ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Futures Studies in the European Ex-socialist Countries EPILOGUE INSTEAD OF CONCLUSIONS Viorica Ramba Varga The futures research (futures studies) has started in the second part of the 20th century, the bloodiest, violentest and most intolerant century. The post-second war period was intensively future-obsessive in Europe. For mainly two reasons: one of them was caused by the geneal aspire to a peaceful world.

Another was generated by the huge more and more accelerated scientific and technological development and its real/potential implication on society. The end of the WW2 gave a rise to a historical optimism that impregnated the European mental, sentimental and comportamental structures. The future was perceived as the time/space bearing hopes and wishes for a better, peaceful, fraternal and free world.

By the end of the after-war reconstrution period, at the beginning of the 60s, the future has strongly installed in the current preoccupations. In Western Europe , it was especially the explorative researches versus “possible futures” (B. Jouvenel) connected to the rapidly progressed science and technological development that generated the double attitude of the technological optimism and already the technological pessimism.

In Central and Eastern European socialist countries it was manifested mainly as future-oriented, interconnected explorative-normative-operative phases that subordinated the explorative studies to the centralised planning. The planning was aiming to attend an accelerated higher development for the countries considered. The prognostics in these countries marked by the spirit of the historical and technological optimism presented a sort of planning euphoria of that age.

All these have been used up by the reality in the first part of the 90s. But the memory and the advices of these cultural-historical experiences deserve to be considered. From the blood-soaked ground of the WW2 sprang the rationalist-humanist-enlightened spirit of the first post-war futures research. It tacitly excluded from its approach the political-ideological criteria , it practiced human solidarity and focussed on criticism against any jeopardy to the future of the entire mankind .

This trend’s spirit bred a new cultural phenomenon in the Cold War decades. The phenomenon’s originality was revealed in the emergence of a specific state of mind within the WFSF.