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.