Journal of Modern European History

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.

The early 1960s saw a number of long-term plans being issued by the British government – for roads, hospitals, new towns, social care, and even the whole economy. A «Very Long Term Planning Group» within Whitehall even looked 25 years into the future, to inform the setting of priorities. By the 1970s, however, this effort seemed to have entirely broken down, and the UK Government was involved in a day-to-day struggle even to keep electricity supplies flowing. Incomes policies and industrial subsidies focused, not on the twenty-first century, but on day-to-day negotiations in particular sectors of the economy. This article will explore this retreat from forethought and precommitment. What factors explain this remarkable retreat from ambitious and hopeful plans of a «scientific» future? It will argue that the British Government's peculiar challenges – of managing a large defence budget, a reserve currency and an international financial centre – made it much more vulnerable to recurrent crises, and a constant sense of emergency, helping to explain why more immediate and rapid «solutions» were applied, in the Thatcherite 1980s, than in France or West Germany.

The present article focuses on the «Scientific-Technical Revolution» (STR), tracing the Soviet leadership's bid for the future throughout the post-Stalinist period and examining how it came to be challenged by the scientific-technical and literary intelligentsias of the country. I argue that what was claimed to be the main strength of official Soviet thought on the future – its holistic character – was also its most serious limiting factor. Unlike Western futures studies, which assumed a plurality of possible futures and stressed the need to strategically choose between them on the basis of preferences and values, orthodox Soviet theoreticians framed the prospective development of mankind in terms of a single future that demanded an all-encompassing vision. The resulting Soviet future discourse was unwieldy and restrictive, and left the Soviet Union ill-prepared to deal with the onslaught of «reflexive modernity» that reached the country in the 1970s.

Sustainability has become a key concept in the national and international policy discourse, and nonetheless it has not been clearly defined. This article argues that it is precisely the vagueness of the concept that has made it so attractive for politics. Focusing on the international politics arena and the West German case, the article shows that dominating political notions of development and progress were partly reconceptualised in order to incorporate long-term ecological and social issues around 1970. Against this backdrop, from the late 1980s onwards, «sustainable development» and «sustainability» became political concepts for the future which, explicitly vague, appeared to balance economic, ecological and social goals in both short-term and long-term perspectives. The notions of sustainable development and sustainability oscillated between crisis perceptions, steady-state thinking and a new semantics of modernisation from the 1970s to 2000. In this light, it is argued that there is no «end of confidence» but rather that understandings of progress have been reconfigured.

Commonplace European and American impressions of the Middle East focus on disorder and violence. But the Ottoman nineteenth century was less violent than in much of Europe or America. People everywhere experienced the emergence of the modern state and its claims on their resources, bodies, and consciousness. The story was similar in most of the eventual Great War belligerents: mass conscription, citizenship, education and indoctrination into the state, and its collective narratives characterised the long nineteenth century. After 1918 Britain and France partitioned the Ottoman State into more than a dozen new colonial and quasicolonial states. This event is the origin point of Middle Eastern disorder of the past century. Former citizens of the defeated Ottoman Empire did not accept partition and colonialism. The post-war Middle Eastern settlement was everywhere greeted with revolts and revolutions. But lost in the details of both colonial and postcolonial nationalist historiography of these movements, is the legacy of nineteenthcentury Ottoman modernity that both bound them together and facilitated their emergence.