Imagined transnationalism? Mapping transnational spaces of political activism in Europe’s long 1970s

ABSTRACT For many political activists in the long 1970s, identifying with a ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ protest movement provided both legitimacy for their claims and stood for the promise of sweeping change. This special issue argues that research focusing on processes of ‘transnationalization’ has often tended to reproduce such perceptions. Building upon a recently emerging trend to diversify the methodological repertoire of transnational history, the authors propose that it is time to take clear analytical distance from the perspectives of contemporary activists and go beyond examining the sheer act and fact of border crossing. Instead, we need to analyse competing transnational spaces of the long 1970s, of which they propose to distinguish three: imagined spaces of belonging and solidarity; spaces of knowledge circulation; and spaces of social experience and political action. Seeing them in their physical, geographical dimension and relating them to each other allows us to ask new questions and to develop a more precise picture of the spatial transformations of the period.