Saturday, March 15, 2014
Diplomat (Omni Shoreham)
A growing literature in the social sciences deals with problems of anticipations, futurity and prediction. The present European crisis can be understood, on the one hand, as the great failure of prediction, but on the other hand, it can also be understood as the result of forms of prediction that have become hegemonic through the construction of the European project. “Foresight exercises” have been a central political instrument in the construction of the European project. While often presented as deliberative and representative public exercises, they can also be understood as political instruments that build on particular forms of expertise and social power. Foresight is a form of prediction that is implemented at every level of the European project. For the EU as a whole, in individual member countries, and in the transition process in Eastern Europe, foresight was the political tool with which to create coherent visions of futures. With all this intelligence creation, how indeed was the financial crisis possible? And if such attempts at building the European future are truly deliberative, how do they manage to respond to the growing critique of the European future as representing a neoliberal future? The article argues that foresight exercises can be described as a particular form of governance, governance by vision, the primary aim of which is to create consensus around certain specific futures at the expense of others. It pinpoints, moreover, the role of such forms of governance in leading up to the European crisis.
