‘68 Retrospective and Prospective

• Whitehall, Deborah 1

Abstract

Revolution is not an international legal category. The golden jubilee of the global protests and rebellions identified with 1968 presents an opportunity to reconsider the usual formula from the angle of the protagonist of the French upheavals and its critic, Hannah Arendt. The soixante-huitard strikes a provocative figure for the humanist achievements and celebrations of the world community in 1968: its youthful songs, playfulness, dissatisfaction and anxiety for things to come tied it, temporally and symbolically, to the moving reel of protest across the post-industrial world and to the thematic heartbeat of international law in the first International Year of Human Rights. The catch is the imperfection of the connection. Arendt’s writing about revolution and international law does not resolve the dissidence between the two phenomena or its reiteration by the United Nations in 1968. What Arendt does do, however, is to measure the success or failure of each against its mission to humanize the world. This article takes inspiration from Arendt to refigure the usual relation between international law and revolution as paired projects that do not yoke, but, rather, relate and separate, along a single, humanist seam.

• 1Lecturer in Law, University of Sydney, Australia