The Long 1960s and the Roots of Modern Liberalism
Part 1: The social and political transformations of the 1960s and early 1970s were not a single revolution, but a chain of developments that steadily dismantled the postwar settlement that had taken shape after 1945. For roughly the first two to three decades after the war, ruling elites and legal frameworks across much of the Western world remained socially conservative, ideologically pragmatic, and unapologetic in foreign policy. Hierarchy, national continuity, traditional moral regulation, and a relatively hard conception of sovereignty and national interest were still the default assumptions. In their place emerged the socially liberal frameworks—centered on individual rights, cultural openness, and a more universalist, rules-based language—that still define much of modern Western politics.
This distinction matters because the common retrospective image of the West as having moved directly from the Second World War into the liberal society of the present is historically misleading. The decades immediately after 1945 were not simply the first stage of today's social order. They represented a distinct postwar settlement: democratic and increasingly welfare-oriented, but still socially conservative, nationally bounded, restrictive on immigration, deferential toward established institutions, and confident in traditional conceptions of family, religion, morality, sovereignty, and national continuity. The West was politically democratic and, in many countries, economically more egalitarian than before the war, but it was not yet socially liberal in the sense that would become dominant several decades later.
In the United States, the sequence began with the Civil Rights Movement, which broke the legal structure of racial hierarchy and established a new moral language of individual rights. The Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the old European-preference system and opened the way toward a fundamentally different conception of American national identity. Anti-war protest and the counterculture then accelerated the broader transformation. The sexual revolution and the rise of second-wave feminism translated cultural change into durable legal reforms: greater female autonomy, abortion rights, a reworking of family law, and a fundamental shift in expectations surrounding gender and personal freedom.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 added another dimension to this transformation. It brought the possibility of nuclear war into the consciousness of ordinary people on an unprecedented scale, creating a widespread sense that a Third World War could become a reality within days. Coming at the beginning of the decade's wider cultural upheaval, the crisis contributed to a growing rejection among some younger people of conventional restraint, delayed gratification, and established social expectations, reinforcing the turn toward more unconventional, individualistic, and hedonistic lifestyles.
The same currents swept through Europe and the wider Western world. In France, the upheaval of 1968 exposed the exhaustion of Gaullism's synthesis of national grandeur, hierarchical leadership, and managed modernization. De Gaulle's defeat in the 1969 referendum and subsequent resignation marked the end of that postwar sovereign style.
In West Germany, the generational confrontation with the Nazi past increasingly became a confrontation with the older establishment itself. Much of the postwar political and administrative elite had held positions within the institutions of the Third Reich, even when individuals had not been committed Nazis. Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member who had worked in the Foreign Ministry under Hitler, became a particularly potent symbol of this continuity. When student activist Beate Klarsfeld slapped him in 1968, the gesture captured a generation's refusal to regard that continuity as politically irrelevant.