Protesting Cold War Conditions

The United States and the Soviet Union reached new heights in the 1960s, but trouble was brewing for the superpowers. By 1965, the six-nation Common Market had temporarily replaced the United States as the leader in worldwide trade, and its members often acted in their own self-interest, not in the interests of the superpowers. In 1973, Britain’s membership in the Common Market, followed by Ireland’s and Denmark’s, boosted the market’s exports to almost three times those of the United States. The USSR faced challenges, too. Communist China, along with countries in eastern Europe, contested Soviet leadership, and by the mid-1960s, the United States was waging a devastating war in Vietnam to block the Communist independence movement there. Rising citizen discontent, sometimes expressed in dramatic acts of protest like that of Jan Palach, presented another serious challenge to the cold war order. From the 1960s until 1989, people rose up against technology-driven dehumanization, lack of fundamental rights, and the potential for nuclear holocaust.