Tourism and Geopolitics: Issues and Concepts from Central and Eastern Europe

By Derek R Hall

With 29 contributors from across Europe and beyond, this work represents a unique and important resource that examines the many relationships between tourism and geopolitics, with a focus on experiences drawn from Central and Eastern Europe. It begins by assessing the changing nature of 'geopolitics', from pejorative associations with Nazism to the more recent critical and feminist geopolitics of social science's 'cultural turn'. The book then addresses the important historical role of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in geopolitical thinking, before exemplifying a range of contemporary interactions between tourism and geopolitics within this critical region.

Edited by a renowned authority on tourism geopolitics, this book:
· Provides the most comprehensive overview of tourism and geopolitics available
· Applies a range of geopolitical concepts and approaches to empirical experiences of tourism and mobility in Central and Eastern Europe
· Embraces contributions from both established and new academic voices.

Pursuing innovative analytical paths, the book demonstrates the interrelated nature of tourism and geopolitics and emphasizes the freshness of this research area. Addressing key principles and ideas which are applicable globally, it is an essential source for researchers, teachers and students of tourism, geography, political science and European studies, as well as for diplomatic, business and consultant practitioners.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CAB International
• Release date: Jan 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780647630

Book preview

Preface

When I first travelled in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the heady 1960s, English was not an overly useful language to possess. German, certainly; Russian, if necessary; French in Romania and Bulgaria; Italian in Dalmatia and Albania: languages of imperial heritage.

Much has changed; or has it? There exists a language extinction crisis. Of the world’s 7000 languages, just 10 are spoken by half the globe’s population. While there are clear benefits from a shared communication medium, there are also spectres of such commonality being abused on an Orwellian scale.

In Chapter 2, Michael Hall points to the geopolitics of academic publishing, and how the medium of English has come to dominate both publishing and the academic careers of non-native English speakers. (Does the French literature concur?) But, perhaps wisely, he does not offer suggestions for ways around this. I would proffer the opinion that there are at least three areas that require action:

1.  The apparent trend in native English-speaking countries of reducing foreign language instruction and learning needs to be reversed. Native English speakers need to break out of the downward spiral of monolingualism – not least to be able to understand and respect other cultures better. Without such a facility, we are reduced as human beings.

2.  Scholars can assist this process by seeking out the better non-English language journals and books, and by reading, promoting and citing them in their work, with more (appropriate) non-English language citations brought into mainstream English language publications.

3.  TNCs (transnational corporations) that dominate English-language publishing – ironically, the largest is headquartered in a non-native English-speaking country – should be more language inclusive, not just in abstracts.

Such thoughts may be hopelessly naïve and far too late. But a useful (interim?) model is the Journal of Alpine Research/Revue de géographie alpine, a multidisciplinary online journal that publishes articles in two languages, ‘… one of which must be one of the alpine languages (French, Italian, German) or Spanish, the other being in English. The objective of this bilingualism is to encourage the exchange and diffusion of ideas’ (https://rga.revues.org/?lang=en).

Is this an unrealistic model for those journals with high submission levels and/or constrained print page budgets?

Of course, given increasing academic global mobility (Scott, 2015; van der Wender, 2015), the requirement for a lingua franca is manifest. And with dominant Silicon Valley-sourced communications technology facilitating interaction, American English, for the moment, is the obvious medium, not merely for scholarly interchange.

As regards the current volume, the contributors represent the native speakers of 11 languages other than English. Would we otherwise have been able to communicate and collaborate if not through my own native tongue? For this I am sincerely grateful.

And, of course, this volume itself cannot be exempt from the reality of academic English language hegemony. I have been keenly aware of the role the editor has been privileged to play while imposing his agenda on the contributors through ‘revising’ their English, ‘editing’ their content and pronouncing on each chapter’s quality, relevance and structure.

Native English speakers’ monolingualism is often accompanied by a cavalier approach taken to the use of accents and diacritics. A few years ago, I was strolling with an acquaintance in the clichéd home/bunker of English reaction, ‘Royal’ Tunbridge Wells. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘do so many people now call their cars Shkodas and not Skodas?’

Throughout this volume, the names of countries and capital (and some major) cities are presented in the form commonly used in the English-speaking world. Thus, for example, Estonia rather than Eesti, Kosovo (albeit not universally accepted as an independent country) instead of the Albanian Kosova/Kosovë, Vienna rather than Wien, Belgrade not Beograd (but Kyiv rather than the more familiar Russianised Kiev).

With Central and Eastern Europe’s complicated history of shifting boundaries, population migrations and changing hegemonies, many cities, towns, villages and hamlets often have more than one version of their name, in some cases perhaps three or four. To avoid this semantic/toponymic minefield and to maintain some semblance of consistency throughout this volume, place names other than those of capital cities are normally rendered in the form currently used in the country within which they reside. Thus, for example, Kraków rather than the anglicised Cracow (a strangely ugly form for such a beautiful city). In those languages where proper nouns decline, I have tried to use the version more widely recognised outside of the country. Thus, Durrës rather than Durrësi, Shkodra rather than Skhkodër. Inevitably, there will be some grammatical inconsistency in such usage. All names locally rendered in Cyrillic (or indeed any other non-Roman alphabet) are here transliterated in Romanised form. This, of course, is not without its problems.

In most cases, the English language translations of quotations from survey and interview respondents (usually indicated in italics) and from non-English language published sources have been made by the chapter authors.

Finally, I would like to share the fact that I have been sustained, despite my own patchy linguistic abilities, by the (fictional) writings of Diego Marani (2000/2011, 2002/2012, 2004/2016), an erstwhile Policy Officer in the External Action Service of the European Union responsible for multilingualism. Marani’s second novel in his trilogy, The Last of the Vostyachs, is a satire of bias and prejudice in academic and philological research …

References

Marani, D. (2000) Nuova Grammatica Finlandese. Bompiani, Milan. [(2011) New Finnish Grammar (trans. Landry, J.). Daedelus, Sawtry, UK.]

Marani, D. (2002) L’Ultimo dei Vostiachi. Bompiani, Milan. [(2012) The Last of the Vostyachs (trans. Landry, J.). Daedelus, Sawtry, UK.]

Marani, D. (2004) L’Interprete. Bompiani, Milan. [(2016) The Interpreter (trans. Landry, J.). Daedelus, Sawtry, UK.]

Scott, P. (2015) Dynamics of academic mobility: hegemonic internationalisation or fluid globalisation? European Review 23(S1), S55–S69.

van der Wender, M. (2015) International academic mobility: towards a concentration of the minds in Europe. European Review 23(S1), S70–S88.

Part I:

Introduction and Overviews

1 Bringing Geopolitics to Tourism

Derek Hall

*

Seabank Associates, Maidens, Ayrshire, UK

*E-mail: [e-mail]

1.1 Tourism as (part of) Transnational Neoliberal Hegemony

The study of both tourism and geopolitics is subject to conflicting interpretations, contrasting methodologies and diverse theorisations. To set and exemplify the conjoining of these two arenas within the dynamic context of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) summons all manner of possibilities and challenges.

Through a critical lens, or series of lenses, this volume explores and evaluates some of the issues and concepts relating to the tourism–geopolitics nexus, raising questions concerning the engagement of both areas of study and offering a springboard for the pursuit of further research agendas. Although this exercise is undertaken with particular reference to the countries and peoples of CEE, the conceptual frameworks, arguments and conclusions that follow often possess far wider relevance.

The main sections of the book pursue the overlapping and interrelated themes of: reconfiguring conceptions and reality, where tourism is set within evaluations of traditional geopolitical issues; tourism and transnationalism, theorising and evaluating the (extra)territorial power exerted by tourism- and leisure-related transnational corporations; borderlands, notably examining the transformation of border areas and the tensions between dynamic, high-level (geo)political relations and local tourism-related cross-border quotidian activities; identity and image, exploring tourism’s post-communist and post-conflict contributions to changing local and national self-perceptions and to overcoming the tensions of contested heritage; and mobilities, theorising and exemplifying the tourism-related processes of human movement and their interactions.

Tourism may be viewed in source countries as representing values of freedom and democracy, if only for some. It may be employed as a symbol of escape from the mundanity of the quotidian. Yet tourism is deeply embedded in politics (and, indeed, politics in tourism) at all levels. Tourism contributes significantly to global ordering (Franklin, 2004; Tribe, 2008) and embraces both the symbolism and reality of ‘neoliberal hegemony’ (Box 1.1). As such, it has become an obvious target for expressions of opposition to what, until recently, has been an almost exclusive ‘Western’ developed world project of hedonistic cultural imperialism.

Box 1.1. A short history of neoliberalism

Subject to a number of critiques in this volume, neoliberalism was a concept first expressed publicly in Paris in 1938, and subsequently defined by Friedrich Hayek (1944) and Ludwig von Mies (1945). Outwardly ‘economic’, it asserts fundamental (geo)political and moral implications and impacts.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations, conceiving citizens as ‘consumers’. It contends that ‘the market’ delivers benefits that cannot be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are seen as contrary to liberty; tax and regulation must be minimised, public services privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining are portrayed as market distortions that impede the natural order of winners and losers. Inequality is seen as a virtuous reward for utility and the wealth generation that ‘trickles down’ to enrich all. Efforts to create a more equal society are counterproductive and morally corrosive.

Hayek’s 1947 organisation, the Mont Pelerin Society, was supported by wealthy sponsors and their foundations to disseminate the doctrine of neoliberalism.

Such wealthy backers would subsequently fund a series of ‘think tanks’ – Centre for Policy Studies, Adam Smith Institute, Institute of Economic Affairs, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute.

They also financed academic positions and departments, notably at the universities of Chicago and Virginia (USA).

Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming became overtaken by a more ‘strident’ form of neoliberalism, championed by such Americans as Milton Friedman, believing monopoly power should be seen as a reward for efficiency.

From the 1950s until the 1970s, neoliberalism appeared to be in abeyance, just too extreme for the West European post-war consensus (excluding Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal). This was, of course, just at a time when communism was consolidating its hold in CEE.

From the 1970s, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, began creeping (back) into trans-Atlantic mainstream debate.

With the accession of Reagan and Thatcher, the rest of the neoliberal canon soon followed: tax cuts for the rich, the diminution of trade union power, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Corporate greed, ‘jackpot capitalists’ (Peston, 2008), ruthlessly achieved and defended monopolies, and predatory business practices were the result.

Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht Treaty and the World Trade Organization (the ‘Washington Consensus’),¹ neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world, not least CEE from 1989, while ‘jackpot oligarchs’, having profited hugely from rapid insider privatisations, siphoned off large amounts of capital to safe (offshore) havens.

(From Hayek, 1944; von Mies, 1945; Monbiot, 2016a,b; Peston, 2008; Romano, 2014; Sayer, 2014; Verhaeghe, 2014.)

In his observations on capitalist transitions in CEE, Smith (2002: 667) argued that stabilisation – an obvious prerequisite for tourism development – alongside the path to ‘democracy’ and to neoliberal capitalism, had resulted from the imposition of a ‘new hegemony’. Neoliberal policies attained global reach as developing countries were urged to adopt such strategies by international financial institutions (IFIs): what Friedman (2000) referred to as the ‘golden straitjacket’.

As crude figures alone testify, tourism has become an inextricable part of neoliberal hegemony by virtue of its ability to pioneer economic structures, employment practices, inward investment, corporate insinuation and significant mobility flows to reconstruct the role and value of particular urban and rural spaces, pursuits and structures (see, for example, Smith, 1997; Giampiccoli, 2007).

In the wake of the fall of communism, Allcock and Przcławski (1990) argued that academics from CEE societies could offer independent analysis divergent from both Marxist precepts and ‘Western’ thinking: a Third Way. Such perspectives could have provided alternatives to their western counterparts.

However, the dynamics of the momentous change that swept Eastern Europe in the early 1990s did not allow for such cross-fertilisation as the ‘East’ either bought into the ‘market’ (or was ‘brought’ into the ‘market’) without pause for such ‘cross-civilisational’ conversations.

(Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006: 1203)

1.2 Tourism and Geopolitics

A growing number of studies (e.g. Weaver, 2010) have articulated the ways in which (international) tourism is an implicitly geopolitical activity: it relies on working relationships between blocs’, countries’ and regions’ administrations. Tourism stakeholders anticipate such relationships to be sustained over coming decades, to the extent that the World Tourism Organization (WTO) predicts over two billion international tourism movements by 2030 (UNWTO, 2014b). Complementing such mobility is the facilitating of cross-border flows of the capital, commodities, labour and skills required to sustain the (international) tourism process (Reiser, 2003; Hannam, 2013) (for example, see Chapter 9).

Tourism is also subject to the outcomes of geopolitical activity. The spatial consequences of international relations at supranational and national levels can impact substantially on activity at subnational levels, both at tourism destinations (e.g. Chapters 5 and 6) and at international borders (e.g. Chapters 12–15). What a number of chapters in this volume reveal is that local tourism-related responses to such impacts will usually be place and context related, and thus articulate those differentiated local conditions (Niewiadomski, 2013). This is what Hazbun (2004), among others, refers to as reterritorialisation: the increased relevance of location and characteristics of place.

Yet ‘tourism spaces primarily are articulated to serve the interests of non-locals (i.e. tourists, foreign investors, organisations)’ (Saarinen and Rogerson, 2014: 25), and while the needs and aspirations of locals and non-locals may not be necessarily contradictory, critical issues can be raised that reflect potential contestation and unequal power relationships (this issue is raised in Chapter 8, for example).

Although back in 1975 Turner and Ash could declare that the study of tourism had not embraced a political dimension, much has changed in 40 years. And since the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences, a growth of critical studies in tourism and of critical geopolitics has brought new methodological insights and cross-fertilisations into areas of research that had previously remained largely positivist and relatively isolated. Hannam et al. (2014), for example, have pointed to the ways in which a critical, political mobilities paradigm has repositioned tourism studies more centrally within the social sciences (see Chapter 25).

Despite a wealth of ‘critical’ geopolitics texts (e.g. Dittmer and Sharp, 2014; Dodds et al., 2014; Kuus, 2014) – a trend noted by van der Wusten (2015) – an interest in this area has yet to be widely grasped within the tourism academy (exceptions include Shin, 2004; Bianchi, 2007; Savelli, 2012; Hannam, 2013; Rowen, 2016). Reasons for and implications of this are developed further in Chapter 2.

First employed in 1899 (Ó Tuathail, 1999), ‘geopolitics’ is ‘a slippery term’ (Dodds, 2014: 1). Indeed, so slippery that it was shunned for almost half a century after World War II, its conception of competition for, and political dominance of, territory having become associated with Nazism, lebensraum, global aggression and genocide. As implicitly state-centric and a largely abstract construct of global power and spatial determinism, the simplistic and often static nature of geopolitical constructs, while generating numerous critiques, only gradually re-emerged as an adjunct to neoconservative Cold War thinking (see Chapter 3).

As the term returned to mainstream popular usage, ‘to infer a hard-headed approach to the world in general’ (Dodds, 2014: 1), ‘geopolitics’ became so widely applied in popular discourse as to retain little specific meaning (e.g. Lacoste, 2006; Gianfranco, 2009; Jean, 2012; Zoppo and Zorgbibe, 2013; Verluise, 2014). But within the ‘cultural turn’ of academic geography, it was being subject to a wholesale reappraisal.² What, in the 1980s, became known as ‘critical geopolitics’ sought to interrogate existing structures of power and knowledge,

… to grapple with the culture that produces imperial attempts at domination in distant places … to expose the complicity of geopolitics with domination and imperialism.

(Dalby, 2008: 413)

Critical geopolitics sought to distance itself both from the earlier ‘neoclassical’ geopolitics (Megoran, 2010) – which promoted essentially imperialist ways of thinking about the effects of geography on international relations – and from ‘popular’ geopolitics.

In contrast to a history of ‘big men’ (Sharp, 2000: 363) that has tended to characterise the study of (neo)classical geopolitics (see Chapter 3), the formulation of critical geopolitics was to offer a Foucauldian approach that could unravel and deconstruct ‘… geographical and related disguises, dissimulations, and rationalizations of power’ (Dalby, 1994: 595).

Although criticised as being ‘anti-geopolitics’, ‘anti-cartographic’ and ‘anti-environmental’ (Haverluk et al., 2014), critical geopolitics has provided a much-needed and necessary critique of classical geopolitics (Kelly, 2006). But the two are not mutually exclusive. Thus, for example, a long-time proponent of closer ties between geopolitics and international relations has argued, cognisant of the critical geopolitics debates, that

… the continuing importance of the geopolitical spatial context to the study of international relations …. is based not on an earlier approach based on geographic determinism, but rather possibilism … and … the need to appreciate both a locational view and the perceptual/symbolic/constructed view of space and place, and to do so within an increasingly globalized, interdependent, and transnational world system.

(Starr, 2013: 433)

While both classical geopolitics and early tourism studies may have focused on a macroscale of activity, critical geopolitics and critical studies in tourism are more concerned with interrogating and understanding the apparently mundane, the quotidian; issues that directly affect people’s everyday lives. The genesis of these two strands, however, has been somewhat different. In the case of tourism, gendered approaches were evident in the literature from the mid-1990s (Kinnaird and Hall, 1994; Swain, 1995), pre-dating self-ascribed ‘critical studies’ in the subject by a decade (Ateljevic et al., 2007; Pritchard et al., 2007). By contrast, ‘critical geopolitics’ itself has been criticised for lacking a gendered awareness: a shortcoming that echoes both classical geopolitics and international relations theory (Kofman and Peake, 1990; Staeheli, 1994). Hyndman (2004: 312), for example, argued that critical geopolitics had largely failed to ‘articulate other, more embodied ways of seeing’.

The aim of a feminist geopolitics (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2001, 2004; Dixon and Marston, 2011; Gilmartin and Kofman, 2013), therefore, has been to render critical geopolitics more gendered and racialised, with particular application to issues of security and mobility at a number of different scales, while refocusing on the mundane, everyday reproductions of geopolitical power (Massaro and Williams, 2013).

Cutting across these domains of geopolitics, the term ‘microgeopolitics’ has been deployed:

•    within classical geopolitical discourse, in relation to small/lower-scale geopolitical events or activities (e.g. Tolipov, 2011; Dwyer, 2014); and

•    in the context of critical and especially feminist geopolitics, to refer to the personal level of interaction and its consequences (e.g. Fyfe, 1997; Pain and Smith, 2008; Pain, 2009; Oswin and Olund, 2010; Harker and Martin, 2012).

In this second context, ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ is an area of study that has emerged from feminist engagement, and has gained increasing attention (Pain and Staeheli, 2014); it offers much potential for the critical study of tourism.

The interrogation of relations between intimacy and geopolitics, within a critical geopolitics paradigm, transcends boundaries between global/local, familial/state and personal/political (Pratt, 2012; Cowen and Story, 2013). The proponents of intimacy-geopolitics view intimacy as being wrapped up in national and global geopolitical processes: international events, policies and territorial claims; that geopolitics is created by and consists of relations and practices of intimacy (Bhattacharyya, 2008; Hyndman, 2010; Pratt and Rosner, 2012).

Within this view, all forms of violent oppression are seen as working through intimate emotional and psychological registers as a means of exerting control. This is often linked to wider social norms, obligations and customs, and to economic relations (Hays-Mitchell, 2005). In this way, violence is seen to play a key role in the oppression and insecurities that disproportionately affect socially, economically and politically marginalised people and places (Koopman, 2011).

These ideas clearly possess much relevance for critical tourism studies, but have thus far enjoyed limited application (e.g. Dowler, 2013).

1.3 Tourism as ‘Soft Power’? High Geopolitics, Low Political Profile

One key theme of this volume is that tourism, and implicitly international tourism, can be conceptualised and operationalised as a geopolitical instrument. One such conception of tourism is through its supposed attribute of ‘soft power’ (Nye, 1990, 2004; Melissen, 2005; Davis Cross and Melissen, 2013). But soft power for whom? And with what consequences for tourists and host societies?

Co-conspiring with place branding, tourism’s ‘soft power’ can both support and be a component of ‘public diplomacy’ (e.g. Ociepka, 2014), a subset of nation branding that focuses on the political brand of a nation (Fan, 2008).

Hollinshead and Hou describe nation branding as:

… that mix of political and aspirational activities through which institutions and interest groups variously collaborate and contend to solidify particular visions of their supposed culture, heritage, and nature for not only distant/external others but for their own proximal/internal selves.

(Hollinshead and Hou, 2012: 227)

In such ways, tourism becomes imbued with propaganda value: its symbols and artefacts gather meaning and implication, its stakeholders – tourists, tourism employees, destination residents and host environments – become (often unwitting) actors in the game of image projection, a pursuit that increasingly has become played out in virtual space, away from the altogether less presentable realities of destinations’ quotidian (as expressed in Chapter 20).

The role of cultural heritage can be important in (re-)establishing the soft power presence of former hegemonic powers and/or in emphasising contemporary cleavages between cultural groups. In south-eastern Europe, Turkish cultural organisations have been extending the country’s ‘soft power’ role in funding the restoration and upkeep of Ottoman heritage sites and artefacts. Yet such sites can also be the source of contested and dissonant heritage (for example, see Chapters 17 and 18). Turkish tourists and businesses are also increasing their presence in the region, in the latter case notably in relation to new highway construction (Chapter 23), thereby helping to consolidate the country’s geopolitical role.

A high-profile contemporary harnessing of apparent soft power is the desire to host (and perform well in) tourist-rich ‘mega sport events’ (MSEs) such as athletics, soccer and other large-scale sports tournaments (for example, hosting the 2018 FIFA World Cup tournament: see Chapters 14 and 15; also UNWTO, 2014a). Although Grix and Houlihan (2014) recognised only a limited literature to be available on both the conceptual and operationalising aspects of this area of research, since the staging of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing there has been a growing literature addressing issues linking soft power and national image (e.g. Chen et al., 2013; Song and Deng, 2014; Giulianotti, 2015).

Yet the efficacy of such supposed soft power has been seriously questioned. Manzenreiter (2010) argued that while, as a symbol of modernity and mass organisation, the 2008 Games appeared to be successful in inspiring the Chinese domestic audience, the filter of western media exerted a considerable constraining effect on the Games’ positive external impacts: what Giulianotti (2015) refers to as ‘soft disempowerment’.

The roles of corporate sponsorship and private financing of Olympic Games were accelerated considerably when Los Angeles was the only candidate willing to host the 1984 Summer Games. Such ‘celebration capitalism’ (Boykoff, 2013) would profoundly remould the political economy of MSEs for subsequent host cities and countries where significant efforts have been made to boost competitive soft power and to devise development and legacy strategies to assist sport in shaping national image (Preuss, 2007; Mangan and Dyreson, 2013). By contrast, major cultural events, such as European City of Culture conferment or the management of European Museums Night, can offer opportunities for both (international) prestige and (domestic) reflection and reappraisal at local and personal levels (see Chapter 19).

As objects of tourist consumption, the heritage, artefacts and practices of geopolitically powerful institutions such as those of organised religion, royalty, and supranational bodies such as the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) represent an important link in the nexus between tourism and geopolitics, and as such require stronger critical conceptualisation.

With leisure-related mega-events usually being accommodated in complex and often contested urban settings, recent attention has been drawn to the security practices accompanying such

global occasions of enormous importance and implication … [effecting] seismic change on the cities and nations that host them.

(Fussey and Klauser, 2015: 195)

The need for assurance of stringent security is fundamental to the soft power benefits to be derived from such events (Giulianotti and Klauser, 2010, 2012; Houlihan and Giulianotti, 2012). A focus placed on the ‘securitising’ of event-hosting city sectors sets it firmly within the growing field of critical urban geopolitics (e.g. Coaffee, 2013, 2015), embracing aspects of urban renewal related to ‘new Olympic topographies’ (Pavoni, 2011).

As alluded to above, tourism’s soft power role can be something of a blunt instrument, not least because of the many imperfections and inconsistences associated with the perceptions, reporting and popular imagery of tourism-related development activity. Closely related but potentially more direct than soft power, tourism’s propaganda value operates in complementary directions. It can act to disseminate the cultural values of tourist-generating countries within host societies, often to the further benefit of source countries’ political and/or economic interests. But also, more explicitly, tourism can be employed to present an outwardly positive face to the world of a destination country or region that might in other respects be less acceptable, but then can capitalise on certain aspects of that enhanced, perhaps falsified destination image. This may be expressed most explicitly in destinations governed by ‘totalitarian’ regimes (e.g. Kwek et al., 2014), but can be implicit in any commercial (place) branding exercise.

In a critique of the concept of soft power, Fan (2008) argues that, similarly to tourism, the nature of soft power is largely uncontrollable and unpredictable, rendering it less efficacious than its proponents might suggest. Indeed, the example of some aspects of tourist behaviour and its negative reflection on the country of origin has been the source of much debate both in the academic literature and the popular press. Guo and Zhang (2008), for example, have argued that the ‘uncivil behaviours’ of Chinese outbound tourists have become ‘the bottleneck to hamper national soft power upgrade’ (see also Loi and Pearce, 2015). The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s annual British Behaviour Abroad Report told us that more than 5400 British nationals were detained by police overseas between April 2013 and March 2014, not necessarily to the advantage of any UK national image (UKFCO, 2014; Austin, 2015). Such image ‘leakages’ also reduce the credibility of conceptions of tourism as encouraging peace and (international) harmony (Chapters 17 and 18): ‘soft incredulity’.

The image of a nation is so complex and fluid that it defies the clarity implied in such a term as brand image (Ren and Blichfeldt, 2010). Further, for those countries that have undergone dramatic changes in their political, economic and social systems, such as those addressed in this volume, external images tend to lag behind reality (Fan, 2010). Although, it could be said that such perceptions themselves fail to keep up with the reality of such destination image formation agents as travellers’ blogs and website presentations (see Chapter 20).

Branding and re-imaging may be especially important for countries that have experienced crisis – whether it be natural disaster, war or economic depression (Insch and Avraham, 2014) – for communities seeking (wider) recognition at a higher level than that which exists, such as with Kosovo seeking wider recognition as an independent country (Chapter 18) or ‘stateless nations’ such as Kurds or Roma seeking international representation (Barany 1998; Tahiri, 2007).

Fan (2010) has contended that empirical studies of ‘nation’ branding are simply exercises aimed at boosting exports or incoming tourism. As Kaneva and Popescu put it:

… nation branding proponents explain global relations of power through the metaphor of market competition and argue that nation branding offers a market-friendly approach to governance that transcends politics.

(Kaneva and Popescu, 2011: 192)

Yet the nation branding campaigns pursued by most countries featured in this volume have held far greater importance than simply as tools for attracting tourism and investment (see Chapter 3). They have reflected processes contributing to the articulation of the meaning of nationhood after communism and/or after conflict, and thereby to a reconceptualisation of the local and regional geographies of Europe (Dzenovska, 2005; Kaneva and Popescu, 2011: 203). Such reconceptualisations should embrace greater cultural sensitivity and higher levels of reflection than are currently evident (Ren and Gyimóthy, 2013: 17), as emphasised by some CEE political leaderships’ positions in relation to Middle Eastern migrant/refugee mobilities into Europe (see the Introduction to Part VI).

1.4 Playing Geopolitics with Tourism

Within the tourism performance, the interaction between stakeholders – tourist and tour company, tourist and host residents/employees, tourist and host environment, tourism corporations and host governance, tourism’s role in balance of payments exchanges, tourism’s enmeshing within multiple international mobilities – constitute fundamental dimensions of connectivity. Such connectivity – the mobilities and interactions associated with tourism-related processes – can be subverted swiftly by overtly political, perhaps geopolitical, acts and declarations, reflecting hegemonic influence and power at a number of levels. As is well documented, many regional tourism organisations are weak in the face of the power of tour companies’ and airlines’ ability to transfer their business rapidly from one destination to another (e.g. Farmaki, 2015; see also Chapter 22), thereby mimicking the behaviour of transnational manufacturing corporations.

Sharpley et al. (1996) illustrated how government travel advisories, such as those from the US State Department and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (which can seem to be conservative, overly cautious and occasionally arbitrary), can exert significant power in portraying a dominant Western world view of specific countries, regions and localities, and even ethnic or religious groupings. Such power can result in profound impacts on tourists’ patterns of travel, and thus on certain tourism destinations, particularly of less developed nations, and on the economic and social opportunities of those working and living in them.

Tourism destinations squeezed between the hegemonies of Western neoliberalism and nihilistic international terrorism now include a number of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern locations. For example, shortly following an armed attack against tourists in Sousse, Tunisia, in June 2015, in which 30 Britons died, the UK government warned all its citizens – tourists, businesspeople and residents alike – to leave Tunisia, as intelligence concerning evidence of likely further terrorist acts had been received. As tourism represents a significant element of Tunisian foreign income, this act was condemned as playing into the hands of the terrorists by devastating the Tunisian tourism industry (Morris and Calder, 2015) and national economy. Within days of the attack, the first UK travel operator had removed Tunisia from its summer 2016 programmes (Calder, 2015). But a failing economy, it was argued, would simply create a recruiting pool for terrorists (Rawlinson, 2015; Sengupta, 2015).

1.5 What Follows

Although a limited number of English-language volumes on the relationship between tourism and politics/power have been published over the years (e.g. Burns and Novelli, 2007; Hazbun, 2008; Su and Teo, 2009; Butler and Suntikul, 2010; MacLeod and Carrier, 2010), no published collection (in English) expresses the thematic and regional focus of the current volume.³ The following chapters present contributors who offer a diversity of theoretical and disciplinary approaches to the still largely uncharted, potentially extensive, territory of tourism and geopolitics.

As an experimental plunge, unashamedly embracing both ‘critical’ and ‘(neo)classical’ approaches to experiences from CEE, this volume:

•    explores the relationships between tourism and interpretations of geopolitics and their conceptual underpinnings;

•    raises key issues arising from the tourism, geopolitics and related literatures that are relevant both to CEE and to a wider context;

•    teases out themes from within CEE that have hitherto been little explored or poorly conceptualised in the tourism literature.

The issues raised and methodological approaches and analytical tools employed represent a diversity that may express some conceptual tensions. Certain chapters emphasise the empirical while others are more specifically theorised. Collectively, they present a substantial body of work and contribution to the field(s) of tourism and geopolitics. It is hoped the collection will present some exciting challenges for the reader.

Following the initial introductory and overview section, the volume’s five central sections are each preceded by a context-setting introduction by the editor. Within each of the sections, contributions are made from both new and established voices from CEE (and elsewhere). In addition to tourism academics, the book draws on geographers, social anthropologists, political scientists and tourism practitioners.

In the remaining two chapters of Part I, Michael Hall in Chapter 2 offers a succinct appraisal of the current state and future potential of conceptualising tourism and geopolitics, and in Chapter 3 the geopolitical and tourism heritage of CEE is explored and the region’s post-communist reorientation is evaluated.

Endnotes

¹ Shorthand for ‘not only the US government, but all those institutions and networks of opinion leaders centred in the world’s de facto capital – the IMF, the World Bank, think-tanks, politically sophisticated investment bankers, and worldly finance ministers … who meet each other in Washington and collectively define the conventional wisdom of the moment’ (Thomas, 1999: 225).

² None the less, by the turn of the century Peter Taylor (2000) could note that geopolitics remained as the least problematised aspect of geographical knowledge.

³ Hoerner (2008) is an early, if undemanding, exploration of the nexus.

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2 Tourism and Geopolitics: The Political Imaginary of Territory, Tourism and Space

C. Michael Hall

*

University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

*E-mail: [e-mail]

2.1 Introduction

Geopolitics is a term with multiple layers and meanings (Hepple, 1986). In its ‘traditional’ form, geopolitics is best understood as the struggle for political dominance of space (Kearns, 2009). For many years, this was seen primarily in terms of global and international space whereby state actors sought to contest for control of territory, particularly with reference to the geographical assumptions and understandings that influenced world politics (Murphy et al., 2004), while particular arrangements of space and specific locations in space also influenced the nature of political contests. Over time, such geopolitical contestation also came to be understood as an area for substate and even private actors. Dalby, for example, picks up on this theme, suggesting,

It is about the spaces of politics, the geographies of rule, authority and frequently violence. It is nearly always about attempts to make, organize, dominate and control particular spaces,

(Dalby, 2013: 38)

before going on to note that this is not just an act of explicit diplomacy or war, but is also now related to the spaces of the global neoliberal economy (Panitch and Gindin, 2012; see also Sheppard, 2002).

This broadening of the notion of geopolitics resonates well with recent scholarship that suggests that geopolitics not only is concerned with the control or occupation of space and territory by state and other political actors but also is about the political consequences of the different modes of knowledge and ways of representing the world (Mamadouh, 1998, 1999; Robinson, 2003; Dalby, 2008; Megoran, 2008; Sidaway, 2008; Pain, 2009; Dodds et al., 2013), including our understanding of the everyday (Dittmer and Gray, 2010). Power and Campbell (2010) suggest that this notion of critical geopolitics encompasses a diverse range of academic challenges to the conventional ways in which political space is written, read and practised. Ó Tuathail similarly regards critical geopolitics as a gathering place for various critiques of the multiple geopolitical discourses and practices that characterise modernity:

It is merely the starting point for a different form of geopolitics, one hopefully burdened less by nationalism and chauvinistic universals and more committed to cosmopolitan justice and self-critical analysis.

(Ó Tuathail, 2010: 316)

Nevertheless, several themes emerge, including the importance of ‘textuality’ and the cultural in geopolitics; the displacement of state-centric readings of world politics to incorporate the ‘messy practices’ of the modern inter- and intrastate system – a ‘geopolitical social which both crosses and crafts traditional borders of internal and external to the national state’ (Cowen and Smith, 2009: 22); and the relations of power and gender in geopolitical thinking and discourse (Sharp, 2000; Ó Tuathail, 2010).

Power and Campbell (2010) note that critical geopolitical thinking in both geography and international relations has been influenced strongly by post-structural philosophies, and particularly the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. This therefore has strong parallels to academic trends elsewhere in the social sciences, including tourism studies (Davis, 2001; Gale, 2012). Nevertheless, the broader influence of critical geopolitics is recognised as being relatively limited (Jones and Sage, 2010) even though it is ‘engaged in the analysis of a range of enduring global challenges like environmental catastrophe, new modes of war, persistent global inequalities, imperial desires and reductive representations’ (Power and Campbell, 2010: 245).

This chapter provides a brief overview of the main themes in research on tourism and geopolitics. It is divided, somewhat artificially, into two main sections. The first deals primarily with ‘traditional’, more state-centric, approaches to geopolitics, while the second examines the post-structuralist and cultural turn of critical geopolitics. The conclusion highlights potential future areas for development.

2.2 Geopolitics and Tourism

Geopolitics has not been a significant theme in tourism studies, although research in the area has increased in recent years. Often, such work is coming from outside what may be considered as mainstream tourism research, and it is instead researchers on geopolitics using tourism or its elements as a way of framing geopolitical issues that dominate the wider literature. Unfortunately, in many cases, tourism researchers also use the term ‘geopolitics’ as a shorthand means to refer to tourism and political territory or politics and tourism as a development tool in general without any seeming explicit connection to the various theoretical themes that exist in the geopolitical literature (e.g. Raymond, 2004; Hillali, 2007; Hoerner, 2007; Sarrasin, 2007; Dehoorne et al., 2014). Nevertheless, even though geopolitics has a wide range of meanings, it is certainly not devoid of theory (see Ó Tuathail, 1994; Gray, 1999; Dahlman and Brunn, 2003; Beeson, 2009; Kaplan, 2009, for a number of useful overviews).

Early writings that connected geopolitics and tourism usually identified tourism as an indication of state activity (see also the framework proposed by Weaver (2010)), often in colonial or post-colonial situations (Doumenge, 1990), or with the possibility of tourist flows and tourism development improving state relations (Molinaro, 2002; Shin, 2004; Coles and Hall, 2005; Daher, 2007; Jordan, 2011; Chiang, 2012; Connell, 2015), especially in cross-border regions (Kandler, 2000; Duffy, 2001; Fabrizio, 2001; Gheorghe and Alexandru, 2001; Lichtenberger, 2002; Olson, 2002; Sparke et al., 2004; Chiang, 2012) or contested territories (Smiraglia, 1994; Kandler, 2000; Daher, 2007; Isaac et al., 2016). The latter themes are particularly important for European writing on tourism and geopolitics in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The work of Sparke et al. (2004) was a notable transition from much of the previous writing in tourism and geopolitics as the paper used the example of the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle to illustrate the complex geographies of power that subverted efforts to read cross-border regionalisation as a straightforward geographical corollary of ‘globalisation’. Rather than the region being treated as a complementary transborder assemblage of land, labour and capital along the lines of European work in cross-border regions, the authors suggested the area should be regarded

as a palimpsest in which the imagined geographies of cross-border development and the economic geographies of their uneven spatial fixing on the ground are mediated by complex cultural and political geographies.

(Sparke et al., 2004: 485)

As such, the paper highlights how the geographies of capital (including its uneven development and its links to the geoeconomics of intraregional competition), land (including post-colonial relations across the region, the geopolitics of land reclamation and the enclaved landscapes of tourism) and labour (including the divergent itineraries of migrant workers) overlay and complicate each other, and therefore problematise the more simplistic narratives of the Growth Triangle as an embodiment of contemporary global processes.

It is interesting to note that the paper had much more impact on geography and regional readings of the complexity of geopolitics in border regions (e.g. Sparke, 2006; Arnold and Pickles, 2011; Su, 2013; Zimmerbauer, 2013; Ormond, 2014; Sigler, 2014) than on tourism in the context of such areas (Hampton, 2010). In one sense this is surprising, given that the legality and regulation of the mobility of people across borders and its effects on de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation are issues that resonate strongly in the contemporary political setting (Hazbun, 2004, 2008; Chiang, 2012). Rowen (2016) extends these perspectives by showing that embodied, everyday practices such as tourism cannot be divorced from state-scale geopolitics. He uses the example of tourism flows in the Chinese region to show that at the same time that tourism is used to project Chinese state authority over Taiwan and consolidate control over Tibet and Xinjiang, it has also triggered popular protest in Hong Kong (including the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement and its aftermath) and international protest over the territorially contested South China Sea.

With respect to some of the more traditional aspects of geopolitics whereby the territorialisation of space becomes an expression of state power, tourism has an important role as an economic expression of permanent occupation under international law, with occupation also often influencing later patterns of tourism (Timothy, 2002; Gelbman and Timothy, 2010; Gosar, 2014; Hannam, 2013). Tourism has been regarded as significant for geopolitical as well as economic development reasons in disputed territories such as the Arctic, Antarctic or the Spratley and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea (Hall, 1994; Timothy, 2002). For example, cruise ship access in the Arctic has become part of the territorial disputes over national versus international waters (Blunden, 2012; Østreng et al., 2013; Kristoffersen, 2014; Huijbens and Alessio, 2015), while tourism is an action to indicate economic activity and human settlement in the terrestrial Arctic (Hall and Saarinen, 2010a,b,c; Horejsova and Paris, 2013; Müller, 2015).

In the case of the Antarctic, significant contestation exists between various cities for the opportunity to host research facilities or to act as tourist transiting stations, with the activities of such cities important in reinforcing Antarctic and Southern Ocean claims and capacities to act as a port of control (Bertram et al., 2007; Hall, 2015). For example, in the case of rival Antarctic Peninsula ‘gateways’, Ushuaia (Argentina) and Punta Arenas (Chile):

They participate in the structuring of a multifaceted Antarctic frontier conquest: military, scientific, ecological and tourist. The bridgehead is a key concept to rethink the territorial structuring and control of conquest frontier. If we recall proximity and connection as minimal criteria to define a gateway, political control and territorial reference tend to reinforce the gateway as the main bridgehead place of the conquest frontier.

(Guyot, 2013: 11)

The geopolitics of tourism at both a national and local state level has been explored by Xue et al. (2015) with respect to tourism in China, where they examined the displacement of people by tourism developments. They note the ubiquity of tourism development-induced displacement and resettlement in emerging economies and colonial/post-colonial societies, particularly with respect to indigenous peoples and national parks and/or tourism development projects (Brockington and Igoe, 2006; Agrawal and Redford, 2009; Attanapola and Lund, 2013). However, such processes may also occur in developed countries, especially where state intervention is part of processes of tourism-led gentrification (Gotham, 2005; Herrera et al., 2007). In such cases, poorer elements of society may be displaced as a result of policy and regulatory change, even if they have been living in a location for many years. Interestingly, the effects of such displacement has been noted for many years but have never usually been framed in terms of geopolitics, although there are clearly processes of re-territorialisation taking place as community social, political and economic structures change. One area where this has come to the fore is with respect to Klein’s (2007) notion of disaster capitalism.

Post-disaster urban regeneration tends to