Beyond Transnationalism: Mapping the Spatial Contours of Political Activism in Europe’s Long 1970s

This book is a collection of case studies that provides fresh insights into the history of political activism in Europe’s long 1970s. It covers the full spectrum of such groups, from the far left to the neofascist right, and from the various parts of Europe, including East and West. The chapters in this book push the boundaries of our knowledge with regard to transnational spaces. For many political activists at the time, identifying with a ’transnational’ or ’global’ protest movement provided both legitimacy for their claims and stood for the promise of sweeping change. Existing research has often reproduced such perceptions. This book goes beyond such an approach by distinguishing between different forms of transnational spaces. More specifically, it recognizes important differences between imagined spaces of solidarity and belonging, spaces of knowledge circulation and spaces of social experience and political action. Each chapter uses this new framework and analyses the interrelationship and significance of each of these three spaces.

Beyond Transnationalism will be of particular interest to historians, political scientists and educators. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.

Sonja Levsen is Professor of History at the University of Trier. Her research focuses on the cultural and social history of twentieth-century Europe in transnational and comparative perspectives, with special attention to British, French and German history. She has published on political culture in interwar Britain and Germany, on youth in post-1945 Europe, on the history of democracy after 1945 and on the transformation processes of French and German societies after the Second World War, with special focus on education.

Kiran Klaus Patel is Professor of History at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich and founding director of LMU’s Project House Europe, a research centre on Europe’s contemporary history. His research focuses on transnational and global approaches to history and empirically on nineteenth- and twentieth-century US American and European history.