Youth too lost, scared to rebel say '68 veterans

By Sylvia Westall

BERLIN (Reuters) - Forty years after Dany Cohn-Bendit's flaming red hair and infectious smile became a symbol of idealized rebellion across Europe in 1968, today's students face a more fragmented fight.

Cohn-Bendit, now 62 and in the European parliament, says the difference between students then and now is simple.

"We had a much more positive feeling towards the future. This makes the social movement different from the ones you see today. Now there is more anxiety and fear."

The 1968 generation wanted to revolutionize society, battle against authoritarianism and demolish what they saw as the old social order. In the United States, demonstrations against the Vietnam War triggered massive peace marches worldwide.

Forty years on, those involved in the protests of 1968 say modern activist campaigns lack the force and scope of the movement which helped give birth to them.

Campaigns today may back a cause, they say, but they do not aspire to change the world in the way the '68ers sought to. Then young people, seeing authority embodied by monolithic institutions, envisaged a radically different social order based -- according to taste -- on Marxism, anarchism, or free love, with slogans such as "Be realistic, demand the impossible".

Where protesters in Paris 1968 lifted paving stones to build barricades and hurl at police, today market economics in its many forms reigns virtually unchallenged in a globalized world, and some from the 1968 generation argue that consumerism has dulled students' rebellious spirit.

Students face much tougher competition for jobs and much greater pressure to conform: for some, even the tame rebellion of self-expression through social networking sites on the Internet is a peril, risking rejection from future employers.

"Although the student movement may talk about cultural change, it nevertheless has precise goals -- to protest against job contract reforms or fight against university selection," said Juliette Griffond, spokeswoman for the French national students' union.

The jobless rate in Germany and France is above 8 percent. At the end of the 1960s, it was below 2 percent in France and West Germany.

Students have to focus on competing for jobs, Griffond said, because the French university population has grown -- seven-fold since the 1960s according to government data.

In Germany, many students have had to give up on changing society, said Anna Menge, an Oxford University researcher on 1960s-70s Germany.

"In 1968, students knew they had quite a good future in terms of job security. Now young people are much more conformist because they have to be. They have to engage and assimilate in order to compete in the job market," she said.

WANT A REVOLUTION

For German Green Party politician Hans-Christian Stroebele, who was a defense lawyer for left-wing militants in the 1960s and 70s, even the largest modern campaigns are more about individual issues than conviction.