A Better Tomorrow. Making Sense of Time in the Conservative Party and the CDU/CSU in the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

A Better Tomorrow. Making Sense of Time in the Conservative Party and the CDU/CSU in the 1960s and 1970s

Parties need to present their voters with a vision of how society, international relations, the economic system, or politics itself should ideally look like in times to come. These ideas about the future are framed by ideas about the present and the past. As important agents of the political public parties are making sense of time. The article analyses the changing time horizons of the British Conservative Party and the West German CDU/CSU in the 1960s and 1970s and scrutinises how far they influenced the parties’ political thought; it focuses on the ways Conservatives of the two countries made sense of time in an era where the integral conservative attachment to the past was fundamentally challenged. In the UK and in West Germany three distinct phases can be discerned: first, a focus on the present in the late 1950s and early 1960s respectively; second its challenge in the 1960s by technological and social changes with visions of planned future «modernity» coming to the fore; and third, a loss of confidence in the opportunities of shaping the future from the early 1970s onwards and the re-formulation of Conservative time horizons. Ultimately the change of future horizons in the 1970s challenged the Conservative Party much more profoundly than the CDU/CSU.