Images of Europe’s Future Threats at the End of the Cold War – a Perspective From Finland

Authors

• Johan Wahlsten Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37449/ennenjanyt.88219

Keywords:

past futures; intellectual history; horizon of expectation; images of threat; Europe; end of the Cold War

Abstract

In the past decade, Europe has faced a crisis after another, and the continent and the European Union have attempted to cope with a myriad of challenges. In the last few years, European liberalism has come under attack. Three decades ago, as the Cold War and the battle of ideas came to an end, Europeans were facing a critical period of different nature. It is not rare that the end of the Cold War and the 1990s is presented as an era of staunch optimism, faith in the future, and a belief in the triumph of liberalism.

This article approaches the era from a different perspective: it will examine the challenges and threats Europe was believed to face in its future. This will be done by analyzing the images of threats that manifested in the horizon of expectation of the Finnish scientific community. How did researchers reorient themselves towards the future during a time of profound societal transformation? The primary sources analysed for past perceptions of future challenges consist of major newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals. Methodologically the article draws both from the research tradition of intellectual history and the conceptualizations of Reinhart Koselleck and the futures history tradition derived from his work.

Based on the analysis, I suggest that Finnish intellectuals saw the threats of future Europe originating from five interconnected questions: issues of nationality and ethnicity, mass migration and its byproducts, the dynamics of European integration, poverty and inequality, and ecological complications. Moreover, I argue that many familiar and acknowledged narratives that present the zeitgeist of early 1990s Europe full of optimism for the triumphal progress of liberalism do not fully represent the reality of contemporaries. On the contrary, it was exactly many of the continent’s current challenges that appeared in the horizons of expectation during the turning point three decades ago.