As has long been obvious, student protests in the 1960s had an international element, global scope, and shared techniques and issues. Martin Klimke illuminates this element by looking at specific interactions between the American and West German student movements and at the U.S. government's reaction to that interaction.

Klimke roots the widespread student unrest in several factors. Most importantly, the prosperity of the 1960s financed a dramatic increase in university enrollments, provided substantial disposable income and self-confidence, and underpinned a youth culture. Ease of communication and travel among countries increased possibilities for shared ideas and activism. The examples of 1950s protests, e.g., against nuclear weapons, and shared opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam were also significant, as was a growing rejection of a Cold-War paradigm many saw as outmoded and counterproductive.

Klimke details interactions between two SDSs: the American (Students for a Democratic Society) and West German (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, Socialist German Students' Association). Central here was German SDSer Michael Vester, who, as a 1961/62 exchange student in the U.S., became active in the American SDS. He offered critical comments on the draft of the latter's seminal Port Huron statement, some of which the Americans incorporated into the final document. More importantly, he returned to Germany with ties to the American SDS and knowledge of American protest techniques and of American debates over the power elite, the role of intellectuals, etc. The German SDS and other German activists continued to look to the U.S. for ideas, with particular focus on the American civil rights movement and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. American protest techniques, such as sit-ins, teach-ins, and civil disobedience were particularly attractive.

Although American examples influenced the Germans, actual cooperation between the American and German SDSs proved difficult. Despite eventual shared commitments to socialism and self-perceptions as the New Left, they were not ideologically fully compatible. They came out of different cultural traditions and had difficulty communicating. And each, along with other New Left national groups they encountered at international meetings, was itself factionalized. Not even their shared vehement opposition to the American intervention in Vietnam could overcome their differences. The result was a mix of shared revolutionary enthusiasm and unbridgeable differences.

Klimke argues that the Black Panthers strongly influenced West German radical politics. German radicals had long focused on the American civil rights movement, seeing it as both disturbing evidence of American imperfection and a source of protest techniques. When some African-Americans began asserting that they were an internal colony of White America and that only violence could secure their liberation, it resonated with some West German radicals, who began to see West Germany as an external colony of the U.S. and violence as the only means to break late capitalism's power and secure German liberation. Klimke can point to numerous direct links between Black Panthers and the German SDS. He further argues that the Red Army Faction, the major West German terrorist group, drew on the ideology of the Black Panthers as it developed its own violent tactics.

American officials found themselves forced to address growing worldwide student movements. In West Germany, as elsewhere, (mostly student) protesters vociferously attacked U.S. officials' efforts to explain American foreign policy, especially in Vietnam. Klimke details the complicated efforts by the State Department and the Johnson and Nixon administrations to meet what they perceived as a growing threat. After World War II, the U.S. government had successfully used cultural exchange programs to build on the credit the U.S. had earned for liberating countries from Nazi and Japanese oppression. From the mid-1960s, though, future foreign leaders were being acculturated through protest movements to see the U.S. in terms of civil rights struggles and Vietnam and hence as a dangerous, unjust, imperialist power to be resisted. The U.S. hence pursued a series of initiatives from 1962 into the 1970s to cultivate a younger generation that had no memories of World War II or the early U.S. role in resisting Communist tyranny. Those efforts, focused initially on students generally but eventually on future leaders, sought to track youth opinion and to influence it in pro-American ways.

Klimke concludes that the most important thing about the student movements of the 1960s is that for all their radicalism, they were not really anti-American. Young people, even radicals, vehemently opposed certain U.S. government policies, especially racial inequality and the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, they also saw in the U.S. much to be admired and copied, from pop culture to protest ideologies and techniques. This complex reaction, he argues, explains how European 68ers, once in power, could prove unwilling to support U.S. policy on, for example, the second Iraq war, while still cooperating with the U.S. in contexts such as NATO.

Klimke's nominal subject is student protest, but he—like most other authors—talks primarily about radical students and, especially, their leadership. Yet what made the student protest movement important was that the tiny minority of radicals was able to mobilize many other students on specific issues, such as Vietnam and university reform. We still have not figured out how to talk about the complex interaction of radical and non-radical students. Klimke brings important new information about international connections that concretizes the often (overly) general discussions of the international student movement; however, his book focuses on several disparate issues that seem chosen because sources were available rather than because they might form a coherent whole. He has entitled his book The Other Alliance in reference to what he sees as an alternative among young radicals to NATO and other formal alliances. As he points out, however, the various New Left groups had great difficulty cooperating at the few conferences they held, so they scarcely seem to constitute an alliance.

Klimke has produced a valuable addition to the burgeoning literature on 1968. He has contributed to the effort to rescue 1968 from the 68ers and to specify what happened as opposed to what people “remember.”