1968 saw a worldwide escalation of protests, which were predominantly characterized by the rise of left-wing politics, anti-war sentiment, civil rights urgency, youth counterculture within the Silent and baby boomer generations, and popular rebellions against military states and bureaucracies.
In the United States, the protests marked a turning point for the civil rights movement, which produced revolutionary movements like the Black Panther Party. In reaction to the Tet Offensive, protests also sparked a broad movement in opposition to the Vietnam War all over the United States as well as in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. Mass movements grew in the United States but also elsewhere. In most Western European countries, the protest movement was dominated by students.
The most prominent manifestation was the May 1968 protests in France, in which students linked up with wildcat strikes of up to ten million workers, and for a few days, the movement seemed capable of overthrowing the Charles de Gaulle's government. In many other countries, struggles against dictatorships, political or sectarian tensions and authoritarian rule were also marked by protests in 1968, such as the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, and the escalation of guerrilla warfare against the military dictatorship in Brazil.
In the countries of Eastern Europe under communist parties, there were protests against lack of freedom of speech and violation of other civil rights by the communist bureaucratic and military elites. In Central and Eastern Europe, there were widespread protests that escalated, particularly in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, in Warsaw, Poland, and in Yugoslavia. Outside the Western world there were protests in Japan, Egypt, and Pakistan.
Background
Multiple factors created the protests in 1968. Many were in response to perceived injustice by governments—in the US, against the Johnson administration—and were in opposition to the draft, and the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.
Post-war world
After World War II, much of the world experienced an unusual surge in births, creating a large age demographic. These babies were born during a time of peace and dramatic improvement in the economic situation for many major countries while at the same time there was a significant expansion of media—baby boomers were the first generation to have TV in their homes.
Television had a profound effect on this generation in two ways. First, it gave them a common perspective from which to view the world. The children growing up in this era shared the news and programs that they watched on television, and got glimpses of each other's worlds. Secondly, television allowed them to experience major public events. Public education was becoming more widely attended, creating another shared experience. Chain stores and franchised restaurants were bringing shared shopping and dining experiences to people in different parts of the world.
The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War was another shared experience of this generation. The knowledge that a nuclear warfare could end their life at any moment was reinforced with classroom "duck and cover" bomb drills creating an omnipresent atmosphere of fear. As they became older, the anti-war, civil rights, peace, and feminist movement for women's equality were becoming forces in much of the world.
The Eastern Bloc had already seen several mass protests in the decades following World War II, including the Hungarian Revolution, the uprising in East Germany and several labor strikes in Poland, especially important ones in Poznań in 1956.
Waves of social movements throughout the 1960s began to shape the values of the generation who were students during 1968. In America, the civil rights movement was at its peak, but was also at its most violent, such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on 4 April by alleged white supremacist James Earl Ray. In Northern Ireland, religious division paved the way for a decades-long violent conflict between Irish republicans and Irish unionists.
Italy and France were in the midst of a socialist movement. The New Left political movement was causing political upheavals in many European and South American countries. In China, the Cultural Revolution had reached its peak. The Arab–Israeli conflict had started in the early 20th century, the British anti-war movement had remained strong and African independence movements had continued to grow in number. In Poland in March 1968, student demonstrations at Warsaw University broke out when the government banned the performance of a play by Adam Mickiewicz (Dziady, written in 1824) at the Polish Theatre in Warsaw, on the grounds that it contained "anti-Soviet references". It became known as the March 1968 events.
The women's liberation movement caused generations of females to question the global status quo of unequal empowerment of women, and the post-war baby boomer generation came to reassess and redefine their priorities about marriage and motherhood. The peace movement made them question authority more than ever before. By the time they started college, the majority of young people identified with an anti-establishment culture, which became the impetus for the wave of rebellion and re-imagination that swept through campuses and throughout the world. College students of 1968 embraced progressive, liberal politics. Their progressive leanings and skepticism of authority were a significant impetus to the global protests of 1968.
Dramatic events of the year in the Soviet Bloc revealed that the radical leftist movement was ambivalent about its relationship to communism. The 2–3 June 1968 student demonstrations in Yugoslavia, were the first mass protest in the country after the Second World War. The authorities suppressed the protest, while President Josip Broz Tito had the protests gradually cease by giving in to some of the students' demands. Protests also broke out in other capitals of Yugoslav republics—Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Ljubljana—but they were smaller and shorter than in Belgrade.
In 1968, Czechoslovakia underwent a process known as the Prague Spring. In August 1968 during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovak citizens responded to the attack on their sovereignty with passive resistance. Soviet troops were frustrated as street signs were painted over, their water supplies mysteriously shut off, and buildings decorated with flowers, flags, and slogans like, "An elephant cannot swallow a hedgehog." Passers-by painted swastikas on the sides of Soviet tanks. Road signs in the country-side were over-painted to read, in Russian script, "Москва" (Moscow), as hints for the Soviet troops to leave the country.
On 25 August 1968 eight Russian citizens staged a demonstration on Moscow's Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After about five minutes, the demonstrators were beaten up and transferred to a police station. Seven of them received harsh sentences up to several years in prison.
Protests
The protests that raged throughout 1968 included a large number of workers, students, and poor people facing increasingly violent state repression all around the world. Liberation from state repression itself was the most common current in all protests listed below. These refracted into a variety of social causes that reverberated with each other: in the United States alone, for example, protests for civil rights, against nuclear weapons and in opposition to the Vietnam War, and for women's liberation all came together during this year. Television, so influential in forming the political identity of this generation, became the tool of choice for the revolutionaries. They fought their battles not just on streets and college campuses, but also on the television screen with media coverage.
As the waves of protests of the 1960s intensified to a new high in 1968, repressive governments through widespread police crackdowns, shootings, executions, and even massacres marked social conflicts in Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and China. In West Berlin, Rome, London, Paris, Italy, many American cities, and Argentina, labor unions and students played major roles and also suffered political repression.
Mass movements
The environmental movement can trace its beginnings back to the protests of 1968. The environmental movement evolved from the anti-nuclear movement. France was particularly involved in environmental concerns. In 1968, the French Federation of Nature Protection Societies and the French branch of Friends of the Earth were formed and the French scientific community organized Survivre et Vivre (Survive and Live). The Club of Rome was formed in 1968. The Nordic countries were at the forefront of environmentalism. In Sweden, students protested against hydroelectric plans. In Denmark and the Netherlands, environmental action groups protested about pollution and other environmental issues. The Northern Ireland civil rights movement began to start, but resulted in the conflict now known as The Troubles.
In January, police used clubs on 400 anti-war/anti-Vietnam protesters outside of a dinner for U.S. Secretary of State Rusk. In February, students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Boston University held a four-day hunger strike to protest the Vietnam war. Ten thousand West Berlin students held a sit-in against American involvement in Vietnam. People in Canada protested the Vietnam War by mailing 5,000 copies of the paperback, Manual for Draft Age Immigrants to Canada to the United States.
On 6 March, five hundred New York University (NYU) students demonstrated against Dow Chemical because the company was the principal manufacturer of napalm, used by the U.S. military in Vietnam. On 17 March, an anti-war demonstration in Grosvenor Square, London, ended with 86 people injured and 200 demonstrators arrested. Japanese students protested the presence of the American military in Japan because of the Vietnam War.
In March, British students opposing the Vietnam War, physically attacked the British Defense Secretary, the Secretary of State for Education and the Home Secretary. In August, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was disrupted by five days of street demonstrations by thousands of protesters. Chicago's mayor, Richard J. Daley, escalated the riots with excessive police presence and by ordering up the National Guard and the army to suppress the protests.
On 7 September, the women's liberation movement gained international recognition when it demonstrated at the annual Miss America beauty pageant. The protest and its disruption of the pageant gave the issue of equal rights for women significant attention and signaled the beginning of the end of "beauty pageants" as any sort of aspiration for young females, and 'square' themed content in general.
Brazil
On March 28, the Brazilian Military Police killed high school student Edson Luís de Lima Souto during a protest for cheaper meals at a restaurant for low-income students. The consequences of his death generated one of the first major protests against the military dictatorship in Brazil, known as the March of the One Hundred Thousand, and incited a nationwide wave of anti-dictatorship student demonstrations throughout the year.
Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union
In what became known as Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia's first secretary Alexander Dubček began a period of reform, which gave way to outright civil protest, only ending when the USSR invaded the country in August. On 25 August, anti-war protesters gathered in Red Square only to be dispersed. It was titled the 1968 Red Square demonstration.
France
The May 1968 protests in France began with student mobilizations against rigid university rules and conservative social values. Subsequently, the movement expanded with the participation of workers, resulting in general strikes that paralyzed the country and placed the government in a serious political crisis.
Italy
On 1 March, a clash known as the Battle of Valle Giulia took place between students and police in the faculty of architecture in the Sapienza University of Rome. In March, Italian students closed the university for 12 days during an anti-war protest.
Japan
Protests in Japan, organized by socialist student group Zengakuren, were held against the Vietnam War starting 17 January, coinciding with the visit of the USS Enterprise to Sasebo. In May, violent student protests erupted at multiple Japanese universities, having started earlier in the year from disputes between faculty and students for more student rights and lower tuition fees. Students occupied buildings and clashed with staff, holding "trials" in public.
Mexico
Mexican university students mobilized to protest Mexican government authoritarianism and sought broad political and cultural changes in Mexico. The entire summer leading up to the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics had a series of escalating conflicts between Mexican students with a broad base of non-student supporters and the police. Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz saw the massive and largely peaceful demonstrations as a threat to Mexico's image on the world stage and to his government's ability to maintain order.