Šolsko polje, letnik XX, številka 5-6, 2009: Vloga ... - Pedagoški inštitut

POVZETKI / ABSTRACTS161‘68 AS PARALLEL CRISIS OF BOTH EUROPEAN WEST AND EASTPrimož KrašovecEurope has, within its territory, become a dominant political concept only with the emergenceof discourses that propagated its unification into EU at the beginning of the nineties.Before that, in times when Europe was still divided, the role of the dominant politicalconcept, which determined the understanding and imagining of the European politicalspace, belonged to the division between (with a few errors) democratic West and socialistEast. During the development of the concept of Europe after the reunification of Germanyand other processes of European integration - which also included the integrationof previously disparate European political discourses into a united discourse of the new,unified Europe by the way of termination of revolutionary discourses, which have beforedivided this space into two – year ‘68 has a special role, since massive insurrections occuringat that time problematised both Western and Eastern type of socio-political orderingof the then Europe. During this crisis Europe emerged as a heiress of the common antifasciststruggle and as a potential space for the development of democratic socialism asa society of the future. Today, in times of the unified Europe, the political history of thepost-war Europe is often represented as a struggle and a final triumph of the free worldover socialist “totalitarianism”. The aim of our analysis is to show that political dynamic ofthat era was much more complex.Keywords: Europe, West, East, socialism, democracy