Dossier - September 2018

“It seems to me that children in the next century will learn about the year 1968 the way we learned about the year 1848”. Before we are able to confirm Hannah Arendt’s observation, it appears that the year 1968 deserves – just as 1848 and 1989 – to be studied as one of the rare (warless) moments of the twentieth century that can be considered as truly trans- European and that was lived as such by Europeans themselves, at various degrees. Contrary to 1948, there was no dissemination or propagation from a centre (Paris, Frankfort, Vienna, Budapest and Prague). Yet the simultaneity of protest movements and their transnational dynamic do justify that we analyse them in a comparative and interactive way. With the Prague Spring as a starting point, the conference did not aim at tracing its history or at stressing its specificities. Rather, our objective was to focus on questioning the internal and external political order (the division of Europe) in order to explore the ideas and logics of protest that have circulated in Central-eastern Europe (Varsow, Prague, Belgrade...) as interactions and the result of misunderstandings that have occurred with West European movements (Paris, West-Berlin, Rome...)

The conference on The Other 1968 we are presenting here is not to be considered among the ongoing commemorative events. Rather, it is an invitation to reflect upon a turning point in the European History. It is a way to widen up, to decentre the many commemorations of the Parisian month of May where self-celebration of a generation on the brink of leaving mix with and a will to imitate, stimulated by a media in search of an opposition to government in power.