From Coherence to Fragments: '1968' and the Making of Youth Politicisation in Greece in the 1970s

Abstract

First paragraph: Youth protest in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe has attracted increasing interest from the social sciences. In the current state of art, ‘1968’ features prominently as a focal point in a number of overlapping teleologies. One approach links the formation of youth cultures in the late 1950s with the student uprisings in the late 1960s in which the examination of the case study of the Federal Republic of Germany predominates. For a number of social scientists, such as Uta Poiger and Kaspar Maase, the student uprisings in West Germany in1968 were related to the mass consumerism and increasing “sexual openness” that had developed since the late 1950s: Young men and women in the latter period are described as challenging conservative social norms that constrained their interaction and which sanctioned premarital sexual relations, by appropriating American cultural products, such as “western” movies, rock and jazz music. This subversion is argued to have been expressed in the form of concrete political demands about sexuality during the youth revolts in the late 1960s.