Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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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