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The year 1968 entered history as a culmination of a series of socio-political and cultural transformations that triggered the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of protest against the shackles of modernity, fostering countercultural values and attempting to replace hierarchical authority with ample democratization guaranteeing individual rights, equality, and freedom. The first half of the twentieth century was shaped by World Wars, in which personal sacrifices on behalf of nation states' collective goals decimated the life of millions of persons. However, after World War II, the reconstruction process in Europe produced a social democratic moment that gave rise to ‘a dense tissue of social benefits and economic strategies in which it was the state that served its subjects, rather than the other way around’ (Judt, 2006: 360). These practices might have functioned as a conscious and unconscious State strategy to work through the damage that the dark times had caused to citizens. Thus, even if illusory, a collective feeling of social cohesion and belonging seemed to prevail in the post-war period (Penna, forthcoming). At the same time, the resulting economic boom, combined with the benefits of the welfare state in association with the rapid capitalist transformations in the socio-cultural spheres, paved the way for the resurgence of individualistic claims in Western societies, reaching their apex during the 1960s and 1970s.
In parallel, while the Cold War itself never escalated into direct confrontation, conflicts in China, Indonesia, and Iran related to political polarization, as well as African anti-colonial wars and Latin American dictatorships, emerged to create the foundations for several of today's international conflicts. These worldwide struggles determined the ideological, international and domestic framework in which the political, social and cultural changes evolved (Westad, 2007). It was during this Cold War period that new social movements emerged, opposing