Conclusion Entangled Futures of International Tourism

In 1975, the International Peace Research Institute published a study that compared international tourism in six “southern European countries”—Spain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria—claiming each underwent similar changes in the postwar era because of international tourism.¹ The study is puzzling for a number of reasons. First, it diverged from the customary postwar rhetoric that draws ideological distinctions between socialist East and capitalist West and instead described the six countries as “southern,” a geographical label rather than a geopolitical or ideological one. Second, the study recognized international tourism as a contributor to social change in different economic and political regimes. Although this study did not aim to place international tourism in a historical context, it offered an alternative way of examining postwar Europe beyond the Cold War and reflected the complexities of the Cold War era in Europe.

Literature published in the twenty-first century questions the clear-cut division of postwar Europe between socialist and capitalist camps and argues that the Iron Curtain was more porous than previously thought.² My arguments in this book support and now join this growing body of scholarship. Socialist Romania and Francoist Spain chose to develop international tourism for similar reasons and international tourism affected the two countries in relatively similar ways, despite their different political and economic systems and their locations on different sides of the Iron Curtain. As the focus has been either the politics of international tourism or consumption (and in the twenty-first century on the environmental effects of tourism),³ here I have revealed that international tourism in the two countries—both at the level of state policies and of everyday life—offers a more comprehensive view of the effects of policies on daily practices in two dictatorships. While both the Romanian and Spanish governments wanted to attract the revenues provided by international tourism, they also wanted to limit the impact of foreign tourists on Romanians’ and Spaniards’ way of life. Despite these similarities, the experiences of the two countries also exhibited distinct differences. While it is unquestionable that both regimes used international tourism to pursue economic modernization, the number of tourists in Spain and the revenues that they brought were considerably higher than those of socialist Romania. Why did this happen? To only focus on the capitalist–socialist divide is unsatisfactory. While Romania tentatively adopted market socialism and the state continued to own all of the means of production, other factors, like timing, had an impact. Spain’s earlier start, Romania’s poor political decisions, and Ceaușescu’s increased squeezing of the economy are only a few of the factors that led to different results in tourism development and revenues. Comparing international tourism in Romania and Spain shows that the answer is much more complex than a simple dichotomy between state and private ownership.⁴

Spain’s slightly earlier embrace of international tourism helps to explain its success. In April 1959, the New York Times assured its readers that vacations in Spain would not be affected by the rampant inflation that afflicted the Spanish economy.⁵ Spain’s attraction for international tourists was its sunny beaches; its unstable economic situation did not deter tourists—if anything, it made the costs for tourists cheaper. While in the late 1950s, despite its economic and political crisis, Francoist Spain had already become an international tourist destination; socialist Romania only grew interested in attracting Western tourists in the early 1960s. Socialist countries expressed their interest in welcoming Western tourists as early as 1955,⁶ but only in 1961 did the fifth meeting of tourist delegates from socialist countries in Moscow put forth concrete ways to strengthen tourism from the “West.” Following this meeting, the Romanian government shifted its interest toward Western tourists, and in 1962, the ONT–Carpathians/Littoral put together the first plan to advertise Romania in the West. It also began to earmark a large amount of funds for tourist infrastructure, with a particular focus on the Black Sea Coast and the mountain region of Prahova Valley. The initial results were spectacular: the number of Western tourists increased from about 20,000 in 1961 to 666,635 in 1974.⁷ Although the number of Western tourists was just 15–20 percent of the total number of foreign tourists in Romania, the hard currency revenues that they brought were in fact higher than those delivered by tourists from socialist countries.⁸ Moreover, most of the Western tourists visiting Romania chose the Black Sea Coast as their holiday destination. Hence, in Mamaia, and later in Neptun, Western tourists predominated. The economic success that international tourism promised to deliver enchanted Romanian socialist officials and accelerated their efforts to attract more Western tourists. The discussions in the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party reflected these views, as well as officials’ intention to turn the entire country, not just the Black Sea Coast, into an international tourist destination.

Despite such investments, Romania’s relatively late venture into international tourism proved to be an impediment that it was never fully able to overcome. The gap between Romania and Spain widened even further because of the economic crisis of the 1970s. Soaring fuel prices turned the geographical distance that separated Spain and Romania from wealthier Northwestern European countries into a hindrance for Romanian tourism. But Romanian decision-makers remained indifferent to these dynamics and asked for a constant increase in prices, as they believed that Romania was still less expensive than other tourist destinations in the region. As a result, individual tourism to Romania, which was the most economically profitable, started to drop in 1973.⁹ But Romania continued to fare well when it came to the number of foreign tourists, as Western tourists were replaced by tourists from socialist countries. Thus, the 1973 oil crisis seems not to have significantly affected tourist numbers in Romania despite the general decline in the number of tourists elsewhere in Europe.¹⁰ Moreover, it looked a like a short relapse, because Western tourists returned to Romania in the mid-1970s and reached peak numbers in 1979. However, the tourists who chose Romania were mostly elderly people or families with children, who arrived in groups and spent little money outside the already purchased tourist package as they had limited financial means. Romanian tourist authorities were hardly content with this situation and constantly tried to improve services and to attract well-to-do tourists. It was the 1979 oil crisis along with inflation in Western Europe that brought these efforts to a halt, and in the 1980s, the number of Western tourists in Romania plummeted for good. While Western Europeans’ declining real income meant that vacations became a luxury, Romanian state policy, which imposed domestic restrictions on consumption while constantly increasing prices for foreign tourists, also contributed to the decline. In 1979, gasoline rationing was reintroduced. Besides the limited quantity of fuel that could be purchased at the pump, the price of gasoline was increased. A liter of gasoline was sold for $0.70 and of diesel for $0.55. The new regulation mentioned that tourists from capitalist countries could only buy fuel using hard currency vouchers (bought at officially set prices when they entered the country), while tourists from socialist countries would receive only a limited number of vouchers within the limits set by bilateral agreements between Romania and other socialist countries.¹¹ The immediate effect was that individual tourism, especially from neighboring socialist countries, plummeted even more. Furthermore, the degradation of everyday life in socialist Romania and the lack of entertainment possibilities contributed to a further decrease in the number of Western tourists. This led Western tourists to choose other destinations. Despite a brief revival in 1985, international tourism failed to provide the economic benefits that the Romanian socialist regime hoped to attain.

In contrast, Francoist Spain fully benefited from the boom of mass tourism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before Romania entered the international tourism market. A combination of low prices, geographical proximity to the wealthier Northwestern European countries, and tourists’ craving for beach tourism turned Spain into a desirable tourist destination. Once foreign tourists became accustomed to visiting Spain and charter flights became more common, the number of foreign tourists increased. Initially, many tourists came from France by car, but American, British, German, and Scandinavian tourists were also numerous.¹² Furthermore, Spain, despite its dictatorial regime and economic crisis, was on the “right side” of the Iron Curtain, primarily due to Franco’s anti-communist stance. After being a pariah state for more than a decade following Franco’s ascent to power in 1939, Spain earned a secure alliance with the United States in 1953 when US military bases were established on Spanish soil.¹³ Soon other Western countries reestablished diplomatic relations with Spain and the flow of tourists started to increase. Because of its anti-communist stance and validation by the United States, Spain was regarded as part of a familiar world by American and Western European tourists. For many Westerners in the 1950s, communist Eastern Europe was more frightening than was Franco’s right-wing personal dictatorship.¹⁴ This situation changed in the mid-1960s, especially in the Romanian case. Therefore, it was not necessarily the geopolitical locations of Romania and Spain on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain but the stereotypes constructed about these locations that affected tourism in the two countries.

But Spain’s earlier start, its proximity to wealthier Northwestern European countries, and its privileged relationship with the United States were not the only reasons for Spain’s greater success in international tourism compared to Romania, or to other Mediterranean destinations such as Portugal and Greece. Concrete policies in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain also shaped the different outcomes of international tourism. One of these policies regarded prices in hotels and restaurants. Both Francoist Spain and socialist Romania controlled hotel and restaurant prices. Nonetheless, because of pressure from hotel owners, in 1962, the Spanish Ministry of Information and Tourism agreed to a liberalization of hotel prices, although it still did not grant the hotel and restaurant owners full liberty in setting their own prices.¹⁵ The purpose was to keep prices as low as possible in order to attract more foreign tourists, as the advertising of Spanish tourism abroad stressed Spain’s affordability. Regardless of the fact that this policy hurt the interests of hotel owners, it turned Spain into one of the most inexpensive tourist destinations in Europe. In socialist Romania, hotel prices had to be preapproved by the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, and after approval they became law. Initially, Romania, like Spain, attracted foreign tourists because it was a very inexpensive tourist destination. Yet as the regime wanted to increase revenue from international tourism, it raised prices in the early 1970s, because the actual income from tourism failed to meet the government’s growing expectations.¹⁶ Romania became a slightly more expensive tourist destination than Spain and its neighbors Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.¹⁷ Raising costs at a time of recession and inflation in Western Europe was ill-timed. Because until the mid-1980s, vacation prices were calculated in dollars or Deutsche Marks and not in the currency of tourists’ country of origin, the cost of vacations in Romania became even more expensive when converted to Spanish pesetas or French francs. This is part of the reason why the greatest number of tourists from Western Europe remained West Germans, as their prices were calculated in Deutsche Marks.¹⁸ The unrealistic pricing policy in socialist Romania, begun under Ceaușescu, halted more than a decade of successful tourist development. When specialists from the Ministry of Tourism attempted to address this issue in the mid-1980s, they were unsuccessful.¹⁹ As the decade wore on, because of the degradation of everyday life in socialist Romania, the plummeting quality of tourist services, and the negative reports on Ceaușescu’s regime in the West, the coveted tourists from capitalist countries found other destinations for their vacations.

The decision-making process in socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain also explains the different outcomes of international tourism in the two countries. In Romania, attempts by party and state officials, like Nicolae Bozdog, who initiated a visit to Spain in 1968, were met with partial success. As chief of the ONT–Carpathians, the state tourist agency, between April 1967 and March 1969,²⁰ he succeeded in improving international tourism by making ONT–Carpathians the sole coordinator of Romanian tourism. This gave ONT–Carpathians the ability to supervise all tourist activities, including plans for developing tourist infrastructure and the promotion of tourism abroad; contracts; and coordinated services such as transportation, lodging, and meals. This centralized responsibility improved tourist services and, although short-lived, the policy attracted more foreign tourists to Romania. To a certain extent, ONT–Carpathians came to function like a capitalist enterprise, as its main goal was to be profitable. Nevertheless, in 1974, Ceaușescu succeeded in replacing the more politically experienced Ion Gheorghe Maurer as prime minister with Manea Mănescu, one of his followers, hence eliminating any substantial political debate or opposition.²¹ With Maurer gone and Ion Cosma, a party apparatchik with no experience in tourism, as the new head of ONT–Carpathians (and minister of tourism as of 1971), politics trumped economics. Cosma pushed for increased prices, fewer funds for tourist infrastructure, and more surveillance by the Securitate among tourist employees in order to limit “embezzlement.”²² Yet this policy disregarded the interests of foreign tourists, who refused to pay more for services that continued to decline in quality. Ceaușescu came to regard international tourism simply as a source of quick hard currency income, not as a sector that required constant investment and service improvements. Coming as it did during a global economic crisis, this change in policy and investment strategy helps to explain the sharp decline in international tourism in the late 1970s and early 1980s.²³

In Spain, Franco was both the head of state and prime minister, but when it came to international tourism he allowed the younger and more practical Manuel Fraga Iribarne to become the face of the Spanish tourism. Although he did not pursue full liberalization, Fraga succeeded in loosening the state’s grip on tourism. Other than requiring hotel owners’ to set prices within limits imposed by the state, bureaucratic rules became less of an annoyance as Fraga adopted a policy of not interfering in local or business issues.²⁴ Fraga replaced almost all of the older, more conservative cohort of tourist functionaries with newly trained public servants who were loyal to him and who put his ideas into practice.²⁵ Although both socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain had a top-down approach to international tourism, Fraga’s more liberal and flexible views and policies diluted Franco’s authoritarianism. By contrast, in Romania, Ceaușescu prevailed over more liberal and consumer-oriented officials, like Maurer and Bozdog, and imposed a policy of maximum currency extraction and a more suspicious view of tourists in Romania.²⁶

Despite the different approaches to and results of international tourism in Romania and Spain, foreign tourists’ day-to-day interactions with ordinary people altered consumption practices and opened the way for a more cosmopolitan way of life in both countries. As this book shows, international tourism contributed to a modernization from below in both Romania and Spain. While the regimes of both countries attempted to control the influence of foreign tourists on local populations, this attempt was only partially successful. Foreign tourists helped some Romanians to overcome the consumer goods shortage, and in Spain they exposed ordinary people to new fashions, more cosmopolitan habits, and a broadminded stance in regard to sexuality.

In the 1960s, socialist Romania abolished rationing and promised to give more attention to consumption, in part because it wanted to attract more Western tourists. Better-quality products became available and tourist guides included information about shopping in socialist Romania. The state allowed some forms of private entrepreneurship, including the commissioners’ system, whereby an individual could rent a small state-owned shop and run it for profit. But this phenomenon was brought to a halt in the mid-1970s; in the late 1970s, rationing was reintroduced for some products, including fuel.²⁷ This had a dramatic impact on individual tourism with socialist countries because these tourists visited Romania by car. This measure forced tourists from socialist countries to pay the same price for gas as that paid by Western tourists. As a solution to this problem, the Romanian government proposed special deals, which allowed tourists from socialist countries to buy gas at subsidized prices in exchange for free agricultural or manufactured products. The number of tourists from each socialist country that visited Romania served as a basis for calculating the amount of delivered products. All socialist countries except the GDR signed such agreements.²⁸ Rationing affected Western tourists as well, because it forced them to buy goods only from tourist shops, using dollars or Deutsche Marks. This had the effect of raising prices for the goods that had once been relatively cheap. This drastically limited the shopping experience of Western tourists visiting Romania. The prices for hotels and other services increased as well, and Romania became less attractive to cost-conscious tourists.

For many Romanians, the arrival of foreign tourists, from both socialist and capitalist countries, provided an opportunity for cosmopolitanism. Not only could they acquire goods that were not available in ordinary shops and speak foreign languages, they could also create social networks beyond the socialist realm. True, most of the goods were bought from tourists from socialist countries, which used this informal commerce to supplement their meager amounts of Romanian lei, but Western tourists were also sources of goods. Western tourists’ more fashionable clothes, beach bags and toiletries, and cars that testified to a richer material culture proved to be quite alluring to Romanians. As Romanian tourist propaganda emphasized, Romanians spoke French, and as the memory of the interwar period was not that distant, the arrival of Western tourists felt like a reintegration into the larger European culture. For some tourist workers and more industrious Romanians, contacts with foreign tourists meant opportunities for entrepreneurial activity, despite its rather illegal nature. Smuggling of foreign currencies and lei became frequent. As a place in between Eastern and Western Europe, Vienna became a venue for these exchanges. Tourist guides used their connections to help tourists from socialist countries exchange lei for Deutsche Marks after they had sold their merchandise in Romania. These activities enabled some Romanian citizens to acquire a bit of economic self-sufficiency in relation to the socialist state and functioned as a form of Eigenn-sinn, a personal space that challenged official power. This suggests that we might qualify somewhat popular claims about the Romanian state’s totalitarian power when it comes to its ability to control these underground developments.²⁹ In addition, these exchanges created informal personal networks between Romanian citizens, tourists from socialist countries, and tourists or tourist delegates from capitalist countries.

The development of international tourism in socialist Romania also contributed to domestic social change, as many of the new employees in the tourist sector came from the countryside. The sheer fact that these employees were exposed to a different way of life, fashions, and work habits significantly changed their mentality. As one of my interviewees recalled about living through this change, “it was like living in a different world, like going outside [abroad].”³⁰ Although Romanian citizens could not easily travel to capitalist countries, by interacting with and acquiring goods from Western tourists, they embarked on a form of virtual traveling. This made employment in tourism very attractive and sometimes various forms of corruption (including nepotism) were used to obtain such jobs. Although some tour guides had connections with higher officials, most rank-and-file tourist employees came from modest backgrounds, and their jobs and the access they offered in the closed society of socialist Romania helped to enhance these employees’ social status.

The arrival of large numbers of foreign tourists also had a strong impact on the lives of ordinary citizens in Franco’s Spain. Changes in regard to the status of women, although gradual, were most obvious. Throughout the 1940s and the early 1950s, the Spanish state and the Catholic Church imposed medieval customs on women. Spanish women could hardly obtain employment and their primary role was that of raising children and taking care of their husbands. Open discussions of sexuality became taboo for both women and men. Women were supposed to follow a conservative dress code in order not to arouse men’s sexual desires. In addition, unaccompanied women were not allowed in cafés or restaurants.³¹ The Catholic Church could (and did) go as far as excommunicating those who did not obey these rules, which led to social and political exclusion. Yet the arrival of large numbers of foreign tourists contributed to a change in this situation. In the 1950s and 1960s, when hotels were scarce, some women would rent a room in their houses to tourists; this provided them with an income and some economic independence. Women also found employment as tour guides and interpreters, and they became the main workforce in the new hotels.³² What is more, the sheer presence of female foreign tourists and their easygoing attitude was an inspiration to Spanish women. Some would pick up smoking, regarded as a sign of independence and cosmopolitanism, or wore clothes that challenged the Church’s puritanical recommendations. Moreover, with the “bikini revolution” of the early 1960s, bikinis and other “inappropriate” forms of attire became common among tourists in Spain. In 1959, Pedro Zaragoza Orts, an official close to Francisco Franco, approved bikinis on the beach in Benidorm, a resort not far from Valencia. Although the Church excommunicated Zaragoza, he appealed to Franco and managed to turn Benidorm into the first Spanish resort that allowed bikinis. Suecos, Swedish female tourists, were the first to take advantage of this change. They were also the ones to astonish both Spanish men and women with their libertine sexual behavior, which popular culture generously referenced in the 1960s.³³ Soon Spanish women, as well as men, living in tourist areas became much more accustomed to foreign tourists’ broadminded sexual behavior and even started to imitate them. Although the state and Church attempted to halt this process, their success was limited, as repression could threaten foreign tourism.

The surge in the number of foreign tourists triggered not just changes in the status of women and sexuality, but also enhanced economic opportunities for ordinary people. Although the most lucrative benefits of international tourism remained under the control of the upper classes, international tourism did offer some opportunities for social change and democratization. Many agricultural workers moved into the tourist resorts and got employment in hotels or restaurants. These new positions offered access to a world less constrained by the religious realm; they also offered a clean bed and regular meals. In some cases, social mobility followed as many tourist workers rose from a bellhops to hotel directors.

When it came to issues of social migration, social mobility, and expanding social horizons, the development of international tourism in Spain and Romania was quite similar. And as noted above, many of the policies enacted to enhance international tourism and the influx of hard currencies were also similar. What distinguished the outcomes of these policies and sealed the fate of international tourism was less the nature of the economic system than how that system was managed and how it was integrated into broader national economic policies. The consequences of these policies became obvious after the fall of the communist and Falangist regimes. While in Spain the end of Franco’s regime brought no changes to tourist circulation, in Romania the continuous degradation of services meant that even tourists from socialist countries who visited Romania in the summer of 1989 chose a different destination in 1990, or stopped going abroad altogether as they lacked economic means in a liberalized market. As for Romanian tourism, it continued to plummet despite the change in regime (for instance, in the 1990s no new hotels were built on the seaside). Only in 2016 did Romania recover the number of tourists that visited in 1989.³⁴