The events of 1968 are often remembered as a global moment of protest, where ideas, tactics and solidarities travelled across borders. Yet examining these movements more closely reveals a more complex picture, one in which transnational connections were both enabling and deeply constrained. By compring Fidelis’ study of Poland and Davis’ analysis of Spain, it becomes clear that while activists engaged with global imaginaries and networks, their ability to translate this into tangible political success remained limited. At the same time, historians today may be attributing a form of agency that was not fully realised in the moment itself.
Fidelis’ article on Poland challenges traditional narratives of march 1968 by placing student protests within the framework of the ‘global sixties.’ Rather than viewing Polish student protests simply as dissdents opposing a repressive regime, she presents them as participants in a broader transnational left. These students engaged with global ideas (drawing on anti-imperialist struggles such as Vietnam and invoking figures like Castro) to articulate their critiques of both Soviet domination and global power strucutres. However, these connections were often more rhetorical than practical. Polish activists operated within a system that severely restricted international exchange, meaning that their engagement with the ‘Third World’ functioned largely as a symbolic language rather than a basis for sustained collaboration.
This liimitaiton was further stressed by the state itself. The communist regime appropriated transnational discourse, especially anti-imperialism, and redeployed it to undermine the protests. By framing students as foreign-influenced ‘Zionists’ or agents of imperialism, the state weaponised the same global imaginaries that the student wanted to mobilise. In this sense, Polish activists did not suceed in translating their transnational engagement into political transformaiton. Instead, their movement was violently suppressed and its global language turned against them.
Contrastingly, Davis’ article on Spain presents a more sustained and embedded form of transnational activism. Focusing on local movements in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Davis demonstrates how activists actively integrated Third World imaginaries into their political practice. Rather than merely referencing global struggles, Spanish activists built networks that connected local issues, such as urban inequality and authoritarian repression, to broader anti-imperialist and revolutionary frameworks. Progressive Catholic figures, for instance, drew on latin American liberation theology, while radical leftists adopted models inspired by movements in Algeria, Cuba and beyond.
These cases show that transnational connections are real but uneven. In Spain, activists embedded global ideas into local movements and sustained them over time, though often through imagined rather than direct links to the ‘Third World.’ In Poland, students were far less successful, as their protests were crushed and their transnational language was turned against them by the state.
This raises a broader question. As highlighted by Clavin, transnational history highlights flows and connections, but can risk overstating how coherent or effective they actually were. In both Poland and Spain, activists clearly saw themselves as part of a wider global struggle. They exercised agency through imagination and engagement with global ideas, but their ability to act as truly effective transnational actors was limited by repression, weak networks, and Cold War structrues.
So did they succeed? In immediate political terms, not really, but if success means contributing to a wider transnational political culture, their actions matter in a different way. What did not fully work at the time is, in hindsight, understood as part of a broader global history, one in which agency is nnot only exercised, but also reconstructed.
I very much agree with your appraisal of the inherently uneven nature of transnationalism in the sixties, there is often a tendency to tar these protests with a single brush of all being for a nebulous international desire for ‘freedom’. You address this directly by commenting on how even deliberate attempts to emulate or manufacture a globalised revolutionary identity such as with the Polish students fell short of actually achieving one.
As Fidelis states, the main tragedy of the 1968 Polish unrest was not the physical violence inflicted by the state but in how the communist regime masterfully hijacked the transnational discourse the students attempted to create. You rightly emphasise how the state weaponised globalised slogans against the students, particularly the portrayal of students as being either reactionary, ‘Zionist’ or of a disdained strain of leftism, such as cosmopolitan or otherwise ‘liberal’ socialism. In this we see the roots of the Eurocommunist split that would tear the European hard-left apart over the next few decades. Utilising these ideological smears the Party leadership were able to successfully alienate the students from their own society and any potential international solidarity they might have been able to gain.
A particularly comical part of the regime’s containment of the student protests was its utilisation of so-called ‘reactionary’ elements. For instance, when protesters attempted to link their domestic demands with that of global anti-imperialism by conflating the fight of the Vietnamese for a sovereign nation with their own, their message was suffocated by the employment of nationalist propaganda by the Polish state. This nationalist co-opt resulted in the regime’s crackdown and antisemitic purges following the protests being staunchly supported by the otherwise anti-Soviet and comparatively reactionary rural areas.
For your conclusion concerning their success, if any, I would have to agree tat they achieved essentially nothing materially. This can hardly be considered a failure of the Polish people however, the other main activist-centric protest of the period in France and the Prague Spring of the same year were similarly crushed before without achieving any of their stated goals. This failure to liberalise or at least loosen the grip of the Polish state caused, in my opinion, the most major schism in the European hard-left since the Trotskyite split, as Western communist parties began to become what is termed to be ‘Eurocommunist’ while the Polish United Workers’ Party joined many of its sisters in the Warsaw Pact of adhering to a far more conservative, nationalistic form of communism.