ABSTRACT
The 1970s have often in retrospect been identified – as far as the Western world is concerned – with bad times: economic crisis, social malaise, and growing social uncertainty and selfishness. Growth rates started to decline, and unemployment was slowly rising, not least in the United States, with an unemployment rate reaching almost 5 percent in 1970. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, among many Western intellectuals, journalists, and artists, there was a feeling that The Sixties, the happy years of freedom and rebellion, of a libertarian 'counter-culture', were finally over. The Sino-Soviet split is one of the reasons why the late 1960s and early 1970s signified the beginning of a remarkable phase in the post-war history of world politics, more or less coinciding with the 'long seventies', a period sometimes referred to as the 'years of upheaval'.
