"If one day that hour returns". The New Left between anti-fascist memories and Third Worldism

Abstract

This article offers a new genealogy of the New Left in Western Europe as it developed from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Differently from prevalent interpretations, it reassesses the historical influence of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), and "Third-Worldism" more generally, in the genealogy of the new political cultures that flourished during the global 1960s. A whole generation of activists appropriated the memory of the anti-fascist Resistance, giving it a function that was not simply defensive but also proactive and merging the myth of the "betrayed Resistance" with the idea of imperialism as the "new Fascism". The European civil war, which Enzo Traverso has defined the distinctive feature of the first half of the twentieth century, was thus reconfigured worldwide as a "global civil war".