Authors

Jan Surman¹;  ¹ Masaryk Institute and Archives of the CAS, Czechia

Discussion

Over the past two decades, socialist planning and forecasting has been the subject of a number of projects. While these analyses have focused on individual state studies or on the sites of East-West cooperation, such as the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, my presentation will approach the question of whether and to what extent socialist foresight was an international and transnational endeavour. Taking Czechoslovak and Polish institutions as examples, I will argue that despite the interest in coordinating forecasting, the initiatives did not develop into joint initiatives. However, joint discussions on methodologies, as well as COMECON-coordinated projects such as multilingual dictionaries, had an impact on national initiatives. I will argue that the main problem was that futures studies was seen as a politically charged field of study. While this brought positive benefits to scholars, such as easier access to international literature and more opportunities to travel abroad, at the same time, both politicians and scholars were reluctant to disclose sensitive data, practicing self-censorship in the international arena.