(Sciences Po, France)
jenny.andersson@sciencespo.fr

Forging the European future, 1945 – 1989

The notion of the future has been addressed, so far, by conceptual historians, arguing that notions of progress and linear time were an Enlightenment heritage and universal category. I want to propose instead that the future is a category of action, a field in which key power struggles over the complex temporalities of  the contemporary are performed, and a question of both control and resistance in liberal and authoritarian systems alike. The contemporary category of the future, or ”long term” has its origins arguably not in modern utopian thinking but in post 1945 approaches to social science and rationality. The category of the future, projected by various forms of prediction and foresight after the Second World War, was a product of rivalling interpretations of the crisis and future of liberalism in the light of the experience of totalitarianism. Forecasting the future was a question of extending the temporalities of liberalism into time and controlling the manifold potential futures of the ”system”. In the first decades after 1945, both liberal and communist regimes made use of this idea of the future as a way of tightening regime control over possible social futures. In other words, the idea of the future encompassed notions of system, and notions of the possibly unforeseeable future of Man within the system. However, the intimate links between political regimes and the social sciences in ”consolidation regimes” of the first decades of the post war period were shaken by a number of developments in the 1960s and 1970s. Among these we can include the development of critical systems theory, as an alternative to convergence theory, ecologism but also feminism and postcolonialism. The future, at this point, became an organising concept for protest and dissidence, and an emergent arena for transnational action. Late 1960s futurology developed as a reiteration of interwar Kulturkritik, radicalized through the influence of the Frankfurt school and revisionist Marxism, and claimed the future as a transgressive notion and as a way out of the ”system”. To futurists, the future must be open and reimagined, reforged through the force of the human imagination, a claim that challenged political regimes not only in the East bloc but in the West as well. The idea of plural futures, in turn, was a key element in the making of neoliberal system change from 1989 onwards, plural futures signifying no longer openended futures of a manmade system, but the plurality and creativity of marketmaking. In my keynote address, I want to probe these issues as a way of outlining a tentative contemporary history of the European future between 1945 and 1989.