[1] In 2021, the project CTES (“Cultural Transfer Europe-Serbia from the 19^th to the 21^st Centuries”) was awarded a grant by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia. A team of 11 researchers from five scholarly institutions in Belgrade (Faculty of Political Science, Institute of European Studies, Faculty of Philology, Institute of Balkan Studies, and Institute for Contemporary History) investigated how cultural transfer Europe-Serbia has re-shaped modern Serbia since the beginning of the 19^th century. The concept of cultural transfer analyses the flow of ideas, concepts, goods, technologies, cultural practices, and forms of knowledge. Although there is a clear hierarchy in this exchange of ideas and practices, cultural transfer does not consist only of cultural transfer from a hierarchically more influential culture to a less influential one. For example, migrant workers, who are by default politically disadvantaged, brought many cultural practices to Western countries that have significantly changed their lifestyles. Similarly, when two neighbouring cultures participate in cultural transfer, the less powerful one also makes a certain impact on the more powerful, although the effects may not be as readily noticeable.

[2] The first edited volume that resulted from this project was A Reformer of Mankind. Dimitrije Mitrinovic between Cultural Utopianism and Social Activism (2023), which focuses on an actor who originated from the Balkans, more specifically, from Bosnia and Herzegovina but left his mark in various cultural and intellectual circles in Europe, particularly in Britain, heralding the New Age culture that so powerfully influenced Western cultures in the last decades of the 20^th century. This example clearly demonstrated that in cultural transfer, power relations are far less straightforward than in cultural or political impacts.

[...]

Quelle: https://wolfgangschmale.eu/2026/01/13/europe-and-serbia-cultural-transfer-19th-to-21st-centuries/