1968: A Privileged Category in a Cosmopolitical Vision of History

If seen from an international and transnational perspective, the social uprisings around the key-year 1968 – usually referred to simply as “’68” - qualify as the first global protest movement. Accordingly, the recent attempts to historicize ’68 tend to privilege an increasingly cosmopolitical approach. Social movements are no longer approached as matters of national particularity and local ‘exceptionalism’ but are placed within a wider context. The reason for this is that the multifaceted experience of the various ’68 movements can no longer be seen as a solid reflection of specific national cultures alone, because of the mimicry and cultural transfer that occurred and that account for the relative synchronicity of the movements, their large-scale diffusion and for the adoption of a global repertoire of action. Different kinds of narratives questioned the barriers of a bipolar world and put into crisis the rigid value systems of the time. Subjectivities were softened as people placed themselves within an imaginary chain of global events, in which they defined themselves not in contrast but in analogy to the ‘other’. Unearthing and illustrating this broader range of experience, clears the way of a historiographical analysis of the sixties on both national and transnational levels. This paper analyzes the merits of viewing specific national case-studies, such as the November 1973 student uprising in Greece, through cosmopolitical lenses.