{"id":518,"date":"2026-09-07T10:06:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T09:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/?p=518"},"modified":"2026-08-28T10:17:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T09:17:21","slug":"visions-of-the-future-from-central-and-eastern-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/visions-of-the-future-from-central-and-eastern-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"Visions of the Future from Central and Eastern Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her post, Keston Fellow Dr Iona Ramsay<\/a> explains how scholars at a recent workshop view Central and Eastern Europe as a place where different visions of the future have unfolded.<\/h4>\n

Popular and academic stereotypes of Central and Eastern Europe have long presented the region as eternally \u2018backwards\u2019, forever catching up with its more modern Western counterparts. Yet it might be more accurate to describe this region as a generator and laboratory of multiple, globally entangled, and sometimes competing, visions of the future. National, democratic, Christian, fascist, socialist, neoliberal, and other futures have been imagined and tested here, leaving behind an array of historical legacies that are never fully past. In this space of inter-imperial conflict and borderlands, we find a region marked as much by its radically diverse possible futures as by the long shadows of its past. To recentre this region as a site in which futures have been made and lost is therefore to decentre the West as a place from which the future unfolds, to reshape Western perceptions of Central and Eastern Europe, and to reimagine the possibilities and limitations of global futures today.<\/p>\n

This was the starting point for a workshop run on 5th<\/sup> June by the Central and East European Research Centre (CEERC)<\/a> at Cardiff, and funded by the university\u2019s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) People, Culture and Environment Fund. In this workshop, nineteen people from across humanities and social sciences at Cardiff came together to explore how experiences and thinking from Central and Eastern Europe can shape the futures being imagined today. Reflecting on the recent interest in \u2018future-oriented\u2019 thinking and \u2018future proofing\u2019, the workshop aimed to highlight the importance of thinking regionally and globally about temporality \u2013 and how disciplines across the university might be productively challenged by this approach.<\/p>\n

Three thematic roundtable discussions brought together speakers from the disciplines of history, religion, modern languages and geography, while a number of postgraduate students and visitors also took part, and interest was also expressed by undergraduate students.<\/p>\n

In an eloquent and provocative keynote lecture, Dr Anca Cretu<\/a> of Warwick University focused on the history of humanitarianism to show how our approach to future thinking might be seen in new light through \u2018a perspective from <\/em>East-Central Europe\u2019. Moving away from a tendency to see East-Central Europe as a space of crisis, Dr Cretu instead sought to show how the collapse of the Ottoman Empire created an important laboratory within which modern visions and practices of humanitarianism developed. The provision of aid was deeply implicated in the making of the modern nation-state, often negotiated between local, national and international actors, and reveals how our understanding of a humanitarian future might be challenged and inspired by turning to this region\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

\"Photograph<\/figure>\n

If this region helped generate and reshape the ideals of humanitarian internationalism that many still hold (and critique) today, in the twentieth century Central and Eastern Europe became the centre of two radically different internationalist visions that each came to an abrupt end: fascism and state socialism. Both these utopian visions were global, but were also, as a number of the workshop speakers showed, remade in very national and regional ways. In the aftermath of the First World War, Professor Kevin Passmore<\/a> explained, Central and Eastern Europe saw the widespread growth of paramilitary groups with extensive, multidirectional relationships with fascist movements across Europe. In Central Europe, however, many of these groups identified themselves as \u2018White Guardists\u2019 rather than \u2018fascists\u2019. These \u2018White Guardist\u2019 movements were able to gain momentum, in no small part, by opposing a very different vision of the future being imagined in the Soviet Union. Here, as Dr James Ryan<\/a> showed, the Bolsheviks were grappling with the task of building the socialist future and increasingly sought to compress time, using socialist realism to bridge the gap between the now and the future. Professor Oleg Golubchikov<\/a> showed how such visions of the future were quite literally built through urban redevelopment: the creation of \u2018Sputnik towns\u2019 aimed to decentralise cities and abolish the distinction between town and country by creating a multi-level, polycentric system of large but connected cities, thereby providing a scaffolding through which a socialist future could be built.<\/p>\n

In more recent years, as the integration of Central and Eastern Europe into Western liberal democracy and the market economy has failed to bring about the promised equality, the teleological nature of the \u2018transition\u2019 process has come under attack from multiple directions. Professor David Clarke<\/a> showed how Germany, the country that for a long time served as a model for how memory work could bring about liberal democracy, is facing a crisis of memory: the culture of remembering that was initially intended to bring about justice for victims and democratization has instead, its critics argue, become a tool of governmentality that forms part of the broader crisis of liberal democracy today. The crisis of liberalism\u2019s future was also taken up by Dr Iona Ramsay, who examined how the failures of liberalism that have helped centre issues of gender and reproduction as sites where alternative futures might be created. Memory of the fight against communism, she showed, has been recaptured to advance explicitly anti-liberal visions of the family. It is also possible to see, however, the emergence of alternative futures built on solidarity. Dr Dorota Goluch<\/a> traced a long and ongoing interest in postcolonial writing in Poland, a country that in recent years has experienced both emigration and immigration, and where the historical experiences of Central and Eastern Europe have been brought powerfully into dialogue with global critiques of colonialism.<\/p>\n

As part of this critique of liberalism, assumptions about the secular nature of the future have also been brought into question. Belief \u2013 whether religious, political or scientific \u2013 has never disappeared from the process of imagining the future. The recent \u2018return\u2019 of religion to the public fore has prompted new reflection on Christian conceptions of the future, which have long shaped, and been shaped by, secular visions of the future. Professor Mary Heimann<\/a> and Dr Rob Heimburger<\/a> drew attention to the very different ways in which the future is imagined in Christian traditions (Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox), including as an eschatological hope that is always both \u2018now\u2019 and \u2018not yet\u2019, and distrusts any purely linear \u2018future\u2019. They showed how, in authoritarian regimes, living in parallel temporalities has played a significant role in developing counter-politics. The future of Europe has far from always been Christian, however. Dr Gavin Murray-Miller<\/a> showed how today\u2019s questions about the place of Islam in Europe can find precedents in the visions of a cosmopolitan Habsburg Empire that sought to integrate \u2018modern Muslims\u2019 into European civilization. Having recentred the process of belief \u2013 whether religious or not \u2013 in imagining the future, the workshop concluded with a discussion between Dr Rosa Hunt, Dr Abdul-Azim Ahmed<\/a> and Professor Josef L\u00f6ssl<\/a> on how interfaith dialogue and exchange might help us imagine plural, open futures.<\/p>\n

\"Photograph<\/figure>\n

The final part of the workshop drew together the day\u2019s discussions by reflecting on the future of the Central and East European Research Centre at Cardiff. Enthusiasm for cooperation across university schools and departments, and for its public-facing role in the city, were clear. Bringing together the diverse expertise that can be found across the university, as well as within Wales more broadly, the centre aims to show that the history of Central and Eastern Europe plays an important role in thinking about what \u2018global\u2019 futures might look like \u2013 including here in Cardiff.<\/p>\n

A wide range of engagement, research and funding developments, centred on, or related to, Central and Eastern Europe are being planned for 2026-2028.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In her post, Keston Fellow Dr Iona Ramsay explains how scholars at a recent workshop view Central and Eastern Europe as a place where different visions of the future have […]","protected":false},"author":905,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,7,19,31,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-central-and-east-european","category-currentprojects","category-european-history","category-intellectual-history","category-modern-history"],"meta_box":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/905"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":520,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions\/520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}