This paper analyses the diverse ways the history of 1968 in Europe has been conceptualized, chronologically and spatially. How have events across multiple years in the late 1960s been reduced to the single year of 1968? When did ‘68’ become shorthand for these events, and what disappeared with the symbolic weighting given to ‘1968’? What is the relationship of ‘1968’ to ‘the Sixties’, the ‘long 1960s’ or the ’68 years’? To what extent has European historiography inserted events in Europe into a global or transnational framework? This paper argues for the importance of the choice of scale in determining the meaning of any analysis of the late 1960s.