To: h-1960s@h-net.msu.edu
Subject: Comments on Suri's _Power and Protest_


COMMENTS ON JEREMI SURI'S _POWER AND PROTEST_

by Greg Eghigian (Associate Professor of Modern European History,
Penn State University)

As an historian of twentieth-century Europe (and of twentieth-century
Germany, in particular), I can only praise Jeremi Suri for his effort
to more thoroughly internationalize the politics of protest and
reform in the 1960s.  While we Europeanists frequently bemoan how
parochial U. S. historiography can be at times, it also must be
admitted that European historiography frequently is prone to the same
malady (one need only look at the vast literature on National
Socialism and the "Third Reich," where an international perspective
on domestic politics is frequently missing). This is not to say we
should dispense with national or microhistorical studies.  On the
contrary, as cultural anthropology has shown, all knowledge is local,
and "thick descriptions" are essential in making sense of the
complexities of historical events.

That said, Suri's book is a compelling reminder for those of us
studying contemporary history that, by using a wide angle lens to
frame our subjects, a range of surprising questions and answers may
well be brought into focus.  That, in my mind, is the service best
performed by synthetic or grand histories such as Suri's.  Thus, I
have no interest here in playing the role of the specialist, who
picks apart the generalist for his oversights and lack of detailed
knowledge (though, I will say that Suri demonstrates a sound
understanding of German politics).  Rather, what I wish to do is to
consider how Suri's arguments open up ways for seeing and
interrogating contemporary political history.  To do this, I want to
introduce another wide angle lens and broaden the discussion, not
geographically, but temporally, by situating Suri's narrative in the
stream of modern history in general and modern European history in
particular.  Taken from this perspective, his study offers us the
opportunity to not only reconceive the 1960s, but also consider what,
if anything, makes politics in the late-twentieth century
historically distinctive.

"FOREIGN POLICY IS ALSO SOCIAL POLICY"
"Foreign policy is also social policy" (265), Suri concludes in
_Power and Protest_.   As he notes in his opening comments, the book
is intended to offer "both a diplomatic history of social unrest and
a social history of diplomacy." There being a direct link between
foreign policy and social policy during the Cold War is a central
contention of Suri's.  And there is no doubt in my mind he is correct
that both policymakers and citizens' groups in the 1960s explicitly
linked the two domains.  East Germany provides a good example.  From
the perspective of western Europe and the United States, the building
of the Berlin Wall was (and continues to be) seen as an admission of
the Socialist Unity Party's (SED) inability to realize its utopian
goals and, thus, the beginning of a more cynically Machiavellian
phase of governance in the German Democratic Republic.  But it must
be kept in mind that communist party leaders saw the wall as a
precondition for advancing the goals of socialism.  This was not just
propaganda talk either. One of the important functions of the Berlin
Wall was, once and for all, to stem the tide of flight to West
Germany.  Universities and health and social services had been
particularly hard hit in the GDR by the persistent "brain drain"
caused by professionals and young people fleeing the country over the
course of the 1950s.  With the border sealed off, then, it became
possible for the first time for party and state officials as well as
professionals and social service providers to finally begin long-term
planning, in the knowledge that they no longer had to fear sudden
losses of personnel.  It is, therefore, not surprising that it was
party chief Walter Ulbricht -- the same man who ordered the building
of the Berlin Wall -- who initiated a comprehensive reform of the
country's economic, legal, health care, and education systems in the
early-1960s.

The question, however, is, how new is this?  Is the statement
"foreign policy is also social policy" -- and Suri seems to be
arguing the inverse as well -- true of politics after 1945 or is the
tie between foreign and social policymaking an inherent feature of
modern statecraft?  The latter seems to be the case. I will leave it
to foreign policy specialists to consider this question from their
angle, but looking at the history of social policy in modern Europe,
one might identify four major bursts of social policy activism: one
in the wake of the French Revolution; another in the wake of the
revolutions of 1848; still another following the wars of German
unification and during the age of high imperialism; and then finally,
one during and in the aftermath of World War I. In all four of these
periods, unrest, revolutions, wars, and/or foreign ventures with
far-reaching international ramifications provided a backdrop for
social policy innovations.  This is something historians of social
policy have often failed to appreciate.  At the same time, foreign
policy initiatives (e.g., the Belgian colonization of the Congo or
the Russian withdrawal from the Great War) were often justified to
the public as solutions to domestic social problems.  So, while it is
rather counter-intuitive to see détente as an effort designed to
pacify increasingly disaffected publics, it seems to fit a pattern in
modern history.  But, then we have to ask, is there anything
different about détente or the social reforms of the 1960s in this
regard?  If so, what?

THE RECIPROCITY BETWEEN "HIGH" AND "LOW" POLITICS
Suri understands the relationship between public policy and social
activism, between state and civil society at this time as a
reciprocal one.  Echoing the sentiments of social theorists (Michel
Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck come to mind), Suri's
arguments urge us -- quite rightly, I think -- to adopt a more
diffuse notion of power in the contemporary world.  The story of
politics in the 1960s cannot be emplotted in the linear terms of
state actions from above provoking citizen reactions and resistances
from below that, in turn, provoked state counter-reactions.  Rather,
party and state officials and social activists together co-produced
the forms of policy  and protest that marked the era [1].

Here, too, we probably should not be all that surprised.  After all,
we are talking about the second half of the twentieth  century, a
period when political parties, officials of state, professional
experts, lobbying groups, and lay persons began to play ever more
prominent roles in one another's work [2].  But once again, it is
important to ask whether this constitutes a rupture or continuity
within modern history.  Is this one of the things that makes the
social movements and reforms of the sixties "new?"  If so, it appears
to be so only in a qualified sense.  For, as Geoff Eley shows,
dissent, protest, and activists have played constituent roles -- in
varying degrees -- in the governance of modern European nation-states
since at least the mid-nineteenth century [3].

I am not sure that Suri provides us any explicit answers with regard
to this line of questioning, but he is quite direct in stating his
belief that détente marked the end of the era of state-civil society
reciprocity.  As proof, he points to, among other things, the marked
decline in political participation (especially voting) and the rise
of corrupt forms of governing in western European and North American
polities.  This is hard to argue with, but there is one region in the
world, at least, that does not appear to neatly fit the
characterization:  eastern Europe of the 1980s.  To be sure, there is
ample evidence that Warsaw Pact states adopted a more authoritarian
style in the 1970s and that by the early-1980s, eastern Europeans had
becoming largely  disillusioned with the prevailing political order.
But eastern Europe was also the site of a wave of revolutionary and
reform activism -- including human rights, peace, environmental,
feminist, religious, trade union, and pop culture movements -- that,
on the surface at least, looks very similar to forms characteristic
of the 1960s [4].  Why, then, did eastern and western Europe
apparently part ways in how citizens dealt with the post-détente
political order?  What is the historical relationship  between social
protest in the sixties with that in the eighties?

THE POLITICS OF CONSCIENCE
Suri does a commendable job demonstrating how states and governing
political parties in the 1960s took it upon themselves to pursue
reform agendas.  Young people (students in particular) were viewed as
potential allies in these ventures.  At the same time, youth were
also considered to be a group at risk of succumbing to corrupt
influences and, thereby, also of becoming a potential threat to the
prevailing order.  No wonder, then, that education, rearing, and
consciousness-raising (the German term "Erziehung" is particularly
apt) -- inculcating right thinking and appropriate attitudes and
values -- were the centerpiece of state-sponsored and civic reform
campaigns.

This hints at a trend that others have noted about the postwar period
in general and the sixties in particular: that this period witnessed
a subjectification of politics along with a politicization of
subjectivity. And to be sure, states appear to have become interested
in more intimate and psychological forms of social engineering and
control in the decades following World War II [5].  Consciousness and
consciences became explicit objects for mobilization not only by
social activists, but also by political parties and governments.  But
this politics of consciousness and conscience was not invented in the
1960s.  While one could argue that it dates back to at least the
Protestant Reformation, in modern times, it appears to be one of the
defining features of twentieth century politics.  Bolshevism and
Stalinism, fascism, liberalism, and Marxism-Leninism all made the
construction and reconstruction of human subjectivity a central aim
[6].  In all these cases, the result was a discourse that
policymakers found difficult to steer and fully domesticate.  Once
again, then, the sixties appear not to have invented a new form of
politics, but rather provided a variation on a theme.

IDEOLOGY AND SHARED VALUES: THE SIXTIES AS INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
Like so many state endeavors in first half of the twentieth century,
social protest and Cold War foreign policy, according to Suri, were
propelled by highly ideological reformist impulses.  The reasons for
this, he notes, were twofold:  (1) the unifying ideas and goals
behind protests and policies were universalistic and idealistic in
nature; (2) across social movements, which were rooted in local and
national politics, individuals were held together not by
organizational ties, but by shared values.  In Suri's view, the sense
of sixties' counter-culture as being just that, *a* movement instead
of many simultaneous movements, was more experiential than
institutional reality.  How, then, do we account for this?  Suri
points to a kind of counter-culture canon (e.g. the writings of
Herbert Marcuse or pamphlets on global economics) that seems to have
served as a basic primer for activists.  Similar arguments have been
made about the European revolutions of 1848 and 1917-1919.  But here
we need to know more about local knowledge.  Were people really
reading Marcuse or getting their Marcuse through word of mouth?  My
colleague Belinda Davis at Rutgers, who is conducting a pioneering
study of everyday life in the West German counter-culture of the
1960s and 1970s, apparently has found that reading was not
necessarily the source of inspiration for many activists.  Could
1968, then, be more like 1989 than 1918 in that television and radio
provided the chief means for political "contagion" across national
boundaries?  What was the relationship between texts, speeches,
symbols, and rituals in the intellectual history of social movements
in the sixties [7]?

THE 1960s AS RENAISSANCE
In his opening comments, Suri says that _Power and Protest_ is "not
an advocacy book, but it does seek to reawaken many of the political
and social reform energies during the period of détente."  I think
this comes through in the book.  While the central argument about
détente is rather counter-intuitive, Suri does confirm something that
policy reformers and social activists at the time generally have
thought about themselves:  that they were part of an historical
moment of great change and innovation.  Here, at least, the
self-representation of historical actors and the assessment of
scholars after the fact match up.  Admittedly, one could choose
almost any decade in the twentieth century -- in European history, at
least -- and argue that it represented a discrete moment of
fundamental change.   But there *is* something strikingly different
about the sixties in Europe, in that centers and peripheries of power
were swept up in the politics of human betterment, the effects being
felt in western, eastern, northern, and southern Europe alike.   The
sixties, thus, ushered in more than just a new social consciousness,
humanism for the masses.  It was the site of a veritable renaissance
of political, social, economic, and cultural experimentation unique
in twentieth century history.

All this is my rather improvised effort to follow some lines of
questioning leading into, out of, and through the 1960s, prompted by
my reading of Jeremi Suri's _Power and Protest_.   It is a testament
to Suri's skills as an historian that his book can elicit such echoes.


NOTES
[1] On the idea of the "co-production" of knowledge, politics, and
the social order, see Sheila Jasanoff, "Beyond Epistemology:
Relativism and Engagement in the Politics of Science," _Social
Studies of Science,_ 26 (1996): 393-418.

[2] Developments in health policy, for instance, demonstrate this
point well.  See Steven Epstein, _Impure Science:  AIDS, Activism,
and the Politics of Knowledge_ (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University
of California Press, 1996); Ilana Löwy and John Krige, eds. _Images
of Disease:  Science, Public Policy, and Health in Post-War Europe_
(Luxembourg, Office for Official Publications of the European
Communities, 2001).

[3] Geoff Eley, _Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in
Europe, 1850-2000_
(New York:  Oxford University Press, 2002).

[4] Sabrina Petra Ramet, _Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The
Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation_  (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1995).

[5] See, for instance, Klaus Behnke and Juergen Fuchs, eds.,
_Zersetzung der Seele:  Psychologie und Psychiatrie im Dienste der
Stasi_ (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1995); Ellen Herman, _The Romance of
American Psychology:  Political Culture in the Age of Experts_
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).

[6]  See, for example, Nikolas Rose, _Inventing Our Selves:
Psychology, Power, and Personhood_ (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996); Igal Halfin, _Terror in My Soul:  Communist
Autobiographies on Trial_ (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press, 2003; Claudia Koonz, _The Nazi Conscience_
(Cambridge, MA:  Belknap, 2003); Greg Eghigian, "The Psychologization
of the Socialist Self:  East German Forensic Psychology and its
Deviants, 1945-1975," _German History_, 22 (2004): 181-205.

[7]  In Germany, for instance, Wolfgang Kraushaar has done an
exhaustive study of the relationship between the Frankfurt School and
the student movement during and beyond the 1960s.  See his
_Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum
Molotowcocktail 1946 bis 1995_ (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, HIS
Verlag 2003).


Greg Eghigian
Associate Professor of Modern European History
Penn State University
108 Weaver Building
University Park, PA  16802-5500
Ph:  814-865-9022
Fax:  814-863-7840
Email:  gae2@psu.edu

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