The "Long '68" period is characterized by a potent re-emergence of minority nationalisms, protest regionalisms, and Indigenous ambitions in the West, from Brittany to Québec, passing through Catalonia, Wales, Australia, and New Zealand. This book reviews some of the most representative cases as well as lesser-known examples, attending to the chronology, causes and consequences of this period’s nationalist renewal.

This collection of essays is the first to propose a global and comparative view of this “national wave” in an attempt to understand the simultaneousness of these movements. Several hypotheses are put forward. The profound sociocultural changes caused by the socioeconomic “Golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s forced social groups and individuals to call into question their worldview, as the culture they inherited grew increasingly distant from reality. Moreover, the internal influence of the decolonizing and anti-imperialist struggles weakened the nation-state and offered regionalist militants a new discursive repertoire. Finally, the social struggles of the New Left and the generalised spirit of protest of the 1960s-70s –which reached their zenith in 1968 – had a cognitive impact that paved the way to an ideological transformation unlike any seen before.

This book offers a historiographic analysis of the “Long 1968” period in its many dimensions (political, socioeconomic, cultural) as well as a theoretical and sociological reflection on the dynamics and shades of its nationalist and regionalist claims. It is the first comparative study of international scope to shed light on the simultaneous re-emergence of claims of a nationalist nature among minorities in this decade of protest and utopia.

Published in French.

Contributions by: Maria Ackrén, Thierry Dominici, Gary Foley, Andrea Geniola, Clause Hauser, Richard Hill, Edina Howell, Nathalie Kermoal, Gilles Leydier, Yan Lespoux, Philippe Martel, Carlo Pala, Daniel Poitras, Xosé M. Nuñez Seixas