Serbia: A part of both the East and the West?

Abstract

The text comprises of two parts. The first is dealing with the basic historical preconditions for the formation of modern cultural patterns common to the largest part of the Serbian population and their relation towards those cultural patterns which appear today in the developed part of the world and are referred to as modern. The research shows that the historical auto/production of cultural patterns is marked by contradictions in Serbia, especially in considering the encounter between the East and the West, traditional and modern. The main finding of this research is that, due to this kind of development (characteristic of a border areas of which Serbia was a part until the end of the previous century) it is, in these parts, impossible to make the usual distinction between the two cultural cores (those of the Western and Eastern cultures), supported by two - unevenly sized - separate and mutually confronted groupings (the traditional strata and modernization actors) and that the above-mentioned splits characterize all the empirical actors whose effects are marked by these controversies on the inside. The second part of the paper sums up the findings of the empirical research carried out within the joint comparative frameworks of the project: "The Socio-Economic Culture of Eastern Europe in the Enlarged Union: an Asset or a Liability? ".

Keywords

• cultural patterns
• modernization
• traditionalism
• Western culture
• Eastern culture
• Serbia