Martin, Klimke. The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Summary
Despite extensive scholarly research that has examined the global significance of the 1960s, Martin Klimke argues that “the exact processes through which activists from numerous countries established contact, shared ideas, and adopted each other’s social and cultural practices are still largely unexplored.” (2) Thus book thus traces the perceptions, shared traditions and exchanges between student movements in the United States and West Germany. These activists attempted to construct a “collective identity that could lead to solidarity and cooperation, as well as more global consciousness.” (3) Transnational exchanges were made possible by the post-war economic boom and the growth of technology and communication that influenced global opinion. Klimke writes: “In short, technological innovation and an internationalized media landscape created a qualitatively new level of sociocultural networking across national borders well before 1968.”  (3) Along with intellectual thinkers such as C. Wright Mills and the various tactics of the civil rights movement (and their inspiration), what linked student movements across national borders was opposition against the war in Vietnam. Thus, Klimke contends, “the transnational interaction among activists in the 1960s… drew its strength from a collective protest identity that consisted of shared cultural and political reference points and was strengthened by a global medial discourse.” (6) However, a collective-activists identity never materialized: “The protest movements turned out to be too heterogeneous and shaped too much by national conditions for activists to reach any consensus on issues such as militancy” or solidarity with the Third World. The global significance of the movement did concern policy makers in both countries; in particular to West German, U.S. policy makers were concerned with the effect these protests had on the stability of the Federal Republic. Also, by the mid-1960s, US policy makers used the Inter-Agency Youth Committee (IAYC) to devise appropriate government responses to protect American interests.