From Reality to Twilight Zones. Transition of Discourses and the Collapse of State Socialism
From Reality to Twilight Zones. Transition of Discourses and the Collapse of State Socialism

Summary/Abstract: In the late 1970s there was clearly a general shift within the discourses on East and West. We can even say that the idea of East/West civilizational slope was reborn after 30 years of discourses on rivaling modernities or modernizationist quantitative/ideological slopes. This evolved discourse replaced one type of teleological, Eurocentric discourse about the world and within Eastern and Central Europe with another, which had not been seen for at least three decades. Until its collapse, the “Eastern” block was seen as something very “real” and “concrete” with clear geographical boundaries. This “reality” was embedded in a discourse of modernization and progress. Within this discourse everything was spoken of in terms of ideologies and quantitative “competition” with other systems. Socialism versus capitalism, “backwardness” versus “superiority”, “progress” (toward socialism or modern economic systems for instance) “modernization”, “industrialization” and “catching up” were the key concepts utilized in the framework of global competition between blocks and incorporated nation states.

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