Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD’s Interfuturs Project

The idea of planning economy and engineering social life has often been linked with Communist regimes’ will of control. However, the persuasion that social and economic processes could and should be regulated was by no means limited to them. Intense debates on these issues developed already during the First World War in Europe and became globalized during the World Economic crisis.
During the Cold War, such discussions fuelled competition between two models of economic and social organisation but they also revealed the convergences and complementarities between them. This ambiguity, so often overlooked in histories of the Cold War, represents the central issue of the book organized around three axes.
First, it highlights how know-how on planning circulated globally and were exchanged by looking at international platforms and organizations. The volume then closely examines specificities of planning ideas and projects in the Communist and Capitalist World. Finally, it explores East-West channels generated by exchanges around issues of planning which functioned irrespective of the Iron Curtain and were exported in developing countries.


Jenny Andersson
Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfutursP roject In 1975,t he Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched ar esearch project entitled Interfutures.Research project into the developmento ft he advanced industrial societies in harmonyw ith the developing world.¹The purpose of the project,i nitiatedb yt he Japanese government and fundedp artlyb yt he Toyota foundation, was to investigate alternative patterns of development for the Western economies in an ew and interconnected world.What was referred to,i nt he project,a st he advanced industrialized societies werei ncreasingly addressing what Interfutures described as "structural challenges."Interfutures was appointed at the samet ime as ag roup led by the American economist William McCracken.The McCracken report introduced the idea of structural challenges in Western economies,w ith the purpose of bringinghomethe argument that the long period of growth and welfares tatism was over.²While the McCracken group dealt with the prospect of post-OPEC economic policies specifically, Interfutures was chargedwith reflectingonthe need for an ew long term strategyf or the West,as trategyt hat could surpass the habitual horizon of conjecturalp lanninga nd deal with the new phenomenono f uncertainty in achanging world economy.The problem of increasinguncertainty in the world environment would be met by setting out a "long term vision of the major problems to which society will be confronted."³'Structural issues,'' interdependence,' and 'uncertainties' werea mong the many1 970s neologisms that informed the Interfuturs group but thata lsop ositioned Interfuturs in anew field of emergent planning methods and forms of expertize from the mid-1970s on.The literature describes the 1970sa sm arking a watershed moment and break from the long postwar period: ashock of the global due to the arrival, center stage, of the developing world as actors in their own right; astructural nach dem Boom markedbythe end of stable industrial growth; By pointingtothe link between such originallydefensivereactions to aset of radical world discourses,and an emergent neoliberal Western world view,the argument allows us to addnuance to the prevailing understanding of the geneaologyofneoliberalism in global politics since the 1970s.What we call in shorthand neoliberalism wasn ever ac lear cut paradigm but should be understood as a gradual outcome of ab attle between as et of much largerd iscourses on the world'sf uture in the 1970s.⁵The OECD,a no rganization that was first created in the context of the Marshall Plan in 1948, emergedinthe context of the oil crises in the early1970s as the "stewardofglobalisation," the overseer of aprocess of global interconnectedness thatseemed to threaten the interests of the Western world and that required, therefore, new tools of planning,management and control.⁶Several studies have pinpointed the role of the OECD as as ite for the circulation of earlyn eoliberal ideas.Thesei deas, carried by the high level expert reports circulated by the OECD in the 1970sw ered ifferent in nature than the first generation of neoliberal thinkingt hath ad emergedf rom the "neoliberal thoughtcollective" of Hayek'sMount PelerinSociety in the 1950s.⁷They were allegedlyn on-ideological and did not take place on the level of doctrine or political theory.Rather,they wereinscribed in pragmatic and technocratic arguments concerning planning and policy toolsa nd showcased as forms of problem solving for welfarecapitalist economies.Around such arguments, liberal, neoliberal, as well as progressive economists and planners could gather.⁸Meanwhile, the ideas presented by the Interfutures group stood in close connection to other notionso fi nterdependence.T he McCracken report,w hich included some of the world'smost famous economists, became alandmark report not onlyf or its diagnosis of problems hitherto understood as conjectural and structural, and thus having endemic causes within Western industrial economies, but also for the remedies thatitproposed: liberalization of labour markets and social systems, an ew set of social compromises based on lower expecta- Johanna Bockman, "Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the New International Economic Order," Humanity:A nI nternational Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 1( 2015): 109 -128. Mathieu Leimgruber, "Stewardso fg lobalisation."Unpublished paper. Dieter Plehwe and PhilipM irowski, TheR oad fromMount Pelerin: TheM aking of aN eoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge,M ass.: HarvardU niversity Press, 2010). Vincent Gayon."L'OCDE au travail.Contribution àu ne sociologie historique de la 'coopération économique internationale' sur le chômage et l'emploi (1970 -2010)" (PhD.Diss,Université Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne,2 010) ;F rancoisD enord, Neoliberalisme version française.Histoire d'une idéologie politique (Paris:D emopolis,2 007); Laurent Warlouzet, Governing Europe in a Globalizing World.Neoliberalism and its Alternatives following the 1973 crisis (London: Routledge, 2018).
Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfutursP roject tions on growth and redistribution, less state intervention and more market mechanisms, and more openness towardg lobal markets.⁹As Vincent Gayon has shown, the publication of the McCracken report settled ac entral dispute as both Keynesian and monetarist economists agreed on what was essentially at urn to monetarism in the organization'se nsuing economic expertize.¹⁰Rawi Abdelal has shown how the OECD in as imilar manner became the privileged arena for the creation of al iberalized framework for the financial markets, and that this framework, designed to fosteraglobal expansion of capital markets,was in fact pushed through by former socialists such as the French premier Jacques Delors, with the idea that liberalization would provide anew market rationality and stability.¹¹This turn within the OECD to seemingly apolitical forms of expertize is important because it permits us to add nuance to the historiographyo fn eoliberalism as ap roject of ideological vanguards,t he influenceo f which wasf or the most part still very marginal in the 1970s.What it instead bringsout is how specific notions of expertize in themselvesbecame the solution for settling an intenselyc ontested process of globalization.
It is pertinent to place the notion of the future in this context.Interfutures is of interest to this volume because of its interest in new future-orientedplanning technologies through which it thought world relationships might be made manageable over the 'long term,' in other words, over anew horizon of time stretching beyond the conventional horizon of planning systems.In addition, as presented by Interfutures, such tools,w hich included the much marketed scenario tool, weret hought to have an ew and global spatial scope, through which they could embrace problems of complexity,interdependence and uncertainty in aworld system.Acentral element of the Interfutures project was indeed that it proposed shifting the gaze of planning from conjecturalm acro economic planning,toward the setting of long-term strategic goals and objectives.This included an emphasis on shapings hared images of the process of globalization and the diffusiono nto the world level of positive images of the world market.
 Paul McCrackenG uido Carli, Herbert Giersch, Attila Karaosmanoglu, RyutaroK omiya, Assar Lindbeck,R obert Marjolin,R obin Matthews,.Towards Full Employment and Price Stability:A Report to the OECD by aG roup of Independent Experts (Paris:T he Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,1977).See Charles S. Maier, "'Malaise':The Crisis of Capitalism in the 1970s," in Shock of the Global,2 5-48.Robert Brenner, TheE conomics of Global Turbulence: TheA dvanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2000(London: Verso, 2006 Interfutures marked at urn here in international organizations as tools, such as scenarios,forecasts and indicators, in which copingwith uncertaintyand unpredictability by setting out images, expectations and scenarios of developmentwas key.

The problem of interdependence
Interdependence was aW estern term, used to describe aphenomenon of planetary disorder,ashake-up of global power relations and athreat to the category of the industrial world.As such, the term interdependence alsos erved to reiterate Western interests in this potentiallym essy process.Interdependence as at erm had antecedents in earlier postwarr eflections on the impact of an emergent tiersm onde that introduceda ne lement of chaos into world relationships.In 1953, the French demographer Alfred Sauvy,f amous for having coined the term 'Third World,' wrotet hat this new world was defined preciselybyi ts rejection of Western images of the future, and its ambition to create images of its own.Sauvy did so in acontext that is not without importance for us here, as amember of the circle of French planners who developed the so-called prospective method as aform of long term planning.¹²The prospective method would resurfaceasthe method of choice of the Interfutures project,i nd irect proximityt os cenarios taken from American forecasting.The emphasis on interdependence as aprocess that needed guidance in order to shift from ap otentiallyconflict-riddens tate of affairs, into aq uestion of 'harmonious' relationships,w as ar esponset oo ther 1970sd iscourses on the world economy, which, inspired by dependency and world system theory,emphasized global structures as reflections of profound imbalances between adevelopedand adeveloping world, or even as aprojection of the Marxist classstruggle at the global level.Interdependence could, as Interfutures would suggest,bemanaged by the active creation of new and "harmonious relations" between the West and the Third World, if methods for such management weref ound.It was preciselyt hrough an emphasis on methodst hat Interfutures set out the elements of what weret ob ecome the dominant Western interpretation of globalization, and arguably,i tw as preciselya st he methodso f steeringn ew world relationships appeared that forms of future research found their relevanceo nt he global level.
Interfutures sat at the same time as the AmericanT rilateral Commission, appointed to resuture an Americanw orldview broken by the problem of multipolarity."Managingi nterdependence," as formulated bothi nt he Trilateral commission and the Interfuturesp rogram, was ae uphemism for finding the political technologies and planning tools with which an ew confrontational world situation could be pushed toward forms of strategic cooperation.¹³ Another shared denominator between the Interfutures group and the TrilateralC ommission was the theme of 'ungovernability,' ad efinition proposed by the Trilateral Commisson to denote problems of rigidity in Western welfares tatesa nd social systems.¹⁴Both Interfutures and the Trilateral Commission performed a central analytical movea st hey joined together,i nt he notiono fi nterdependence, problems of uncertainty in the outside world environment with the idea of uncertainty within Western societies.The latter were understood as having been unleashedbyforms of social crisis with roots in Western systems of governance.By joining these two elements of crisis together, bothInterfutures and the Trilateral Commission also came to the conclusionthat the capacities of the West to meet atransformed world order in which the Third World now had abargaining position hinged on its ability to draw developing countries into an expanding world market.I na ddition, Western competitiveness needed to be restored through the reform of labor markets and welfare states.¹⁵In this sense, 'interdependence' wasmore than adescription of anew phenomenon of globality,itwas term chargedwith aheavy historical legacyofW estern hegemonyand adiagnosis of as ituation in which the colonial relationships inherited from the nineteenth centuryw ereg iving wayt oanew symmetry in power relations.I nt his world situation, the meaning of First,S econd and ThirdW orld was no longer clear.
The Interfutures program defined interdependence as at hreefold problem: First,t he oil crisis was the final indication thatt he long period of stability around industrial society was over.F altering growth rates and new forms of social conflict eroded the basiso fF ordist societies.Moreover,t he volatility that  Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).Phillip Golub, "From the new internationalo rder to the G20," Third WorldQ uarterly,3 4, no.6( 2013): 1000 -1015. TrilateralCommission, Towards aR enovated International System (Washington,1977) growth rates and price levels had encountered in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970sseemed to mark the end of conjecturalmarket patterns,and introduced aconcern with fluctuations in commodity markets that defied predictability and governability.Second, the liberal capitalist economies wereincreasinglycompeting with the socialist planned economies over resources, technological development and investment.Arelatively stable Cold Warrelationship was thus changing as both worlds wereenteringthe post-industrial eraand encountered similar problems of value and labor change, the skills revolution, and new struggles for energy and rawm aterials.Third,t his process of possiblec onvergence( convergence theory boomedi nt he decade priort ot he Interfutures group) was disturbed through the confrontation with the Third World, which forced both Western societies and the economies of the Eastern bloc to seek new competitive alliances.I nt he years leadingu pt oO PEC,t he Third World had shown that it was no longer content to be the object of developmentpolicies, and was increasingly claiming af airs hare of world development.This included access to markets for advanced industrial goods, an increaseds hare of world industrial labor,a nd controls over prices of its rawm aterialsi nw hat to Interfutures was nothing less than af ull shake-up of the postwar world order.¹⁶In summary, world hierarchies werei nf lux.Interfutures gave expression to this flux as the group proposed anew categorization of the world into the 'Advanced Industrial Economies,' AIS, which included the socialist countries,onthe one hand, and on the other,the LDCs of the developing world.Meanwhile, the Interfutures report, publishedi n1 979, foresawi mportant processes of fracture also disintegrating these new geopolitical categories.The Western world was,i nthel ight of problems such as price fluctuations,waged rift,e xpanding public sectors, and stop and go policies, at the risk of no longer representing acoherent and unified system of organized market economies.Somecountries (France, the UK) ressembled developing nations in their reliance on ag rowings tate apparatusa nd failing macro economic policies.The incoherence in the use of macro economic planning was at hreat to au nited AIS position thatm ight have been able to meet Third Worldism with asingle Western strategy.Thecoreproblem with the second category,the developing countries,was of course its new and menacing role as a collective agent in an inverted bargaininggame.But Interfutures pointed out that the hope for new and harmonious relations between the Third World and the OECD countries layi nt he fact that Third Worldism was not stable and was al- Glenda Sluga, "The transformation of international institutions: Global shock as cultural shock," in Shock of the Global,ed.Niall Fergusson, Charles S. Maier,E rezManela, Daniel JSargent (Cambridge,M ass.: HarvardU niversity Press, 2010), 223 -237.
Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfuturs Project readybreakingupbetween oil exporters and importers.Anumber of countries -Iran, India, Brezil, South Africa, Mexico, and Algeria -werec ontenders for industrialism, while other Third World countries -such as Bangladesh -werebasicallyonlyt he sites of location for Western industries.Japan (the third node of the Trilateral Commission) occupied an intermediary place with its hyper industrialization and increasingr elianceo nr aw materials.H ighlye nergy sensitive, Japan was challengingE urope for oil.With its Western system of governance after 1945and the direct links between its planning elites and Western networks, Japan was an extension of the Western world in Asia.Interdependence was thus af undamentallyf ractiousp rocess which posed not one but manyp roblems of coordination, but also the opportunityfor strategic alliancesifcommon interests over the long-term could be found.Interfutures' problem was how to reassert the AIS' interests over the long-term by possiblymaking strategic concessions to the most advanced LDCs for the purpose of protecting long term hegemony.¹⁷ The vision of globalc hallenges put forward by the notiono fi nterdependence wasthus one that reflected ahighlyW estern biased conception of changes to world order,and alimited take on globality.The Interfutures group also used the term to refer to ad ifferent set of issues that by the mid 1970sw erel abelled 'world problems' or 'common problems,' and that went beyond problems of coordination between categories and depicted planning problems thatcould not be dealt with within the frame of the nation state and national planning systems such as those developed during the postwar period.In radical globality discourses, so-called 'world problems' wereu nderstood as problems that necessitated common solutions,i no ther words forms of planning and decision-making surpassing the national, the bipolar or even the transnationall evel and that could onlye fficientlyt ake place on an ew level of world, for instance in the form of world government,w orld regulation or indeedw orldp lans.This latter notion -the idea thatt he entire world system could be planned -was as we will see an idea that flourisheda long with the manyd ifferent models of the world economyt hatm arkedthe first half of the 1970s.In most of these models, problems in the world economyw erep erceiveda ss hared, or indeedc ommon.The Club of Rome, in manyw aysatwin project to that of Interfuturesbut guilty in the eyes of the OECD of the problematic Limits to Growth-report in 1972, spoke of problems in the world system using the term world problematique, denoting encompassingp roblems that concerned the world as aw hole.
It is important to note, in this regard, that Interfutures dealt to onlyasmall extent with such notions of common or world problems,a nd spokei nstead of  Interfutures, chapter drafts (in particular VI, XI, XIX), OECD archives.
'problems of development.'This was ahighlyconscious choice.The euphemism 'problems of development' hid the fundamental tension between discourses affirming globality by arguingt hat the interests of the whole world required changeo nt he level of the world system, and discourses thateither emphasized 'common futures' by pinpointing trans-border problems such as environment or armament, or reaffirmed, likeI nterfutures, the stakeso ft he Western worlda nd new strategic alliances with the South.¹⁸Interfutures did not set out to address development as ac ommon world problem of over vs. under development in a systemic whole, as did radical planners such as the Dutch JanT inbergeno r the Armenian born American systems analyst Hazan Ozbekhan in connection to NIEO debates at the same time (see below).Rather,itaddressed development as aset of fractures thatchallenged the dominance of the industrialized world in anew struggle over an international division of industrial labor.The first of these fractures was the acute crisisinrelationships between AISand LDCs alreadydescribed.T he second fracture was the conflict between resource extraction and nature, highlighted by the Club of Rome-report and directlyi nc onflictw ith the OECD'sp revailing notiono fd evelopmenta se conomic growth.¹⁹ The third fracture was more subtle but the most important,a salarge part of Interfutures would also cater to the issue of reactions to development in terms of 'changing socio-cultural values' and instability within Western nations.The problem of interdependence,inother words, was not aproblem of addressing problems common to the world in the interest of all, but rather,aproblem of reigning in an emergent new world order so that fundamental categories of the developing and developed world could be restored.By articulating and framing problems of interdependence as problems that could be solvedi ft he interest of each was reasserted, the OECD reiterated the liberal capitalist West as ac ategory under threat of losing its world dominance, but with ahistoricallylegitimate interest in maintaining its hegemonic position.

Planning the world: originso ff uturology
Interfutures' mission was in fact atwo fold one, as its work not onlyconsisted in the strategic analysis of an ew world situation marked by interdependence, but Planning the Futureo fW orld Markets: the OECD'sI nterfutursP roject also in examining which new methodsofplanningcould permit overseeing and managingthis new situation.Interfutures was thus devoted from the onset to the question of methods, and to the particulart echnologies that could transform a global situation of conflict and struggle for resources into one of "harmonious development."²⁰The program proposed using formso fl ong-term or long rangeplanning, includingscenarios, prospective and modelling,asits particular method.
Futurological tools proliferated in planning circlesi nt he period from the mid 1960st ot he mid 1970s.While historians have dealt with the transnational networks of planners in the interwar and postwar era, much less historical research has been devoted to the circulation of concepts and tools of planninginformedb yi deas of complexity,i nterdependence, risk and having as their focus the long term from the 1970son.²¹Meanwhile, as argued here, this second mode in planning impliedanotable expansion of planning rationalities, both with referencetothe 'long term' as temporal horizon, and to the global scale.Future research, for instance the scenario method experimented with by Interfutures, originated in technological forecasting and Cold Warstrategy.Both focused on the idea of the 'long range,' ac ategory produced by nuclear strategya nd ballistic research.From the mid 1960s on, forms of forecastingb egan to be considered as ways of planning changei nn on-technological systems, including social organizations and the political system.²²In the Eastern bloc, the proclamation of the Scientific and Technological Revolution emphasized scientific management, and rehabilitated forecastingasakey planningt echnology (it had alreadybeen used as part of Lenin'sN EP in the interwar period).Ad ecision by the central Party committee for the use of forecasting as part of scientific management in 1967, led to the explosion of sectorala nd governmental forecasting activities in socialist economies, and in 1967and 1968 there were several transnationalmeet- ingsofsocialist forecasters.²³On the other side of the Atlantic, anational Science and Technologyp olicy which included am uchm ore active role for federal government and aturn to new planningtools such as cost benefit analysis and forecasting began under the Kennedya nd subsequentlyt he Johnson administrations.²⁴From 1972 on, the debate over future research as an ew planningt ool also inspired the creation of ad hoc commissions to nationalp lanning systems in Europe -the Netherlands, Sweden, France, West Germany, UK -and Japan.These commissions were national spaces but they also functioned as international hubs for the circulation of methods, writing,a nd forms of expertize.The methodso ff orecasting, systems analysis,g lobalm odelling and scenario analysis laid the basis for new communities of planners, oftentime consultants, who moved between national planning commissions and transnational sites such as the Club of Rome, IIASA, or Interfutures.²⁵Like its more insubordinate twin, the Club of Rome, Interfutures stemmed from ac entral gathering of planners organized by the OECD in Bellagio in 1969.The Bellagio conference, the themeo fw hich was "Longr angef orecasting and planning" wascalled by the OECD'sScience Policy Unit around the theme of 'problems of moderns ocieties.'²⁶ As Matthias Schmelzer has shown, problems of modern societies was ae uphemism for the concern within parts of the OECD with the critique of growth by the late 1960s and the discovery of both the environmental and social costs of economic development.The OECD'sS cience Policy Unit was created by Alexander King,the initiator,with Aurelio Peccei, of the Club of Rome, as part of aturn away from the strict postwar focus on growth within the organization.King used the SciencePolicy Directorate in order to criticizet he standingo ft he idea of industrial development,c onvinced as he was that the prerequisites for industrial development weree xhausted and that growth basedo nr esource extraction had reached maturity in the Western world.²⁷He thought that the Western world had to develop am ore nuanced ap- Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfuturs Project proach to problems of industrial developmenti fc apitalism was to survive.This included harnessing the forces of science in better ways and picking up the competition over productivity with the socialist world and the US,a sw ell as developing methods of planningthat drew on the so-called policy sciences,the scientific approach to planning thath ad emergeda sp art of systems analysis or Operations Research in the 1950s and 1960s.TheBellagio Declaration expressed the OECD'sw ish to concentrate Western nations' efforts in planning, and stressed the need thatW estern nations develop formso fl ong-term forecasting that could help them managet he long-term effects of development in and on their social structures,deal with possible value conflict,a nd establish priorities for policies.²⁸ The Bellagio meeting gathered manyofthe forecasters and consultants who had been active in spreadingt he tools of future research.One of these was the German-born engineer Eric Jantsch.Jantsch wroteamuch read report on planning and technological forecastingi n1 967.It presented the idea that technological changecould be actively governed and plannedfor the benefit of welfaresocieties and thatt he unintended consequences and cybernetic feedback loops of new technologies could be forecasted, so that the system of economic and technological changewas in actual fact amalleable, controllable entity.Itintroduced the idea of the long range,toaEuropean public of planners.Thereport also proposed that human values and value reactions to industrial and technological processes wereamong the thingsthat could be planned and foreseen as systemic feedback functions.This wasnosmall point in the aftermath of 1968 and turbulent years in European societies marked both by anti-nuclear protests and labor market unrest.²⁹Jantsch edited the 1969v olume from the Bellagio conference, and in 1972 published Long range policy and planning which circulated widely amongst European, American and Japanese planners (and was also translated into Russian and prefaced by Dzhermen Gvishiani).³⁰Another participant at Bellagio was the former RAND strategist and software engineer Hasan Ozbekhan.Ozbekhan designed the first model for the Club of Rome, meant to address a 'globalp redicament' by stressing interdependence in aw orld system.³¹ At Bel- lagio, Ozbekhan presented his 'general theory of planning,' which argued that the world could be considered to be ah olistic system, and that this system could be plannedinorder to work towards an overarchingvalue, such as for instance human developmentorenvironmental balance.The 'critical problems' of the world could be solved, if the world future wasn ot treated as ap roblem of prediction, but as an ormative problem of setting out an imageo fw hat an ideal worldf uturew ould be like.To Ozbekhan'sm ind, this had to be about the envisioning of ideal states such as aw orld withouth unger,a nd an end to the dichotomyo fo vera nd under development.³²Ozbekhan is an example of the radical use of systems theory in forging radical visions of ab etter and more rational world by the late 1960s and 1970s.But Ozbekhan'sm odel for the Club of Rome, which explicitlyi ncorporated the variable of Western value changea sapreconditionf or an ew world equilibrium, was never used and the Limits to Growth reportp ublished in 1972 was basedi nstead on JayF orrester'sW orld 2m odel, initiallydesigned to monitor the flow of goods in commercial warehouses in Boston harbor.³³The Interfutures report made use of some of Ozbekhan'si deas but translated the idea of aworld system with an ideal future objective into ac ompletelyd ifferent concern with the future interests of the industrialized nations and the necessityo fm aintaining the 'market image.' From systemsa nalysis to world consultancy: Jacques Lesourne and the MITRA group It is clear from this argument that Interfutures did not represent future research as such, nor an engagement with the more radical attempts to use future research as away of engaging with globality that existed at the sametime.Rather, Interfutures represented av ery specific Western take on the world'sf uture.This take needs to be understood in the context of the rationale of the OECD and its mandate to oversee the process of globalization, but in addition, it was av iew directlyi nfluenced by the conditionso fm aterial production within the Interfutures group, by the scenario methodused, and specifically, by the use of consultancy.A sa rgued, future researchr epresented aw idening of the repertoires of planning,a nd the extension of the scope of planningr ationalities both in  Hasan Ozbekhan, AGeneral Theoryo fP lanning (Santa Barbara: Systems Development Corporation, 1969). Elodie Vieille Blanchard, Les limites àl ac roissance dans un monde global:m odélisations, prospectives, réfutations (PhD Diss., Paris,E HESS,2 011).
Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfuturs Project space and time.Tothis it might be added that future research also involved new forms of circulation, in particular of management techniques,between the public and the corporate spheres.F uture research had origins bothinmilitary planning,a nd in the planningentitieso fl arge multinational, predominantlyA merican, corporations such as IBM, Kodak, Bell laboratories,L ockheed, Kaiser Aluminum, or the Swiss Battelle Industries.A ss uch, it had direct links to the idea thatm arket mechanisms in various ways could be used as am ethod of steeringa nd as ac omplement to plans, but that marketa ctivities also required ap recision of operational objectives, goals, and processes.In the Eastern bloc, future research was part of anew reform communist toolkit which included management science and systematic forecasting.³⁴In the West,f uture research contributed to ag rowingi ndustry in indicators of long-term developments in technologya nd prices,b ut it alsor eflectedamarket metaphor in that it drew on emerging forms of consultancy.T ransnationalo rganizations after 1945p ut in place new forms of mobilityofe xpertize, as expertsm oved from nationaltoi nternational planning entities and back again.Theg rowth of the multinational corporation, in the Cold Ware ra,f ostered an ew kind of mobile expert which was that of the consultanti nm atters of strategy and decision, who facilitated the interfaceb etween corporations and public decision-making bodies on both the national and transnational levels.The OECD'smodus operandus with expert groups privileged the use of consultancy,a si nm anyw ayst he UN-system and the European Community did.Consultants could be academics, on leave for shorter missions, but they could also be professional expert-strategists whose origins were not in academia but in contract-seeking agencieswith am ediating role between corporations and national or transnationalo rganizations.As a form of expertize, consultancy enabled new forms of circulation between national and transnationals paces,a nd forecasting,s cenarios,m odels and forecasts werea ll technologies that were, from the mid 1960s on, carried by consultancy.Consultancya lsoc reated as pecific mode for the translation between planning technologies taken from public sectors and decision tools taken from the corporate world.Interfutures mobilizedanumber of consultants, includingthe French plannerBernard Cazes, the Britishsociologist Andrew Shonfield, and the American sociologist DanielB ell, all of whom werep rominent within the field of future research and forecasting (both Shonfeld and Bell wrotec entral bookso n forecastingand planninginpost-industrial society).It was directed by yetanoth- See Kott and Sommer in this volume.
er consultant,the French systems analyst and prospectiviste JacquesLesourne.³⁵The method used by Interfutures, the scenario method and prospective analysis, was aproduct of consultancy and the circulation of expertize between decisionmaking in corporations and forms of public planning.The scenario method had been invented by the nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, first at RAND and then at the neoconservative Washington thinktank,the Hudson Institute.From there, the scenario method was transferred to simulations of domestic developments in the Americancontext (in particularinthe field of value tensions and race relations).Kahn also sold ap ackage known as 'Corporate Scenarios' to leading corporations, and in the early1 970s, the French systems analyst Pierre Wack brought the scenario method from the Hudson Institute to Royal Shell, as am eans with which to oversee uncertainty in oil markets and reserves.³⁶The scenario method,which aimedtoactively invent or script possible futures,was closelyrelated to another method which influenced the field of futurer esearch from the mid 1960s on, French so-called prospective.Prospective wasbrought into the Interfutures group through Jacques Lesourne and wase ssentiallyaform of decision science that developed in the large French publicc ompanies,i np articular the SNCF but also the privateSaintGobain.It was to alarge extent aconsultancy activity thatbegan in the so-called Clubs that grouped together business leaders and politicians, and prospective was ak ey element in the introduction of economic forecasting, business cycle theories, and labor management in France.³⁷As such prospective is highlyi ndicative of what Francois Denord has described as French neoliberalism, astrangealliance between French planners, engineers, and leaders of public and national industries.³⁸Prospective was integratedi nto the French Commissariat au Plan in the mid 1960s.After 1968,i ts focus became that of consideringt he impacts of revolutionary value changeo nF rench society.³⁹Both scenarios and prospective,inother words, wheremethodswith an ap-parent focus on the social, on monitoringvalues and forms of uncertainty resulting from value changea nd potential unrest.
Lesourne was well familiar with prospective.He was an engineer and management consultant,who as the author of an umber of books on business management and planning had introducedk ey elements of econometrics and business cycle theory in France.In 1958, Lesourne created ac onsultancy firm SEMA (Sociétéd 'économie et de mathématiques appliqués)which worked in prospective analysis, econometrics and information management..At the time that he was recruited to Interfutures, Lesourne was centrallyplaced in the futurological field as assistant director to the International Institute for AppliedS ystems Analysis,I IASA, and president of the French Futuribles association.⁴⁰But in the 1950s Lesourne had also ventured into global consultancy through SEMA'sinternational branch, METRA, which worked on exporting systems analysis and management consultancy to key countries in the south, in particularM orocco, and which had as its particular market niche the aim of helping French multinationals maintain relationships with the former colonies after decolonisation.As demonstratedb yC hristian in this volume, France, Britain and Belgium reacted against the volatility in commodity markets by the early1 970s by strengthening their tieswith formercolonies and setting in place systems for price negotiations on primarym aterials.At the samet ime, the former colonies,a nd particularly those on the path of industrial development,became interesting markets for European technological solutions in communication and finance.port drew on the prospective methodthatLesourne was at the same time experimenting for Interfutures.⁴²

Overcoming limits: reshaping international order
The Interfutures group, and in particularL esourne, used scenarios as the method for constructingavision of interdependence thatprotected key Western interests, and with which it could also reject alternative visionsofanew world order and in particularthosecomingfrom the Limits to Growth report,published ayear before OPECsent oil prices searing,and the RIO-report,written by JanTinbergen for UNITAR.R IO codifiedt he theme of aN ew International Economic Order (NIEO).
Limits to Growth was based on computer models producedbyateam of computer analysts and systems programrs under the direction of Dennis and Donatella Meadows at MIT. Limits sent ashock wave through the industrialized world with its projection of an "overshoot and collapse" scenario.⁴³The report was publically marketed and spread in ways that were strategicallyorientedatcatching public attention, its models and scenarios alsoi ntended to work as triggers of the globalimagination and to raise attention about an ensuing environmental collapse.As Matthias Schmelzer has shown, the publication of Limits created profound tensions within the OECD.⁴⁴The Club of Rome, agroup of industrialists and planners under King and Aurelio Peccei (another world consultant,h aving worked for the Olivetti foundation in Abyssinia) was the creation of the OECD Science PolicyU nit as part of its search for ab roader idea of planning,capable of embracing common problems and negative feedback loops.But the final messageofthe report,projecting afuture determined by the tension between population and finite available resourcesand prophesyingthe end to capitalist development was alittle hard to swallow for an organization devoted to protecting the economic development of the Western world.Interfutures was, as Schmelzer shows, ac entral component in the OECD'sa ttempt to save af ragilized growth paradigm from the mid 1970so nward,byaccepting the idea thatenvironmental problems needed to be managed, but by reiterating the importance of growth to lasting social stability in the Western world and by an ew insistenceo nt he role of market mechanisms.Interfutures was appointed at the same1 975M inisterial  "Industrial development in the Third world.Actor'sstrategies" (SEMA, METRA International, 1977). Vieille Blanchard, Limites al acroissance. Schmelzer, "Born in the corridors of the OECD." Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfuturs Project meeting thatl aunched the McCracken group and its theme of structurala djustment.The meeting "put an end to previous debates about the problems of modern society by reaffirming without anyqualifications the pursuit of growth as the key responsibility of governments."The ministerial meeting in 1975 included a new emphasis on market mechanisms, as planninga nd welfares tatism were now understood as incapable of overcoming the endemic problem of stagflation.⁴⁵The formulation 'in harmony' in the description of the Interfutures project was acorerejection of the idea of physical boundaries to growth: it referred not onlytoareconciliation of interests with the ambitions of development of strategic countries in the Third World, but also to the idea that the physical limits to development as posited by Limits could be overcome with less thanlife altering changes in industrial strategies.Infact there weredeemed to be no physical limits to growth.The Interfutures group acknowledgedthat Mankindwas enteringa critical stagei ni ts relationship to the ecosphere.But it rejected (as did the McCracken group) the idea that therewerephysical limits to growth: "The question of physical limits is not of the form frequently proposed."Limits to industrial development weren ot found in natural resources, but identifiedi nstead in a rangeofothers factors and in particular political phenomena such as the protectionist stances motivated by forms of Third Worldism and nationalism, or,importantly, the rangeo f' socio cultural factors' standing in the wayo fi ndustrial growth in the advanced capitalist economies.⁴⁶By socio cultural factors was meant the kind of 'psychological' protests against nuclear energy and environmental effects of industrialization that the Western world had witnessed since the late 1960s.Addressingproblems of growth meant addressingthese sociocultural factors.This included reigning in social struggles so that competitiveness could be restored and cycleso fw agee xpectations broken.⁴⁷It is unfortunate that the existingliterature has not made the links between the environmentalist messageo ft he Club of Rome, the rise of Third Worldism and NIEO,a nd the ensuingi deas of interdependence in the Western world.These three debates weren ot isolated, but part of ag reat conflict over the world'sf uture that makes little sense considered in isolated pieces.I ndeed the relevance of Interfutures onlystands out if we consider it as aset of counterargu- ments to much more radical visions in aw ider debate on the world future.The Limits to growth-report spawned ag lobal controversy about the useso fm odelling,which was technicalo nt he surface but in fact concernedt he very idea of world order.⁴⁸The neo-Malthusian framework of Limits opened the door for a radicalization of the development debate: if the resources controlling world development weref inite within fixed planetary boundaries, then the struggle over the rights of exploitation of these resources wasa cute.⁴⁹This problem transposed, in aw ay,t he nineteenth-centuryp roblem of the class struggle to the level of the world, which Interfutures recognized in its own analysis of apostwar global division of labor.
The Interfutures reporthas to be understood here as akey building stone in the monumental rejection of the Limits to Growth reporta fter 1975,a nd in the gradual transformation of the apocalyptic arguments of Limits into an emphasis on management and sustainable development.These rejections came from different camps.The idea that there were physical limits to growth wasinacceptable not onlyt op revailing Western notions of capitalism, but also to socialist ones.On the initiative of the Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu, an alliance of Romanian and African socialist forecasters challenged Limits by arguing that postindustrialism and the Scientific Technological Revolution made the resource dependency taken for granted in the model irrelevant by replacingnaturalr esources with intellectual ones.Aworld of learning and creativity had no limits.The Limits reportw as, they argued, ap roduct of al imited Western capitalist imagination and a "bourgeois futurology."⁵⁰Other models accepted the idea of planetary limits but challenged the waythatmodels partitioned the right to development between the developing and the developedw orld.The most important intervention here was the so-called Bariloche-Report,written by the Latin American Fondacion Bariloche and deeplyinfluenced by dependency theory.The Bariloche-report argued that Limits wasa ne rroneous representation of events,a s world catastrophe was not an impendings cenario but alreadya th and with two thirds of global populations living in poverty.R ejecting the idea of as tatic equilibrium point in the system, the Bariloche-report proposed using modelling in order to answer the question of how adynamic system could be made to meet what the model referred to as the 'basic needs' of human populations.Covering global needs in the model required at otalreorganization of the world economy and international order,infact anew system thatmoved beyond both capitalism Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfuturs Project and socialism and allowed estimateso fh uman needs to determine the rate of production within environmentallys ustainable limits.⁵¹This would be the messageo fR IO,writtenb yt he Nobel Prize Laureate and World Bank economist Jan Tinbergenf or UNITAR.⁵²In 1973,t he so-called Group of 77 of the non-aligned countries met in Algiers to follow up on the ThirdW orld forum held during the 1972 conferencefor the environment in Stockholm.The Third World was concerned thatt he problem of the environment would take attention away from problems of development.⁵³The Algiers conferencel aunched the New International Economic Order.N IEOw as votedb yt he UN General assemblyi n1 974.The following year,the Lima conference of UNIDO set the goal for the developing countries to obtain a25percent share of world manufacturing.⁵⁴NIEO led to interpretations in the Western world of the UN as the arena of an ew and militant form of Third Worldism that threatened to overthrow the existing economic order.⁵⁵The corec oncern of the NIEO was the right to self reliance,t oachoice of one'so wn economic and social model which to most meant av ersion of socialism,and ashare in what was projected as anew global division of industrial labor (seeC hristian in this volume).NIEO economists attacked an international divisionoflabor destined to reproduce aglobalproletariat.They alsorejected socalled cascading,bywhich the developing world could not access the highvalue added part of production dependent on some of its key minerals.⁵⁶Someminer- See Sam Cole, JayG ershuny, and Ian Miles, "Scenarios of world development," Futures 10, no.1( 1978): 3 -20. JanT inbergen, Reshaping the International EconomicO rder:A ar eport to the Club of Rome (New York: Club of Rome, 1976). Mahbub Al Huq, ThePoverty Curtain: Choices for the Third World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). UNITAR, AN ew International Economic Order:S elected Documents 1945-1975(New York: United NationsInstitutefor Trainingand Research, 1976).See also UNESCO, International Social Science Journal 4, 1976,devoted to the NIEO; Mark T. Berger, "Afterthe Thirdworld?History,destinya nd the fateo fT hird worldism," ThirdW orld Quarterly 25,n o. 1( 2012): 9 -39;A rif Dirlik, "Spectres of the Third world: globalm odernity and the end of the threew orlds," ThirdW orld Quarterly,2 5, no.1( 2012): 131-145; Nils Gilman, "The new international economic order:Areintroduction," Humanity:AnInternational Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no.1(2015): 1-16;Sibylle Duhautois, "Un destin commun?Etudes sur le futur et formation d'une conscienceg lobale 1945 -1989," (PhD Diss., Centred ' histoire de Sciences Po, 2017), chapter4 . UN Charter of the economic rights and duties of states, and Declaration of the principles of international lawc oncerning friendlyr elations and cooperation among states in accordance with the charter of the United Nations,1974. GA resolution 3201, 1974. Samir Amin, "Self relianceand the New International Economic Order," Monthly Review 29, no.3( 1977): 1-21;s ee Christian in this volume.als -aluminium, bauxite, iron -were singled out in particularastargets of cascading (these werea lso at the center of attention in the Interfutures report).In 1974,following the NIEO and the incorporation of principles such as 'unjust enrichment' in the UN Declaration on International Law, Jamaicas hocked world markets by nationalizing bauxite.European countries reacted through the socalled Lome convention,g iving former African, Caribbean and Pacificc olonies privileged access to European markets in the hope of preventing collective protectionist stances.⁵⁷ The RIO report followed the conceptions of the world as as ystemic whole put forward by planners such as Tinbergeno rO zbekhan, and rejected the distinctionb etween developed and developing world in favoro faperspective on the world as aw hole.This was reflected in the production of the report which brought in two expertsf or each chapter,o ne from the developed and the other from the developing world.The report argued for the need for an entirely new international architecture aimeda tp romotingp eace and development and providing for basic human needs.This included giving Third World countries control of their own resources, pooling the world'smaterial wealth includingcapital and technology,a nd developing an overarchingn otion of the common heritageo f Mankind.R IO also gave OPECa ni ncreased role in new globalf inancial institutions and foresawe qual representation of all nations in something called the World Treasury.UNCTADw ould be transformed into aW orld Development and Trade Organisation dominatedb yt he Third World, and complementedb ya World Bank and aW orld Technological Development Authority which would aim to close the technological gapbyloweringt he prices for Third would countries' access to knowhow.⁵⁸Historians and development scholars have shown how the NIEOg radually failed, after 1976,a saThird Worldist attempt to collectively challenget he rules of the postwar economic order.F aced with Western resistancea nd in particular by American monetary extortions by the late 1970s, the attemptsa tmobilizationdemonstrated by OPECbrokedown.Third Worldism in the UN system prompted the US in particulart oc reatea na lternative structure of international organization in the G7.⁵⁹ Interfuturewas as much apartofthis rejectionofNIEO as it was part of the mounting rejection of the Limits report,and the value of the  Golub, "From the new international order to the G20":1005. In 1974 the World Bank was givenanew targett ow ork for the eradication of basic needs.Corinna Unger, International Organizations and Development, 1945-1990(Amsterdam:Springer, 2016). See in particular the special issue in Humanity, Humanity:AnInternational Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 1( 2015).
Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfuturs Project Interfuturegroup'swork layinthe waythat it presented adifferent imageofthe world'sf uture,i nwhich the coree lements of aglobal division of labor between commodity producing nations and industrial actors was preserved.The final report,published in 1976 as Facing the Future,was amirror imageofRIO'sdescription of af undamentallyt ransformed world economic order,a nd the report also directlyr egrouped the themes introducedb yt he NIEO (which developed from a set of statements in 1973 and 1974 to aset of actual negotiations between the developing countries and the Western world): commodity prices,inparticularminerals and oil, technology and technologytransfer,the monetary order of the Bretton Woods system includingd ebt and currencyp rices,a nd the international divisiono fl abor between commodity producing and industrialized countries.⁶⁰In Interfutures' own narrative of an ew economic world order,onlyt he Western world maintainedanadvantage as the main manufacturer of industrial products, and what the report referred to as new and 'harmonious' relationships with the Third World dependednot on areconfiguration of this system but on integrating the industrializing nations of the third world -India, Algeria, Iran -into a 'shared' vision of ag rowingw orld market.Such an emphasis on ag rowing world market can be put in the perspective of the Limits-report,which of course foresawafirm limit to capitalist accumulation.Interfutures alsodismissed RIO's conception of shared world interests -arguing thatRIO did not takeinto consideration the needsofthe Northerncountries and thatits conception of the world was therefore biased.The idea of aW orld Plan wasu nderstood as an unacceptablybureaucratic (socialist) conception that neglected market mechanisms.Market mechanisms, Interfutures proposed, would instead need to be givenalarger space in Western economies in the comingdecades.⁶¹This rejection of planning often returnedinthe Interfutures report,which was concerned with how market mechanisms could be protected for the long term, and with how they could be used in order to solve possible conflicts between short and long-term issuesi n policy planning.As Christian shows in this volume, in the years 1971-1976,forecasting became ak ey tool of UNCTADi norder to plan the development of commodity prices;from the mid 1970s, the socialist countries also attempted to consolidate relationships with the ThirdW orld by forecastingt rade relationships and prices;a nd from the mid 1970st he EEC also engaged in forecastinga sa wayo fs tabilizingc ommodity prices.T hese forms of forecast wered ifferent in kind thanthe idea of aW orld Plan that informed RIO,but they were alsodifferent from the argument thatw ould be put forward by Interfutures and thatf a- Interfutures, "Searchingf or an ew order of the world economy," draft.OECD archives. Interfutures, Newsletter,s ummaryo ft he RIO report,J uly1 977.OECD archives.
vored the use of scenarios as away of creating 'shared' and 'harmonious' images of the world economic future.

Scenarios: am ethod form anaging world relationships
The actual scenarios proposed by Interfutures followed directlyo nt he recommendations of the McCracken group.The main issues paper produced by Lesournei n1 978f ocused on two scenarios,o ne in which therew as growth in the Western world thatw ent through ap rocess of rapid structural adaptation, and one in which this world encountered an endurings tagflation scenario followed by an escalation of social conflicts.Ac onflict-ridden Western world would not be able to put up aunited front towardthe ThirdW orld.⁶²It washowever not onlythe messageofthese scenarios,but also the use of the scenarios as method for shapingforms of opinion and decision-making thatwas important in Lesourne'sw ork for Interfutures.While Limits and RIO werec irculated widely, intended for globalp ublics, the scenarios created by Interfutures werew ritten by expert consultants, and alsoi ncluded the creation of as pecialized public of targeted decision-makers and experts of the world community.I nterfutures worked with am otley crew of consultants strategicallyr ecruited to informt he group of developments in the developing nations,⁶³ but also to spread the messageo ft he Interfutures report of the necessity of al ong-term harmonious strategy to decision-makers in these nations.In other words, consultancy was aform of expertize chosen not onlyinterms of its input,but also to form the basis of a form of circulation which was part of the notion of shapingapositive imageo f the future.T he importance of actively shaping this positive imagel ed to the choice of scenarios as method, and to the rejection of computer modelling, which was accused of leading to deterministic representations of static trends.Interfutures (in fact Jacques Lesourne) argued that scenarios contained adynamic and normative element.Through this dynamic element,they could be used to actively influences ocial relationships within Western societies as well as between the advanced industrialised world and the developing nations.To Lesourne, scenarios were, like systems analysis,awayofmanagingThird world re- Main issues paper for the meeting of senior officials,P aris,2February 1979. Ih aven ot been able to find ac omplete list of these in the remaininga rchives.
Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfuturs Project lations.⁶⁴Prospective,heargued, was amethod that allowed for the evolution of dynamic situations and focused on actors and governments as actively creating strategies of cooperation or conflict that shaped the future of the 'system.'⁶⁵A normative visionofthe future could be chosen,and communicated through prospective analysis and scenarios to decision-makers in this system.
The methodological pertinence of prospective analysis and scenarios had also been indicatedb yt he conclusions of the McCracken group, in which it was suggested that as hift from the conjectural developments that had hitherto been the focus of economic planning to structural and long-term issues that could not as such be planned had to be accompanied by an ew concern with the analysis of fundamental 'trends and developments.'⁶⁶The McCracken group came to the conclusion that the instabilities in Western economies due to price fluctuations had rendered the macro economic models that had been used through the postwarp eriod of Keynesian management inefficient.T he idea of the Interfutures project was thereforetomovebeyond conventional modelling and economic planning to examine 'numerous trends' and in particular those driving up inflationary prices.T his provided scenarios with yeta nother purpose, because preeminent among the trends driving up prices were, as argued both by McCracken and Interfutures, value revolutions and 'unsatisfied aspirations' in the developing world as well as within the West.⁶⁷Fluctuations in commodity prices,r aw materials and currencies wereu nderstood as basedo n irrational sentiments and psychological reactions in the developing world, adding to social tensions in the West by pushing prices up and in their effect on protectionist modes by governments, organizations and interest groups in Western societies.⁶⁸Among the major obstacles targeted by the McCracken group were thus competing social claims and expectations, as well as al ack of preferences for economic growth in terms of the critique of growth that Western societies had witnessed since the late 1960s.⁶⁹Echoing contemporary developments in eco- nomic theory toward the idea of rational expectations, rising prices weredefined as "ap sychological problem which depends on expectations."This was,t ot he McCracken group as well as to Interfutures, ad eeplyp roblematic situation that forced the need for governments to deal with such rigidities by opening up to more flexible relationships with the developing world.⁷⁰Managings uch value problems, defined as the real challenges to growth, hinged on an ew element in planning:t he capacity to set ap ositive imageo ft he futuret hat would help ease conflicta nd inducec ooperation."The more the OECD governments can lead the public to share ac onstructive vision of the future, the greater will be the ability of these governments to implement sets of consistent long term policies."⁷¹Decision-making needed a 'positive' messaget hat brought home the messaget hatp ossiblep hysical limits in natural resources over the long term could be overcome by political, social, and institutional adaptation.The "method should include economic, social and political elements and provide the basisf or the scenarios."⁷²Through scenarios,p sychological aspectso f structural challenges could thus be dealt with.
The final report of the Interfutures project proposed five different possible scenarios for the OECD world until 2000,based on the different factors (derived from the NIEO structure) that had been considered.⁷³But the main issuesp aper produced by the group to ahighlevel meeting of senior officials at Chateaudela Muette in Paris in 1978 onlyfocused on twocentral scenarios.The first was anew growth scenario, in which the rigidities of Western nations werehandled through arapid adaptation of values and a 'conscious drive' towards new patterns of output and consumption.Scenario two was that of enduringstagflation, with adual fragmentation of advanced societies, and prevailing conflicts about the distribution of national income that alsor enderedt he Western world incapable of putting up au nited front toward the Third World.⁷⁴In order to push the situation from scenario two to scenario one, Interfutures emphasized the role of governments in "attacking the psychological basisofpresent problems" and "replacing the prevailing negative attitude toward the future by ap ositive one."Education and otherf orms of public opinion should be used as ways to shape long-term preferences thatavoided competing social claims, and alsoexplained to Western Planning the Futureo fW orld Markets: the OECD'sI nterfutursP roject populations that the interdependent relationship with the Third World set limits on consumption and redistribution.Scenarios, it was suggested, was akey method for enlighteningb oth national policym akers and their electorates about structural challenges and the need to address them through ac oherent longterm strategy.Thisi dea of scenarios as an ew form of planning that not only set objectiveso fd evelopment,b ut created positive images of development, also came from the McCracken report, which ascribed anew role to governments in terms of constructingpositive images of the futurethat might wear down negative feelingsa nd influence "creative and energetic people grasping opportunities."Such positive images would increase the "social willingness to accept the continuinga djustment of economic structures."⁷⁵"Instead of the real danger of introducing rigidities in dealing with crisis, AIS have potentiallyenormous capabilities of influencingtheir futures if they develop forward looking activities and sustained effortstoinfluencethe future in positive ways."⁷⁶While the McCracken report had the interior workings of the Western nations in focus; Interfutures applied the samelogic to relationships with the developing world.By creating positive images of the benefits of al ong-term integration in worldm arkets through cooperation with the AIS, the protectionist stances of OPEC could be averted, and the Third World divided into those nations remainingi nabasic needs approach, and thosew ho might through industrialization become eventual members of the AIS.⁷⁷As full members of an expanding globalm arket,t he latter could be expectedt ot ake an increased responsibility for the functioningo f this, as well as for carrying the 'burdens of development.'It wasthereforeessential to create positive images of development thatc ould be shared by populations in the West and strategic parts of the Third World alike and "consolidate areas of common interest."⁷⁸The scenarios were ac ommunicative tool for this, as was the use of consultants and strategic communication meetingss et up by Interfutures with policy makers both in the West and in the developing world, through which the scenarios could be spread.
The emphasis on 'sociocultural factors' came from the original Japanese proposal to createthe Interfutures project.⁷⁹TheJapanese delegation, led by Saburo Okita, head of the Japanese Overseas Fund, was concerned with the value reac-tions to the high postwar growth rates that could be observed in the Western world.They drew the conclusiont hat Japan, with its extreme levels of industrialization in the postwar decades and anticipations of aleap into apost-industrial economy, ranahighr isk of similar developments.SaburoO kita had ab ackground in futures research as the formerc hair of the Japanese futurological society (severalm embers of the Japanese OECD delegation had emergedf rom the futurologicals ociety,i ncludingY oshihiro Kogune and Yoneji Masuda).The futurological society was directlya ssociated to the Japanese Office of Technological Planning and ac entral overseero fJ apan'si ndustrialization process, and it also seems to have had alink to the Institutefor Information Society,which planned the transition into post-industrialism.⁸⁰As acorrespondent of, in particular, Daniel Bell and Betrand Cazes, Okita was very familiar with futurological tools.The specific focus on socio-culturalf actors as something that could be systematicallya nalyzeda nd anticipated and thus planned waso utsourced within the Interfutures group to ap articularp roject draft written by the Toyota foundation and referredt oa st he 'Japanese project.'⁸¹The Toyota proposal wast ightlyf ocused on the relationship between quick economic and technological change, and value reactions,w hich werel inked to the problems of stagflation in the Western world, through changes in demand and anew governmental impossibility of satisfying expectations.The proposal identified afailuretorealizeawelfare society as the sourceo fan ew structural contradiction between economic and technological development,o nt he one hand, and human satisfaction, on the other.T he aim of the Toyota proposal was thus the 'systematic identification of the main factors of socio cultural background to be introduced into the analysis of future consumption and production patterns' and the integration of changingm otivations of individuals and groups.T he final report to Toyota was entitled "Changingvalue patterns and their impact on economic structure" and listed excesses of the welfares tate and new,c onflictings ocial demands as 'structural challenges' and 'ridigidities' in Western market societies thatcould be anticipated and managed through scenarios.⁸²These themes of the Toyota proj- Interfutures, "Note by the secretariat.New elements and their policyimplicationinAIS." 16 May1 978.OECD archives. Folder 212779,l etterf rom Oshima to Lees, 24 December 1975,a nd Memorandum, 12 December 1979,signed Oshima."Proposedfinancial contribution fromaprivate foundation to the Interfutures project,n oteb yt he General secretary," 24 May1 977, C( 77) 89.O ECD pressr elease, 28 January 1976.OECD archives. "Proposed financial contribution from aprivatefoundation to the Interfutures project.Note by the secretary general," 24 May1 977, Annex A, "Changingvalue patterns and their impact on the economic structure, ar eport to the Toyota foundation," 8J anuary 1979.
Planning the Future of World Markets: the OECD'sI nterfuturs Project ect had also gained in significance within the Interfutures project as awhole, as as ummary of discussions in 1977 decided to focus more on values as the main problem of the 'manageability' of AIS economies.⁸³

Conclusion
The Interfutures program, lost in the dust of the less than transparent OECD archives, was astrategic reflection on how to close afuture window openedbythe emergence of aset of alternative discourses on globalization.It was akey carrier of the proto-neoliberal worldview -emphasizing the need for structural adjustments of welfarestatist structures in the West,animageofagrowingworld market as as hared strategic interest of the Western and the developing worlds,the existenceofsociocultural reactions and values as the main obstaclesfor growth -that by the mid 1970sw as taking over within the organization.Af ew years later the OECD became an active diffuser of such ideas into the global environment.
The idea of the long term playedak ey role in these proton eoliberal discourses.A ss hown here, Interfutures stemmed from ad esire within the OCED to find an ew method of world management,which allowed for an active influence on world relationships and also permittedt he organization to fend off at least twoofthe organization'sdisastriousimages of the world'sfuture, presented in Limits and the RIO report.Scenarios were such amethod,and offered both the possibilityt op ut forward partisan responses to alternative images of globalization.As such they represented ah ope for an ew governmental mechanism that could shift from the national to the global focus and allow OECD nations to act as globalp layers.
This chapter has pointed to another key aspect of this Western resistance, namely, the waythat the reaction to the alternative visionsofglobalization pushed by the Third World led to responses in the West.T hese contained two elements: the willingness to accept certain countries in the Third World within an extended category of Advanced Industrial Societies, and the conclusion that meetingt he challenges from these in an ew international divisiono f labor would requires ignificant changes in the social structures of Western economies.Inthis narrative,the link created bothbyInterfutures and the Trilateral Commission between forms of upheaval in the world environment and forms of social crisis within Western societies is crucial.Restoringcompetitiveness de- "Summary of discussions," 13 -14 October 1977.OECD archives.manded, both in Western countries and in the surrounding world, re-establishing positive images of development and in particular,o facreative and flexible world market.I tm ight be argued that the role of toolss uch as scenarios and long-term forecasts wasexactlytostabilize expectations around this world market,a nd entrench them in nationalg overnments and publics.
Planning the Futureo fW orld Markets: the OECD'sI nterfutursP roject

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Eric Jantsch, Perspectives on Planning:Papers from the Bellagio Conference (Paris:The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,1969). Eric Jantsch, TechnologicalF orecasting in Perspective (Paris:The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,1967). Jantsch, Perspectives on Planning. Hasan Ozbekhan, The Predicament of Mankind: AQuest for Structured Responses to Growing World-wide Complexities and Uncertainties.O riginal Proposal to the Club of Rome (New York: Club of Rome, 1970).
SEMA-METRA continued to work on strategic advice for French investment banks and companies in North Africa, the Middle East and Iran.⁴¹In 1975,S EMAb ecame METRA Iran, specializedinprovidingsystems analytical tools for the management of Iranian oil production.Anglo-Persian Oil had been nationalized by the Mossadegh regime in 1951.I n1 977, SEMA-METRA producedareport for UNIDO analyzing actor strategies of the Third World and the "future consequences of achieving the Limaobjectives" (the Lima objectives were voted in 1975,see below).The re- IIASAwas acentral sitef or the development of global modelling from 1972 on in particular in energy and world resources.EgleRindzeviciute, "Purification and Hybridisation of Soviet Cybernetics:The Politics of Scientific GovernanceinanAuthoritarianRegime," Archiv fürSozialgeschichte,5 0( 2010): 289-309. Manfred Pohl, Handbookont he HistoryofE uropean Banks (New York: EdwardElgar, 1994), 249.From 1962o nS ema Metra published ap eriodical on investments and branch structures in Middle Eastern and African economies, Cahiers Sema.See "Le développement international du groupe METRA," in PCM, Révue publiée par l'associationprofessionnelle des ingénieursdes Ponts et Chaussees et des Mines, Les entreprises françaises al ' étranger 68, no. 10 (1971): 93 -99.