were based on actual personal relationships between western and third world activists; with the emergence of the Vietnam War as a key radical issue, these concrete forms of transnationalism were surpassed by a more theoretical take on global solidarity and an imagined radical
103 Brown 2009, 69-70, 72.
104 See, e.g., Dirlik 1998, 314.
105 On the role of cross-border travels, see Jobs 2009. On the role of “public intellectuals”
sympathising with New Left, see for example Geary 2008.
106 Brown 2009, 72.
107 Brown 2013, 6.
108 Niedhart 1998, 178.
109 Salomon 1996; Johansson 2010.
community.110 In some cases, establishing connections was relatively straightforward. As Slobodian has described, there were a lot of Iranian and Congolese exchange students in West Germany at the time, who proved to be ideal candidates for cooperating with the radical German student movement.111 In other contexts, establishing radical networks with third world agents was laborious and needed considerable resources that often came from the state.
Especially in European countries with a colonial past, even radical social movements often had a predominantly western- and Eurocentric world-view;
their connections suffered greatly from their poor understanding of the real contexts of countries in the Third World and Eastern Bloc. Even their conceptions of the contexts in which their radical peers in western countries operated was predominantly shaped by their own national experiences.112 Correspondingly, some European cooperative endeavours with third world activists where characterised by deep disagreements, usually due to a colonial history;113 for instance, neither African nor Afro-American third world organisations were that interested in co-operating with activists in Europe.114 There were also plenty of disagreements when attempts were made to straddle the Iron Curtain. East German opposition activists did establish some contacts with their western radical peers, but disagreements on policy questions and suspicions about whether they were cooperating with the state’s intelligence officials made these attempts futile.115 Similarly, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) Finland's geopolitical location and soviet-oriented official foreign policy, the student movement there was not so keen on destroying its domestic credentials by too close an association with the USSR.116
Transnational contacts were nevertheless attempted even when there had been no actual physical or organisational links beforehand. The use of concepts pointing to global cooperation was often a unilateral affair, and Jørgensen has aptly described these declarations of solidarity as a form of “virtual internationalism […]”, that “took place without any real contact or common acts of solidarity.”117 The imagined global community of radicalism was also often compromised by images that actually contradicted the meanings they had previously had in their originating context. The leading figures of Communism, for instance, were common emotive images used in the west, despite the apparent opposition of said figures to the individualistic and anti-authoritarian values of the western movements.118 These examples aptly demonstrate the symbolic side of global unity that became especially relevant during the tumultuous events of 1968. However, one should not disregard this symbolic
110 Sellström 1999; Slobodian 2012.
111 Slobodian 2012, 61-71.
112 Fink, Gassert & Junker 1998; 27; Jobs 2009, 395; Rothenhöfer 2011, 120.
113 Skinner 2015, 421, 426.
114 Klimke 2011, 142; Skinner 2015, 429-431.
115 Brown 2009.
116 Kolbe 1996 63-66, 80.
117 Jørgensen 2011, 53.
118 Dirlik 1998, 299-301; Brown 2013, 212.
transnationalism as mere rhetoric, as it was an essential part of the way radical activists saw themselves. Third world movements provided examples of non-alignment and youthful political energy,119 and thus provided western agents with the hope of initiating social change. Since theorising was seen as a significant form of political action, and theory was not only a source of inspiration, but also proof of the constant forward progress of activism, third world examples fit well into the framework of generalising local examples into a universal theory.120 Often, the premise was that social theories simultaneously advanced in step with all other means of protest.121 Whether this understanding should be considered as the central expression of a world-view that united the whole movement into a global entity (at least on the symbolic level), or as an example of theoretical Marxist jargon (far from the actual political practices and intentions of movement members) is a question that continues to divide scholarship on the subject. Only a close reading of arguments on the topic from this period will eventually shed light on the matter.