Sixties Europe

This history of emancipatory left-wing politics examines the border-crossing uprisings of the 1960s, on both sides of the Cold War divide.

Timothy Scott Brown (Author)

9781107552906, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 August 2020

250 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.42 kg

'Brown provides an important analysis of the conceptual underpinnings of the revolutionary movements of the 1960s in Europe. This is very much a book of ideas, which rightly argues that the many movements on the left which blossomed in countries across the continent placed a search for meaning at the heart of their efforts.' Nick Thomas, University of Nottingham

Sixties Europe examines the border-crossing uprisings of the 1960s in Europe on both sides of the Cold War divide. Placing European developments within a global context formed by Third World liberation struggles and Cold War geopolitics, Timothy Scott Brown highlights the importance of transnational exchanges across bloc boundaries. New Left ideas and cultural practices easily crossed bloc boundaries, but Brown demonstrates that the 1960s in Europe did not simply unfold according to a normative western model. Everywhere, innovations in the arts and popular culture synergized radical politics as advocates of workers' democracy emerged to pursue longstanding demands predating the Cold War divide. Tracing the development of a distinctive blend of cultural and political activism across diverse national settings, Sixties Europe examines an important, historically-recent attempt to address unresolved questions about human social organization that remain relevant in the present, and it offers an original history of Europe across a transformative decade.

Introduction
1. Mapping Sixties Europe
2. Cold War(s), and hot
3. Cultural revolutions
4. 1968 in three Europes
5. The search for social power
Afterword.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]