Trans Europe Express is an online media platform aiming to connect Sweden/Scandinavia with Serbia/former Yugoslavia through an ongoing dialogue that has ‘pan-European’ framework. Writers and collaborators areare having “mixed” origins and multiple identities, they are dispersed all over Europe and world, and they are sharing certain values and beliefs as equality, openness, freedom of expression, democracy, sustainability…

Trans Europe Express is multi-lingual, but its’ primary language, at least in the first phase of the project, is the majority language of the former Yugoslavia which is known today under different names: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrian, Serbian. That “divided language” is still one of the strongest metaphors of post-Yugoslav divisions – although the differences between those “languages” are minimal, they are still not tolerated in the official media in those countries.

Therefore, one of the main long term aims of Trans Europe Express is to create the “common language” acceptable and understandable to all the people in that region, and particularly to younger people, who feel the need, necessity and desire to communicate, to overcome the troubled past inherited from their parents, and to move forward from the conflicting “ground zero”. Trans Europe Express is imagined as a space for tolerant multi-layered dialogue and communication that would place and contextualise the culture in that language with four names in wider European and global framework.

Predrag Dragosavac Editor, journalist