Why does 1968 matter today? The authors of this volume believe that it is a crucial point of reference for current developments, especially the ‘illiberal turn’ both in Europe and America. If we want to understand it, we need to look back into 1968 – the year that founded the cultural and political order of today’s world. The book consists of the following four sections: '1968 and transnationality', '1968 and the transformation of meanings', 'Artistic representations of 1968', and '1968 and the European contemporaity'. This is followed by an afterword from the significant keynote speaker at the conference Unsettled 1968: Origins – Myth – Impact in June 2018 in Tübingen, Germany: Irena Grudzinska-Gross, herself a Polish ‘68er’, reflects upon the conference and leaves remarks on her 50 years of engagement with what happened in 1968.

The 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe was not only a human and ecological disaster, but also a political-ideological one, severely discrediting Soviet governance and galvanizing dissidents in the Eastern Bloc. In the case of Poland, what began as isolated protests against the Soviet nuclear site grew to encompass domestic nuclear projects in general, and in the process spread across the country and attracted new segments of society. This innovative study, combining scholarly analysis with oral histories and other accounts from participants, traces the growth and development of the Polish anti-nuclear movement, showing how it exemplified the broader generational and cultural changes in the nation’s opposition movements during the waning days of the state socialist era.

Examining the ways in which societies treat their most vulnerable members has long been regarded as revealing of the bedrock beliefs and values that guide the social order. However, academic research about the post-war welfare state is often focused on mainstream arrangements or on one social group. With its focus on different marginalized groups: migrants and people with disabilities, this volume offers novel perspectives on the national and international dimensions of the post-war welfare state in Western Europe and North America.

This book advances a local, regional, and comparative analysis of the history of the sixty-eighters from Hungary and Romania between 1956 and 1975. The aim of the book is to answer to the following research question: to what extent does ‘the long 1968’ mark and change protest history? Another axis of my research, equally important, is: how can one genuinely distinguish between a protest, an opposition, and a pastime? Where did radicalisation truly begin, and when was it solely an auto-perception as a dissident? In other words, how can one truly distinguish between a leisure activity like listening to Radio Free Europe or exploring an altered state of consciousness, and an explicit political activity like organising a protest or writing subversive texts? Among other aims, the books’s scope is to understand where a leisure activity ends, and a protest starts. By ‘practicing counterculture,’ did the youth wish to contest the system or simply express themselves? As method, oral history plays a crucial part. On a superficial level, the interviews helped to fill in the archival gap. However, oral testimonies proved to reveal much more than essential factual information. Oral history clarified how political and social events influenced the subjects' memory formation.

In the region known as Eastern and East-Central Europe, the framework provided by memory studies became highly valuable for understanding the overload of interpretations and conflicting perspectives on events during the twentieth century. The trauma of two world wars, the development of collective consciousness according to national and ethnic categories, stories of the trampled lands and lives of people, and resistance to the rule of authoritarian and totalitarian terrors—these trajectories left complex layers of identities to unfold. The following volume addresses the issue of identity as a pivot in studies of memory and literature. In this context, it addresses the question of cultural negotiation as it took shape between memory and literature, history and literature, and memory and history, with the help of contemporary authors and their works. The authors take the literature of countries such as Estonia, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, and Russia as the point of departure, and explain its significance in terms of geographical, theoretical, and thematic perspectives.

The Sixties occupy a prominent place in popular culture and scholarship as an era of global upheavals, including the Civil Rights Movement, de-colonization, radical social movements, student and youth protests, and the Vietnam War. This pioneering book explores the seemingly isolated Eastern bloc and a non-capitalist context, demonstrating the impact of those global upheavals on young people in Poland in the form of international youth culture, protest movements, and counterculture.

Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.