Τhe Personal is Political The interfaces between Politics and Culture Across Europe in the 1970s Cambridge, 26-27 August 2009 Lucy Cavendish College A two-day conference organised by Erato Basea (University of Oxford), Sebastian Gehrig (University of Heidelberg), Christiana Mygdali (University of Oxford), Nikolaos Papadogiannis (University of Cambridge) Supported by Faculty of History, University of Cambridge Society for Modern Greek Studies 1 Τhe Personal is Political: The interfaces between Politics and Culture across Europe in the 1970s Cambridge, 26-27 August 2009 Location: Lucy Cavendish College Conference Timetable Wednesday, 26th August 9:00-9:45 a.m.: Participants’ Arrival and Conference Registration at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge 9:45-10:00 a.m.: Opening of the Conference; Formal Greetings 10:00-11:00 a.m.: Keynote Lecture: Gerd-Rainer Horn (Warwick University) When the Sixties Emerged in Full Force: Reflections on the Meaning of the 1970s 11:00-11:15 a.m.: Coffee and Tea Break 11:15-12:45 p.m.: Panel 1: Challenging the East-West Border Chair: Martin Klimke (German Historical Institute, Washington/University of Heidelberg) Marko Zubak (Croatian Historical Institute, Zagreb) The Yugoslavian Youth Press – State Sponsored Subculture? Michael Kilburn (Endicott College, Beverly, MA, USA) “Total Realism”: The (Anti)Aestethic of the Czech Underground During Normalization 12:45-13:45 p.m.: Lunch Break 13:45-15:15 p.m.: Panel 2: Far Left and Beyond in Southern Europe Chair: Pedro Ramos Pinto (University of Manchester) Tiago Avó (Birkbeck College, London) Cultural Cooperativism or the Logic of Interclassist Opposition (Portugal 1968-1973) Nikolaos Papadogiannis (Magdalene College, University of Cambridge) Discussing the periodisation of youth protest in Western Europe in the 1970s: the making of Eurocommunist youth identities and the case of Greece 2 15:15-15:45: Tea Break 15:45-17:15 p.m.: Panel 3: Generation Chair: Kostis Kornetis (Brown University) Belinda Davis (Rutgers University) The Personal, the Political, and the Postmodern Turn: Subcultural Politics in WestGermany, the 1970s and the Long Postwar Anna-Maria v. d. Goltz (Magdalen College, University of Oxford) A Right Wing Generation-unit of „Counter-68ers“? Political Polarization and Generational Identities in West-Germany „around 1968“ 17:15-17:30 p.m.: Coffee and Tea Break 17:30-19:30 p.m.: Panel 4: Beyond “Americanisation”: Transnational Flows in Cinema and Literature Chair: Gerd-Rainer Horn (Warwick University) Christiana Mygdali (Christ Church College, University of Oxford) How Much Does Prestige Cost in Times of Political Upheavals? American Funding and Greek Cultural Production Under the Junta Erato Basea (St Cross College, University of Oxford) The Personal, the Collective and the Political in the Greek 1960s and 1970s: The Case of Dimos Theos’ Kierion Kostis Kornetis (Brown University) Representations of the impasse of the lost Utopia: L’après 68 in cinema 20:30 Dinner Thursday, 27th August 9.30-11:00 a.m.: Panel 5: Gender Roles Chair: Belinda Davis (Rutgers University) Eva-Maria Silies (Hamburg University) The “Generation with the Pill” after “Sexual Revolution”: Female Contraceptive Decisions in England and West Germany in the 1970s Aribert Reimann (Wadham College, University of Oxford) The Radical Politics of Maoist Masculinities in West Germany during the 1970s 11:00-11:15 a.m.: Coffee and Tea Break 11:15-12:45 p.m.: Panel 6: Depoliticisation in Northern Europe? Chair: Thomas Ekman Jørgensen (University of Copenhagen) Eva Schandevyl (Free University of Brussels) The Problematic Being of Belgian Eurocommunism in a Globalised Society 3 Hanno Balz (University of Bremen) Sarcasm and the Crisis: Punk and the Postmodern Condition in the Late 1970s 12.45-13.30 p.m.: Lunch Break 13.30-15.30 p.m.: Posters 15.30-15.45 p.m.: Coffee and Tea Break 15.45-17.45: Panel 7: Rethinking Maoism Chair: Sebastian Gehrig (University of Heidelberg) Thomas Ekman Jørgensen (University of Copenhagen) The Left and the Rediscovery of the “Popular” in Scandinavia Eros Francescangeli (Università degli studi di Padova) The Bride in Red. Public and Private Spheres in the Italian Maoist Groups Andrew Tompkins (University of Oxford) Whose Personal, whose Political? Outsiders in the Larzac and Wyhl Struggles 17.45: Closing Remarks 4 Τhe Personal is Political: The interfaces between Politics and Culture across Europe in the 1970s Cambridge, 26-27 August 2009 Location: Lucy Cavendish College Keynote Speaker Gerd-Rainer Horn (Warwick University) When the Sixties Emerged in Full Force: Reflections on the Meaning of the 1970s The 1970s are portrayed, first of all, as a decade when far more individuals were active within the orbit of the Left than in the more (in)famous 1960s. In addition, however, I intend to cast some light on the 1970s as a decade of rapid strategic reorientations for social movement activists. Having discarded the promises of the New Left in the wake of 1968, Maoism and Trotskyism were, for a while, in the ascendancy. Yet, in the second half of the 1970s, under the impact of experiences within the broad, cross-class movement against civilian nuclear power plants, the Far Left diminished in relative importance, and supposedly “new” social movements and Green Parties became the new lodestar, paving the way for the single-largest wave of social movements in Europe since World War II: the campaign against nuclear weapons in the Reagan era. Speakers Marko Zubak (Croatian Historical Institute, Zagreb) The Yugoslavian Youth Press – State Sponsored Subculture? In my paper I will analyze how, during the second half of the 1970s in communist Yugoslavia, one specific communist media – the youth press – originally designed as a chief political party tool, turned into a focal point of a new urban youth subculture. The Yugoslav youth press could best be defined as a corpus of various newspapers and magazines produced under the auspices of the Yugoslav youth communist organizations. As such, a concept is in no way typical solely for the Yugoslav communist regime. Rather, it reflects a traditional concern of the communist societies for their young subjects who, since Lenin, were considered to be in need of firm guidance – a task left to a network of youth organizations and their publications. What makes the Yugoslav youth press specific is its complex transformation in respect to this initial purpose that it was created for. Instead of remaining under strict 5 party control and serving for hard communist propaganda, the Yugoslav youth press, starting from late 1960s turned into a distinguished media factor, unwilling to blindly follow the official party line. This unorthodox evolution which started in the late 1960s occurred in two phases, the latter of which will be in the focus of my paper. During the first political phase, the youth press played a crucial role, both as a mediator and an organizer, in the sudden politicization of the Yugoslav students which echoed global student concerns but had special domestic overtones. Youth journals not only provided ample media space once the students found themselves on the streets, but were heavily involved in all of the necessary preparations. Openly pointing to the shortcomings of the Yugoslav regime on one side, while imitating the form of American underground press on the other, these youth journals emerged as a genuine alternative media which stood in direct opposition to the mainstream papers. The suppression of these movements coming at the beginning of the 1970s signalled a clear failure of the regime to incorporate any genuine youth political activity within its scope. Virtually any oppositional political youth activity was outlawed and, consequently, the youth press went into a period of crisis, loosing any journalistic relevance and returning to its original Leninist roots. However, in the second part of the 1970s the youth press managed to reinvent itself. It did so by shifting its focus from direct political action to seemingly apolitical but thoroughly subversive countercultural activities, such as a vibrant rock scene. I will show how both, the existing institutional framework as well as the party ideology was used by this media to propagate the newly developing rock lifestyle. Though the youth press abandoned its political tasks, becoming a true spokesperson of both musicians and their audience, authorities were happy to tolerate this new policy, as long as the political issues were not tackled directly. The Yugoslav youth press can thus also be treated as a specific sight to observe, in the specific late Titoist context, the interplay of two distinct streams of the 1960s global student movement: the “political” and “subcultural” one. While the bulk of the article will deal with the latter, continuity between the two streams will be established using the model of alternative media developed by Chris Atton. Finally, in this way, attempt will be made to employ theoretical concepts developed in the context of Western media to analyze phenomena that emerged in a diametrically opposed setting. Michael Kilburn (Endicott College, Beverly, MA, USA) „Total Realism“: The (Anti)Aestethic of the Czech Underground During Normalization This paper examines the cultural response of the Czech underground to the social and political conditions of "Normalization" that dismantled the 1968 Prague Spring experiment in democratic socialism and instituted in its place a “post-totalitarian” ideological state apparatus. As the despair of the immediate post-invasion period faded into apathy and conformity, the 1970s in Czechoslovakia were characterized by a cynical complicity between a regime pretending to believe its own ideological simulation and a people shamed and compromised into acquiescence. In the context of this existential malaise, the Underground represented “ab-Normalization”: calling the regime’s ontological bluff with a coarse, pragmatic insistence on lived, empirical reality. Its aesthetic of “total realism” rejected the ideological social contract of Normalization as disingenuous and strove for cultural authenticity in both positive and negative terms. As an artistic principle, it signified an embrace of the artless, the common, 6 the vulgar, and a refusal of artifice, high style, abstraction, idealism and officiating structures. As a mode of expression, it was manifest through coarse, literal imagery in texts; the incorporation or citation of banned texts and individuals; and art that ignored or flouted both standards of state cultural policy and social norms. Despite the roughness and atonality, Underground music and poetry consistently sought an element of the sublime, or the marvellous, in the everyday as an antidote to the numbing mediocrity and daily moral compromise of Normalization. Total realism was a cultural expression of “living in truth” described in Havel’s 1978 essay “the Power of the Powerless.” But the Underground consciously rejected the civic implications of this position –(“antipolitical politics”) for a culture of the powerless: an antipoetical poetics. By taking seriously the self-determination of the Czech cultural underground as apolitical rather than antipolitical, this paper aims to complicate the dissident conceit that the personal is necessarily political and that every expression of authenticity led inexorably –if rhizomically- to the collapse of the system in 1989. It also attempts to place the stark absurdities of the Czechoslovak case in a broader European context, for, as Havel points out, the post-totalitarian system was only a symptom of modern society in general. The way the Underground strove – and also the ways it failed – to maintain its distance from an aggressively ideological state is relevant to the practice of democracy and the functioning of civil society in the post-communist East and the post-modern West alike. Tiago Avó (Birkbeck College, London) Cultural cooperativism or the logic of interclassist opposition (Portugal 1968 1973) The emergence of new political actors in Portugal in the late 1960's promoted a sense of change; it was meant to be a political springtime (“Primavera Marcelista”) after almost forty years of obscurantism and repression. Although these feelings were spreading across the whole political spectrum – from liberals to communists – the elections had shown once more that the change was impossible. Subjective revolutionary conditions were created with the collapse of this opportunity. Following these events, the oppositions were sent back to clandestinity but the conditions were now different. The cooperativist movement was expanding in Portugal, not only economically but especially in a cultural context. By then university students driven by the traumatic experiences of struggle and repression felt during the academic crisis (1962) organized themselves in cooperatives apparently serving as a way to buy and sell books at lower prices. Cooperatives operated mainly as a legal structure for ideological formation and organization of students promoting oppositionist actions against the dictatorship and the colonial war. Among the new wave of cultural cooperatives we can observe a persistent pattern of transformations in what concerns to their ideological affiliation. After the advent of Marcelo Caetano's administration (1968), cultural cooperatives were divided in four prevalent groups: 1) catholic progressivism; 2) socialist/republican; 3) communist; 4) radical left wing (including Maoists). The first and second types were commonly sustained by a short [small] and effective group of intellectuals and liberal professionals (lawyers, doctors, business man); those where communists and/or leftists prevailed were much more diverse in their composition, with workers, students and middle class people among their members and directors. Cultural cooperatives played an ambivalent role in the strategy of oppositional forces. 7 They appeared as a response to the educational and cultural limitations imposed by a repressive state that defined what was morally, politically and socially acceptable. On the other hand, cooperatives were born as a commercial solution to the juridical obstruction that overthrew the cultural associativism but had grown as a powerful counter-hegemonic instrument. Finally, up until the repressive annihilation of cultural cooperativism in 1972-73, cooperatives worked as legal platforms of illegal political movements such as C.E.D. (electoral coalition where the prevailing elements were communists and other leftists). Concluding, cultural cooperatives were organizations where individuals from different social origins, wealth and educational status could promote an intensive cultural activity and, mainly, act politically against the dictatorship. Nikolaos Papadogiannis (University of Cambridge) Discussing the Periodisation of Youth Protest in Western Europe in the 1970s: the making of Eurocommunist youth identities and the case of Greece In this paper, I would like to argue against the narrative of the "retreat into the private" that is often employed in historiography to describe the late 1970s in Western and Northern Europe. I shall try to bring a relatively neglected case-study into the fore by analysing the emergence of strong Eurocommunist youth groups in the 1970s in Southern Europe; This paper focuses on the Eurocommunist youth group Rigas Feraios in Greece, while taking also its relation with the FGCI (Federazione Giovanile Comunista Italiana), the youth organisation of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as well as the UJCE (Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de España), the youth organisation of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), into account. In brief, the first claim put forth in this presentation is that the flourishing Italian Communist subculture in the 1970s that comprised Festivals and cultural societies and which has been analysed in detail by Stephen Gundle, was not an isolated case; similar subcultures affected significantly the making of youth identities in Greece as well as in Spain in the same period. Given their cross-fertilisation, this trend could be described as the Eurocommunist youth moment in the mid and late 1970s. It has been argued that the individual well being, which was associated with mass consumption and had emerged in both countries since the 1960s was incompatible with any Communist effort to construct youth identities premised on collective solidarity. However, this paper wishes to offer a more dynamic understanding of Communism by resonating with the approach of Frank Trentmann, according to which mass consumption did not necessarily erode the feeling of common belonging in collective groups. In addition, since the mid-1970s in Greece, a number of subjects of protest, either second-wave feminists or autonomous left-wing youth groups, lambasted the activities through which Communist Parties and their youth groups tried to cultivate commitment among their members, claiming that they reproduced the “hierarchical” and “bureaucratic” relations of the “bourgeois” or “patriarchal” society. Thus, what this paper also examines is how Rigas Feraios reformulated its ideological discourse, influenced by relevant discussions in the PCI, the FGCI, the UJCE and the PCE, in order to meet such challenges. It explores changes in the style of the publications of the Greek Eurocommunist youth group as well as in its organisational structure, analysing how Rigas Feraios defined two concepts that appeared often in its discourse in the mid and late 1970s, namely “autonomy” and the “shift to the personal issues”. 8 This presentation tries to capture this reflection by exploring the ambiguous relations of Rigas Feraios with three actors: second-wave feminism, amateur and professional rock bands as well as autonomous left-wing youth groups that emerged in Greece in the mid and late 1970s. My analysis is based on the official texts as well as on pamphlets published by local branches of RF, FGCI and UJCE, minutes from discussions in their congresses as well as on semi-guided interviews, which help illuminate a varying reception of the prescriptive language by members of different gender, social and geographical origins and rank. Belinda Davis (Rutgers University) The Personal, the Political, and the Postmodern Turn: Subcultural Politics in West Germany, the 1970s and the Long Postwar This paper treating the subcultural activity of the 1970s takes seriously the notion of the personal as political, examining the way indeed that the activity of this era redefined politics in a fashion ultimately broadly legitimated in West Germany. The paper examines the ways in which this activity broadly defined (from the establishment of women’s centers to occupying houses to organizing within a Maoist “K-Group”) thus gave new life to political modes out of Germany’s past, including politics with an intimate connection to one’s emotional life, that many had viewed as suspect in the aftermath of the Weimar and Nazi eras, as formal political leaders sought to advance a very specific form of democracy modelled after Cold War desiderata. At the same time, paradoxically, this revival of earlier political forms, in concert with political forms from the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe out of the postwar decades, led to an epistemological break building up from across the postwar period. That is, this subcultural activity—itself not least a response to authorities’ physical violence and economic pressure against political protestors—came to constitute not only fundamentally new forms and even definitions of politics. It was also both cause and effect of a postmodern turn, represented not least in new understandings of how change takes place, transcending notions of “revolution” versus “reform” and “left” versus “right”; public versus private and political versus personal. These changes had profound and lasting effects on politics in West Germany—as they did across much of Europe. I will look in this context at the broad range of activities in this era, through the eyes of activists’ own recounting, contending that these developments were salutary and far more than the dogmatism and violence with which it is commonly in vogue to characterize the era; that they were both fundamentally political and personal; and that the sectarianism with which the era is associated is misleading, occluding the remarkably broad and impressive political networking, and a broad vision—in contrast with a totalizing political theory—that permitted this political work, including remaking the self. Finally, I will examine the issue of “generation” to understand how this happened when and how it did. 9 Dr. Anna-Maria v. d. Goltz (University of Oxford) A Right Wing Generation-unit of „Counter-68ers“? Political Polarization and Generational Identities in West-Germany „around 1968“ The paper, which is based on my postdoctoral research, will focus on a hitherto neglected dimension of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the activism, networks, and generational identity of right-wing students and youths in this period. Whereas the fact that the self-proclaimed ‘68ers’ did not speak for most of their contemporaries who were employed in factories or worked in white-collar jobs is regularly acknowledged, the fact that they do not necessarily reflect the experiences of most students either is hardly ever discussed in the historiography. Contemporary opinion polls suggested that those students who rejected the revolutionary aims of the SDS represented a considerable part of the West German student population. Even those figures that show that large numbers of students thought criticizing the political system was legitimate also included right-wing students who favoured far-reaching political reform – but strongly rejected ideas of ‘revolution’ so commonly associated with the left-wing ‘generation of 68’. And yet, we know very little about what right-wing students did around ‘1968’ and absolutely nothing about how they made sense of these formative experiences afterwards. Hence, the paper will focus on the politicization, activism, and identity of Christian Democratic Students (the members of the RCDS) and the members of other rightwing umbrella organisations (the so-called Studentenunionen) at West German Universities. The paper seeks to make a contribution both to the historiography of the late 1960s and early 1970s and to the theoretical study of generational identity more generally. Studies on generational identity often invoke the theoretical approach of German sociologist Karl Mannheim, but the fact that he emphasizes the significance of polarization for the formation of generational identities, is often overlooked. Mannheim identified the ‘two polar forms of the intellectual and social response to a stimulus experienced by all in common.’ These polar forms belong to the same ‘actual generation but form separate, differentiated and often antagonistic “generation units” within it.’ These are ‘oriented toward each other, even though only in the sense of fighting one another.’ Building on Mannheim’s concept of generations, the paper will argue that the formation of a generational identity ‘around 1968’ was not limited to former left-wing activists. On the contrary, the often spectacular nature of the events and the subsequent public projection of the left-wing ‘68ers’ mobilized their right-wing contemporaries and led to increasing attempts to locate their experiences within a collective in their turn: within the imagined community of the counter-generation of ‘alternative 68ers’ or the ‘silent majority’. Right-wing students equally endowed their activist experiences with great biographical and symbolic significance and attempted to establish a counter-narrative of ‘1968’ in the decades to come, clearly reflecting a strong right-wing desire to be recognized publicly and lend legitimacy to one’s experiences through collectivization. The paper will present tentative research results based on archival material and oral history interviews, as well as a conceptual framework that may be of more general use to other conference participants. 10 Christiana Mygdali (University of Oxford) How much does Prestige Cost in Times of Political Upheavals? American Funding and Greek Cultural Production under the Junta In this paper I will focus on two cases of cultural production financially supported by American factors under the Greek Junta. The first case is that of Ford Foundation, which gave large sums of money to already established Greek authors and poets of the time in order to undertake intellectual tasks, such as translations or original cultural production. The Ford Foundation also gave scholarships, which allowed young Greeks to pursue studies abroad. The role of Ford Foundation under the Junta has not been fully explored yet, and Giorgos Chatzopoulos, the director of Kalvos editions (the first publishing house to be established under the Junta) has conducted an archive of the relevant contemporary discussion. He was the first to denunciate the gesture of accepting funding by Ford Foundation as one, which would diminish the prestige of authors and make young people of the time stop trusting them. The second case is the literary journal Dialogos (Dialogue), which was published in many languages in different European countries from the early seventies onwards. It consisted of translated texts, most of which were literary extracts, theoretical essays and book reviews written by renowned American authors. Sometimes the initials of the Greek translators accompanied these translations, but their names were rarely indicated. The Greek edition of Dialogue was sponsored by the National Army Equity Fund. Leonidas Christakis, a pioneering artist of the time, who published two antiauthoritarian literary journals (Panderma and Kouros) under the Junta, published a sharp article in Panderma under the title ‘How did I sue the Americans under the Junta’ referring at this issue. By examining these two examples, I aim to show how political issues turned into personal battles under the Junta in Greece and I hope to demonstrate how such issues have determined Greek political consciousness in general until the present day. Erato Basea (University of Oxford) The Personal, the Collective and the Political in the Greek 1960s and 1970s: The Case of Dimos Theos’ Film “Kierion” The paper focuses on Dimos Theos’ “Kierion” to reveal aspects of the politicization of the Greek youth of the 1960s and 1970s. The character of post-war cinematic and socio-temporal space in Greece, alongside the film’s reading and the cultural analysis of its terms of production, has a twofold aim: first, it attempts to demonstrate the film’s place in the Greek culture and society of the mid-1960s and mid-1970s; second, it aims to show the personal initiative, the collective action and the political praxis of a group of young Greek directors. “Kierion’s” making started in the turbulent pre-Junta years (1966) and finished in the first year after the reconstitution of democracy (1974). Although Theos is officially credited with its direction, it was a large group of young directors that took part in its filmmaking. The film appropriated the American film noir genre to narrate the story of a journalist who investigates the murder of a foreign reporter. However, what was started as a comment on the political crisis in early 1960s Greece and a gesture of new politics in filmmaking was later employed as a form of resistance to the Colonels’ 11 dictatorship (1967-1974). Resistance operates on two levels: filmically, “Kierion’s” secretive language and the missing links in its narrative point towards the possibilities of the filmic language to resist censorship and dictatorial politics. Through the examination of selected personal recollections of the directors who participated in the film the paper will further argue that “Kierion” can be also read as one of those works where the boundaries between life and filmmaking break. It has become common practice for the hegemonic critical discourse to treat “Kierion” as a cultural myth and the starting point of films produced outside the sphere of the commercial mainstream Greek cinema of the Sixties. In fact, “Kierion” is seen as the inauguration of ‘New Greek Cinema’, a term which unified the cinema being in accordance with the European cinema d’ auteur. The paper argues that the process of canonization excludes many aspects of the formation of the subject of the young director as the political and the cultural other in Greece. Kostis Kornetis (Brown University) Representations of the impasse of the lost Utopia : L’après 68 in cinema This paper discusses 1970s cinema as a dystopian space in terms of socio-political representation. Several different directors recorded the lost hopes and promises of 68 as leading to despair, isolation, suicide or political extremism. The paper focuses on three of the most characteristic imprints of this tendency from France, Germany and Italy respectively. In “La main et la putain” by Jean Eustache (1973) we see the dead ends of sexual revolution but also the endless logorrhea that followed May 68’s demand for the "right to speak". Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s “Lost Honour of Katharina Blum” (1975) is a film that ¬focuses on how the state creates the reflexes of terrorism, whereby violence is the only way forward. A similar theme is explored by the Taviani brothers in “Alonsanfan” (1973), a film nominally about the early 19th century but in reality about the “gauchistes” of the 1970s and the futility of revolutionary fervour. The paper analyzes both the content and the visual representation of these movies, which can be labelled as a requiem to the cinematic exaltation that preceded them, reflecting a radical departure from the euphoric side of the 1960s movements. Eva-Maria Silies (Hamburg University) The „Generation with the Pill“ After „Sexual Revolution“: Female Contraceptive Decisions in England and West Germany in the 1970s A sometimes called “revolutionary” contraceptive possibility arose in the 1960s: the pill allowed women to make sexual experiences without the permanent fear of pregnancy. This safe method was especially important for one group: young and unmarried or newly-wed women who were in the middle of their academic or vocational education and who wanted to combine on long term career and family life. The pill enabled them to plan their life more reliable than women could do before. It was a generational experience for women born between 1935 and 1955 who distanced themselves in their contraceptive and sexual experiences from their mother’s generation. 12 But in the 1970s, especially under the influence of the Second Feminist Movement, the evaluation of the pill changed. It was no longer seen as possibility of liberating women’s sexuality but as an instrument of the ongoing male dominance in sexuality. Debates on side-effects and possible long-term damages alienated lots of women, and the former steady rise of sale figures of the pill came to an end: numerous women stopped taking it and looked for other, often more “natural” ways of contraception. The aim of the paper is to examine the reasons for this change in contraceptive behaviour in two national contexts: West Germany and England. It will be based on oral history interviews, statistical and empirical studies, media coverage and sources from the Women’s Movement. Firstly, I am going to analyse who were the main activists in the “protest” against the pill. The Women’s Movement of the time was pretty present in the public debate, especially in the context of abortion. How did these women argue against the pill and what kind of alternatives did they propose? Did “average” women follow this argumentation or did they continue to prefer the pill because of its safety and reliability? Secondly, what kind of life concept was combined with the refuse of the pill? How was motherhood seen and how did men fit into new ways of partnership and family models? Thirdly, the generational aspect is important. If women who used the pill for the first time in the (late) 1960s distanced themselves from their mothers and their sexual experiences, how did they educate their own daughters? And finally, the famous “the personal is political” should be questioned: was taking the pill or refusing it judged as a political statement or did the contraceptive use become (like before) a very private decision? Aribert Reimann (University of Oxford) The Radical Politics of Maoist Masculinities in West Germany during the 1970s During the 1970s, the cultural politics of masculinity within the remainders of radical left-wing movements underwent a dramatic transformation. Earlier notions of revolutionary masculinity during the 1960s had established a symbolic context of ‘cool’ corporeal habit, long hair, sexual liberation in the form of (often enough imaginary) male promiscuity, and a fashionable tendency towards militancy and physical violence among the most radical parts of the subversive movement. Since the early 1970s, the shift towards a more ideologically coherent approach to radical oppositional politics led to a reformulation of revolutionary masculinities that became heavily influenced by political and private notions of discipline. Maoist groups in particular promoted a far more conventional concept of male appearance as well as behaviour, denouncing earlier habits of the so-called ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s as ‘petty bourgeois’. The result was an ironic return to lower-middle-class ideals of ‘decent’ looks, the institute of marriage, a dress-code and hairstyle (sometimes complete with moustache) that would agree with the proletariat, a crack-down on extra-marital sexual relations, and a pronounced homophobia that presented a spectacular contrast with the homosexual liberation movement among the more libertarian oppositional milieus of the time. The proposed paper will follow the contradictory development of the cultural politics of masculinity among the avant-garde of radical opposition: a biographical sketch of Dieter Kunzelmann, leading ‘cultural revolutionary’ and former ‘mastermind’ of the Berlin Commune at the end of the 1960s as well as a ‘pathfinder’ for international terrorism, who spent the best part of the 1970s as a devout follower of the Maoist 13 KPD-AO in Berlin, provides a long-term perspective, while (anonymous) insiderreports of Maoist veterans help illuminate the often rather obscure and clandestine aspects of radical private politics during the period. The main challenge is to establish the interfaces of radical politics and cultural practices of the gendered private to arrive at an appropriate understanding of this extremist sub-culture of the 1970s, many followers of which since 1978 joined the nascent environmental movement and Green party. While it is tempting to regard the cultural politics of Maoism simply as an aberration from a long-term path of political and private emancipation, its importance for oppositional tactics and political strategy deserves special attention and may yield a better understanding of the trajectory of alternative politics. Eva Schandevyl (Free University of Brussels) The Problematic Being of Belgian Eurocommunism in a Globalised Society Was Eurocommunism a missed opportunity for new paths to socialism at a time when traditional political values had lost a good deal of their legitimacy and recruitment power? This happened in the wake of new developments and factors in political and social life, such as globalisation and the rise of neo liberalism, the growth of regional parties and the arrival of the greens. Why in Belgium - the case-study considered in this contribution - did Eurocommunism fail to have a significant impact on the 197080s generation, despite a wave of international support? With Eurocommunism, some Western communist parties hoped to break free of their ‘father’ – the Soviet Communist Party – but at the same time there was a fear of leaving the trusted path. Eurocommunism represented the problematic search for a ‘personal’ communist identity, rather than a clear and practical alternative to the prescriptive Soviet example. It forced communists to consider a series of concepts which had been the subject of debate amongst them since the late 1960s. What was the position of the Belgian Communist Party in this; to what extent did it distance itself from the Soviet Communist Party and how significant to it was international solidarity? How did its attitude change over the years, from the turbulent decade of the 1960s – which brought a crisis in the international communist movement – through the 1970s which heralded a new period, characterised by the end of the Southern European dictatorships – and during the 1980 when (Euro)communism died away? The methodology of this contribution is inspired by concepts from historical theory on transnational movements and political sociology and from discourse theory. Not so much the concrete political results are looked at, as the ideas which marked the overall discourse and the official statements: the cultural speech act (e.g. the slogans and images they conjured up) in which the choice of particular terms – because of the inherently disciplinary nature of communist discourse – constituted a commitment in itself. In their search for a new identity Belgian communism lost its monopoly over a counterculture of radical opposition to the system, which had long been its attraction for successive generations of militants. Belgian communists did not succeed in modernising to meet social changes and the increasing global complexity of the political and economic world. The contrast between the national context and the socalled teleological dimension of communism – the constant tension between socialpolitical and international aspects in its being – proved te be insurmountable. 14 Hanno Balz (University of Bremen) Sarcasm and the Crisis: Punk and the Postmodern Condition in the Late 1970s While Western Europe underwent significant political crises in the middle of the 1970s this can be stated for protest movements of that time as well. As one result of this, social movements gradually turned away from concepts of revolution and focused on grass-root movements. Following this development a "drop out" culture became a widespread phenomenon (sects, communes, squats, drug-scenes). Still, some of the "drop out" lifestyles were part of a wider protest culture, while others were completely leaving "politics" behind and even expressed their dislike concerning political activism. In general it can be observed, that in a time when "revolutionary discipline" seemed to be outdated, the "politics of the first person" gained influence on the self-concepts of activists. The individual was back on the agenda. Punk emerged during these years of rethinking and proved to be the antipode of the political movements. Still it was an unseemingly appropriate expression of an overall political and moral crisis as well as of the turn towards politics of the individual. Punk as a cultural phenomenon has been described as being a product of postmodernity, given its eclecticism, irony/sarcasm, a tendency towards camp and the overall use and preaching of simulacrum in a Baudrillard-sense. My paper shall discuss the Punk movement (mainly in the UK and Germany) with regards to its self-proclaimed cultural opposition against the "mainstream" and the Left. Furthermore it will be asked if the self-proclaimed individualism and nihilism was a reaction to cultural hegemony or rather its by-product. What kinds of antagonisms have been evoked with the punk-movement (for example the praise of plastic, concrete, pain, alcohol, non-musicality, nihilism, "anarchy"...) and what similarities could be observed (counter-culture, anti-establishment, rock-music, "dropping out"...)? Were the tendencies towards a focus on the personal interlinked to a certain extent, - and putting this even further: can we speak of correlating phenomena of individualization in the subcultures as well as in the ideological agenda of neoliberalism under Thatcher/Reagan/Kohl? Thomas Ekman Jørgensen (University of Copenhagen) The Left and the Rediscovery of the 'Popular' in Scandinavia The Scandinavian 1968 to a large extend played out in the context of the humanistic/rational project of the Nordic welfare states. During the 1960s, there was a great deal of similarity between the core values of the New Left and the aspirations of the political leadership to engage in deep social and cultural reforms of society. Particularly in Sweden and Norway, however, the Left became increasingly critical of the rationalistic elements of Nordic welfare. The consequences of central planning and rationalisation especially for the periphery became a focal point of leftist critique of the Nordic class compromise. Instead of embracing progressive rationalism, large parts of the Left became fascinated with popular traditions of the rural and industrial working class. Whereas much of the critique of capitalist society in the 1960s had been concentrated on global issues and the Third World, the Left turned to domestic or even local issues. De-population of the northern periphery and later de-industrialisation became 15 important points of departure for a more general critique of the capitalist system. In turn, this lead to a sometimes rather pronounced social and cultural conservatism, suspicious of new developments as being un-authentic and dangerous threats to the sound, traditional life-style of the ‘people’. This conservatism failed to grasp the major transformation of the social and cultural fabric of Nordic societies in through the 1970s: The largely peaceful dismantling of traditional heavy industry and, as a consequence, the gradual decline of the classical working class combined with more fragmented, ‘post-modern’ or post-materialistic life-styles, which – arguably – the Left itself was part of. Eros Francescangeli (Università degli studi di Padova) The Bride in Red. Public and Private Spheres in the Italian Maoist Groups Departing from an interdisciplinary perspective, and utilizing different sources – including those of police, recently declassified and accessible – my paper will analyze the presence, political strategies, relationships, cultures, linguistic codes, lifestyles, and morals of major Italian Maoist groups between the end of Sixties and Seventies. I will begin with identifying the most important organizations, including a number of smaller groups, and then proceed with analyzing the social, generational and gender composition of these groups, their territorial consistence, their theoretical production, and the political cultures of reference (Maoism, Stalinism, Albanian model, etc.). Finally, I will focus on their organizational practices, forms of struggle, as well as their relations with international realities and their inclusion of “foreigners” in their midst (for example, Greek and Chilean exiles). My examination will not be limited to the political history of leadership. I am most interested in analyzing Italian Maoist groups also from the perspective of social and cultural history. In particular, my paper will be focused on the “existential” and private dimension of “activist life,” and the relationship between center and periphery. These are some of the themes I will touch upon in my talk: • Connection between “68” and the Chinese “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”; • Discontinuity and continuity with previous political experiences; • Influence of national liberation struggles and terzomondismo (“thirdworldism”), the Vietnam’s war, and the experience of similar groups in other European Countries; • Influence of the coup d’états in Greece and Chile, and of the Portuguese Revolution; • Relationships with other radical left-wing organizations (Lotta continua, Trotskyist groups, etc.), terrorist groups and “counter-cultural” actors; • Relationships with the “traditional” left, the trade unions, and the Institutions (political parties, local administrations, etc.); • Their “imaginary,” methods of propaganda, discourses, associative formality, forms of struggle (included those violent and illegal), collective rites; • Relationship center-periphery inside associative structures. Maoist presence in the countries and in the South of Italy, attention towards the “peripheral” actors (soldiers, imprisoned, etc.); • Mechanism of power and inter-gender relationship inside the organizations; 16 • • Lifestyles, morality, private dimension and relationship public/private (from the control of sexuality to “party’s marriages”) of members; Level of incisiveness on the public order and Italian social-political reality, including the attention given to these groups by government spy agencies, and police infiltration. Andrew Tompkins (University of Oxford) Whose Personal, whose Political? Outsiders in the Larzac and Wyhl Struggles This paper will explore the interactions that took place between locals and outsiders in two struggles that were formative for the so-called “New Social Movements” of the 1970s. In 1971, peasants on the Larzac plateau in southern France began what would eventually become a decade-long campaign to stop the expansion of a military camp in their midst. Around the same time, winegrowers and farmers in the West-German town of Wyhl initiated their own protests against the planned construction of a nuclear facility. In both places, local populations who were personally affected by these state projects were joined by outsiders (both domestic and international) who sought to ascribe a broader political meaning to their struggles. The ensuing “improbable encounters” that occurred between students and peasants, urban and rural, Marxists and Christians in the post-1968 period were not always harmonious, but nor were they without consequences. The aim of this paper will be to illustrate the mutual impact that such interactions had on their participants. Some of the questions this paper will attempt to address include the following: Why did outsiders take an interest in these conflicts and how did they approach them? How important were the transnational support networks associated with Larzac and Wyhl to their eventual successes? What were the unintended consequences of interaction between, for example, Maoists and peasants? What strategies did local populations pursue in order to prevent “their” struggle from being overtaken by others with different interests? The paper will argue that the post-68 student left played a substantial role in politicizing Larzaciens and Wyhler, but that it was unable to direct that politicization as it would have liked. Instead, locals quickly asserted control over protest by making nonviolence a condition for participation, forcing the far left to choose between adapting to the local struggle or abandoning it. As points of interaction, Larzac and Wyhl constitute potentially important bridges between the histories of the earlier “student movements” of 1968 and the later “New Social Movements” of the 1970s. Both of these local communities relied on transnational support networks, which later fed into the development of broader, European anti-nuclear and peace movements. An analysis of these domestic and transnational interactions should make a valuable contribution to the “Personal is Political” conference. 17 List of Poster Presentations: Patrick Cuninghame (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Unidad Xochimilco, Mexico City) Italian feminism, workerism and autonomy in the 1970s: Struggles against unpaid reproductive labour and violence Based on interviews and social movement primary sources, this paper critically analyzes the contributions of that current of Italian feminism which, while maintaining its distance, has both influenced and been influenced by the evolution from the neo-Marxist workerist movements of the 1960s to today’s global autonomist movements. Through the writings of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and other academics, and the activism of New Left-related feminists movements such as Lotta Feminista, one of the first transnational feminist movements, Wages for Housework, began to network in North America and Western Europe from the mid 1970s. In their campaign against sexual violence within the working class family as a disciplinary measure used by men to force unwaged housework from women, and their demands for waged housework, sex work and other forms of unwaged reproductive labour as part of an overall demand for a guaranteed social salary, these theoretician-activists have made links with grassroots, autonomous movements among mainly non-unionised women workers. They have critiqued the limits of both the liberal-feminist discourse on participation in the labour market as the prerequisite for equal opportunities, and the dependence of much socialist-feminist discourse on the centrality of the welfare state for female emancipation. Irene Gerogianni (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki/University of Western Macedonia) “The fist that decorates the collector’s living room does not punch”: Four Exhibitions on the Art of the ’70s in Greece Art exhibitions are historiographical and communicational devices, or else, narratives that use art works as episodes in institutionalised stories that are promoted to an audience. Therefore, art exhibitions form part of the multiple althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses. For this, their analysis should move beyond the mere attempt of an interpretation of the works included, to the positioning of their privileged discourses, in relation to dominant ideological constructions of meaning in the wider sociopolitical framework. The aim of this paper is the comparative ideological positioning of four contemporary exhibitions, all of which are concerned with the representation of the art of the ʼ70s in Greece. The four exhibitions I am going to examine are: The Great Unrest: 5 Utopias of the ʼ70s, a bit before-a bit after, curated by Thanasis Moutsopoulos in 2006 as part of the celebrations of ʻPatras Cultural Capital of Europeʼ; the National Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition The Years of Defiance: The Art of the ʼ70s in Greece, curated by Bia Papadopoulou in 2006; the two-part exhibition The Pioneers, which took place at the Contemporary Art Centre of Kalampaka in 2002 and 2003, curated by Denys Zacharopoulos with works from the Beltsios Collection; and the exhibition P+P=D. New art from the ʼ70s and ʼ80s. Selections from ʻDesmosʼ, curated by Yorghos Tzirtzilakis in 1999 for the 18 Contemporary Art Centre of the DESTE Foundation. As the common ideological point of reference of these four rhetorical schemes I am acknowledging the consolidation of the narrative of defiance, i.e. the situation from which a possible rupture between any form of authority and the socially emancipated subject stems, as the means of constructing an agreeable past. My analysis focuses on the ʻobviousnessʼ that characterises any attempt to relate the art of the times in Greece with terms and notions related to ʻdefianceʼ, marking the strive for the de-contestation of the state of defiance during the ʼ70s in the country, on both a political and a visual arts level. What is intriguing, however, is that even when the subject of defiance is located in these discourses, its object, or the ʻOtherʼ, is scarcely defined. As I will argue, these exhibitions fail to address the connection of local visual arts practice in the ʼ70s with the bourgeoisie, the very class that provided all arts-related Ideological State Apparatuses in the absence of a state policy. Or, as the painter Yannis Chainis claims, “the fist that decorates the collectorʼs lounge does not punch”. Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard (Stirling University) Lindsay Anderson’s “O LUCKY MAN!”: The impossible voyage or the cinematic artist’s personal politics By the time Lindsay Anderson started filming O Lucky Man! in 1972, his career had already spanned 25 years and ranged from film criticism – as a co-founder of the film magazine Sequence - documentary filmmaking – with the Free Cinema initiative – stage directing – at the Royal Court - and full feature filmmaking – starting in 1963 with This Sporting Life, produced by Karel Reisz. Anderson had also gained both domestic and international recognition when he won the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes International Film Festival with his third feature film, If…. (1968). O Lucky Man! (1973) will be the focus of the paper as it captures the essence of the challenge that underlies my study of Lindsay Anderson’s work for the cinema. This is a film which highlights the tension constitutive of Anderson’s directorial practice: the tension manifests itself both inside and outside of the space delineated by the film. The structure of the film itself – its narrative, visual and sound/musical features – acts as a reflection of the dynamic that surrounds the director’s work – the production and reception phases. The present paper will unravel the nature of these distinctive yet complementary spaces and thereby highlight the existence of a tension underpinning Lindsay Anderson’s work in the cinema. The objective is twofold: first ascertain the extent to which the personal and the political co-exist within Anderson’s work by using O Lucky Man! as a point of reference. It should be noted that the co-existence of the personal and the political had found a theoretical expression in the director’s critical writings in the fifties – most notably in “Get Out and Push!” (1957) and “Stand Up! Stand Up!” (1956) – and had further informed the critical reception of his third feature film If…. (1968), especially at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. Second, the paper will investigate the impact of Lindsay Anderson’s own approach to the question of a personal-political dynamic by putting O Lucky Man! into the context of both its production and reception. It will notably look at the significance of Anderson’s choice of including the pop singer Alan Price within the film narrative – performing his songs with his band – as well as of his continued collaboration with the Czech cameraman Miroslaw Ondricek. 19 David Gouard (Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne) The Maurice Thorez and Youri Gagarine housing estates in Ivry-sur-Seine in the 1970s: a place of social construction for a generation representing a political counter-culture In my third year of PhD in political sociology, I study the social, political and electoral changes in two housing estates in Ivry-sur-Seine, in the very near suburb of Paris: the Maurice Thorez and Youri Gagarine housing estates. In this research, I use the concept of generation to explain the transformations of political identities, referring to sociology, history and psychology. Ivry-sur-Seine has been governed by the PCF since 1925, and was known like orthodox towards the national instructions from the PCF leadership. Ever since they were built, in the 1950s and 1960s, these housing estates were historically considered as a privileged place for the electoral base of the French Communist Party backed by a working-class tradition. More than anywhere else, this city of 60 000 inhabitants has tried to resist the deep disaffection to which the Communist Party has been gradually subjected, even in its deepest strongholds. In France, the communist local governments reached his peak at the end of the 1970s, both their number and their prestige. During this decade, local-based communism took advantage of its political local hegemony to develop a pattern of politization for electors. In these housing estates, a large part of residents, old-aged by now, arrived in the 1950s looking for work in factories. They were of French rural origin or first countries of immigration like Spain, Portugal or Italy. Those generations contributed to the praise of local communism because this city, through control and socialization, transformed them into a political generation characterized by a specific social situation as to the family structure, the industrial area, and the communitarian socialization. Communist activists and actors offered this uprooted population social dignity and pride. This feeling contributed to their electoral faithfulness to the PCF and still produces effects today regarding the gap between generations as far as voting is concerned. A communitarian counter-culture has erected from a specific working-class culture and against different imagined enemies like employers, upper class or rich people from Paris, etc. At the peak of the political identity of their area, they formed an objective and subjective attachment to the political actors and activists. Some of them turned out to be part of them. Actually, by studying this type of electors, we notice a link between a social identity, a territorial identity and a political identity erected by a specific sub-culture. This investigation is backed by plenty of quantitative data taken from questionnaires from the first rounds of the presidential, legislative and local elections in 2007 and 2008 in the polling stations I surveyed, as well as from more than 60 semi-directive interviews. Celia Hughes A window into the activist soul: the public and private spheres of housing within Britain 's far left network in the late 1960s and 1970s 20 Celia Hughes (Warwick University) 'A window into the activist soul: the public and private spheres of housing within Britain's far left activist network, 1967-1974.' The fluid nature of Britain's far left activist network, as it emerged and rapidly expanded in the late 1960s into the mid 1970s, was a central, perhaps its most defining feature. The connections between old and new left in Britain were far more complex and long lasting than in either Western Europe or the United States. Relations with the labour movement remained integral to both the practical political campaigning of the far left and to the activist identity. Yet simultaneously the crossfertilization of radical political and cultural ideas that occurred within the British network included activists' ready absorption of ideas and communicative forms from across the continent together with personal relations, which they formed with foreign activists. Examining the role of housing in Britain's activist network provides ready scope for highlighting the key characteristics of the activist enclaves. The issue of housing, as a basic human need, had long been a burning issue on the British left, and as such the housing campaigns that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s serve to illustrate a host of continuities remaining with the various tenets of the British left. The plethora of political links within the activist network both with its own left heritage and with those contacts from abroad were often innately personal in nature. As such venturing inside the private world of the activist household reveals the way in which personal contacts across the international left spectrum shaped the network, and how politics suffused often every intimate aspect of activists' lives and identities to such an extent that the boundaries between public and private blurred. Above all the snapshot of the activist's life that can be gleaned within the domestic setting provides valuable insights into the dreams and dilemmas that resulted from living one's life as politics. Cristian Popescu All Women’s Sacred Duty to the Fatherland: Nicolae Ceauşescu’s 1970s Romania in the Broader Context of International Communism This empirical paper explores some fundamental features of the complex relationship between personal autonomy and political authority in a communist context, with special emphasis on the condition of women. My working hypothesis is that the treatment of this (paramount in terms of numbers although not of status) category of citizens by the regime can provide meaningful insight into its nature, structure, and hierarchy of goals. The starting point for this analysis will be the question of life vs choice. The ban on abortion in communist Romania (legally binding from 1967 onwards) was not religiously but politically motivated. It put a brutal end to the first half of the communist rule that had claimed both to have suppressed the relevance of religion in the political, public, as well as private realms – and to have achieved enlightened gender equality instead of traditional male chauvinism. As such, it heralded a deeper change of stance in official ideology, changing its focus from fighting religious sentiment to using it, and from the rights of women to their duties. Major denominations in Romania had all been traditionally critical of abortion (and contraception, divorce, extramarital sex, etc.) ; the communist regime was violently opposed to major denominations ; thus its strong embrace of (very limited) forms of 21 sexual liberation in the wake of WWII seemed only natural politically. And moreover so ideologically justified. However, starting from the end of the 1960s, as Nicolae Ceauşescu met his time of glory on the international stage, he attempted to give his relatively small country the needed demographical means of his lofty political goals of “leader of non-aligned” countries, by twisting ideology once more towards the paramount cult of natalism albeit at the heavy cost of personal autonomy. His vigorous natalistic policies, supported by an aggressive State propaganda, included symbolic and material incentives as well as a panoply of repressive tools ranging from comparatively higher taxes paid by unmarried persons to significantly long time in prison served by persons involved in abortions. I will discuss all these developments in the broader context of the condition of women in communist Romania, as well as in other communist countries. Achievements both of individual women and of the woman status will be balanced against setbacks. The condition of women in communist Romania will be put in perspective not only in space but also in time – and that is, before, during, and after communism. 22 List of Conference Participants: Conference Participants: Contact Details: Tiago Avó tiagoavo@gmail.com Hanno Balz Hanno.Balz@uni-bremen.de Erato Basea erato.basea@stx.ox.ac.uk Patrick Cuninghame pcuninghame@hotmail.com Belinda Davis bedavis@rci.rutgers.edu Eros Francescangeli francescangeli@libero.it Sebastian Gehrig gehrig@asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de Anna-Maria v. d. Goltz anna-maria.menge@magd.ox.ac.uk David Gouard gouardd@yahoo.fr Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard isabelle.gourdin-sangouard@stir.ac.uk Gerd-Rainer Horn G-R.Horn@warwick.ac.uk Celia Hughes C.P.Hughes@warwick.ac.uk Irene Gerogianni iriniger@arch.auth.gr Thomas Ekman Jørgensen thomas.ekman.jorgensen@gmail.com Michael Kilburn mkilburn@endicott.edu Martin Klimke maklimke@gmail.com Kostis Kornetis kornetis@gmail.com Christiana Mygdali christiana.mygdali@chch.ox.ac.uk Nikolaos Papadogiannis npapadogian@googlemail.com Cristian Popescu cristian.popescu@sciences-po.org Pedro Ramos-Pinto pedro.ramospinto@manchester.ac.uk Aribert Reimann aribert.reimann@wadh.ox.ac.uk Eva Schandevyl Eva.Schandevyl@vub.ac.be Eva-Maria Silies eva-maria.silies@uni-hamburg.de Laura Skardhamar lauras@ruc.dk Andrew Tompkins andrew.tompkins@history.ox.ac.uk Marko Zubak markozubak@hotmail.com 23 

Call for papers for the International Conference: ““The personal is political”: The interfaces between Politics and Culture across Europe in the 1970s” Date: 26-27 August 2009 Location: Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. Organisers: Erato Basea (University of Oxford); Kathrin Fahlenbrach (University of Halle-Wittenberg); Sebastian Gehrig (University of Heidelberg); Martin Klimke (German Historical Institute and University of Heidelberg); Christiana Mygdali (University of Oxford); Nikolaos Papadogiannis (University of Cambridge); Joachim Scharloth (University of Zurich) Aims and scope: The collapse of the dictatorial regimes in Spain, Portugal and Greece, the Charter ´77, the activities of the second-wave feminist and of the ecologist movement and the emergence of Interrail train program are some of the multiple facets of the 1970s. The dynamics generated during this period have had an impact on theoretical endeavours, political activism as well as a plethora of social and cultural patterns. Still, to this day the academic treatment of the 1970s in the domain of social sciences in general and historiography in particular remains somewhat modest. As historians Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried argue, the historiography of the 1970s basically constitutes a “no-man´s land” suffering from two major deficits: Most works consist of national case-studies (mainly of the Federal Republic of Germany, France and Italy), and are predicated on the assumption that politicization in the 1970s should be judged solely against the metaphorical “1968,” either as an “afterlive” or its “discontinuity”- with the latter mainly understood as a “retreat to the private”. In this vein, the analysis of particular political and social subjects, namely radical left-wing organizations, terrorist groups and “counter-cultural” actors, such as rock music bands, is prioritized, even though there are still many lacunae in the examination of these actors as well. This conference aims to offer a different exploration of the 1970s, without neglecting the aforementioned actors. First, it attempts to widen the perspective to include previously neglected countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, thereby seeking to encompass developments across all of Europe and avoiding any isolated examinations of individual countries. Second, the conference will regard “1968” as just one parameter from which to analyze the following decade and will equally focus on the impact of developments such as the collapse of militaristic regimes, the “normalization” period in Czechoslovakia, or, for example, the prospective or potential entry of a number of Southern European countries, such as Greece, Portugal and Spain, to the EEC. Third, the conference will look at a broad spectrum of political actors, including those often dismissed as “dogmatic” or “Old Left,” from Maoist groups, Eurocommunist parties, which flourished in Italy and Spain in this period, to pro-USSR Western Communist Parties, such as KKE in Greece and PCP in Portugal. It will give equal attention to conservative or right-wing movements, organizations and parties, which emerged stronger in many European countries from the late 1960s, for example in Denmark. Fourth, the conference will explore the various forms of domestic and transnational interactions among these actors. Finally, the conference will put the very definition of “political protest” under scrutiny with regard to the 1970s by taking into account the (often seemingly “apolitical”) self-representations of social groups and organizations, such as transcendental groups or punk bands, in order arrive at a new understanding of how they conceptualized their protest and dissent. The conference will therefore not be confined to mapping the political topography of the 1970s: it will expand its focus to the everyday life practices in an increasingly globalized world. The “time-space compression” through the expanding youth tourism, the emergence of Interrail and the dissemination of television across Europe will be reflected upon in terms of their impact on processes of transnational diffusion and networks. Furthermore, the conference will examine the tension between these global interconnections as expressed, for example, in the growing influence and spread of “American” culture, and the notion of a specifically European cultural patterns and practices, as well as “traditions.” Moreover, we will seek to clarify whether a single “transnational civil society” arose in this period or whether the transnational flows among various politicized actors took place in a framework of multiple transnational publics, relatively detached from each other. The areas of particular interest are, for example: · How useful is the concept of “generation” as an analytical tool for the examination of the 1970s? · Rise of countercultural spaces and textual production (eg Sponti-Szene in the Federal Republic of Germany, Re Nudo magazine and theatre plays by Dario Fo and Franka Rame in Italy): experienced as continuity or rupture with the 1960s? The emergence of “Eurocommunism” and the interactions of organizations that described themselves as “Eurocommunist” (the dissemination and appropriations of their theoretical texts, youth festivals organized by eurocommunist parties and youth organizations, etc.). · Pro-Soviet communist organizations in Eastern and Western European countries. · Feminist and homosexual liberation movements and activities across Europe. · “Diverse Maoisms”, “Maoism as a European phenomenon”: Comparative and Transfer history approaches. Lifestyle of members of Maoist groups: their taste in music, cinema, theatre and literature and potential interaction with counter-cultural actors. · Networks and cultural practices among right-wing organizations. · Transcendental movements and religious cults. · The impact of globalisation on everyday life: guest workers, youth tourism, student migration. · Translation of literary and political works among social and political actors in Europe. · (Reciprocal) influences in the production and reception of European films. The conference aims at combining an in-depth analysis of concrete case-studies with reflection on theoretical concepts and methodological tools from various disciplines. The participants are warmly encouraged to elaborate on issues of methodology and to examine the merits of state-of-art relevant approaches (e.g. “histoire croisee,” (Werner/Zimmermann), “processual geography” and “life of things” (Appadurai), as well as “global history”). The conference will attempt to illuminate the advantages and disadvantages of various concepts with respect to an analysis of the relationship the “political” sphere and various lifestyles, particularly regarding concepts such as “sub-” and “counterculture.” The purpose of the conference is to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue. Thus, we aim at attracting scholars from the entire range of social sciences and humanities, including political science, history, social/cultural anthropology, media studies, history of art, linguistics, literature, sociology and geography. Actually, the fact that the conveners specialize in a variety of fields (History, Linguistics, Media Studies, Literature) reflects our endorsement of an inter-disciplinary approach. The organizing committee welcomes applications from both more advanced scholars and early stage researchers, namely PhD students and post-doctoral researchers. In order to achieve the best possible osmosis with the academic community of the University of Cambridge and to encourage participation, we do not intend to charge a registration fee. Abstracts not exceeding 400 words should be submitted by 15 May to one of the following organizers: Nikos Papadogiannis (np308@cam.ac.uk), Erato Basea (erato.basea@stx.ox.ac.uk), Christiana Mygdali (christiana.mygdali@chch.ox.ac.uk) or Sebastian Gehrig (sebastian.gehrig@gmx.net) .