A Nova Esquerda na Holanda, França e Alemanha

Paul Lucardie é investigador na Universidade de Groeningen. Democratic Radicalism Resurrected: the New Left in the Netherlands, Germany and France foi o título da sua comunicação na conferência New World Coming: the sixties and the shaping of a global consciousness, realizada na Queen’s University, em Kingston (Canadá), entre 13 e 16 de Junho de 2007. Nela, Lucardie traça um quadro comparativo da evolução da Nova Esquerda nos países referidos entre a década de cinquenta e a década de noventa, centrando a sua análise nos «anos quentes» de sessenta. O texto, inédito, aponta as linhas centrais de uma tese de doutoramento já concluída e é apresentado com a devida permissão do autor.

All New Left movements (in the wider sense of the term) seemed to share two characteristics. In the first place, they refused to take sides in the Cold War between Western capitalism and Eastern socialism, unlike social democrats and communists who sided with the former or the latter camp. Many, but certainly not all New Leftists justified their neutralism in pacifist terms; but practically all criticized the nuclear arms race between the USA and the USSR. In the second place, all New Left groups emphasized democracy, which seemed to decline on both sides, in their opinion, and should be renewed and revitalized somehow. How this should be done, was a question that divided the New Left, especially through time. One could distinguish five stages here – going beyond the 1960s. [continua aqui>>]