Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente - Hardcover

Suri, Jeremi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674010310 ISBN 13: 9780674010314

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2003

Synopsis

In a brilliantly conceived book, Jeremi Suri puts the tumultuous 1960s into a truly international perspective in the first study to examine the connections between great power diplomacy and global social protest. Profoundly disturbed by increasing social and political discontent, Cold War powers united on the international front, in the policy of detente. Though reflecting traditional balance of power considerations, detente thus also developed from a common urge for stability among leaders who by the late 1960s were worried about increasingly threatening domestic social activism.

In the early part of the decade, Cold War pressures simultaneously inspired activists and constrained leaders; within a few years activism turned revolutionary on a global scale. Suri examines the decade through leaders and protesters on three continents, including Mao Zedong, Charles de Gaulle, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He describes connections between policy and protest from the Berkeley riots to the Prague Spring, from the Paris strikes to massive unrest in Wuhan, China.

Designed to protect the existing political order and repress movements for change, detente gradually isolated politics from the public. The growth of distrust and disillusion in nearly every society left a lasting legacy of global unrest, fragmentation, and unprecedented public skepticism toward authority.

About this title

About the Author

Jeremi Suri is E. Gordon Fox Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Reviews

This scholarly study of the global protest movements in the 1960s and their concomitant effect on governmental policy in the following era of detente weaves a grand theory regarding the influence of social unrest on the wielding of public power. According to Suri's "international history," the rise in student and worker discontent in the Cold War era-as exemplified not only in the demonstrations of Europe, America, Mexico and the Soviet Union, but in the Cultural Revolution in China as well-prompted leaders of all nations to isolate the realm of political power from the hands of the public. In a sense stripping the world theater of its ideological differences, Suri, a Univ. of Wisconsin assistant professor, finds similarity among leaders such as Charles de Gaulle and Mao Zedong as they fight insurgent forces at home and come to depend on a balance of power among nations to maintain their loosening grips on control. Détente "was a convergent response to disorder among the great powers," Suri argues, established to counteract a global "language of dissent" that threatened to topple the world's institutions. Grand yet cautious, Suri's thesis links many events and personalities during a time of great change, and succeeds in "connecting the world of politics and diplomacy with social and cultural experiences" and mapping a global history of the decade. But sometimes the author falls into a glancing, generic account of world events from a wide-angle view, which can reveal a theory soft enough to absorb anything. 16 half-tones.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674010310
• ISBN 13: 9780674010314
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384