London (CNSNews.com) - As European leftists mark the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 riots in Paris, the impact of that notable year continues to generate fierce debate.

While newspapers in France relate accounts of when student protestors fought police in the streets of the Latin Quarter, Britain this month also is holding a series of conferences and other events looking back four decades.

Popular historians have begun to argue that the true beneficiaries of 1968 were conservative politicians like Richard Nixon, who rode a backlash against anti-war protestors to electoral success. Many on the left, on the other hand, say that although mistakes were made, the world was left better off as a result of the year of generational ferment.

David Green, director of Civitas, a London think tank, said those years had been a disaster for traditional progressives, who had been pushed aside by a newer breed of self-promoting activists.

Green, a member and later a politician in the left-leaning Labor Party, said concerns about improving society had become overshadowed by a temporary spasm of trying to overthrow it.

"It became kind of the fashion to be against everything," he said. "It did quite a bit of harm and it took about a decade to get over it."

On Saturday, socialists and academics met in central London at a conference entitled "May 68 and All That," and discussed what aspects of that year should be cherished and what could be discarded.

Jean-Pierre Duteuil, a French student leader in 1968, said the events had largely been reduced to simple television images of protesting students and barricades on the Left Bank of Paris.

Speaking through a translator, he said most accounts of the time ignored the general strike by three million French workers that had taken place during the riots, as well as a broader struggle by socialists to restructure society.

"It's been come to be seen as a student [prank], like invading the girl's dormitory," he said.

For Lindsey German, a coordinator for the Stop the War Coalition in Britain, an important outcome of 1968 and the years following had been America's withdrawal from Vietnam.

The defeat of what she called "American imperialism" had been an inspiration for people around the world and one which that remained with those today who campaign for the U.S. to leave Iraq, German said.

"In a way, it was a great victory for our movement and the left in general," she said.

Other speakers on Saturday lamented a time of lost opportunity, saying the potential for a better world had seemed to be within reach.

For academic Peter Gowan, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the ouster of a reformist government had crushed the last chance for reform and renewal in the Eastern bloc.

For American writer Mike Marqusee, a teenager in 1968, those years were partly wasted as the left became fragmented, with unaccountable leaders and with no coherent program for change.

"We longed for an outlaw community without defining what we were rebelling against or what we were rebelling for," he said.

Despite the setbacks, other speakers said that the protests in 1968 were simply part of the larger struggle against capitalism.

Chris Harman, a former editor of the U.K. publication, the Socialist Worker, said it was inevitable that Britain would someday experience its own May 1968.

"I'm convinced that the workers will fight, just as the sun will come up tomorrow, but the question is when they will fight," he said.

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