This historical research project asked about how to account for a series of transnational political and cultural shifts within the broader crisis of the radical Left in Western Europe at the end of the Seventies and in early Eighties. Such questions can help us to understand the broader transformations of democratic political culture in Europe during a period of significant transformations that followed the 1968 events and in the contexts of the reciprocal influences of the women’s movement, counterculture, and ecological movements on the one hand and the radical Left on the other during the Seventies and early Eighties. This project also looked at how the broader responses of institutional actors (the state, political parties, the police) helped to inform local expressions of political radicalism, and investigated how subcultures of political violence were shaped by state practices and national and local conditions. Specific overall objectives were to evaluate the extent of the transnational convergence of political cultures and practices popularized first in Italy by the Autonomia movement and diffused to neighboring France, West Germany, and Switzerland; to evaluate how institutional actors reacted to these processes and their impacts; to identify agents of transnationalization and identify and explain disparate scales of radical activity; and to revise our historical scholarship on this period.
The researcher was able to identify similar processes of political and cultural negotiation within the radical Left at the end of the Seventies in a multi-national civic space, and the research also underscored the common influence of second-wave feminism on radicals and the decline of the industrial working class as the privileged figure of radical strategy. It showed that there was a large diffusion of similar cultural themes between radical milieus in France, Italy, Switzerland, and West Germany and a common shift away from the factory floor as the main site of political interventions. It showed how the transnationalization of novel themes and motifs was facilitated by left-wing journalists and intellectuals who constructed a network of interconnected publications as well as by international conferences and events that brought together radicals from different national settings. The analysis also demonstrated that the extent of judicial repression and state violence towards radical movements was a highly significant factor in shaping local subcultures, particularly when it came to issues of political violence. Meanwhile, the scale of international diffusion was highly uneven and, confirming previous scholarship, Autonomia remained a largely Italian phenomenon, even if other radical milieus in France, West Germany, and Switzerland proved receptive to similar themes and practices. Both the published and forthcoming work and the researchers’ manuscripts will allow a further revision of our scholarship on the period aligned on recent work on transnational alternative milieus.
