Introduction Entangled Histories of Eastern and Southern Europe
Me gusta hacer turismo,
Es algo estimulante,
Es una emocionante,
Manera de aprender. […]
Relájese en la arena
Consígase un flirteo
Y sienta el cosquilleo
Del sol sobre su piel
With this joyful announcement, the 1968 film El Turismo es un Gran Invento [Tourism Is a Great Invention], directed by Pedro Lazaga, hailed the merits of international tourism in Spain.1 The movie’s plot centers around Sr. Alcade, a relatively well-to-do villager who wants to turn his village into a tourist resort. In order to do so, he convinces his fellow villagers to fund his trip and that of the village’s secretary to Marbella, a resort on the Costa del Sol, to learn from that region’s experience. “What was Costa del Sol, or Costa Blanca, or Costa del Azahar before tourism? A godforsaken corner of Spain,” he tells his fellow citizens. Seduced by the mirage of tourism, the male villagers agree on the benefits it would bring to their forgotten village and support Sr. Alcade’s plan. Together with the village’s secretary, Alcade takes the bus to Marbella and checks into the Don Pepe Melia Hotel, one of the most luxurious hotels on the Costa del Sol. The appearance of the hotel with “moving doors” and bathrooms, and women in bikinis and short skirts, dazzles the two visitors. Nothing resembles their home village.2
Similarly, a 1979 Romanian film directed by the communist regime’s darling, Sergiu Nicolaescu, touted the benefits of tourism. Nea Mărin Miliardar [My Uncle, the Billionaire] tells the story of Nea Mărin, a peasant from Oltenia (a region in southern Romania), who visits his nephew, an employee in one of the modern hotels in Mamaia on the Black Sea Coast.3 Although the hotel is fully booked, the nephew manages to book Nea Mărin for a night in the presidential suite with the help of the receptionist, also an Oltenian.
Although physically separated by the Iron Curtain, which placed them in different political and economic systems and more than 2,000 miles apart, the locations depicted in the two films strongly resemble each other. Both places are dotted with modern hotels with pools and fancy amenities and populated by women in bikinis and men in swim trunks who speak either English or German (the languages of most foreign tourists in the two areas at the time). As they have never seen foreign tourists or such modern conveniences before, this diversity shocks both Alcade and Nea Mărin, and they behave clumsily.
Though both directors, Pedro Lazaga and Sergiu Nicolaescu, had their films financed by their respective governments, the two films convey a shared official message: international tourism benefits the economy, and foreign tourists are emissaries of modernity. Both movies became very popular with their respective national publics, because both Lazaga and Nicolaescu chose comedy to address the pragmatic interests of the Francoist regime and of the Romanian state. While humoring their viewers, each director deftly reflected the officially desired social and economic realities in both Franco’s Spain and socialist Romania. These new realities included modern spaces, dynamic individuals, and, last but not least, tourism.
In the mid-to-late 1950s, the governments of both Francoist Spain and socialist Romania became aware that the advent of international tourism promised to bring potential advantages to their economies. Yet initially, international tourism was not a priority for either state. For Franco’s Spain, mining and the chemical industries were the priorities; for socialist Romania, heavy industry was the most promising economic sector. In each case, those priorities fit into the economic model that the two governments deemed successful. Developing, prioritizing, and turning international tourism into a profitable business (Spain), or partially successful economic sector (Romania), was a lengthy process in both countries. One reason international tourism became a priority was that it offered a way to navigate complicated foreign affairs, especially since both countries were internationally isolated from the North Atlantic world in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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.
Vacationing in Dictatorships examines the processes that led the two very different political cultures to embrace international tourism; the fears and impact that such policies engendered; and how the physical and human landscapes in the newly constructed tourist resorts, like Marbella on the Costa del Sol and Mamaia on the Black Sea Coast, came to resemble each other, despite their locations on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Furthermore, it examines how foreign tourists unintentionally set in motion forces that forced the two dictatorial regimes to take new approaches to consumption and how ordinary people in Franco’s Spain and socialist Romania took advantage of the foreign tourists’ arrival to serve their own ends and acquire their own private space. In short, this book examines why these states made the decision to embrace international tourism and the intended and unintended consequences of their decisions.
Franco’s Spain and socialist Romania represented two contrasting political regimes against the backdrop of the Cold War. Francoist Spain grew out of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) after the victory of Nationalist forces led by Francisco Franco over the Popular Front composed of socialists, republicans, communists, and anarchists. Because of Franco’s wartime alliances with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Spain was a pariah state in postwar Europe and the United States until the early 1950s. In the early 1950s, Spain reentered the arena of international politics on the side of the United States. At the height of the Cold War, Spain’s anti-communist stance was its trump card in its attempt to overcome isolation and procure capital for its shattered economy. Yet Francoist Spain was neither capitalist nor democratic like the other countries in the Western Bloc. The standard narrative describes Spain throughout the 1940s as a semi-fascist dictatorial state.4 The Falange, a paramilitary group with a strong fascist orientation, was the main political group. In support of Franco’s government, it mobilized all social strata by creating political organizations for youth, women, and workers.5 But in the early 1950s, the nature of the Spanish government shifted into the personal dictatorship of Francisco Franco, supported by the Spanish Catholic Church and the military.6 Only in 1958 did the Falangists lose their political influence to Opus Dei, a secretive group within the Catholic Church that profoundly influenced the government. But the shift could not resolve the deep economic problems that had afflicted the Spanish economy since the end of the civil war. In the mid-1950s, the regime was confronted with workers’ protests and a deep economic crisis. In response to these political and economic challenges, the government agreed to the Stabilization Plan of 1959, which allowed foreign capital to be invested in Spain. This plan officially ended the country’s economic isolation.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Romania became part of the socialist camp in March 1945, when Petru Groza, the chairman of Frontul Plugarilor (Ploughmen’s Front), a political party close to the Communist Party and sanctioned by the Soviets, became prime minister. With strong Soviet support, the Communist Party of Romania moved quickly to consolidate its influence and power. On December 30, 1947, King Michael I abdicated, and in February 1948, the Communist Party of Romania merged with the Social Democratic Party. With this union, the newly formed Romanian Workers’ Party (after 1964, the Romanian Communist Party) became the only political party in Romania. The party dominated all state structures, and membership became a precondition for any public position. Initially, the Romanian Workers’ Party followed Moscow’s line, but it had little popular support because, according to public perception, it was run by non-Romanians or individuals fully loyal to the Soviet Union.7 In 1952, the leadership became Romanianized when Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, an ethnic Romanian who had not spent time in Moscow, became the general secretary of the Romanian Workers’ Party.8 Throughout the 1960s, Dej and his successor, Nicolae Ceaușescu, adopted a nationalist policy, and over time Romania took a relatively independent stance toward the Soviet Union. Against the background of the party’s increasingly nationalist policies, both men enhanced their power within both the party and the state. A nationalist stance, along with a gradual liberalization of society, increased the Romanian Communist Party’s popularity at the grassroots level in the 1960s and early 1970s, but a widespread consumer goods shortage delegitimized the party in the 1980s.9 These are the standard narratives about Francoism in Spain and communism in Romania, which this book adapts in various ways by examining international tourism from a comparative perspective in the two countries. Like all standard narratives, they ignore the processes examined here, which are more complex and nuanced. By bringing together economic policies and their effects on social behavior and mores, this book unpacks that complexity to explore the many ways state and society affected each other in the two countries. In doing this it shows not only the similarities between the two dictatorships but also the sweeping effects of international tourism in postwar Europe.
Destination Desires
In the 1960s, despite their different political orientations and being on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, Franco’s Spain and socialist Romania capitalized on the advent of international tourism. Both decided to welcome foreign tourists for the same reasons: to acquire coveted hard currencies and to improve their image abroad. Both promoted themselves as a destination for beachgoers and people with limited income. In doing so, they attracted a similar spate of tourists from capitalist countries. In the Spanish case, West Europeans predominated. They included West Germans, French, British, and Scandinavians with a working-class background who could not afford to travel abroad until the 1960s.10 In socialist Romania, tourists from other socialist countries, especially those from Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, originally dominated, but by the mid-1960s, tourists from Western Europe “discovered” the Romanian Black Sea Coast. Most of them came from West Germany, Italy, France, or the Scandinavian countries. Because they brought with them coveted hard currencies, the Romanian government privileged them over tourists from the Eastern Bloc or Romanians themselves. Put simply, it was not just the states, but also individuals from both the capitalist and socialist blocs, who took advantage of the tourist boom of the 1960s, when, as the sociologist John Urry explains, travel became “almost a matter of citizenship, a right to pleasure.”11
Against this background, the number of European tourists increased from thirty million in 1955 to one hundred million in 1966.12 Virtually any place with access to the sea, an attractive landscape, or decent tourist infrastructure could become a tourist spot. Commercial advertising in Western countries picked up on this opportunity, and places off the beaten track, like Spain and Romania, began to be intensely promoted. Moreover, as most tourists chose group travel over individual travel, their travel agent suggested which tourist destinations could be more rewarding and affordable. Most tourists sought the sun, sea, and beach during summer and snow and skiing in the winter. As many European tourists only had two weeks of vacation, the majority chose to spend it during the summer, and thus beach destinations became more popular. Medicine, too, played its part, as most doctors recommended the sun as therapy for overworked Europeans. In addition, advertisements, television, and magazines popularized sunnier destinations as well as a new approach to the body. All these factors and forces served to build a tourist mentality among the middle and working classes, who gradually began to spend their summers at the beach. Franco’s Spain and socialist Romania appealed to such tourists as both countries advertised themselves as affordable beach destinations.
Most importantly, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was not just the sun that lured Western European tourists to Spain and Romania but also their lower prices. In 1973, French tourists would pay US $220 for a fifteen-day vacation package, which included lodging, meals, and transportation, on the Black Sea Coast with the possibility of winning another three weeks for free if their vacation was scheduled in June or September.13 Spain was even less expensive—foreign tourists traveling to the country paid roughly $200 for a two-week trip, airfare included.14 These low fares became possible particularly due to mass tourism. Before the World War II and in its immediate aftermath, touring abroad was prohibitively expensive with the exception of government-sponsored programs in some countries. In the late 1950s, the advent of charter flights and package tours sharply reduced the cost of international travel. The first charter flights, introduced at the end of the 1950s, connected Great Britain and southern France.15 Until the 1970s, charter flights were a standard way to travel, and their routes spread to the United States, the Mediterranean coasts, and Eastern Europe. In 1969, the introduction of charter flights between the United States and Europe made international travel affordable: while a round ticket for a regular flight between Atlanta and Paris ranged from $656 to $925, a charter flight cost only $390.16 In addition, package tours for the working class changed the definition of tourism itself. From an activity involving individual exploration or health recovery, tourism became a collective pursuit of pleasure and relaxation affordable to most wage earners. Group tourism prevailed over individual travel because it was more affordable and did not involve special preparations. Tourist agencies carefully included a set of preestablished activities in tour packages. This practice was part of becoming a tourist because it taught inexperienced people about essential albeit mundane things, such as what to do when traveling, what kind of behavior was or was not socially acceptable, and what activities to engage in on vacation. Tourists caught on quickly. Soon they learned to master not just the different cultures of the places they visited but their different politics. This was the case with both Franco’s Spain and socialist Romania, two dictatorships located on different geographical edges of Europe. Nonetheless, in the snowball of mass tourism, the two countries’ political orientation ceased to matter to financially conscious travelers. And so, in less than a decade, Western European blue-collar workers turned from individuals who had barely left their hometowns to tourists in “exotic” countries, such as Spain and Romania.
Entangled Histories of Tourism
When writing an integrated history of Europe, most scholars limit their discussion to postwar capitalist Western Europe, while socialist Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean region are included only, if at all, as ancillary entities.17 This book aims to change this perspective by examining two of postwar Europe’s peripheries through the lens of tourism. A democratization of tourism occurred in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean region as well as in Western Europe. The number of tourists to these countries soared and, in many cases, tourists also started to visit other countries.18 Spain and Romania were part of this general European and global trend, but the tourist phenomenon was shaped by the specific political contexts of the two countries. The two very different types of dictatorships determined the process of tourism development in light of their own political and economic structures. Yet strikingly, they also shared some similarities. These similarities resulted from Romania’s and Spain’s overall similar paths in the twentieth century. Both sought to modernize their societies and, in doing so, they vacillated between the “European model” and their own version of modernity.19 To a certain extent, this situation gave birth to similar mentalities that regarded the European core as desirable, emphasized privileged nationalism and masculinity, and favored an ambiguous relationship between citizens and their relatively weak states. When it came to designing and implementing tourist policies in the two countries, these similarities prevailed over ideological differences.
As modern individuals have become more experienced tourists, scholarly interest in this phenomenon has also risen.20 In the late 1970s, sociologists and anthropologists started to pay attention to tourism. For Dean MacCannell, a sociologist considered to be the founder of tourism studies, tourism is both a product of modern consumerism and an attempt to reduce everything to a commodity.21 He examines tourism through the lens of modernity, arguing that “the expansion of modern society is intimately linked to modern mass leisure” and that the study of tourism can explain the transformation from an industrial society to a modern one.22 MacCannell argues against the prejudice embedded in academia and public consciousness that in the 1960s and the 1970s that tourists were outsiders and therefore superficial or ignorant observers who could not really understand the societies and cultures that they explored.”23 Another scholar of tourism, John Urry, argues that it is a force of democratization, characterized by the search for novelty rather than for authenticity.24 For Urry, what defines the touristic experience is the gazing at places and objects that are out of the ordinary; this comes “from a logical binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary.”25 Although I agree with him that tourist experiences presuppose distinct types of mental and physical circumstances, the sharp distinction he makes between the everyday and extraordinary components of tourist activity loses sight of tourism as an extension of everyday life.
In his Tourism: An Introduction, Adrian Franklin makes a similar argument. According to Franklin, because of modernity and globalization, “the everyday world is increasingly indistinguishable from the touristic world.”26 But what happens when tourists go on vacation in a dictatorship like socialist Romania or Franco’s Spain? Did modernity and tourism become inseparable in these cases too? In the following chapters, I address these questions, and argue that Franco’s Spain and socialist Romania, despite their political orientation and their position on the European periphery, also became part of these global developments.
A History of Tourism
Historians are latecomers to the study of tourism. It was only in the 2000s that some cultural historians became more interested in studying this phenomenon. The acknowledgment of the importance of examining tourism first came from a historian of Great Britain, John K. Walton,27 and one of Germany, Rudy Koshar. Interestingly enough, similar to scholars in sociology and anthropology, Koshar argues that tourist experiences are genuine and that tourists do more than “substitute a fake ‘tourist reality’ for the ‘real reality’ ” in their pursuit of leisure.28 In addition, Ellen Furlough and Shelly Baranowski, historians of France and Germany, respectively, point out that “tourism is not only a formidable economic force but has also been operated by various types of governments as an instrument at the juncture between ideology, consumption, social harmony, and national coherence.”29 In a more focused study on Franco’s Spain, Sasha Pack regards mass tourism as a component of international relations, arguing that tourism played an important role in changing the nature of Franco’s regime from a harsh authoritarian to a more liberal one and in “Europeanizing” Spain.30 Justin Crumbaugh uses a cultural lens to focus on how international tourism in Franco’s Spain built representations, especially when it comes to the dictatorship.31 Lastly, Alejandro Gómez del Moral examines the tension between the regime’s officially favored austerity and the emergence of a lavishing consumer culture during Franco’s regime.32
A more convoluted discussion arises when focusing on tourism in socialist societies. Scholars like Anne Gorsuch, Diane Koenker, Hannes Grandits, Karin Taylor, Igor Duda and others have meaningfully shown how socialist regimes in the USSR and Yugoslavia wanted to turn workers into “purposeful consumers.”33 Other histories of tourism under socialism have shown how these regimes not only wanted to shape tourists, but also the landscape they were inhabiting. Notably, Scott Moranda meaningfully describes how the Socialist Unity Party regime in East Germany altered the environment, initially with ordinary Germans’ agreement; they were promised an improvement in living standards in order to fit tourism’s economical and ideological needs.34 In the Soviet case, Gorsuch and Koenker contend that tourism is a feature of modernity, stating that “socialism too was part of the modern world, and socialist tourism also reflects the ineffable tension generated by traveling in groups, or according to officially arranged itineraries, in order to produce individual meaning.”35 When discussing the intricacies of domestic tourism—an issue not central to this book but a part of the official vision on consumerism in socialist Romania—Gorsuch and Koenker assert that socialist tourism created Soviet citizens and targeted the working- and middle-class.36 This is similar to what John Urry describes happening in Western societies during the early twentieth century, with the introduction of paid vacations in countries such as France, Great Britain, and Italy.37
Although excellent, with few exceptions the existing literature on tourism has focused either on the Western/capitalist world or on socialist Eastern Europe and Soviet Union and has made few attempts to put the two worlds into comparison. Moreover, with the notable exception of Gómez del Moral, it overlooks the interplay between high politics and everyday life in the case of international tourism in dictatorships, or how issues like gender and class affected international tourism in these political regimes. In both Spain and Romania, most rank-and-file tourist workers were women, while men maintained their managerial positions. Thus, a pivotal question is, how did informal relations between rank-and-file tourist workers and foreign tourists affect the relationship between the two groups and the status of women? Kristin Ghodsee thoroughly examines the impact of international tourism on women in late socialist and post-socialist Bulgaria, while Aurora Morcillo investigates how Francoism shaped gender relations, but no work accomplishes this in a comparative perspective.38
This book attempts to cover these glaring gaps in the literature. In the following chapters, I examine international tourism in socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain with an eye to both high politics and everyday life practices in the attempt to combine top-down and bottom-up perspectives. This will offer a better view not only of how politics shape society but also how ordinary individuals affect politics in dictatorships. Furthermore, I pay special attention to tourist workers, because in both countries these workers benefited from access to economic capital due to their interactions with foreign tourists, which translated into cultural and social prestige. This is particularly significant in the Romanian case, as according to the socialist discourse, workers were supposed to hold the central place in society, while employees in the service sector (like those working in tourism) held secondary importance. Yet, as I show, the social dynamics that tourism unleashed overturned this social hierarchy at the grassroots level, not only in Romania, but also in Spain.
How comparable is tourism in socialist Eastern Europe with tourism elsewhere, especially that in Southern Europe? What can we learn from such a comparison?39 Was socialist Romania a small player in the world of tourism, or catalyzer of transnational relations across the Iron Curtain? Gorsuch and Koenker touch upon the intellectual benefits of comparing tourism experiences in socialist and capitalist worlds and of writing a transnational history of tourism;40 this is also the goal of Eric Zuelow, who meaningfully points out that most histories of tourism are still focused on national case studies, though with “considerable evidence that suggests the growth of tourism occurred amid a complicated matrix of transnational forces.”41 Thus, to build on these studies I examine the transnational connections between socialist and capitalist words, and between Eastern and Southern Europe, through the lens of international tourism.
Small Players, Global Phenomenon
Approximately one million tourists from capitalist countries traveled to Romania in 1979, while the number of total visitors reached seven million in 1980. Most of these tourists headed to the Black Sea Coast. Similarly, fifteen million tourists visited Spain in 1965 at the height of the Francoist regime. Both governments regarded international tourism as a vehicle for offsetting their balance of payments. As both countries wanted to modernize their economies, they needed to import expensive technology from Western European countries or the United States, which had to be paid for in hard currencies. Tourism was but one way to return this money to their economies, and this study offers an insight into the dynamics of this phenomenon and how it shaped the economic and international landscape of postwar Europe. Moreover, this book shows how even small players, like Romania or Spain (at least in the beginning), capitalized on the advent of the global phenomenon of mass tourism. In the process, they not only acquired hard currencies but also became a part of Europe because of international tourism and despite Cold War divisions.42 Although financially Spain performed better than Romania, both countries’ performance is noteworthy. Yet the question is why Spain did better than Romania, although their beginnings with tourism and their goals were highly comparable. The standard narrative explains this through their locations on either side of the Iron Curtain, with Spain being in the orbit of the United States and Romania part of the socialist Bloc. Yet, as socialist Romania became interested in establishing relations with both the United States and Western Europe as early as the mid-1950s, this clear-cut division between socialist East and capitalist West falls short. How important was this division when it came to international tourism?
By focusing on the politics and impact of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain, Vacationing in Dictatorships offers an answer to this question by examining the socialist and capitalist economic systems and showing how they functioned at the grassroots level.43 I argue that, in the case of international tourism, the distinction between the two economic systems became increasingly blurry, as socialist countries also relied on market-driven mechanisms to render their tourism sector profitable. Numerous studies published in the 1970s by Romanian specialists in tourism made use of terms such as “market,” “marketing,” “profit,” or “management.”44 This suggests a pragmatic approach to international tourism and the intention to run this activity for profit, which was the same goal of Western capitalist enterprises. A comparative approach sheds light on the actual functioning and mechanisms of international tourism in a state-owned enterprise, as opposed to a private one, by examining the decision-making processes and issues of economic efficiency.45
My comparative approach in the following chapters reveals not only how the two systems operated in relation to international tourism, but also to what extent ideology played a role, if any, in developing international tourism, both at the level of high politics and everyday life. Such an approach runs counter to existing literature that has overemphasized the role of ideology in socialist societies and has suggested it was deeply entrenched in every aspect of society. The Romanian case has been arguably the most publicized from this point of view.46 Moreover, after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, few studies have compared socialism and capitalism, as socialism vanished from the political scene while liberal capitalism seems to have prevailed. However, after over three decades, liberal capitalism has shown its own limits, and the question of why socialism “failed” is more pressing than ever. One possible answer is tied to state socialism’s economic performance and its inability to deliver access to consumer goods.47 By comparing international tourism in repressive dictatorships that held different attitudes toward individual consumption, I examine the role of tourism and consumption in fostering change from below. While Francoist Spain did not suppress the consumption of foreign goods nor Spaniards’ interactions with foreigners, the socialist Romanian state strived to control these interactions and to limit access to foreign commodities. Therefore, a key theme embedded within this book is the divergent stances that affected international tourism in the two countries, and although more far-fetched, how this divergence played a role in the different ends of the two dictatorships and their aftermaths.
Soft Diplomacy and Cultural Affairs
The transnational web that international tourism generated in the postwar era is not just a topic in economic and international history. It also was also embroiled in complex social and cultural aspects, which only a comparative approach can meaningfully highlight. Citizens in both socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain were faced with political and economic obstacles when they sought to travel abroad. Thus, for Romanian and Spanish citizens, the arrival of foreign tourists opened a window onto the world. Hence, friendships were made between people who could not meet otherwise. Flirtations and affairs ensued, much to the dismay of the Securitate (the Romanian secret police) and the conservative Catholic Church in Spain. Beyond the moralizing of these institutions, these encounters took place against the backdrop of the Cold War. This was more obvious in the case of socialist Romania, which prioritized tourists from capitalist countries. This book shows that at the level of everyday life, these contacts came to work as soft diplomacy during the Cold War.48 It does so precisely by examining the ways in which the everyday interactions between citizens of Western countries, Spaniards included, and Romanians turned the Iron Curtain into a more porous border.49
The book illustrates how contacts with foreign tourists and the opportunities that came from such contacts provided ordinary people in both Romania and Spain with a private space, or in Alf Ludtke’s terms, “a self-willing distancing from authority.”50 While in Romania such contacts helped the “little” women and men to overcome the consumer goods shortage, in Spain these connections helped them to adapt to the Francoist system in ways that ranged from tax evasion to embracing social mores and ideas that went against the principles of the Spanish Catholic Church. These contacts offered ordinary people a certain independence in relation to their political systems, connections that challenged the aspirations of both dictatorships and defined a wide range of citizens’ behaviors.51 Another consequence of international tourism was that in both countries, but most notably in Romania in the 1980s, the black market successfully rivaled official control of the market. Yet the communist regime, and especially its officials and agents, benefited from this challenge to the system of state socialism: one surprising effect of the parallel market was that it helped the regime stay in power, despite its declining popular legitimacy. In Spain, tourism brought about a liberalization from below, which the Francoist regime could not stop. The number of tourists was too high, and the advantages of international tourism to the Spanish economy were too enticing to induce the state to halt this process. As a result, ordinary people adopted new consumption patterns and acquired new ideas about sexuality, which the Francoist state had no option but to reluctantly tolerate.
Furthermore, the increasing separation of citizens from the state in both countries created an odd state of “normality,” which allowed them to limit state involvement in their daily lives. This book shows how international tourism, particularly interactions with foreign tourists in Romania and Spain, sparked an “alternative liberalization” of everyday life in both countries despite the tight grip of their authoritarian regimes.52 Moreover, it created a common culture of everyday life that involved both enjoyment and coercion (sometimes self-imposed).53 This became a routine for both tourists and locals on both the Romanian Black Sea Coast and the Costa del Sol, two areas to which foreign tourists flocked and that this study examines in detail. Comparing the impact of tourism on everyday life practices in socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain helps us to further put into perspective the histories of Eastern and Southern Europe in the postwar period.
Lastly, this book differs from mainstream scholarship in its approach to the Cold War. Most scholars have approached the history of the Cold War from the perspective of political and diplomatic history, an approach that emphasizes the division between the socialist East and the capitalist West. Yet beginning in the early 2000s, a number of studies have not only challenged this perspective but have also shown that the Iron Curtain was more porous than previously thought.54 This book enhances the current understanding and illustrates how Romania and Spain, despite their locations on the different sides of the Iron Curtain, not only shared an interest in international tourism but also followed similar paths of development until the early 1970s, when an aging Franco began to lose his grip over Spain and a rising Nicolae Ceaușescu took a more authoritarian and autarkic stance in both the political and economic realms in Romania. Both countries developed their tourist industry practically from scratch and capitalized on wealthier Northwestern Europe, from which most tourists were coming. These developments suggest how international tourism reconfigured, in some measure, the geopolitical landscape of postwar Europe.55 Thus, in the following chapters, the ideological and political division between the socialist East and capitalist West is not central, because Eastern and Southern Europe shared certain economic aspirations to move toward the core of Europe, and thus to modernize. International tourism offered this opportunity. To a certain extent, Franco’s Spain performed better at this task than did socialist Romania—not for ideological reasons but rather for reasons rooted in the economic performance of each country and their ability to promote themselves on the external tourist market.
A Note on Primary Sources and Methodology
Given its comparative and international approach, this book necessitated research in five countries and eleven archives. My main archives and research sites were, however, in Romania and Spain. In Romania, the Central Committee Collection (Chancellery, Economic, Propaganda, Administrative, and External Affairs Sections) from the National Archive (Arhivele Nationale) helped me to pinpoint the role of international tourism in Romanian politics and economic policies. This collection houses the materials produced by the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, the most important resource for the study of the communist period in Romania.56 In addition, the Council of Ministers Collection, also from the National Archive, offers key information on the official perspective of international tourism, especially in its inchoate stage. The Collection of the National Institute for Research and Development contains studies about tourism development in Romania and its prospects as well as about how international tourism is approached in other countries, both from the socialist Bloc and capitalist West. Materials from the archives of the former Securitate (Romanian secret police) provide the official perspective on the interactions between Western tourists and Romanians, but also offer valuable information about the tourist industry.57 The archive contains surveys and reports about tourism as well as some of the tourist workers’ personnel files. As the creator of this archive was a member of the Securitate, all these documents have to be treated with caution. As a matter of fact, a large part of the documents are informative notes that colleagues gave about each other. In addition, tourist magazines (such as Holidays in Romania) published in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Yiddish show the ways in which the socialist state promoted itself as a tourist destination and the type of image that it wanted to project abroad. Tourist brochures and fliers published for a foreign audience provide insightful information about available tourist services in socialist Romania and consumption patterns.
In Spain, I used the General Directorate of Tourism (Dirección General de Turismo) subcollection of the General Archive of Administration (Archivo General de la Administración)58 to examine how international tourism became a priority for Franco’s Spain and how the tourist industry was run and promoted abroad. These documents offer insight into how the Spanish state dealt with any negative influences that tourists might have had on its citizens’ customs. In addition, I use the Institute for Tourist Studies (Instituto de Turismo de España, Turespaña) archive, which abounds in studies about the economic efficiency of international tourism, reports of tourist congresses, and promotional materials. Furthermore, it houses the archive of the World Tourism Organization, a tourist body that reunited all countries interested in developing tourism, regardless of their political regime and economic system. Local and national newspapers from the Spanish National Library and the Provincial Historical Archive of Malaga as well as tourism magazines from the National Tourist Office provide a glimpse into the day-to-day life of Spaniards in the 1960s–1970s. These are familiar social science sources and are invaluable to my research, but my work is not simply a study of policy.
I supplement these sources with oral interviews with a variety of people who worked in the tourism industry in both countries, as well as with domestic and international tourists. I conducted thirteen interviews in Romania and five interviews in Spain with tourist workers and domestic tourists. In addition, I interviewed three foreign tourists to Romania and two foreign tourists to Spain. These interviews help me explore the human and subjective dimensions of international tourism and thereby enrich my study. I treat these interviewees as experts who can bring a valuable perspective to balance information from the traditional archival documents. Tourist workers proved to be an excellent source for understanding how tourism worked at the grassroots level. Interviews with domestic tourists illustrated how contacts with foreign tourists took place, what would they buy from foreign tourists, and what it meant to own those goods in the context of socialist Romania’s economic shortages. Although at times the interviews with foreign tourists who visited Romania reproduced a colonial discourse that originated mostly in the post-1989 period, these interviews offer insightful information. They shed light on the type of available services, what tourists wanted to see in Romania, and, most importantly, the transnational connections between young people from Eastern and Western Europe, despite the different political regimes. For Spain, interviews with domestic tourists revealed the initial cultural shock of interacting with a different culture after years of isolation and the transformation that ordinary Spaniards underwent because of the arrival of more libertine foreign tourists. Foreign tourists’ memories of Franco’s Spain look striking at first sight. To the two American tourists whom I interviewed in Pittsburgh, Franco’s Spain looked welcoming and “normal” despite the dictatorial regime.59 As they built their recollection in light of the present situation, some of the negative impressions might have disappeared altogether throughout time. This type of recollection shows the limits of oral history, and I am vividly aware of these limits.60 Yet, when treated with caution and combined with other types of sources, oral history interviews can provide valuable insight into everyday life practices as related to tourism and consumption, practices that official sources might silence.61
At the same time, archival materials are also shaped by specific contexts. Working with state-created archives in Romania and Spain, I observed how the studied materials reflected the nature of the two dictatorships. Whereas in Romania, reports and discussions within the Secretary Office and the Central Committee predominate, in Spain most documents are in fact letters between various state officials or between entrepreneurs and state bureaucrats. The formats of these documents reflects different decision-making processes in socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain. While in the Romanian case this shows a process centered around one major governing body and later one person, the personal letters illustrate the importance of personal relations and networks in Spain. Yet the cohesive decision-making process in socialist Romania can prove deceptive if one only examines one archive or collection. For instance, the ordinary people’s bargaining ability surfaces in the denunciatory notes that clog the former Securitate’s archive. Although morally questionable, these notes are attempts to manipulate a state hungry for information. Yet the authors of these notes had their own agenda when following what appeared to be a simple format. The notes often involved seeking to compromise someone else’s position while establishing a relationship of outward trust with the regime, which might help the author climb up the social ladder. At times, even Securitate officers acknowledged this situation and the precariousness of received information, but they too were caught in the system.62 Far from wanting to suggest that socialism was intrinsically bad, this scheme illustrates the power that ordinary citizens had to leverage in relation with the regime.63 Similarly, the Spanish practice of exchanging letters reflected the subjectivity of decision-making and the bargaining power of state functionaries in relation to the dictatorial regime.
The first part of the book focuses on the politics of international tourism in the two countries. Chapter 1 initiates this discussion with an examination of institutional and policy foundations in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain and the subsequent shift in priority from domestic tourism to international tourism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this initial phase, socialist Romania and Francoist Spain had similar approaches to international tourism, and in both countries it was external factors (e.g., other socialist states’ orientation in the Romanian case; the interest of American and British tourists to vacation in Spain and the 1959 World Bank report in the Spanish case) that led to its development.
Chapter 2 examines the countries’ different approaches to building a tourist infrastructure (more state-controlled in Romania, less so in Spain) and the connection between tourism and modernization in both countries. The 1960s was a period of tourism growth in both countries, with Spain becoming the poster child of international tourism. Thus, once an efficient transportation infrastructure was built, Romania and Spain became better connected to the rest of Europe and beyond. Along the way, they also developed similar policies and institutions to enhance international tourism, suggesting that pragmatism was more decisive than ideology.
How, though, did Romania and Spain use international tourism to create political and economic networks beyond their respective political Blocs (socialism and capitalism)? Chapter 3 reveals how Romania became a tourist destination for Western tourists, while Spain also welcomed some tourists from socialist countries and developed a tourist relationship with Romania as part of the World Tourism Organization. In Romania, it was the state that pursued such policies; in Spain, at least initially, it was mostly the private sector that took an interest in tourism in socialist countries and established networks across the Iron Curtain. This chapter exemplifies how the two countries’ interest in going beyond their ideological Blocs was the outcome of both political détente and globalization. Yet, in the Romanian case, this process was halted by the global economic crisis in the late 1970s and by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s decision to pay Romania’s foreign debt and hence to limit investments, including in tourism.
The second part of the book examines how the arrival of foreign tourists affected both official and unofficial consumption as well as space and everyday life practices in two coastal regions, the Romanian Black Sea Coast and the Spanish Costa del Sol. In chapter four, I first focus on how a vision of consumption and consumer society was built in each country with the help of international tourism. Chapter 5 explores the tension between the two states’ intentions to develop international tourism and their fear of foreign contamination. Groups within each government harbored substantial fears about the smuggling of goods (in Romania) and religious or moral disturbances (in Spain) that would result from the influx of international tourists. International tourism did indeed help locals and tourist workers build informal networks beyond the state’s authority, as I uncover by describing the nature and implications of official fears and some of the informal networks in both countries.
Finally, chapter 6 uses two case studies—the Romanian Black Sea Coast and the Spanish Costa del Sol—to describe not only how development plans affected international tourism, but also transformed the tourist landscape and shaped people’s lives and identities in each region. Beach tourism was a focus of both governments, and coastal regions in both countries benefited from substantial investment. Therefore, foreign tourists significantly reshaped both coastal areas despite the different political and economic systems. Besides the building of modern hotels, the arrival of foreign tourists helped give rise to a cosmopolitan society where various languages were spoken and new fashions were disseminated, and where tourists and locals developed relations and lifestyles that had previously been impossible. These similarities suggest that we need to refine the existing literature’s portrayal of a state-driven socialist system as strictly opposed to market-driven capitalist development.64 In this respect, Sr. Alcade and New Mărin became epitomes of change that international tourism brought about in both countries.