In Brussels, the “future of Europe” can be difficult to escape. There are conferences about it, think tanks publishing reports on it, and Institutions regularly invoking it. After spending several years working around the EU Institutions, Margaret Pulk began to wonder what exactly everyone meant by it.
“Everyone is talking about it all the time,” she says. “But it kind of seemed empty to me. And still does, to be honest.”
That frustration became the starting point for Margaret’s doctoral research at the EUI Department of History. She studies how, during the 1970s and 1980s, the European Commission tried to make Europe’s long-term future an object of research by building models, bringing in futurists and other experts, and looking for methods that could help policymakers understand what might lie ahead.
“I am mapping the story of the European Institutions doing research on the futures of Europe,” she explains. “On one side, it is an institutional history. But what I am more interested in is how this idea of the future of Europe was scientised and researched.”
Rather than trying to forecast Europe’s future herself, Margaret wanted to understand how this way of thinking had become part of policymaking in the first place. “It was not really about producing this knowledge,” she says. “It was to understand where it comes from.”
When the European Commission tried to study the future
The answer took her back to the 1970s, when European Institutions began experimenting more systematically with ways of studying long-term change. One important influence, she says, was The Limits to Growth, the controversial 1972 study commissioned by the Club of Rome. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used computer modelling to examine how factors including population, industrial production, pollution, food production, and resource use might interact over time.
Margaret found that officials in the European Commission were intrigued by the possibilities offered by this kind of modelling. “There were people saying: This model and this kind of computerised future thinking, that is interesting,” she explains. “Maybe we should try it for European development, not world development.”
The idea had particular appeal within the part of the Commission responsible for research, science, and education. European cooperation in research policy was expanding, but science and technology posed a particular planning problem because decisions taken in the present could have consequences decades later. “Science and technology and R&D are inherently long-term processes,” Margaret says.
Thinking about research policy therefore also meant thinking about how European economies, societies, and technologies might develop in the years ahead. Futures research seemed to offer a way of bringing that longer perspective into policymaking.
Over the following years, the Commission experimented with several approaches. Margaret points to one which involved trying to develop a predictive model specifically for Europe. In the mid-1970s, a much larger exercise brought together around 40 scientists, academics, politicians, and other experts to consider how the Commission might build its own permanent futures research capacity. “They wanted to start a big think tank within the Commission that would hire 50-70 futurists and become a flagship futures research Institute,” Margaret says.
The proposal was eventually considered too ambitious and expensive, but the idea behind it did not disappear. Instead, the scope was reduced, leading to smaller initiatives concerned with long-term developments in science, technology, society, and European integration.
For Margaret, these successive experiments reveal an Institution determined to find ways of producing knowledge about the future. Yet they also expose a problem that increasingly became central to her research.
What happens when futurists meet policymakers
The Commission and the experts it brought in did not always agree on what futures research could actually provide. “The Commission throughout this decade is really trying to do futures research,” Margaret says. “It is like: okay, we can do in-house knowledge production. We just need the right tools and the right people.”
Yet the experts involved came from very different intellectual backgrounds, and many resisted the idea that research could simply reveal how Europe would develop. Thinking seriously about the future also meant confronting political choices about what kind of Europe the Institutions wanted to create. “They implicitly keep countering the Commission by saying you cannot purely see the future through research,” Margaret explains.
Her thesis deals with this tension. From the institutional perspective, futures research could appear to promise knowledge that could guide decision making. The researchers themselves were often much less willing to make that promise.
“From the institution side, it is kind of: okay, we just need a think tank, and then they will tell us how things will work out,” Margaret says. “And then the experts say that this is not what this field is about at all. This is not how this business is done.”
This is also why Margaret is less interested in one of the questions people often ask when they first hear about her project: What did these futurists actually predict correctly? “A lot of people, when I talk about my research, tend to ask whether they got it right or wrong. What did they predict?” she says.
For Margaret, judging individual forecasts retrospectively would miss the more important historical question: why European Institutions continued returning to futures research despite the difficulty of producing the certainty they seemed to be looking for. “The actual research problem, which was the development of Europe in the long term, is just something too complex to answer through this kind of knowledge production,” she says.
Her research follows this story into the early 1990s and the creation of the European Union. She sees this period as an important turning point in how Institutions related to the future. The people she studies were often asked to explore possible futures as a way of helping the European Communities work out what direction to take. Later forms of foresight, in Margaret’s interpretation, increasingly used possible futures to work with political priorities that were already taking shape.
“The people and the projects that I am looking at were initially working on the future in order to help the European Communities find a political agenda,” she says. “Whereas contemporary foresight could be seen as using the future to implement a political agenda. This is the difference I feel I am getting at.”
Finding the history of Europe’s future in the archives
Reconstructing that history means following an institutional paper trail spread across different archives. Margaret works extensively at the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence and the European Commission’s archives in Brussels, alongside material held elsewhere in Europe.
The abundance of material can itself become a problem. “The archival problem in European integration history is that there is a lot of material,” she says. “You need to dive in. And I think I got lost in there a bit.”
The records are also uneven. Archiving practices changed over time and differed across Institutions and offices. Some periods contain detailed correspondence and personal exchanges; others leave behind mostly formal reports. Margaret has therefore found her relationships with archivists particularly important. She regularly updates colleagues in Brussels on how the project is developing, helping them identify material that may be relevant to the next stage of her research.
“They really have brought me amazing material to work with,” she says. “It is super, super important for me.”
Despite continuing digitisation, some of her most useful discoveries still come from physically working through boxes of documents. “The nicest things I have found have not been digitised,” she says. “I found them for myself.”
What has surprised her most is how much history emerged from what had initially seemed like an empty contemporary slogan. “I have been surprised to find out that there is actually this longer history of foresight for Europe,” Margaret says. “And nobody really knows about it.”
The EUI inside the history of European integration
There is also an unusual overlap between Margaret’s subject and the Institution where she is conducting the research. “This Institution itself is kind of part of the history that I am interested in,” she says. “How knowledge could be used for the improvement of European society. It is kind of what it stands for, right? The way it was founded.”
Figures connected to the EUI’s early history also appear in the wider networks she studies. The EUI’s first President, Max Kohnstamm, for example, was involved in the debates and projects surrounding research and Europe’s longer-term development.
Beyond that historical connection, she also values the freedom offered by the Department of History to keep questioning concepts that can otherwise appear self-evident. The professors, she says, are “critical readers and thinkers”, but rather than imposing a particular framework, “they are always asking us more questions than we can answer.”
When it comes to her own future, however, Margaret is less enthusiastic about looking too far ahead. “Thinking too much about my own future can be very anxiety-inducing,” she says. “So, it is nice to do it as a research topic.”
She would like to remain in history and continue working on European integration and the idea of Europe. Beyond that, after spending years studying other people’s attempts to anticipate what comes next, she is reluctant to make a prediction of her own.
“I do not really know what is going to happen.”
Margaret Pulk is a PhD researcher in the EUI Department of History. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Improvement of European Lives: futures studies in the EEC Institutions since the 1970s’, examines the history of futures research in European Institutions. Her research is supervised by Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, with Corinna Unger as second reader.
Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons