cover image Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente

Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente

Jeremi Suri. Harvard University Press, $29.95 (355pp) ISBN 978-0-674-01031-4

This scholarly study of the global protest movements in the 1960s and their concomitant effect on governmental policy in the following era of detente weaves a grand theory regarding the influence of social unrest on the wielding of public power. According to Suri's""international history,"" the rise in student and worker discontent in the Cold War era--as exemplified not only in the demonstrations of Europe, America, Mexico and the Soviet Union, but in the Cultural Revolution in China as well--prompted leaders of all nations to isolate the realm of political power from the hands of the public. In a sense stripping the world theater of its ideological differences, Suri, a Univ. of Wisconsin assistant professor, finds similarity among leaders such as Charles de Gaulle and Mao Zedong as they fight insurgent forces at home and come to depend on a balance of power among nations to maintain their loosening grips on control. Detente""was a convergent response to disorder among the great powers,"" Suri argues, established to counteract a global""language of dissent"" that threatened to topple the world's institutions. Grand yet cautious, Suri's thesis links many events and personalities during a time of great change, and succeeds in""connecting the world of politics and diplomacy with social and cultural experiences"" and mapping a global history of the decade. But sometimes the author falls into a glancing, generic account of world events from a wide-angle view, which can reveal a theory soft enough to absorb anything. 16 half-tones.