A year of crises abroad
Americans in 1967 often saw the world through the lens of Vietnam, but the year was full of other upheavals. Some were short and dramatic, such as a war that lasted six days. Others were just beginning and would run for years. This overview sets out the main events outside the United States, in date order, and keeps to what is reasonably well established. The word “revolution” in the title is used loosely: only some of these events were revolutions in a strict sense, and several were coups, wars or secessions.
January: the Cultural Revolution reaches the cities
China’s Cultural Revolution had been launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and 1967 was a year of its most chaotic phase. In January, radical groups in Shanghai took over party and government institutions in what became known as the January Storm, and the idea of seizing power from local authorities spread to other cities. Over the following months the movement split into rival factions, and violence between them occurred in various places, including the city of Wuhan in the summer. The army was eventually drawn in to restore order. Many of the Red Guards who had been encouraged to attack “enemies” found themselves in factional fights, and the death toll of the whole period is uncertain and much debated.
April: the Greek coup
On 21 April 1967 a group of army officers seized power in Greece, shortly before elections that were expected to bring back a centre-left government. Politicians were arrested, civil liberties were suspended and a military regime, often called the Greek junta, took control. King Constantine attempted an unsuccessful counter-move in December. The junta lasted until 1974, and the coup became a symbol of how fragile democracy could be in a NATO country during the Cold War.
May and June: the Six-Day War
Tension in the Middle East rose through May, as Egypt ordered United Nations peacekeepers out of Sinai and then closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping around 22 and 23 May. Israel began the war on the morning of 5 June with air strikes on Egyptian airfields. Jordan and Syria joined, and by 10 June, when a ceasefire took hold, Israel had taken the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank including East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The Six-Day War reshaped the region’s politics and left territorial questions that are still unresolved. In November the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which called for a withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict and for peace within secure borders; its wording has been debated ever since.
May to July: Biafra
In Nigeria, ethnic violence and political crisis in 1966 had pushed the Eastern Region towards separation. On 30 May 1967 its leader, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared the region the independent Republic of Biafra. Federal troops moved against it in July, and the Biafra secession turned into a civil war that lasted until January 1970. It became known internationally largely through the famine that followed, and it was one of the first African conflicts to be widely covered in images by Western television.
Hong Kong, Aden and Quebec
Spillover from the Cultural Revolution reached Hong Kong in May 1967, where a labour dispute turned into months of strikes, demonstrations and bombings, and the Hong Kong riots were met by a firm response from the colonial government. In Canada, French President Charles de Gaulle shouted “Vive le Québec libre” from a balcony in Montreal on 24 July, during a visit linked to Expo 67, which caused a diplomatic row. And at the end of November, Britain completed its withdrawal from Aden, one of the later stages of the end of its empire in the Middle East; the area became an independent state, later known as South Yemen. In the same month, de Gaulle blocked Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community for a second time.
October: the death of Che Guevara
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary who had helped lead the Cuban Revolution, had left Cuba to try to start a guerrilla uprising in Bolivia. His small force was captured in the mountains on 8 October 1967 and he was executed the next day, 9 October, by Bolivian soldiers. His death was reported widely, and his image, especially the photograph taken years earlier, became a lasting emblem for young people on the left. In life, his Bolivian campaign had found little local support.
What links these events
None of these events shared a single cause, and treating them as one global revolution would be misleading. The Cold War stood behind many of them, as did decolonisation and old regional rivalries. What they have in common is that each was a sharp break with the order that had existed at the start of the year, and each had consequences that lasted far beyond 1967.