FOREWORD

In the years after 1917, various Soviet thinkers set their minds to the question of tourism. They imagined something that was not bourgeois, a form of leisure travel that was different from middle-class and elite consumption of sites/sights. This was a lofty goal. It was not easy to reimagine a pastime essentially based on the pursuit of pleasure in some revolutionary new way. Nobody had experienced anything else.¹

Whatever the barriers, Soviet tourism developers did arrive at something they called “proletarian tourism.” It was premised on “purpose and rigor,” designed to assure that “broad masses of workers, peasants, students, and intellectuals” could develop their “tourist skills” while improving their health.² It apparently worked for a while, but by the 1960s and 1970s Soviet citizens made clear that they wanted more. They wished to blaze their own trails. Having fun was individual, and no doctor could easily prescribe it. The result was a growing consumer marketplace.³ Bourgeois tourism could not be contained.

As powerful as it is, the gravity of consumer culture generally and tourism specifically is not naturally occurring, and it is surprisingly new. Sociologist Colin Campbell places the roots of modern consumerism in the eighteenth century, when elites embraced what he calls “self-illusory hedonism,” the notion that one is made better through the things that they purchase. The result was a consumer revolution.⁴ At first, only the elite could take part, but eventually cheaper products arrived and advertisers figured out how to teach people to attain true self-expression through buying.⁵ In the aftermath of World War II and following a period of austerity across much of Europe, consumer culture took widespread hold in capitalist countries. Those in communist ones were interested enough that the US government could use consumer products as propaganda.⁶ The contents of one’s kitchen, the vehicle in one’s driveway, the tchotchkes above the fireplace, the clothes on one’s back, the makeup on one’s face, and the places one went on holiday all said something important.⁷ Ads were everywhere, with name brands carefully placed into movies and television programs.⁸ Celebrities lent their faces, their smiles, and their voices to the cause of telling people what to buy.⁹ Consumption quickly defined culture.

Tourism emerged as a desirable consumer item at essentially the same moment as the consumer revolution identified by Campbell. Modern tourism sits apart from earlier forms of travel because of this. Premodern travelers—whether pilgrims, explorers, traders, or even soldiers—certainly enjoyed themselves,¹⁰ but they did not take to the road primarily for the sake of buying enjoyment or to enhance their social prestige through pursuit of the exotic.¹¹ The Grand Tour changed this. Travel became a prominent form of self-illusory hedonism. It was a way of making oneself better through the act of consuming, of expressing identity through buying. It was also a way of letting loose. Being wild. Doing things that were off-limits at home. As the practice was democratized during the nineteenth century, more and more people found a means of self-improvement and release through leisured mobility.¹² Cheaper transportation,¹³ carefully packaged tours,¹⁴ whole libraries of travel writing, and guidebooks designed to tell people what ought to be seen—all taught people to travel for fun.¹⁵ When most governments opted to pass legislation promising holidays with pay,¹⁶ there was little reason not to begin roaming the beaten track.¹⁷ Mass tourism was the result. It is too simple to say that it sold itself, and yet consumption begot consumption. As German author and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger explained in 1958: “Tourism is that industry whose production is identical to its advertisement: its consumers are at the same time its employees. The colorful pictures taken by the tourists differ only in their arrangement from the picture postcards that they purchase and send. These postcards are the travel itself on which the tourists set out.”¹⁸

Nineteenth-century political leaders certainly saw the potential of touristic consumption, especially in colonial settings where tourism could help sell empire,¹⁹ but it was in the interwar years that it was put to real political use. As noted above, communists used it to show how different their regimes were. Democracies used it to show the power of the market. Fascists used tourism to build healthier workers, to highlight national and racial difference, to push ideology, to attract political supporters, and even to aid economic growth in underdeveloped areas.²⁰ Tourism was far from just a leisure pursuit. It was a tool: economic, pedagogical, and political.

After the war, virtually every state recognized the potentials of tourism.²¹ What they were generally less prepared for was the complexity of it. Tourism was often a Faustian bargain. It is difficult to control. A tourism developer might set upon a desirable message to send, but tourists will usually arrive with a range of preconceptions in mind. Leisure travel involves a remarkable amount of shape-shifting and role-playing. The moment a developer attempts to cash in, to develop a product, to raise hard currency, they throw their doors open to reinterpretations and cultural influences from elsewhere that might not be entirely welcome. But even more than that, tourism puts people into contact with other people who would otherwise never meet. Who can say what will happen then?

This reality was certainly the case for the two states at the heart of Adelina Stefan’s superb comparative book. Being comparative means, as Stefan notes in the introduction, parsing out how two regimes “operated in relation to international tourism” and examining “to what extent ideology played a role … in developing international tourism both at the level of high politics and everyday life.” As the author discusses in the introduction, Romania and Spain rested at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they both embarked on their tourism development projects for much the same reasons: to “acquire coveted hard currencies and to improve their image abroad. Spanish authorities dreamed that tourists could generate “economic growth [while] regulating the balance of payments” and at the same time produce “a politically correct opinion of Spain” though attaining “the most authentic knowledge of the history and development of the country” (chapter 1). Both states assumed that they could bring their societies into the modern era while somehow balancing Europe’s model with their idea of modernity.

The first task, of course, was to create the necessary infrastructure. Hotels had to be built, roads improved, rail links made, necessities provided, and international agreements struck. As Stefan notes in chapter 1, specific “state institutions had to be established.” To this end, Romania and Spain followed a similar path already trod by many Western European states during the initial stages of development: they looked abroad for ideas. Just as the Marshall Plan had led countries such as France and Ireland to send budding tourism professionals to the United States to learn about running hotels,²² now Romanian socialists and proto-capitalist Spaniards sought to learn “the language of market economy” as represented by leisure travel. Tourism professionals needed to know the ins and outs of providing for consumer desires, something that was not innate to either society.

While the two regimes hoped for the same ends, they approached getting there somewhat differently. In Romania, the state very much took the lead, controlling all aspects of development and implementation. Outdated rural facilities had to be modernized and transportation connections dramatically improved. In addition to hotels, they built “restaurants, commercial complexes, and places for spending free time”—all centrally planned and so carefully mapped to the state’s aesthetic and moral sensibilities (chapter 2). It went well enough until financial pressures led the regime to raising prices and cutting quality during the 1980s. Spain took a different tack, opting to provide models of hotels, for example, but letting private developers undertake much of the work from there. This meant that the industry was perhaps not as subject to the political whims of the state, but so too the risks of market competition were painfully obvious. Tourists who came to Spain were attracted to a particular ambiance, but unfettered development in once quaint fishing villages often left these places feeling like a honky-tonk hodgepodge of architectural styles and conflicting rooflines. It was not what many tourists had in mind.

Once they built it, the tourists came, but the lived reality of the story was anything but a simple binary of production and consumption, host and guest. As noted above, tourism is a story of exchange by actors with frequently blurred roles. It is one thing to engage in state planning, or even to leave things open to developers, another to control what happens next. As Stefan notes in the introduction:

All economic policies affect people, and so it should not be surprising that along the way, ordinary people in Franco’s Spain and socialist Romania became modern too. Interactions with foreign tourists put them in contact with a different material culture and social mores that brought significant changes in their daily lives. Not only did ordinary Spaniards and Romanians start to dress more fashionably, wear bikinis, and listen to Western music, but their entire vision about comfort and lifestyle changed.

As the author notes in the introduction, foreign currency was welcome, but morally questionable culture was not. International tourism “opened a window onto the world.” It created friendships unimaginable without tourism and fueled “flirtations and affairs” (introduction). Both the Romanian and Spanish governments had very different ideas about sexuality, dress, and behavior than did many of the tourists who came to stay. When bikini-clad women turned up on Spanish and Romanian beaches and inspired local women to rethink their own beach attire, it was an insult to conservative Spanish Catholicism as well as the Romanian state’s view of suitable dress. Stefan provides the example of a French student named Henry Jacolin, who turned up at the Hotel Continental in Constanța without his shirt and ordered lunch at the café. As she notes in chapter 1, the Romanian secret police viewed it as “an affront to communist public morality.” When Spanish women began to seek careers frowned upon in a deeply patriarchal society, it was a revolutionary act. Ultimately, as the author argues in the conclusion, “international tourism contributed to a modernization from below.” The regimes tried to control the influence of foreign visitors, but stopping the tourist-led change was no easier than willing an object to fly. Both countries and the people who lived there were permanently transformed. Tourism creates its own gravity.

At a time when political ideology seemed to repel states from one another, pushing East and West, North and South in opposite directions, Stefan shows us how tourism pulled them together. It played a vital part in “a more extensive process that heralded the integration of the three major political regions of Europe in the postwar era: the socialist states of Eastern Europe, the authoritarian states of the Iberian Peninsula, and the liberal states of Western Europe” (chapter 1). High politics was no match for the wants and desires of consumers, many of which these governments were only just learning that they had. To understand the story of postwar European politics, it is not enough to examine state-level wrangling, one must delve into Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) as well. They must recognize the that the powerful pull of consumer wants could and did change politics.

Stefan’s account expertly captures both the top-down and the bottom-up, illustrating that they are really two parts of a whole. She shows that the evolution of tourism is never an entirely national story. Not only do states draw upon the ideas of others, but tourists permeate borders and bring along their own influence just as surely as they pack toothbrushes and extra socks. This book offers a vital model for understanding the various forces involved and for making sense of the results. It will be essential reading for those anxious to understand not only Spanish and Romanian tourism history, but also the ways in which touristic consumerism pulled Europe together.

—Eric G. E. Zuelow