"A period less like 1968 I can’t imagine." That's what British playwright David Hare says about the world today, when he thinks about a British foreign policy that not only includes wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but, as he sees it, is closed for public discussion.

Did the "radicals" of 1968 become the humanitarians of the latter part of the century? What happened to their ideals and their mistrust of state power? What are we supposed to think when we look at Bernard Kouchner, once co-founder of international relief agency Médecins Sans Frontières and now France’s minister of foreign affairs, a man who wanted everyone to speak out against the war in Nigeria’s Biafra in the 60s and then backed intervention in Iraq on the grounds it would free people from Saddam Hussein?
Even if the idea of "humanitarian intervention" was forged by this generation of activists, Hare says, speaking at an event at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, he argues it’s a mistake to think that the term’s meaning these days has anything to do with 1968.

Samantha Power, Harvard professor and foreign policy adviser to U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama, says humanitarianism needs to be rehabilitated now that it has been lumped with political and military goals it should never have been combined with.

She argues there needs to be more effort to talk about the Iraqis that are at the centre of the conflict in Iraq.

But in the United States, she says, there is no room for a counter-narrative about the Iraq conflict. The U.S. is either the saviour of Iraq or the cause of all the country’s problems, leaving little room for Iraqi people themselves as agents of change.

According to Power, who as she herself points out wasn’t even born in 1968, the United Nations plays a contradictory role in our time. It is both where we park our principles and an amalgamation of all state power in the world, she says.

She says Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. special envoy to Iraq who was killed in an August 2003 bomb attack on the U.N. building in Baghdad, had to come to terms with the U.N.’s dual purpose. She’s just written a book about him, and describes his progression from child of the sixties towards understanding the workings of the United Nations as “the education of the idealist”.

Former U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown, who now works for the British government, agrees that the United Nations is going to have to work to regain its legitimacy and perceived neutrality after the war in Iraq.

Malloch Brown, who flew to Jordan to identify bodies of the nearly two dozen U.N. personnel killed in the bomb attack that killed Vieira de Mello, believes the United Nations was targeted as a proxy for the United States and Britain.

In the “You’re with us or against us” attitude that spread after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the U.N. was seen as part of the military coalition.

No one seems to think there are any easy answers for moving humanitarianism forward from this point.

Many of the activists of 1968 protested against what they viewed as an unlawful and inhumane war in Vietnam, fought unilaterally by the world’s superpower. Not much has changed.

Will the activists that currently protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be the next generation of humanitarians? And will they have learned from the mistakes of the children of 1968?

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