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
