Preface

Turkish Historical Review, vol. 12, pp. 105–107

Abstract

Even half a century later the 'events of 1968' , seen as the culmination of the cultural and social transformation of the sixties, still engender a lot of interest.Indeed: one could say that 1968 has achieved a kind of mythical status.Partly that is, of course, linked to a generational issue.Students and dropouts in their twenties played a dominant role in the different political protest movements of the late sixties, in the development of countercultures, in the sexual revolution and in the outburst of musical creativity of the time.The survivors of this generation are now, of course, the quintessential 'boomers' who look back fondly at this period as the heroic era of their lives, as well as their youth.Many of the protagonists of '68' in the West did not survive (although it has to be said that drugs caused far more fatalities than state violence) but those that did are now often respected members of the establishment-something symbolized by the award of the Nobel prize to that reluctant icon of the protest movement Bob Dylan in 2016.Turkey is one of the countries in which '1968' (as a shorthand for the movements that rocked the world in the sixties and early seventies) has always received a great deal of interest and that interest seems only to have increased in recent years.In the Turkish case that seems to have less to do with the nostalgia of a generation of former activists than with an interest among younger intellectuals and academics in the alternatives offered by the activism of the sixties and seventies and what it might have to offer in terms of analyses or solutions for today's issues.That, to me, seems to be a big difference between the way '68' is remembered (and studied) in Europe or the United States on the one hand, and Turkey on the other-the underlying notion that it is not only interesting historically, but relevant.The underlying question motivating many publications on 1968 in Turkey seems to be 'What went wrong?'This double special issue is an expression of that interest.It asks some very interesting questions.It recognizes that '1968' was a global phenomenon but that it took on different shapes according to the different social and political circumstances, and the historical setting, in which the activists had to operate.The question to what extent the movements of the sixties and seventies in Turkey were part of a global wave and to what extent they had specific characteristics of their own is at the heart of this special issue.The transnational dimension is investigated both in the sense of comparison between the

Authors 1

1. Erik Jan Zurcher corresponding Aachen Emeritus Professor Chair of Turkish Studies Institute for Area Studies

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Emeritus Professor, Chair of Turkish Studies, Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands, e.j.zurcher@hum.leidenuniv.nl