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To: h-1960s@h-net.msu.edu Subject: Discussion Introduction for Suri's POWER AND PROTEST DISCUSSION INTRODUCTION FOR POWER AND PROTEST by Jeremi Suri For many years the scholarship on the 1960s has replayed the battles from this turbulent period. Passion about reform, anger about repression, and regret about lost opportunities have given this literature great vitality. These qualities have also connected with contemporary debates about politics and social change. Power and Protest is deeply indebted to the passion and scholarship of previous writers, including those who participate in the H-1960s discussion list. Power and Protest does not attempt to revise existing work, but instead push debate in new directions. Unlike virtually all other writers on the 1960s, the author did not live through the period. The book, therefore, approaches events from a historical vantage point that is decidedly different from the perspective of those who personally marched for civil rights, protested against the Vietnam War, or pursued a vision of socialism with a human face. Power and Protest offers three new perspectives on the period. First, this book treats the 1960s as international history. Everyone recognizes that ideas, images, and events during this decade bled across state boundaries. Few scholars, however, have analyzed the period in these terms. Instead, the overwhelming emphasis in the literature has been on local and national (usually American) experiences. Power and Protest argues that the Cold War, the worldwide expansion of higher education, and the presence of charismatic personalities (including Mao Zedong, Herbert Marcuse, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and others) created a global simultaneity in protest activities. Young people in different societies did not coordinate their activities, but they exploited similar structural conditions to challenge established authority at the same time. Second, this book examines the intimate connections between "high" and "low" politics. Archival research in government documents from the United States, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and China reveals that state leaders were deeply influenced by social unrest within their societies. Similarly, a close reading of protest literature indicates that radicals in all societies followed national and international politics closely. (I still remember my astonishment at finding hundreds of French student pamphlets from May 1968 on global economics!) Power and Protest contends that state leaders pursued a variety of international policies -- including arms control, French-Chinese reconciliation, escalation in Vietnam, and East-West recognition -- as a reaction to domestic pressures. Many activists who initially organized in response to government-inspired promises for international reform, turned radical when these promises went unfulfilled. Power and Protest offers both a diplomatic history of social unrest and a social history of diplomacy. Third, this book reinterprets "détente" as counterrevolution. State leaders like Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev, Willy Brandt, and Mao Zedong found themselves similarly besieged by domestic protesters at the end of the 1960s. Traditional Cold War adversaries came together because they now saw a common interest in political stability. Instead of mobilizing their citizens for competition with foreign enemies, leaders now cooperated to contain the demands of their citizens. Détente was not about diplomatic strategy; it focused on social control. The 1972 Soviet-American agreement on "Basic Principles" is one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon. The document rejected international reforms that threatened the political status quo and embraced elite controls on relations between and within societies. Similarly, the West German government's progressive policy of Ostpolitik became increasingly narrow, secretive, and conservative during this period. Détente manipulated great power diplomacy to repress the domestic urges for reform in each society. This explains the strange holding pattern that Cold War politics entered during the 1970s. Power and Protest is not an advocacy book, but it does seek to reawaken many of the political and social reform energies repressed during the period of détente. The book reflects the author's belief that citizens across the globe gave up on reform after the darkest days of the 1960s. Since 1968 political participation has declined precipitously in almost every society. Cynicism also appears pervasive, especially among undergraduates. Perhaps new perspectives on the history of 1960s can reverse these trends and inspire creative international activism. __________________________ Jeremi Suri Assistant Professor Department of History University of Wisconsin 3211 Humanities Building 455 North Park Street Madison, WI 53706 (608) 263-1852 suri@wisc.edu Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Harvard University Press, 2003). http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SURPOW.html 2003-2004 National Fellow Hoover Institution Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-6010 (650) 725-3432
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