Introduction

Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth, Laura Wong

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

In a speech on worldwide student unrest, the executive secretary of the InterAgency Youth Committee Robert Cross in 1968 discerned five factors that separated current youthful unrest from its historical precedents. According to Cross, “quantitative growth, democratization of education, ‘post-modernism,’ the education explosion and the creation of a ‘youth class’” distinguished student activism at the end of the 1960s. Due to its global dimension and an increasing utilization of violence, governments worldwide suddenly paid attention to this phenomenon after years of polite yet largely unsuccessful requests for change voiced by the students. What was even more significant was that, in Cross’s view, students had formed the “first truly international generation”: A steady stream of student activists have become internationally selfperpetuating and multiplying. […] The 1968-style international student movement is international not because it is organized but rather because young people in many countries are facing the same human problems and applying the same basic approaches to their solution. It is equally certain, however, that a great cross-fertilization, a very rapid and effective student grape-vine, functions. What happens in New York is known overnight in Paris and Manila. The speeches of Rudi Dutschke are in the hands of Mark Rudd faster than you can seem to get your mail delivered.1

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationPalgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages1-13
Number of pages13
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012

Publication series

NamePalgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series
ISSN (Print)2634-6273
ISSN (Electronic)2634-6281

Keywords

  • Advocacy Network
  • Contentious Politics
  • Protest Movement
  • Public Diplomacy
  • Social Movement

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • History

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