Introduction

In a speech on worldwide student unrest, the executive secretary of the InterAgency Youth Committee Robert Cross in 1968 discerned five factors that separated current youthful unrest from its historical precedents. According to Cross, “quantitative growth, democratization of education, ‘post-modernism,’ the education explosion and the creation of a ‘youth class’” distinguished student activism at the end of the 1960s. Due to its global dimension and an increasing utilization of violence, governments worldwide suddenly paid attention to this phenomenon after years of polite yet largely unsuccessful requests for change voiced by the students. What was even more significant was that, in Cross’s view, students had formed the “first truly international generation”: A steady stream of student activists have become internationally selfperpetuating and multiplying. […] The 1968-style international student movement is international not because it is organized but rather because young people in many countries are facing the same human problems and applying the same basic approaches to their solution. It is equally certain, however, that a great cross-fertilization, a very rapid and effective student grape-vine, functions. What happens in New York is known overnight in Paris and Manila. The speeches of Rudi Dutschke are in the hands of Mark Rudd faster than you can seem to get your mail delivered.¹