Abstract
The introduction puts the topic of Vietnam War protest into a global context. It briefly reviews relevant literature on protest in the era of the Indochina Wars and explains why the Vietnam War (or Second Indochina War) was so significant globally in terms of mobilising mutually interlinked liberation struggles, social movements, protest, and solidarity activities in different parts of the globe, harking back to the 1950s and fully unfolding during the second half of the 1960s. The historiographical inspiration for the entire volume is to shift our focus away from established perspectives that are thoroughly focused on US history with only peripheral attention paid to other parts of the world. The United States is thus no longer seen as the centre and origin of dissent that eventually spread outwards, making way for a more complex understanding of the interplay between the different world regions in the global emergence of protest.
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Notes
- 1.
Herbert Marcuse, “Vietnam—Analyse eines Exempels”, Neue Kritik 7 (1966), 30–40; English transl. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/Chapter6Doc3Intro.pdf.
- 2.
“The Seven-Point Proposal Constantly Forces Nixon Into A More Nervous and Passive State” (November 1971), Engl. transl. in CIA, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts (3 January 1972), K 4.
- 3.
On religious pacifism see David E. Settje, Faith and War: How Christians Debated the Cold and Vietnam Wars (New York: NYU Press, 2011); Sabine Rousseau, La colombe et le napalm: Des chrétiens français contre les guerres d’Indochine et du Vietnam, 1945–1975 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2002).
- 4.
Examples include Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), La guerre de Vietnam et l’Europe 1963–1973 (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003); Ingo Juchler, Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und -theorien aus der Dritten Welt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996); Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (eds.), 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Michael Schmidtke, Der Aufbruch der jungen Intelligenz: Die 68er Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und den USA (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003); Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
- 5.
Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach (eds.), America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 6.
Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (London: Allen Lane, 2017). An emblematic study for this globalising impetus is Young-sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), which, however, neither focuses on protest nor on the Vietnam War.
- 7.
Emblematic instances are Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Slobodian (ed.), Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York: Berghahn, 2015).
- 8.
Victoria Langland, “Transnational Connections,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 15–26.
- 9.
Eric Zolov, “Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties,” The Americas 70,3 (2014): 349–362, 354.
- 10.
See, for instance, Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
- 11.
Langland, “Transnational Connections,” 19 and 25.
- 12.
Katharine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: the Women’s International Democratic Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” Women’s History Review 25,6 (2016): 925–944.
- 13.
See, for instance, Sheila Rowbotham, “Vietnam,” in Women, Resistance, and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 206–220; Fabio Lanza, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
- 14.
Langland, “Transnational Connections,” 25.
- 15.
Ibid., 21.
- 16.
See Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
- 17.
Simon Hall, Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement (New York: Routledge, 2012); Melvin Small, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds (Wilmington: SR Books, 2002); Walter L. Hixson (ed.), The Vietnam Antiwar Movement (New York: Garland, 2000); Charles DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990).
- 18.
Accounts that are focused on US travelers to Vietnam are Mary Hershberger, Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Nationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Jessica M. Frazier, Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
- 19.
Ilya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003).
- 20.
Teishan Latner, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
Bibliography
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Daum, Andreas W., Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach (eds.), America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
DeBenedetti, Charles, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990).
Frazier, Jessica M., Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
Gaiduk, Ilya V., Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003).
Goscha, Christopher and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), La guerre de Vietnam et l’Europe 1963–1973 (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003).
Hall, Simon, Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Harmer, Tanya, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
Hershberger, Mary, Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998).
Hixson, Walter L. (ed.), The Vietnam Antiwar Movement (New York: Garland, 2000).
Hong, Young-sun, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Juchler, Ingo, Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und -theorien aus der Dritten Welt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996).
Klimke, Martin, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Klimke, Martin, and Joachim Scharloth (eds.), 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 2008).
Langland, Victoria, “Transnational Connections,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 15–26.
Lanza, Fabio, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Latner, Teishan, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
Marcuse, Herbert, “Vietnam—Analyse eines Exempels,” Neue Kritik 7 (1966): 30–40; English transl. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/Chapter6Doc3Intro.pdf.
McGregor, Katharine, “Opposing Colonialism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” Women’s History Review 25,6 (2016): 925–944.
Rousseau, Sabine, La colombe et le napalm: Des chrétiens français contre les guerres d’Indochine et du Vietnam, 1945–1975 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2002).
Rowbotham, Sheila, “Vietnam,” in Women, Resistance, and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 206–220.
Schmidtke, Michael, Der Aufbruch der jungen Intelligenz: Die 68er Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und den USA (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003).
Settje, David E., Faith and War: How Christians Debated the Cold and Vietnam Wars (New York: NYU Press, 2011).
Slobodian, Quinn (ed.), Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York: Berghahn, 2015).
Slobodian, Quinn, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
Small, Melvin, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds (Wilmington: SR Books, 2002).
Varon, Jeremy, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Westad, Odd Arne, The Cold War: A World History (London: Allen Lane, 2017).
Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, Radicals on the Road: Nationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
Zolov, Eric, “Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties,” The Americas 70,3 (2014): 349–362.
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Sedlmaier, A. (2022). Protest in the Era of the Indochina Wars: Upending Centre and Periphery. In: Sedlmaier, A. (eds) Protest in the Vietnam War Era. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_1
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