STUDENTS
“There were an enthusiasm and sense of urgency for the fate of humanity most students might not have in 2018” Soviet tanks intervened in August to repress the dissenters. The rest of Eastern Europe experienced similar happenings, social issues worth exploring and just as interesting as elsewhere in the Old Continent. However, this article mainly focuses on Western Europe. There, the asked questions were more about individual freedom and liberalisation against the state, rather than national freedom. There, the students were decisive, not entire societies. I am a student and probably, so are you. This article asks the question what today makes us so different to the students of ’68. How come it is unthinkable now to most of us here in Maastricht to ever become a radical? What would need to happen? I asked my friends these questions. They agreed, that the moment they would riot against the state, not only protest, would arrive when their personal democratic rights or those of society unjustifiably start being cut. Freedom of speech, democratic elections, separation of powers and so forth. Rights, which they appreciate right now. German students of 1968 saw these as painfully lacking and opposition to the state as indispensable. The protests, where oftentimes violent demonstrators clashed with ruthless and cruel police, shook the nation in its foundations and polarised it to an explosive extent. The country was virtually being ripped apart along the age of thirty, as the youth accused their parents’ generation of either complicity or silence in face of Nazi crimes. Consequently, many young people, mainly from the educated middle class, turned to Leftism, supported by intellectuals like the “Frankfurt School”, a group of German philosophers centred around Theodor W. Adorno. Rudi Dutschke, the most prominent student leader in Germany, decried the alleged fascism, that the bourgeois post-war structures and states harboured, and argued that the older Germans had not really changed. He criticised the consumption society, which was the economic backbone of young West Germany, as a tool to domesticise the people and depoliticise them. Thus, opposition to capitalism and the older generations mixed into an explosive battle cry, that innumerable students followed. Dutschke never found clear words for his position on violence. But some did eventually become convinced, that the only effective means to battle them in their eyes quasi-fascist state was bombings, shootings, kidnappings. The most notorious socialist terror group, the RAF, originates in the sixties and terrified the German public until 1993. To this day, evaluations of the ’68 movement are thus an intensely controversial topic in public opinion’.
In Paris, the riots took on even more dramatic dimensions, the likes of which unseen in Europe. What started out as student sit-ins and protests against the universities’ policies evolved into a proper revolt lasting days. The abhorrently brutal measures of an overwhelmed police radicalised the students in May ’68, as well as the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke’s life by a right-winger that gravely injured him. Eventually, the Labour Unions were convinced to join them, leading the protesters to announce a studentworker union under the banner of Leftism. Streets and the Sorbonne University were barricaded, street riots ensued. Initially, the students and workers demanded more liberal curriculums and higher wages, but increasingly focussed on more fundamental questions like capitalism and the consumption society. They despised the thenconservative government and its orthodox policies: Promarket economic ideology, interventionist foreign policy and the piously Catholic views of the establishment came under fire, drawing inspiration from the American hippiemovement. Reading circles discussing Das Kapital, student committees on for example sexual liberation or anarchism, and spontaneous lectures on all kinds of social issues sprung up as rapidly as they would eventually cease. There were an enthusiasm and sense of urgency for the fate of humanity most students might not have in 2018. Then, students did not shy away from discussing the class system or the global world order. No fear of not quite knowing what they are talking about could hold them back from unapologetically rallying against the old people’s state and worldviews. Needless to say, how attractive the movement thus became. In May, it will be the 50th anniversary of the Paris riots. This article does not aim to glorify the ’68 movements’ goals. It does not propagate a particular political message. And it certainly does not advocate the use of violence to any extent. I simply want you, dear reader, to reflect on this anniversary on your attitude towards society, politics and the state, in short; the system. While the word may have become a cliché, it is still in dire need of a revival in debates. Do you think humanity lives in the best possible system? Consider the fundamentals that are shaping the world order; a global capitalist market, abhorrent industrial conditions in some parts of the world, imperialist aims by global superpowers. These parameters are the same ones that were protested fifty years ago in the Western bloc. Certainly, things are quantitively better: European democratic institutions are more reliable, poverty and low wages are not as rampant and arguably, European governments have become more moral in their actions since the end of colonialism and the Cold War. Not least because the students of ’68 have become today’s
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