What Remains from May 1968
Elias Harfoush Al-Hayat - 03/05/08//
With excessive nostalgia for a romantic past, the once-called left-wing movements celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the May 1968 "student movement". Its first spark was ignited in the Latin Quarter in Paris near the Sorbonne University, and it initiated a wide intellectual and protest movement that spread through the minds of that generation across the European continent, even reaching our shores not long after that.
Forty years later, such a movement seems more like a dream. The revolutionary pulse which characterized the period has faded away and its "heroes" have been tamed inside systems and institutions. Daniel Cohen-Bendit, also known as "Danny the Red", one of the symbols of the French student movement, who, along with his companions, had then upheld slogans of hostility against "American imperialism" for its involvement in Vietnam, is now a member of the European Parliament who defends America's invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Other "symbols" are now dispersed between government offices and opposition seats, but the revolutionary touch that favored changing the status-quo rather than reforming it from the inside, has vanished from their political discourse. Another sign of those times is how Paris then made history in regard to the Vietnamese question. Indeed, it was the only western capital in which North Vietnam's delegation accepted to hold negotiations with the Americans, despite the security concerns such participation raised for the American delegation, as loud demonstrations gathered in the vicinity of the American embassy in Paris almost on a daily basis.
The Vietnamese problem is over. The US has withdrawn and reviewed its history. Vietnam today is prosperous and open to the economic elements of capitalism, having itself reviewed its relationship with the US and the West in general. As for May 1968, it has led to a cultural revolution against the values which then prevailed in European societies, beginning with the views on women and issues of marriage and divorce, renewing the laws concerned with the protection of liberties, and organizing the situation of immigrants to insure their basic rights. This cultural pattern soon spread to several countries in Europe itself, but also in regions known to be conservative in Asia and Latin America, such that what was acceptable before that date became impossible after it.
Despite the criticism directed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy at what he refers to as "the 1968 generation", and his call to "liquidate the heritage" of that period because of the "contempt" of its leaders in dealing with society, it would have been very difficult to imagine Sarkozy, a divorced Catholic, born to an immigrant father and a Jewish mother, making it to the Elysée had it not been for the cultural heritage of 1968. In this sense, Sarkozy's criticism of that legacy is true "contempt", as Cohen-Bendit candidly put it.
However, an evaluation of the political outcome of the effects of May 1968 will leave a completely different impression, whether we discuss France or whether we cross the Channel to Britain. At the time, Britain boasted the rise of emblematic figures to the left of the Labor party and from within its communist and Trotskyist movements, who began to oppose Harold Wilson the "leftist", just as the French movement began by opposing Charles De Gaulle, whom they perceived as a symbol of chauvinism and an obstacle to France's openness to the world.
In this context, the picture is by no means rosy. If May 1968 was intended as a political gain for the left, what has happened is quite the opposite. In France, Although De Gaulle's resigned, he was succeeded by George Pompidou (a De Gaullist), and the right dominated the Elysée for 26 of the 40 years that followed. This was interrupted only by Francois Mitterrand (14 years), whose term cannot be described as the outcome of the student movement, despite the sentimental, cultural, and lifestyle affiliation (close to the Latin Quarter) with that period which Mitterrand used to boast. Similarly in Britain, the Conservatives ruled for 22 years before the rise of the "new" Labor to power. The "new labor" is as remote from the revolutionary legacy it inherited as it can possibly be. The same occurred in the US, where the Republicans have dominated the White House for 28 of the past 40 years.
As for us, and in the few locations that felt the storms of the student movement forty years ago, societies fell backwards and returned to their tribal, ethnic, and sectarian spirit, while the wind of change, which was expected to coincide with these barriers and overcome them, has subsided. And we remained, awaiting a 1968 of a different kind!
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