In 1968 student activism and the international connections between students became a source of interest and concern throughout the world. These international connections, however, were far from new. Internationalism has always been at the core of the National Union of Students of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (NUS), the largest student organisation in the UK. The NUS represented the majority of British students, although their policies were never universally accepted but were the outcome of sometimes vociferous debate. In the years between the end of the Second World War and 1968 the NUS was deeply involved in setting up two international student organisations, the International Union of Students (IUS) and the International Student Conference (ISC), as well as developing their own bilateral connections with students around the world. The membership and leadership of the NUS were clearly interested, and concerned, about students internationally. However, the extent to which this interest and concern should be seen as solidarity or is more rightly a new manifestation of older British traditions of paternalism and liberal internationalism is questioned in this article.
The nuclear age had a profound impact on politics and international affairs. More fundamentally, it altered the way people saw the planet and their relationship with it. These attitudes changed gradually in the post-war period, with the 1960s a key transitional moment. This article explores these changing attitudes towards the environment within the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). At the beginning of the 1960s CND's concerns about nuclear testing and fallout fit easily into the dominant anthropocentric view of the environment. However, by the end of the decade they espoused a much more holistic, even ecocentric, attitude. This article examines how attitudes towards the environment were changing in the 1960s through a close examination of attitudes within CND, and argues that the modern environmental movement was a product of the nuclear age.
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