Current research on political culture in Western industrialized countries has emphasized that political orientations towards planning and modernization prospered during the 1960s due to the economic “golden age”, the rapid growth of science and technology and the breakthrough of Keynesianism [99 van Laak; 27 Doering-Manteuffel; 71, 72 Metzler; 18 Cazes; 74 O’Hara]. In West Germany, conceptions of central planning had been perceived more or less negatively in the 1950s. This was especially due to West German perceptions of the GDR, as the planning principle in itself seemed to epitomize some sort of planned economy (Planwirtschaft). This changed in the mid-1960s. The economic boom played a central role as it seemed to offer new possibilities for action. West German politics came under the sway of new spirit of reform and modernisation, which also aided in the breakthrough of the Keynesian paradigm [72 Metzler, pp 225–366; 81 Ruck]. And this was true both for Social Democrats and Liberals, even for many Christian Democrats and conservative politicians with visions of conservative “modernity” coming to the fore. Politicians from different parties argued that social and technical change had altered the requirements of politics tremendously. Thus it seemed to be necessary for politics to control this change actively, absorbing its implications. Hence, planning attained a somehow enigmatic image in Western industrialized countries, being linked to progress, modernity and “a view of the world at once positivistic, linear and rational, celebrating the machine” [74 O’Hara, p 1; see also 72 Metzler; 95 Süß]. “Rational” politics became a discursive leitmotiv [72 Metzler, p 209–10], and in this rationality could mean both seeking objectivity and the best solution as well as enabling people to decide on a free, reasoned and “enlightened” basis. Hence, planning was linked to some sort of “scientization” of politics, as politics relied more than ever before on scientific and experts’ advice [82 Rudloff; generally 77 Raphael].
This met with the aim of futures research to not only do research on the future but also to shape it. It is thus not surprising that futures research tried to contribute its expertise to politics in the 1960s, as will be demonstrated using the following examples of West German futures research and the Federal Government. This applied most by far to the empirical-positivist approach.
First, the protagonists of the critical-emancipatory approach refrained from providing scientific advice to the government. These futurists focused on having an impact on the critical public (in the understanding of Jürgen Habermas), on civil society and social movements. Hence, Jungk and Galtung founded “Mankind 2000”, a transnational organisation engaged in thinking about and visualising coming peace and human development transgressing the boundaries of the Cold War. Initially, Jungk planned to organize an international exhibition entitled “A World at Peace” in London in 1964.Footnote 10 The exhibition was designed to deal with utopias of a peaceful future and “visions of a better world” [54 Jungk, p 360]. This plan failed but with Galtung’s support Mankind 2000 was set up as a transnational network. Mankind oscillated between acting as an epistemic community and a social movement, from which the “World Future Studies Federation” emerged at the beginning of the 1970s.Footnote 11 Furthermore, Jungk concentrated on making an impact on the public by means of publications and on discussing “willed futures” with students as a lecturer at the “Technische Universität” in Berlin. From this emerged the concept of future workshops (Zukunftswerkstätten). In a multi-level model, which in some ways embodied a link between brainstorming and the Delphi method, people were supposed to “invent” their future, i.e. creatively develop it by discussing social problems in a dynamic group process, gathering ideas for solutions and examining their application [24 Dator; 33 Gabor; 91 Seefried, p 167–8].
From the second field, of the normative-ontological approach, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, who believed he had a particular social and political duty as an atomic physicist, continually pushed the boundaries between the functional systems of science and politics. One way in which he did this was via the public, for example by initiating the Göttingen Declaration of Atomic Physicists in 1957. The arcane field of politics became even more important for him, however, as he focused on having a political impact as an expert. Hence, he entered into the public sphere especially when he aimed at increasing the pressure to act on political actors via the media [61 Kraus; 91 Seefried, pp 96–7, 178–9, 349–51]. In the mid-1960s von Weizsäcker extended his thoughts from the “atomic age” to the whole “technical age” [101 von Weizsäcker]. In general, von Weizsäcker regarded the technical development, with its “rapid tempo”, ambivalently [102 Weizsäcker, p 68]. On the one hand, the new “basic sciences” from the sphere of the think tanks, such as cybernetics and games theory, fascinated him. On the other hand, he was well aware of the problematic consequences of technical progress, as was reflected in atomic physics. In order to assess the ambivalent consequences of science and technology for the future, he planned in 1967 to found a “Max Planck Institute for Research into Living Conditions in a Scientific-Technical World”. The Institute was designed, on the one hand, to do research on the new basic sciences such as cybernetics, and on the other hand to address special topics of direct political relevance, such as global food production and the deterrence system. The Institute should in particular advise the executive in related factual issues.Footnote 12 The Federal Minister of Research Gerhard Stoltenberg supported this plan as he was especially interested in “modern” techniques and knowledge produced at the US Think Tanks. However, von Weizsäcker‘s Max Planck Institute could not be completely realised. His concept encountered resistance from industry representatives in the senate of the Max Planck Institute, which feared that the industry could be restricted in its innovative freedom by “leftist” exponents of futures research and peace research. Von Weizsäcker was thus forced to limit the Max-Planck-Institute in Starnberg in its advisory capacity and to reduce its size [91 Seefried, p 351–4; 64 Leendertz, p 20; 32 Futurologie].
The project “War Consequences and War Prevention” of the Max Planck Institute attained particular political significance. It had already been begun under the aegis of von Weizsäcker in the research department of the “Association of German Academics (Vereinigung Deutscher Wissenschaftler)”, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation. This project examined in various scenarios the effects of a nuclear war on West German territory [2 Afheldt]. A task force designed a computer-assisted simulation model that divided the territory of West Germany into zones and forecast in war scenarios potential human losses, health casualties and housing and industrial costs. Furthermore, the group dealt with the deterrent strategy and developed scenarios for ranges of variations of strike likelihoods of new weapons, such as anti-ballistic missiles. The simulations showed that in none of the scenarios did the Federal Republic possess a real defensive potential, i.e. the capacity to prevent an opponent from carrying out his threat by use of military means. Ultimately, the group drew up three global qualitative scenarios: a duopoly as the most obvious option would suffer from the difficulty of maintaining the balance between the two powers. A monopoly as the second scenario was barely conceivable without a large-scale war. The third option was a global political system consolidated by international organisations that would initiate disarmament [103 von Weizsäcker; 3 Afheldt]. This option had already been designed by von Weizsäcker in 1963 entitled “Weltinnenpolitik” [100 von Weizsäcker, p 131]. Thus, the project confirmed von Weizsäcker’s thesis, that technical developments made a permanent stabilisation of the deterrent system almost impossible. From an epistemological point of view, the project had admittedly been designed in such a way that a confirmation of von Weizsäcker’s theses was not very surprising. Fundamentally, however, the project successfully connected peace research and futures research, and it had both a normative and an action-orientated reference point. As it questioned the deterrent system and called for promoting détente, the study backed the architects of the new eastern policy (Neue Ostpolitik), the new Chancellor Willy Brandt and State Secretary Egon Bahr, with whom von Weizsäcker stood in contact.Footnote 13 However, this project led von Weizsäcker and the Max Planck Institute further into the realm of peace (and not futures) research [see 46 Hutchinson & Inayatullah].
Third, protagonists from the field of an empirical-positivist approach attempted most strongly to provide scientific policy advice. The Centre Berlin for Futures Research actively offered itself up for advising politics. The Centre claimed that it could draw up research planning modelling but also be active in the fields of budget planning as well as constructing traffic planning models, population models and global government models.Footnote 14 It is clear that it was no longer the object – the “what” – that was decisive but the “how”: any topic appeared to be workable because in the centre of focus was the method, and here, above all, the computer-based simulation model.
The Centre Berlin established contact in particular with the new planning department of the Federal Chancellery. The planning department had been set up against the backdrop of fresh scientific, political and also media interest in a “modern” and “rational” form of governance. The Chancellery had already come under fire during the “grand coalition” 1966 to 1969: it allegedly fulfilled its duties as an organ of coordination, information and control insufficiently, as it forewent “modern leadership staffs”, “political planning and systematic data management” [110 Zundel; see 95 Süß]. Therefore, from 1967 on, a new planning staff should ponder the planning of procedures, i.e. the organisation of political processes, as well as task scheduling, i.e. coordination of fields of activity with regard to a catalogue of aims. This was bound up with setting up the “Project Group for Government and Administrative Reform”. That panel, consisting of representatives of the Chancellery and other ministries, was to submit proposals for better coordination between the individual ministries [96 Süß]. The Brandt government which came to power in 1969 then expanded the planning staff into a planning department. This was completely in line with the proposed reform policy: according to Willy Brandt in his first government declaration, the government had to “begin with itself when talking of reforms”. The Federal Chancellery and the ministries should be “modernised in their structures and thus in their work” [17 Brandt, p 261]. Subsequently, Chancellery Minister Horst Ehmke, who acted with a striking, technically-friendly reform vigour, turned the planning policy into the preferred field of activity [26 Der Macher; 72 Metzler, p 364–5]. According to Ehmke and the new departmental head, political scientist Reimut Jochimsen, planning should now be anchored in all sections via so-called planning plenipotentiaries. Thus, planning now incorporated not only economic policy (in the sense of Keynesianism) but all political fields. Above and beyond this, the temporal horizon of planning was now extended and conceived for the medium to long term, for between 5 and 15 years. As planning was predestined to develop “strategic concepts for the solution of complex political problems under consideration of their contexts and longer-term consequences”, the connection to systems analytical models, which explored the inner correlations of the system, was obvious.Footnote 15
Koelle of the Centre Berlin contacted Ministerialrat Adolf Theis from the planning department of the Chancellery, who was also the chairperson of the Project Group for Government and Administrative Reform. Theis invited Koelle to give a paper before the Project Group for Government and Administrative Reform. After Koelle’s presentation, Theis stated almost euphorically that the Centre Berlin would offer expertise in the area of planning, data preparation, decision models and operations research “that is, at least currently, unique in West Germany”.Footnote 16 Thus, the Centre Berlin for Futures Research received various commissions from the Federal Government. For one, the Project Group for Government and Administrative Reform participated in the Berlin Simulation Model (BESI), which the Centre Berlin for Futures Research drew up for the Berlin state government as a model “for studying the development and restructuring of large cities”. Koelle and seven other academics from an interdisciplinary team constructed an early warning system that was initially designed to divide the “‘condition’ of a social system” into individual activity sectors and then split these up into components. At the same time, indicators should be used to gather the most important characteristics of this condition. The thoroughness of this gathering was, according to Koelle, who completely underestimated the social and political complexities, “primarily a question of applied effort”. Beyond that, the decision-makers would have to develop short-, medium- and long-term aims; here, for example, the government declaration of the lord mayor of West-Berlin, divided into variables, could be fed in. The decision-makers should also determine target values for the indicators, concepts of time for when the target values should be reached, and thresholds for defining the parameters of the aims. The fact that a government declaration was difficult to quantify and divide into factors was evidently not considered. After the indicators were assigned with concrete data, a “warning system” was to issue a timely signal if one of the indicators threatened to exceed the set thresholds. The information system was to reproduce and simulate the possible consequences of planned decisions.Footnote 17 Thus, the simulation model was based on the certainty that it could quantify and formalise social processes, and this concept epitomised nothing less than a euphoria of steering.
Second, the Centre Berlin was commissioned by the planning department of the Chancellery and the Project Group for Government and Administrative Reform to handle the project PLABUND (Planning Aid in the Federal Administration). For this it received the princely sum of two million marks. The overall concept, according to the Centre Berlin, was guided by the idea that “planning processes in the field of federal administration […] can only be decisively improved by means of specific planning aid that has been coordinated in its functional profile”.Footnote 18 Thus, the project aimed at “rationalisation”, i.e. the creation of scientificity and efficiency in process planning. The core was the project EIPE (Experimental Integrating Planning and Decision-making System), led by the sociologist Helmut Klages. It aimed at developing “foundations and design criteria for the construction of an interagency information system in the area of government and administration”. According to the abstruse formulations, it attempted to do research on the “space for deliberation of preparatory work for decisions” within the basic units of the federal administration, i.e. the decision-making processes and the scope of action. So far, the preparation of decisions in the individual sections seemed to impede the decision-makers, i.e. the ministers, in making assessments within the overall political concept. In this way, “non-rational determinants of political-administration action” were to be reduced.Footnote 19 The project team ascertained “fundamental assumptions and allocated information holdings” of the administrators “on social, economic and political prerequisites”. This was to take place empirically by means of “participatory observation”. Staff of the Centre Berlin (two political scientists, a sociologist and a economist) was therefore appointed for 3 months to four ministries as assistant administrators. Parallel to this, intensive interviews of the administration with the Centre staff were to take place. The information acquired was to be gathered in a “categorial filing arsenal”, i.e. quantified.Footnote 20 In principle, it was thus attempted to gauge information flow within the ministry, to rationalise working processes and make them more transparent, and to examine the room for manoeuvre possessed by the administration and to what extent the administration could be synchronised with the political line. On this basis, an information system should be developed that would be of value to an early warning system.
Yet the consultation process turned out to be sobering. BESI was cancelled whilst still in its pilot phase because the Project Group for Government and Administrative Reform and the Berlin state government discontinued the funding step by step in 1972 and 1974, respectively. EIPE quickly met with resistance from the ministerial bureaucracy in the Chancellery, which criticised the lack of administrative experience among the futures researchers. The Centre Berlin for Futures Research argued that the administration insulated itself “against the general availability of experience and background knowledge”.Footnote 21 The approach of measuring the room of manoeuvre of the administration in order to bring it more strongly in line with politics did indeed lead to concerns that leeway could be restricted. Theis, who had initially been so positive, criticised the lack of intelligibility on the part of the texts. Ultimately the Project Group argued that the undertaking lacked “the necessary autonomy”.Footnote 22 The Centre Berlin would have to be satisfied with continuing to accept ideas from the Federal Government and convert them into the “inflated ZBZ [= Centre Berlin] language”.Footnote 23 The Project Group for Government and Administrative Reform now focused on a study carried out by the consultants McKinsey. In contrast to the Centre Berlin, McKinsey was seen as having a “pragmatic approach”. Footnote 24 The “practical use” of EIPE, on the other hand, was called into question.Footnote 25
Consequently, the Centre Berlin’s policy advice to the government quickly ran into problems. Both the computer-assisted simulation, which simulated and anticipated the consequences of decisions (BESI), as well as consulting in the area of process planning (EIPE), ended more or less without success. It was of central importance that the interaction between the futures researchers, politics and the ministerial bureaucracy was full of tension. This had its roots in the inflated expectations that politicians had in futures research as well as those which futures researchers had in themselves. The Centre Berlin declared itself responsible for all political fields and yet always competed with specialists. The futures researchers overestimated the capacity of systems analytical models for solving problems and the rules and system character of social structures and processes. Furthermore, they spoke a different language to the ministerial bureaucracy; the Centre Berlin had developed its own system language permeated with cybernetics, which was not compatible with the ministerial bureaucracy, most of whom had a background in law [40 Hegelau, p 169; 9 Bebermeyer, p 18–9]. It was decisive that the Centre Berlin assumed that it could gather problem scenarios and decision-making processes “completely” and quantify them. Model simulations attempt to imitate and to visualise the complexity of reality, but they can supply only fragmentary knowledge on a virtual model world, which cannot depict social complexity [65 Lenhard]. In an engineering mentality of feasibility, the Centre Berlin ignored the fact that decision-making in politics cannot be completely modelled or, even more so, quantified [76 Porter]. It was ultimately overlooked that the interaction between state guidance, societal change and the influence of experts – experts such as the Centre Berlin itself – were much more complex than it was possible to depict in a model [91 Seefried, pp 393–5; 84 Schanetzky]. Fundamental problems of the planning department certainly also played a role. The Project Group for Government and Administrative Reform was disbanded, not least due to criticism of the far-reaching planning projects of the Chancellery formed in the Ministries that feared a reduction in their influence. In the cabinet, in which the view of the planning department as a “child’s steam engine” did the rounds, the ambitious Ehmke came under pressure. Finance Minister Helmut Schmidt, an opponent of the planning concepts, prevented a direct coordination of financial and task planning between the Finance Ministry and the Chancellery and, not least as a result of rivalries in the cabinet, Ehmke had to switch to the Technology Ministry in 1972 [47 Jäger, p 33; 95 Süß, pp 369–77; 85 Schatz]. It furthermore became clear in summer 1971 that the budget did not offer sufficient funds for all the reform projects that had been drawn up by the Brandt government. The oil crisis of 1973 and the economic crisis then pulled the rug out from under the planning department, as the planning group was not “suitable for moderating conflicts of allocation against the backdrop of limited resources” [95 Süß, p 375].
However, the Centre Berlin for Futures Research learned from these problems. A policy paper from 1975, composed by the new deputy chairperson Rainer Mackensen, a sociologist, regarded the task of futures research as doing the spadework for political decision-making in the interests of the people. It conducted research, he continued, on possible developments, the extent to which they could be evaluated vis-à-vis various objectives and the extent to which they could be influenced by public decisions. Improving the life of many seemed to be much more important than the “impressive demonstration of technical capacity”. For this, futures research should use tangible social scientific, systems analytical and technical processes. Futures research helped to utilise the potential for a “more comprehensive consideration of public decisions” [68 Mackensen]. The distancing from the phase of model simulation is very apparent here. Futures research was now aimed at integrating systems analysis and modelling into a mixture of methods under the banner of a reflected, socially-orientated understanding of the “discipline”. This understanding was pragmatic because it balanced the possibilities and limits of futures research and realistically assessed them.