Tourism is not only a major force within a country’s economy, but also vital within the Western cultural lifestyle. [1] Within Europe, tourism provided some reconstruction of normality after the tragedies of the Second World War.[2]The twentieth century brought about new understandings of movement through borders and a new desire to venture away from one’s homeland, even within the ever-changing political landscape. Tourism is fundamentally a transnational idea, as it relies on the travel of people from one region to another, in search for the unknown and a divergence of the mundane.[3]
I am interested in how the phenomenon of tourism continued to grow, even within the authoritarian regimes of postwar Europe. These governments saw the developing importance and reliance on tourism as a source of economic flow, as well as using it for the promotion of their country’s government to the rest of the world, convincing visiting citizens of their authority and legitimacy. This also came at a time when, after the war, world-wide tourism was becoming more accessible and the importance growing within Western culture.
However, research today continues to be limited in how tourism is addressed, with historians focusing on one specific case study. This constraint forgets the inevitable transnationality of tourism as a subject, which becomes even more important when focusing on the different regimes around the world. Looking specifically at Spain during Franco’s regime and the Soviet Union will be beneficial in comparing not only nations under vastly different regimes, but also varying political ideologies. The need for tourism from an economic standpoint is just one factor in the reasons for creating and expanding tourist offices. What were the justifications in opening their borders to tourists, and how were they able to create the image of Francoism and Socialism, respectively, into a vision that would be accepted by the visitors? In other words, why was it a government initiative to pursue tourism, and what was done to create an image of the country that the regimes would allow the international public to see and experience? The importance of these questions also comes from the analysis of the response from the visiting public, was the government initiative successful in swaying public opinion?
By using a comparative transnational lens, I will work to uncover the reasons for a push toward international validation, and to see the universal importance of tourism, even within illiberal regimes. The importance of comparing the different political structures created to handle tourism is to create a picture of the global importance of leisure travel. In Spain, the Ministry of Information and Tourism was created in 1951 to “officially [recognize]” the growing need of “social and commercial activity.”[4] The Soviet equivalent was called Inturist, created to sell socialism to the visiting public and hoping these ideas would transfer through tours of the Soviet sphere.[5] The opening of their countries to foreigners helps explain the importance of the globalized world, and how it became impossible to ignore the necessity of foreign support, especially when it came to validating the legitimacy of one’s government.
[1] Hartmut Berghoff and Barbara Korte, “Britain and the Making of Modern Tourism: An Interdisciplinary Approach”, in Hartmut Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralph Schneider and Christopher Harvie (eds) The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600-2000, (Hampshire, 2002), p. 1.
[2] Sasha D. Pack, “Tourism and Political Change in Franco’s Spain”, in Nigel Townson (ed.), Spain Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959-75, (London, 2010), p. 51.
[3] Eric G.E. Zuelow, “The Necessity of Touring Beyond a Nation: An Introduction”, in Eric G.E. Zuelow (ed.) Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History (London, 2011), p. 12.
[4] Pack, “Tourism and Political Change in Franco’s Spain”, p. 53.
[5] Shawn Salmon, “Marketing Socialism: Inturist in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s”, in Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (eds), Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism, (Ithaca, 2006), p. 187.