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The third chapter reflects on new youth activism within the wider context of what has been termed ‘the new social movements’. It addresses the broader transnational influence of movements abroad, and shows how new areas for political expression opened up around peace, anti-militarism, environmentalism/nuclear disarmament and sexuality. Late socialist Yugoslav society witnessed the proliferation of a youth arena of civil initiatives and activist citizenship, albeit fragmented and often discordant, which found shelter and support within parts of the existing youth institutional framework. Although the federal Youth League did not explicitly endorse all of the initiatives stemming from the new social movements, it did provide spaces for some of them and increased the visibility of their demands in the public space.

This essay explores the so-called ‘Bomb Plot of Zürich’, in which the Indian nationalists Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and Abdul Hafiz of the Indian Independence Committee collaborated with the German Foreign Office and a band of Swiss-based Italian anarchists led by Arcangelo Cavadini and Luigi Bertoni to smuggle German-manufactured bombs, weapons and poison into Switzerland and Italy in the summer of 1915. This was a prime example of the solidarities and overlaps between, in principle, conflicting ideologies of Indian nationalism, German imperialism and Italian anarchism. The essay draws primarily on proceedings from the Swiss Federal Court and aims to situate the event within both the histories of the Indian nationalist movement abroad as well as the Italian anarchist movement. It argues that, during the geo-political context of the First World War, the Indian nationalists forged strategic alliances with strange bedfellows to overthrow the British Empire.

This chapter examines the heated debates within the French anarchist movement after the outbreak of the First World War, leading up to the 1916 Manifesto of the Sixteen and the Russian Revolutions of 1917. It focuses on the movement’s shift from a near-unanimous anti-militarist stance to a more equivocal one, with significant voices being heard in support of interventionism. What were the arguments deployed by the supporters of the Union Sacrée, and how much did they owe to the influence of Peter Kropotkin? Crucially, could the revolutionary project of the anarchists co-exist with participation in the war effort, or did the war in fact expose the growing integration of the working classes into the nation, defusing their revolutionary potential? The chapter then examines how the anarchists’ varied attitudes to the national war effort largely determined their differing responses to the two Russian revolutions of 1917. It concludes that the failure of the movement to prevent the mobilisation of 1914 was a watershed for the French anarchist movement, provoking some profound soul-searching about the state of the movement and, specifically in relation to war, a much less ambitious attitude with regard to anti-militarist positions and tactics.