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The Cold War Paradigm and Normal Science. When I first came to Ohio, in 1986, Yugoslavia was not overwhelmingly represented in American popular discourse. Many people I came in contact with had only a vague idea where the country was (some did not even know it was in Europe), and a few thought its capital was Prague (the capital of, then, Czechoslovakia). Some people knew of Tito, Yugoslavia’s former “communist” president, and others had heard of Dubrovnik, a tourist city on the Adriatic coast (now in Croatia). As for such well-known people who did, originally, come from Yugoslavia (for example, tennis player Monica Seles or pianist Ivo Pogorelic, as well as some basketball players, film makers and scientists), even when Ohioans had heard of them, they were not, in their minds, always connected with Yugoslavia. An occasional joke about Yugo (the only Yugoslavian car on the American market), most frequently pejorative, was more or less all one could hear on a regular basis (although not even Yugo was always associated with Yugoslavia).

Practically without exception, however, everybody I met in the United States at the time classified Yugoslavia as an East European country (that is, as belonging to the Eastern bloc) and myself as East European. This came as a complete surprise, since this was not how we, in Yugoslavia, saw ourselves. I had expected, rather naively as it turns out, that Yugoslavia would be perceived by others the way it perceived itself. Yugoslavia had not been a member of the Warsaw Pact, and it had been a member of Cominform (an international communist information bureau set up by the USSR) only from 1947 to 1948. In 1948, Yugoslavian ties with the Soviet Union were severed.¹ Since that time, Yugoslavia was precariously balanced between the blocs, and was one of the founding members (with Egypt and India) of the nonaligned movement. The first nonaligned nations’ summit conference was held in Belgrade, in 1961.² Yugoslavian borders were open to visitors from both blocs, and Yugoslavian citizens easily traveled to both Warsaw Pact and NATO Pact countries. Furthermore, the country was full of Western popular culture and, it seemed to me, more West- than East-bloc-oriented. In fact, when I had traveled to the Soviet Union, many years previously, I had been labeled a “Westerner.”

In Bowling Green, Ohio, however, I was considered “East European.” With the label went a set of assumptions: closed borders, poverty, political and gender oppression, primitive living conditions, a need for guidance by more developed and more democratic nations. Although, as I said before, many people I met only vaguely knew where the country was located, they took these assumptions for granted. (Since all of the above assumptions were seen to uniformly apply to all “East European” countries, not only was I considered “East European,” I was also frequently asked to speak for the whole Eastern bloc.) Although people I met rather hungrily sought information about life in the Eastern bloc, however, they, at the time, rarely expected to hear anything that would contradict the image they had already formed of it. In other words, they never expected to be told that the above assumptions were incorrect, but, rather, they wanted more proof that they were correct. When I did happen to provide information which questioned dominant American views of Eastern Europe, I was, as a rule, disbelieved.

I could list pages of examples, but the following should suffice.

One of my frequent complaints about life in Ohio is that washing machines and/or washing detergents do not do as good a job as the ones “back home.” With some extremely rare exceptions, this statement always met with vehement opposition. This opposition ranged from attempts to explain this (to my opponents, obviously wrong) belief by my inability to use the machines correctly, to direct accusations of delusions or lying. In the words of one of my friends: “I find it hard to believe that any domestic appliance in Yugoslavia can be better than an American one.”

When, on one occasion, I was trying to impress upon one of my colleagues that Yugoslavia was not a member of the Eastern Bloc, he said: “Are you sure? I heard it on NBC last night.” I said that only proved that not everything said on television was true. He gave me an indulgent smile and refused further argument.

On the other hand, my stories about things I disliked in Yugoslavia, such as the absence of satisfactorily clean public bathrooms, or lack of tolerance in public discourse, were in Ohio met with instant belief. Nobody ever said (yet): “Oh, really? I never thought Yugoslavia would have dirty bathrooms!”

It might be useful to look at this situation in terms of what Thomas Kuhn calls “normal science.” According to Kuhn, “normal science” means research within a firmly established paradigm. He defines paradigms as “some accepted examples of actual scientific practice … [which] provide models from which spring particular traditions of scientific research.”³ These are taught to us in textbooks, and they “for a time define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.… The study of paradigms … is what mainly prepares the student for membership in the particular scientific community” (10–11).

According to Kuhn, normal science can be compared to jig-saw puzzle-solving. The picture is already known, we just have to put the pieces in the right place. “Perhaps the most striking feature of the normal research problems [writes Kuhn] … is how little they aim to produce major novelties, conceptual or phenomenal” (35). In other words, normal science does not, by definition, produce radically new knowledge. Rather, it produces the “steady extension of the scope and precision of scientific knowledge” (52). When nature violates “the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science (52),” when, in other words, a discovery does not fit the paradigm, it is treated as an anomaly. An anomaly does not automatically create a paradigm crisis. Scientists are aware that no paradigm is perfect, that all of them are approximations rather than accurate descriptions of reality. Anomaly is usually treated as a hint that the paradigm needs adjustment, not that it should be rejected. In fact, scientific communities are very resistant to paradigm change. According to Kuhn, this is good: it ensures that paradigms are not rejected easily, at the whim of a few impatient scientists.

Let us for the moment assume that, with respect to Eastern Europe, the cold-war picture of the world can be seen as the dominant American paradigm. This paradigm saw the Western bloc as the “free world” and the Eastern bloc as a dark communist world behind the Iron Curtain. It saw the Western bloc as good and the Eastern as bad, or, more precisely, it saw the Western bloc as progressive, enlightened, democratic, open to new ideas and committed to the equality of all people, and the Eastern bloc as lacking in all these areas. It also saw the Western bloc as affluent, colorful, and full of joy, and the Eastern bloc as gray, oppressive, poor, and joyless. In Kuhnian terms, stories about Eastern Europe can be seen as normal science when they can be easily told within and when they confirm this paradigm; and as anomalies when they cannot be contained or explained within it.

During the cold war this was the paradigm used by American popular culture to present Eastern Europe (particularly the Soviet Union) to American audiences. It was present in popular films, popular books, newspapers, and magazines, as well as in television news shows. This also seems to have been the paradigm used by most people to classify and interpret information from Eastern Europe.

When communism “fell,” the Eastern bloc became in America a subject of lively popular and academic interest. Although one might have expected that, with the end of the cold war, the cold-war paradigm would be rejected and supplanted by another one, that is not what happened. The cold-war paradigm persisted well into the “new world order” and still sometimes appears to be considered a valid model for interpretation of and research about Eastern Europe. If we look at the popular media’s response to the events in Eastern Europe through a Kuhnian lens, it becomes obvious that reporting and interpreting the events were conducted very much within the cold-war paradigm. No new knowledge was produced, at least not the kind of knowledge that might question the dominant paradigm and prompt a search for another one. Like all normal science, it simply added more pieces to the already existing picture.

The news about the fall of communism was accompanied by feelings of euphoria and triumph. Although, in theory, the fall of communism could have been seen as a creation of an entirely new political and discursive space (more complex, contradictory, and larger), in practice it was seen as confirmation of the cold-war paradigm’s validity. Communism lost, and the “Free World” won. The American world and its values were not seen as being in any way threatened or even affected by these changes. If anything, they were even more firmly established. “We” had been right, “they” had been wrong. It seemed to be a common expectation that now “they” would become like “us” and that becoming “like us” is what “they” should naturally desire. Any unwillingness on the part of the former Eastern Bloc to see events in this light was pronounced reactionary or shortsighted. It was often said that Eastern Europeans were not used to democracy since they had no democratic tradition, and that they had to learn how to use their freedom. Any warning that the transition might not go as smoothly as expected was met with impatience, sometimes even anger.

Then came the news of wars, the rise of nationalisms, economic disasters, and so forth. These were again explained within the cold-war paradigm and were blamed on the former communist regimes: the oppression of ethnic and national freedoms was seen to have produced a nationalist overreaction. (Whether or not this was true for the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia’s situation was not quite that simple. The country had been decentered and federal, with multilingual education, publishing, press, television, and so forth. While this regulated and strictly controlled ethnic tolerance might not have been enough to assuage nationalist hungers, reducing the causes of the war to nationalism only is, in my opinion, overly simplistic.) Communist economies and bad financial politics were seen to have made Eastern European countries unable to compete on the global markets. (Again, while this is probably true, it is also probably true that a full explanation would require looking into who controls the global markets, taking into account that global markets are capitalist, as well as that transition from total state control to a free market economy is hard for and economically detrimental to the people in lower income brackets.) And so on.

Popular fiction followed a similar pattern. Popular characters on television incorporated Bosnia into their past. All those sexy, macho, war correspondents now came from Bosnia, or returned to Bosnia, or had had their lives changed by the war in Bosnia. For example, the American journalist with whom Murphy Brown fell in love in one of the winter 1994 episodes has come from and returns to Bosnia. One made-for-television film in the fall of 1993 featured two journalists (a man and a woman) who had reported from Bosnia — before they met in Paris and fell in love. In these cases, the characters (as well as the war) were simply inserted into the already existing formulaic place: the story followed an older formula and, for most people, the (particular) war mentioned was incidental. Whether the hero or the heroine came from Bosnia or Cambodia was of no consequence; it was the war — or, rather, a war — experience that mattered. In other words, neither popular formulas nor the cold-war picture of the world were questioned.

Because the above is its implied context, the question about women in Yugoslavia, rather than being a simple question about another place (about which the asker knows very little or nothing, and hence is in a position of a less powerful partner in the exchange), frequently strikes me as already containing a number of assumptions which put the askee in a disadvantaged position and limit the answers in kind. These assumptions usually are — or can be translated into — cold-war assumptions. Yugoslavia is labeled an Eastern Bloc country and as such its women are expected to be oppressed, unaware, unsophisticated, unliberated.

I do not mean to say that people who asked did not want to know “how things really were” but rather that “how things are” is an enormously complicated category, whose appearance and moral inflection are to a large degree determined by the conceptual apparatus used to describe it, or even simply to inquire about it. “[0]ne of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm,” writes Thomas Kuhn, “is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will admit as scientific or encourage its members to undertake” (37). In other words, the paradigm within which one inquires will affect both the kind of questions asked and the kind of answers expected and considered scholastically valid and valuable. If one violates these expectations by saying that not only are answers impossible within the paradigm, but the question itself is “wrong,” this will, to the believers in the paradigm, appear confusing and unscholarly.

Asked, then, in Bowling Green, Ohio, to speak about women in Yugoslavia, I as a rule had to either position myself as East European, or devote the whole time allotted (usually 20 minutes to an hour) to explaining why this classification should not be taken for granted; that, in other words, Yugoslavia in its own eyes had not been an Eastern Bloc country. When, occasionally, I did exactly this, I most frequently confused rather than enlightened my audience. It is hard to shift an audience’s worldview in an hour, so what I had to say appeared incoherent and anomalous. The audience felt they had not quite gotten what they had come for. At other times, I accepted the classification and focused on specific examples of difference between Yugoslavian and American beliefs and life-styles. This, as a rule, went down well because it made the audience feel that their knowledge of the subject had become more precise and better. In short, in the former case they felt they had learned very little, while in the latter they felt they had learned a lot. One could argue, of course, that the situation was exactly the reverse. They had learned nothing in the latter case, and a lot in the former, since increasing the precision of knowledge within an already questionable paradigm is far less useful than questioning the paradigm itself.

Women in Yugoslavia and Cultural Diversity. One might wonder why educated and well-meaning people continue to use an oppressive and politically nonliberal paradigm such as the cold-war one, and I would suggest that, in fact, they do not. Although it appears to be a cold-war question, the question about women in Yugoslavia is also and simultaneously (perhaps primarily) asked within another, politically far more “correct,” paradigm, that of cultural diversity.

The cold war and cultural diversity paradigms have very little in common. In fact, they are ideologically opposed to each other. To put it simply: the cultural diversity paradigm is (globally) a reaction to (mostly European) imperialisms which tended to favor homogenization over cultural difference, thus devaluing and erasing cultures which they found in their way. Within the American context, the movement for cultural diversity is a reaction to long-term racist policies which have had a similar effect: non-European (as well as some European) cultures have been devalued and made invisible. Cultural diversity can then be seen as an attempt to restore to these cultures their rightful place in the world and in America, and, by doing that, to reposition the whole imperialist, homogenizing picture of the world which assumed strict hierarchies among cultural and political systems, postulating European, industrial, Christian, science-oriented cultures as an ideal. In short, the cultural diversity paradigm favors a dehomogenized, heterogeneous picture of the world in which all cultures are equally visible and in which they all have equal rights.

The cold-war paradigm’s worldview is directly opposite. This paradigm is a result of two imperialisms’ (the “First” and the “Second” Blocs’) collision in their attempts to control large chunks of the globe. After World War II, the two blocs got locked into a stand-still which lasted for decades. During this time they kept an eye on each other and waged a mass-mediated ideological war. More specifically, this consisted in spying on each other, in competing in everything, from sports over arms invention and production to space research, and in consistently painting the other bloc as an evil, dark other. This process led in America to an image of the other bloc as both alien to “us” and homogeneous within itself. At the same time, “our” bloc was also perceived as homogeneous, precisely because of its striking and constantly emphasized difference from the evil, dark other in opposition to which it was being constructed. In other words, while the cultural diversity paradigm makes difference visible, the cold-war paradigm covers it over — except when it comes to the difference between the two blocs.

Although considering a group an other and considering it culturally different are not, theoretically, one and the same thing, they appear to be easily confused, or, at least, easily translated into each other. While the end of the cold war removed in America some of the negative charge from the image of the Eastern Bloc, there remained a residue of (a certain negative) difference. This was an obvious, easy way to make sense of Eastern Europe: while not evil (any more) and not “other” in any negative sense, neither was it the same as “us.” At least not yet. After all, it had been communist for quite a long time; it is still in a state of transition. While Eastern Europe might now be acceptable to the American general public, communism most certainly is not; and neither is the Eastern Bloc’s communist past. Although there is in America a rising awareness that the former Eastern Bloc countries are culturally very different from one another, these cultural differences are still covered over and/or come second when set in the context of Eastern Europe’s communist past. In short, the Eastern Bloc is still considered different from “us” and homogeneous within itself (in a certain vaguely negative way) precisely by virtue of that past.

There is in the cultural diversity paradigm an (implied) element of atonement. The paradigm not only teaches that allowing for cultural differences is good, but also that making these differences visible and considering them valid and valuable is a correction of past injustices. The cold-war paradigm has taught us that Eastern Europe was different in precisely the way which merits this kind of treatment. In other words, Eastern Europe is not (has not been) considered different in a way in which, say, Sweden is different. It was considered different in a way taught to us by the cold-war paradigm. This, in fact, was an othering rather than an acknowledgment of real differences. Consequently, Eastern Europe can now be treated in American discourse as an oppressed and wronged culture. And it is, perhaps, precisely because we still think of it as slightly different (in that vaguely negative sense) that we feel we need to acknowledge it, to give it prominence and visibility.

In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observations and experiments easily accessible to that science’s practitioners. Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes. That professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change (Kuhn 64).

It also produces a lot of good, precise information. As it was said before, even the resistance to change is, according to Kuhn, useful. It “guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core” (65).

I believe one can easily argue that the cultural diversity paradigm is still at a stage where normal science is quite in order. It is a relatively new paradigm, only entering the stage of professionalization, with a lot of blank spaces yet to be filled. Learning more about, and restoring visibility and legitimacy to, different cultural groups whose difference has been covered over by the previous paradigm is both politically and scholastically useful. Within this paradigm, then, a perfectly justified desire to internationalize and interculturalize the curriculum and campus life has led, at Bowling Green and elsewhere, to an increased inclusion of other cultures/countries into both course syllabi and campus events. As a result (as was said at the beginning of this essay), I had been asked to speak about Yugoslavia even before the country had grabbed the world’s attention by disintegrating into the chaos of war. I have been asked to comment on leisure in Yugoslavia, women in Yugoslavia, popular culture in Yugoslavia. In other words, I was given visibility and attention which I most likely would not have enjoyed under other paradigms. Why, then, the unease?

For a number of reasons, most of which have already been noted and analyzed by members of other cultural groups who have gone through similar experiences.

1. At the simplest level, it is a common dilemma: on the one hand, I wanted my difference acknowledged; on the other, however, “difference” often implied an inferiority in the eyes of the asker since to be “non-American” (more particularly, to be East European) was by many taken to automatically mean “worse than American.”

2. On a more complex level, speaking “as a Yugoslavian woman” could be seen as feeding a paradigm which my talk was supposed to question. I felt I was not contributing to my audience’s better understanding of the world, or, for that matter, to the development of scholarship. Gayatri Spivak (among others) suggests that some representatives of other cultures are token representatives. When an audience wants “to hear an Indian speaking as an Indian, a Third World woman speaking as a Third World woman, [writes Spivak], they cover over the fact of the ignorance that they are allowed to possess, into a kind of homogenization.”⁴ When I spoke “as a Yugoslavian woman” (particularly when what I said met — or could be interpreted to meet — the audience’s expectations) I became a token representative of both my imagined culturally pure and purely different group and an imagined proof of the audience’s openness toward difference and toward discourses of the “other.”

3. What my encounters with the First and the Second Worlds’ ideological spaces also show is Yugoslavia’s and my own semiotically unstable place within them. The First World considered me East European, the Second World considered me a Westerner. Although my meaning changed as I entered these ideological spaces, my structural position within them was vaguely similar: I was always identified as being — belonging to —“the other.” In both cases, the cultural/discursive spaces entered were more powerful (larger and politically and militarily stronger) than my place of origin (at that time, my country, Yugoslavia), so their reading of me (and by implication of my country) carried, so to speak, far more weight than my own reading of myself (and my country’s reading of itself).

The cold war could also, then, be seen as a war for classification of Yugoslavia. If the Eastern Bloc had won, Yugoslavia might have found itself classified as Western, and then, in retaliation (who knows?) been far more firmly united, all difference and decentering erased? Since, however, the West “won,” Yugoslavia finds itself in the position assigned to it by that discourse; it finds itself an Eastern European country. In other words, until recently semiotically unstable, Yugoslavia now finds itself fixed as Eastern Bloc. One could take this to clearly indicate at least one definition of the nature of the “fircond” world: the common space, rather than being negotiated among all participants, is defined in American terms. This indicates the victor’s prerogative to impose rules, in this case of discourse: it appears that the victors’ definition of the “fircond” world space (which now consists of both, the First and the Second Worlds) will apply from now on. Yugoslavia will be fixed as an Eastern Bloc country (which is the way it had been most commonly seen by the American popular discourse, but not by other discourses on the global stage).

And I, instead of performing on a common stage — created by the opening up to each other of Western and Eastern Blocs’ discourses (perhaps the image of one large room created out of two smaller ones by removal of a wall is a better one?) — am actually appearing on a stage which is controlled by the West. Furthermore, I am expected to assume on that stage an already designated place: to be different (specific to my region and culture, as well as to the political past of that region), but to relate my (different) experiences in the conceptual, linguistic, and stylistic categories offered, understandable, and expected by American audiences. And, by implication, I am also expected to walk through the door opened for me by (and into) the Western discourse, without changing that discourse.

So, when I speak as a Yugoslavian woman within the context of the Eastern Bloc, I also help legitimate the redefinition of Yugoslavia as an Eastern Bloc country. I represent and thereby participate in the American cold-war (re)definition of the “fircond” world, and, by the same token, attest to the international legitimacy, indeed, democratic inflection, of that (re)definition. In other words, by performing normal science within the cultural diversity paradigm I am also performing normal science within the cold-war paradigm.

4. And finally: in all of the above-described situations there is a lack of viable cultural space in which I (and other people like me, people with complex and nonlinear affiliations) can move, act, speak. I find most of the categories offered as vehicles of my visibility and identity to be limiting, oppressive, and stifling. This can partly be explained by historical circumstances: Yugoslavia has been semiotically unstable on the global stage, so any one affiliation or definition of it sounds simplistic and inaccurate; furthermore, since the country does not exist any more, Yugoslavian identity might appear fictional rather than real. In other words, both in the past and in the present, Yugoslavian identity appears to have been clearly something which is culturally constructed. But this historical explanation does not quite suffice. Today most scholars of culture believe that all cultural identities are constructed in one way or another. We are not dealing here with one constructed, “unauthentic” identity in the world of pure and authentic ones; rather, we are dealing with a world full of complex constructed identities. And it is precisely that world that the above categories do not seem to adequately address.