Tensions of Transnationalism: Youth Rebellion, State Backlash, and 1968 in Poland

Abstract

Abstract This article looks at Polish students who attempted to challenge the communist state’s hegemony with their own alternative interpretation of leftist politics during the pivotal era of the global sixties. This challenge culminated in student and youth demonstrations in March 1968 and the state’s violent reaction. In contrast to dominant narratives that depict 1968 in Poland and Eastern Europe as primarily shaped by the domestic political context, this article shows Polish students not simply as protesters against a “totalitarian” regime, but as active participants in a contemporary global search for a new kind of leftism. This quest involved turning away from the state as a potential vehicle for a socialist transformation, reformulating ideas of justice and solidarity, and engaging in leftist conversations across borders. The concept of transnational imagination is central to this discussion as both the young people and the state projected different visions of transnational solidarities and were influenced by crises happening elsewhere, including the Vietnam War and the Six-Day War in the Middle East. In Poland, the communist regime deployed and weaponized the transnational imagination against the protesters by launching a powerful antisemitic campaign. Stigmatizing protesters as Zionists and foreign agents alien to the Polish national community, the campaign solidified the racialized understanding of the “Polish nation,” which had lasting political consequences, including the shape of oppositional politics in the 1970s and 1980s.