Note: Working draft

The other side of Fordism: International tourism and the making of the global economy

Waleed Hazbun

Department of Political ScienceJohns Hopkins UniversityBaltimore, Maryland 21218

hazbun@jhu.eduPaper prepared for the American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual

Meeting in Philadelphia, August 28 - 31, 2003

Abstract: International tourism remains a highly neglected aspect of the global economy which has nevertheless contributed significantly to the expansion of transnational capital flows, global consumerism, and thepromotion of economic development in the postwar global economy. This paper seeks to explain one critical aspect of this process, the rapid transnationalization of tourism leading to expanded flows of tourists from developed to developing countries in the early postwar period. This expansion and territorial extension of mass tourism, I argue, was primarily a consequences of the Fordist character of post-war industrialization and the rise of the welfare state in Northern Europe. Fordist patterns of production and organization led to rising incomes, increased leisure time, and decreasing transportation costs which enabled tour operators to exploit economies of scale in the supply of tourism. The process of transnationalization, however, cannot be fully understood without reference to the development of transnational cultural patterns of mass consumerism which embraced the increasingly generic nature of standardized beach tourism and allowed for its widespread ritualization as a form of mass consumerism in the early postwar period. The production of a territorially-substitutable construction of an experience of place was essential to enabling the deterritorialization of tourism development to lower-cost underdeveloped regions along the Mediterranean coast. International tourism thus prefigured globalization as a process of deterritorialization and became a leading conduit for transnational flows of capital, people, and ideas about territory, culture, and development which helped shape patterns of economic change in the developing world.

1Writing in 1966, Somerset Waters, a member of the U.S. Department of Commerces Travel Industry Advisory Committee, suggested that Perhaps history will show that in the mid-period of the twentieth century, tourism exceeded all other influences in creating an impact on world economic, cultural, and social behavior (Waters 1966, p. 110). Before dismissing this claim as mere boosterism by a tourism consultant, consider that Waters seemingly farfetched suggestion was motivated by the phenomenally rapid growth of international tourism in the postwar era.1

Between 1950 and 1965 international tourist arrivals expanded from 25 million to over 112 million while foreign travel expenditures grew at an average annual rate of 12%. In ten years time international tourists were expected to be spending the $40 billion per year leading Waters to conclude that international tourism will have a major role in determining the rate of development in many underdeveloped nations, will cause major shifts in the gold holdings of the industrial countries, and can influence the pattern of international trade for a wide range of consumer products (p. 110). Moreover, motivated by a Cold War era concern that persistent poverty in the underdeveloped nations could make these states venerable to communism, Waters viewed international touristswith Americans playing a leading roleas the driving force behind a new engine for global economic development. Noting that currently tourists do not favor the developing countries Waters argued that its was in the American interest to promote tourism to these regions, because more than foreign aid or manufactured exports, tourism may play the keyrole in the future in providing the underdeveloped nations with a much needed new source of foreign exchange required for economic development (p. 109, emphasis added).

1 This study is concerned primarily with international tourism and references to tourism generally imply international tourism (in contrast to domestic tourism) defined the World Tourism Organization as the activities of any person visiting, for at least 24 hours, a country other than that in which he or she usually resides, for any reason other than following an occupation remunerated from within the country visited.

2Writing almost forty years later it is clear that tourism development has had a massive impact on the economies of the developing world where it remains a leading export sector for many states. At the same time, however, international tourism generated large negative social and environmental consequences as well as possibly distorted patterns of economic development.2

While it remains, of course, difficult to assess Waters claim that tourism exceeded all other influences in creating an impact on world economic, cultural, and social behavior, it is not farfetched to suggest that international tourism has become as a critical, yet understudied, aspect of the global economic development. By 1976 international tourism receipts surpassed the $40 billion mark and continued to grow (at a reduced pace) reaching over $440 billion by the end of the century making it one largest economic sectors of the global economy reaching most every country on the globe.3 Moreover, international tourism has become a major driver of transnational flows of people, commodities, and capital which circulate in globally coordinated production networks governed by large transnational firms such as airlines, tour operators, and hotel management companies. International tourism also operates literally on the leading edge of globalization in terms of continually transferring consumer tastes, cultural practices, business people, and capital to new locations across the globe. Nevertheless, international tourism remains one of the most overlooked sectors in the vast literature addressing the politics of the global economy.4 The field has

2 The local social, cultural, and economic impacts of tourism remain one of the only well developed fields relating to tourism, thus they will not be recounted here, for an overview see Mathieson and Wall (1996).3 Cited in Weaver and Lawton (2002, p. 69), values in current dollars. Taking both international and domestic tourism in account, by one estimate, tourism indirectly generates over $3.6 trillion, accounting for over 10% of gross world product and one out of every 10 jobs globally, see Travel and Tourism Survey, in The Economist, January 10, 1998, p. S3. This figure was for the year 1996. Milne (2001, p. 371) reports that in 1998 tourism generated 200 million jobs across the world economy.4 Pioneering exceptions include Gray (1970) and Matthews (1979); Some more recent contributions include: Richter (1987, 1989), Harrison (1994), Hall (1994) Brohman (1996), Clancy (1998), Martin (2001). On the neglect of tourism by the field of political science, see the literature reviews Richter (1983); Richter and Matthews (1991). For a slightly dated, but comprehensive overview of the social science literature, see Crick (1989).

3failed to notice, as critic Jonathan Culler observes, that there are few clearer indicators of shifting lines of force within the economic order than changes in the flow of tourists (Culler 1988, p. 167).

International tourism and the origins of globalization

This paper forms part of an exploratory effort to investigate the contribution of international tourism to the expansion of transnational capital flows, global consumerism, and the promotion of economic development in the postwar global economy. The goal of this larger project is to incorporate the study of tourism into the field of international political economy (IPE) while seeking, at the same time, to inform and expand the theoretical tools of IPE theory and its understanding of understudied aspects of the postwar global economy. While this essay will mention some of the recent IPE related research on international tourism and suggest a number of avenues for possible future exploration, my primary effort here will be to offer elements of an explanation for the rapid transnationalization of tourist activity in the postwar era which incorporated much of the developing world. By transnationalization I mean the shift of a process which had previously been primarily organized within a national context (defined by national markets and institutions) to one organized through processes crossing national boundaries (and thus no longer defined by national institutions and the scope of national markets).5 The process of transnationalization can be viewed as a precursor or driving force behind increased globalization.

Seeking to explain the causes of the postwar transnationalization of tourist activity is a question which has increased resonance at the present moment when patterns of international travel may be at another critical turning point. After the increasing volume, diversification, and vast geographic spread of international tourism over the past two decadescaused by the decline of oil prices, economic expansion in east Asia, and the end of the cold warthe international tourism economy has entered a period of slower growth with a shift towards increased domestic travel in major tourism generating markets such as the

5 While this does imply that the process in not governed by states (ie. that non-state actors play a leading role process and that the process is no simply an aspect of the interaction between national systems), it does not imply that the process is (or will inevitable be) fully global, that is without regard to national contexts.

4United States caused by the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the crisis of the international airline industry, and the mounting environmental costs of the mass tourism among other factors. While the future pattern of global tourism is not clear, Imention this point to remind us that international tourism patterns are contingent and reversible. And a critical factor which will determine the future patterns of tourist travel will be consumer tastes and predisposition of people to cross-national cultural interaction.

International travel was not an invention of the postwar era, but that era did mark a radical shift on patterns of international travel. Until the 19th century, in addition to merchants, diplomats, religious pilgrims, and migrant workerswho travel for reasons other than leisureinternational travel was the purview of a small sliver of socioeconomic elites who posses the free time and means to conduct foreign travel (Feifer 1985, Tower 1985, Theilmann 1987). The rise of popular tourism in the late 19th century was driven by the pioneering efforts of Thomas Cook who organized some of the first all-inclusive (or packaged) tourism at greatly reduced cost and increased comfort allowing a much wider range people to travel internationally.6

These travelers, however, were still only a small select segment

6 Thomas Cook and Sons established an economic model based on insulating the tourist from the burdens and risks of local economic transactions and other forms of uncertainty such as trusting local guides. By arranging to provide the transportation, accommodation, and other needs of a group of tourists Cook could have them prepay for the whole package. This also had the effect of sharply reducing the price of tourism, while at the same time eliminating the extraction of rents by local providers of tourism goods and services. In doing so Cook institutionalized the method for modern tourism firms to capture economies of scale and laid the foundations for popular mass tourism. The Cooks later vertically integrated their operations in Egypt by buying up Nile transport boats and building their own hotels in Luxor creating a cultural as well as economic enclave tourism economy. The nature of the cultural and economic relationship constructed between Western travelers and the indigenous society and economy in this era (a construction which might be called enclave orientalism) became institutionalized in this economic model which has continued until today to be reproduced in many forms of tourism in the region.On the history of the tourism fostered by Thomas Cook, see Brendon (1991), Withey (1997). Mark Twain provides a popular, irreverent account of a Cook tour to Europe and the Holy Land in his Innocents Abroad. For more on the business practices of Thomas Cook and Sons, see Rae (1891).

5of society and primarily British and American.7 With the expansion of popular tourism through tours organized by Cook and his competitors, local entrepreneurs across Europe and parts of the Middle East began catering their establishments to independent travelers. Much of this travel, like the international economy of the 19th century, came to an end with the outbreak of the First World War. In the 1920s and 1930s with the development of national economies national government began tacking flows of cross border travel allowing for the accumulation of data on the impact international travel on balances of payment (Ogilvie 1933, Engermann 1994) In the interwar period states began to devote significant attention to tourism activity. Most of this was devoted to the promotion of domestic tourism, often as part of patriotic national building efforts or in some cases to supporting and legitimating of overseas colonization efforts (Baranowski and Furlough 2001, Furlough 2002). By the outbreak of World War Two, however, international travel across Europe and the Mediterranean had been disrupted by increased border controls and political instability (Lambert 1950).

In the 1950s, in contrast, not only did mass tourism rapidly expand across the developed world, but it began to expand to the developing world. By the mid 1960s tourism boosters such as Waters could imagine the development of tourism industries in underdeveloped economies across the globe as a critical element of their development strategies. By the 1970s, international tourism would have an impact on the balances of payment, the operation of transnational corporations, and strategies for economic development across much of the developing world. Not only was tourism viewed by many in this period as a new engine of economic growth it was also seen as a means to integrate developing economies into global markets. Even in developing countries promoting inward oriented development, often with socialist overtones, tourism remained a refuge for private

7 It is worth noting that while Cook did allow people of modest means to travel internationally for the first time he also vesting increased the

6capital as well as a critical conduit for earning hard currency, attracting international investment, integrating the nation into global communication and transportation networks, and the transferring of management technologies through the operations of transnational corporation.

What accounts for this vast geographic expansion of tourism activity and its rise as a force in the global economy? States played only an indirect role. The United States made a concerted effort to promote tourism development, but the scope of its activities was limited. US efforts were critical to reviving European postwar tourism economies8 and, motivated by Cold War concerns tried to promote tourism in the developing world but by the late 1960s US government efforts had switched to restraining foreign travel in light of it worsening balances of payments situation. And with the process of decolonization, European states were no longer interested in promoting foreign travel. Even in host states in the developing countries played a limited role in transnationalizing tourism flows. While they did aid hotel and infrastructure development programs (often with the help of World Bank loans), they had limited capacities to change the tourism habits of people in the developed world. At the interstate level, unlike other aspects of the emerging global economysuch as trade, money and capital flowsinternational tourism was not governed by the same international regimes which first helped established the postwar embedded liberalism system (and later, changes in these international regimes would mark the shift towards increased

ability of women to travel, see Enloe (1989).8 In the early postwar period as part of the reconstruction effort, transatlantic tourism was heavily promoted by US officials as a means to infuse postwar European economies with dollars and help generate a demand in the US for European products. See OEEC (1951), Randall (1958), Bischof (2000), Endy (2003), McKenzie (2003). Not only did American tourism to Europe help infuse the continent with US dollars in the years soon after the Wars end, these visits were also viewed as critical to the development of European exports as more Americans became familiar with new foods, drinks, and manufactured products Waters (1966, p. 111), also see Randall (1958). American reconstruction efforts sought to not only encourage more Americans to travel, but they also sought to reshaped the European tourism economy to cater to the consumerist tastes of middle class Americans. This interest in tourism development quickly became engulfed in the politics of the Cold War. Christopher Endy provides one the most detailed consideration of the international politics of tourism in his forthcoming Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France. With a focus on the politics of modernist design in hotel archtecture, Wharton (2001) explores the case of the Hilton International hotel chain arguing that hotel architecture functioned as a tool in the Cold War by helping to promote across Southern Europe and the Middle East images of material success generated by capitalist development in the North Atlantic economies. See also, Michael Z. Wise, A cold war weapon disguised as a place to spend the night, New York Times, July 21, 2001, p. B11. Another case study ripe for exploration is provided by the Inter-Continental Hotel chain which was established by Pan American World Airways in the late 1940s, with U.S. government support, for the purpose of fostering U.S

7deregulation and globalization). International airline regimes did help develop a global airline industry (Zacher 1996), but before the deregulation of the 1970s commercial airline travel remained expensive and highly regulated by national states. It is also possible to suggest a change in tourism patterns originating at the level of individual tastes, or to put it another way a shift in global tourism norms. A new generation was growing up in the wake of decolonization, who might have developed an interest in the postcolonial developing world. As I will show, however, the transnationalization of tourism flows was a product of a new, more... let us call it, superficial way of imagining and experiences other places and culture.While these factors are not unimportant, in my reading, the postwar revival of international tourism and the extension of mass tourism to developing regions was primarily a consequences of the Fordist character of post-war industrialization and the rise of the welfare state in Northern Europe. Fordism is at the center of three interconnected factors: the sustained postwar growth in the demand for mass tourism in Northern Europe, the standardization of the mass tourism product represented by popularization of the beach holiday, and the evolution of international firms called tour operators which bought and sold wholesale packages of tourism services. These factors led to the expansion of mass tourism first along the Northern Mediterranean coast in the 1950s, and then to its replication and spread along the Southern shore of the Mediterranean beginning in the 1960s.

Fordist patterns of production and organization led to increased productivity and rising incomes which allowed for increased leisure time. More critically, under Fordism, the mass production of standardized goods developed along with the expansion of the mass consumption of standardized goods. The rise of mass consumerism led to the expansion and standardization of middle class leisure consumption in Europe and North America. Decreasing transportation costs coupled with the standardization of leisure practices helped forge the market for mass tourism which enabled a new class of firms, tour operators, to exploit economies of scale in the supply of tourism. This process led to the transnationalization of patterns of mass consumerism which embraced the increasingly generic nature of standardized beach tourism and allowed for its widespread ritualization as a form of mass consumerism in the early postwar period.9 As mass beach tourism became increasingly standardized in became increasingly place-substitutable. By the 1960s standardized beach

trade with Latin America. See the corporation's official history, Potter (1996).9 This idea draws on Michael Storpers suggestions about the globalization by ideas and the role of consumerist identities in shaping contemporary patterns of economic and technological change, see Storper (2000). It can also be read as a consumerist counterpart to studies such as Maier (1977) and Rupert (1995) which look at impact of domestic relations of production on the global economic order.

8resorts facilities could be constructed in multiple rival locations such that they could even be marketed with almost no reference to national location allowing tour operators to continually book holiday at whatever location which could offer them the lowest rate. The production of a territorially-substitutable construction of an experience of place was essential to enabling the transnationalization of tourism development to lower-cost underdeveloped regions along the Mediterranean coast and elsewhere. The transnationalization of international tourism, I argue, prefigures many aspects of globalization. The standardization of mass beach tourism represents one of the earliest and most widespread examples of what has come to known as deterritorialization in the postwar global economy. The concept of deterritorialization denotes the decreasing importance of place and distance to economic activity as the costs and barriers of transnational flows of capital, people, and information decrease. As an ideal type, according to Jan Aart Scholte, it entails a reconfiguration of geography, so that social space is no longer wholly mapped in terms of territorial places, territorial distances and territorial borders (2000, p. 16). Regardless of the validity of various efforts to assess the scope of deterritorialization affecting particular sectors of economic activity, at the heart of the contemporary debate about globalization is the assumption that to the degree that patterns of economic activity are becoming deterritorialized within particular economic sectors in particular countries (and this, of course, remains the focus of much debate) it is generally assumed that the nationally defined and territorially based powers of nation-states to regulate economic flows are being decreased.10

How ever one views the extent of deterritorialization in the global economy, I want to suggest that the process cannot be understood simply as a product of technological change or neoliberal economic polities which reshape patterns production of economic and organizational development. In this paper I wish to suggest a cultural component to the process. I, however, do accept the notion that the cultural dynamics of deterritorialization are a product of the formation and dissemination of a single or hegemonic global culture (such as those who refer to Americanization or McDonaldization). Instead, culture must be viewed not as a residual factor or a wholly separate variable affecting behavior. The following examination of global tourism seeks to show how culture can be viewed as an integral component of how we understand territory and economic change, two factors often viewed in highly materialistic terms.

Tourism is connected to territory because in essence it can be defined as an experience of place generated by geographic and cultural differences. These differences are generally sustained by distance, geography, and

10 I explore the limits of deterritorialization as a measure of globalization

in Hazbun (2004).

9territorial boundaries, but also by the cultural constructions which form around them. Drawing on the experience of mass tourism development this paper seeks to integrate the cultural dynamics of deterritorialization with how they interact with technological, economic, and organization forms. I make this suggestion based on the observation that international tourism was one of the first and largest postwar industries to experience the emergence of a global market for a standardized consumer product (as Levitt 1983 would advocate as an business internationalization strategy). While many industries were focusing on national markets, postwar international tourism was developing as an integrated network of firms organized on a transnational basis while producing a globally standardized consumer product. International tourism thus prefigures many aspects of the globalization processes as it became a leading conduit for transnational flows of capital, people, and ideas about territory, culture, and development which helped shape patterns of postwar develop across much of the developing world.

Fordism reaches the beach: Leisure time, mass consumerism, and tourism

The driving force behind the expansion of mass tourism was the postwar economic boom across Western Europe lasting from 1945 to 1973 which saw the simultaneous development of Fordist mass production and the social welfare state supported by Keynesian macroeconomic policies (Harvey 1989, pp. 124-140). This era produced sustained growth in middle and working class incomes resulting in the rise of modern mass consumer society. The development of mass tourism can be viewed as an extension of these processes from the world of work and production to leisure and consumption. As Williams and Shaw explain, Tourism benefited from a one-off redistribution of income, expanded public expenditure, and the success of organised labor in enhancing entitlements to paid annual leave. In addition, workplace and work-time constraints were relaxed, so that not only did the majority of workers in Northern Europe have more free time but there were able to spend more time away from their home areas (1998, p. 4). In France, for example, the annualrate of departure grew from 15 percent in 1950 to over 50 percent by 1974 (Furlough 1998, p. 262).

Economists have generally viewed tourism as what they call a luxury good. This means that it is characterised by a positive income elasticity of demand, whereby demand rises proportionately greater than income level (Shaw and Williams 1998, p. 19). This econometric observation, however, masks the possibility that increased income and free time could have just as well been spent at home, on non-commercial forms of tourism, or on other consumer items. In fact, as cultural historian Ellen Furlough explains, With the onset of the eight-hour day after World War I elites feared that workers would dissipate their free time in drink or other morally irresponsible behaviors,

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in commercial entertainment such as cinema, or even worse, on political or labor militancy (Furlough 1998, p. 253).

The development of mass tourism as a popular social activity must be understood as a political construction which by the 1960s would lead to tourism being considered a social right and an integral part of the experience of modern life in industrial society.11 As early as the 1930s onward trade unions and socialist governments in France backed efforts to organize affordable mass vacations for the working class designed to express social democratic ideals (see Furlough 1998, p. 253). Such efforts followed, to some degree, the early efforts of Thomas Cook to promote temperance and Christian benevolence. But like the evolution of the firm Thomas Cook and Son, these motivations were soon overshadowed by economic forces.12

Instead, the most powerful cause of the expansion of mass tourism was most likely the expanding economic interests behind the tourism and travel industry supported by government policies encouraging the expansion of both the supply and demand of domestic tourism. With new marketing techniques and technologies, the growing tourism industry aided by regional boosters, was able to commodify leisure experiences and market them through widespread mass advertising and other promotional means.13 Tourism as a cultural practice has become so deeply engrained in North Atlantic middle class culture that Jost Krippendorf notes whether it is travel we want to fill our spare time with is a question nobody asks anymore (Krippendorf 1987, p. 19). This process was enabled, as I show below, by the two interconnected developments: 1) expanding economic interests in the tourism sector, supported by government assistance; and 2) the popularization of the beach holiday as a form of mass consumerism. These two forces feed off each other as increased standardization allowed for private firms to exploit economies of scale, provide tourism at cheaper prices, and thus further expand their market.

The development of beach tourism as a transnational mass consumerism norm

The spread of industrialization and technological innovations in the area of transportationaided by public sector road and airport building and direct and indirect subsidies given to private firms in the automobile and air craft industrieshelped to translate the growth in middle class incomes and lower costs of travel into increased mass travel. Domestic tourism in Europe first expanded through wider automobile ownership. In the late 1950s the radius of annual summertime vacation destinations increased with the

11 MacCannell (1999) develops a semiotic interpretation for why the act of tourism might be viewed as a universal middle class expression of modernity.12 That is not to say that tourism did not help promote various social values

and practices (such as legitimating colonialism), but these factors to not in themselves explain patterns of tourism development.

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development of commercial jet travel and the introduction of the economy fare ticket (Pearce 1989, pp. 28-29; Poon 1993, p. 42). By the mid 1960s the affordability of flying to tourist destinations was greatly increased by the development of charter flights and reduced fares resulting from airline price wars. By 1970 the number of passengers traveling by charter flights grew past those traveling by scheduled airlines (Williams and Shaw 1998, p. 4).

While the ability for tourists to travel longer distances more cheaply helped lead to the rise of tourism industries globally, the growth of the tourism industry across the Mediterranean shore cannot be understood with reference to the cultural dynamic shaping trends in leisure consumption in Europe. Before the rise of mass consumerism, leisure travel was generally a form of elite education (as in the Grand Tour) or functioned as a form of conspicuous consumption by the nouveau riches marking their entry into the leisure class.14 By the early 20th century luxury tourism developed in elite enclaves along the Mediterranean shore, such as in Nice. These forms of proto-tourism directed travel to a narrow set of specific Southern European sites making patterns of tourism development highly territorial. In contrast, the rise of mass tourism in the 1950s was driven by a new sort of psychology and sociology which combined with the introduction of Fordist organizing techniques that allowed for the standardization and deterritorialization of tourism development. In the 1950s and 1960s the dominant destinations for mass tourism became the beach with leisure activities centered around the sun, sand, and sea (many would add, spirits and sex). While the beach had become increasingly accessible to wider segments of society since the 19th century (Urry 1990, pp. 16-39), in the post-war period the experience of a vacation at the beach became a central feature of North Atlantic middle class consumer culture.15

The motivation for the rise of beach tourism is often described as the desire to escape the routine of industrial and bureaucratic work, expressed well in the slogan of the Club Mditerrane (Club Med) which professed to be

13 See Rojek (1990), Furlough (1998), Lfgren (1999), Baranowski and Furlough

(2001).14 While published in 1899 Thorstein Veblens The Theory of the Leisure Class

seems to me indispensable for understanding the early evolution of tourism patterns which until the Second World War were still patterned on the Grand Tour of the 19th century. For a detailed study of the (high) culture of early (anti-)tourist traveling, see Buzard (1993). Two rival readings of the cultural meaning of the rise of tourism motivated by more seemingly shallow pursuits are Boorstin (1971) and MacCannell (1999). They remain discussed and debated in the field of tourism studies. Note however, that neither author views beach tourism within their analysis of tourism trends.15 The study of the political and economic dynamics of beach tourism is often

neglected by works in the field of tourism studies. Lfgren (1999) and Rojek (1990) are two of the only studies to successfully incorporate beach tourism within the larger patterns of the evolution of global tourism history. Urry (1990) begins his book with a discussion of the rise and fall of the British seaside resort before the Second World War but then moves on to discuss other

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an antidote to civilization (Furlough 1993, pp. 65-66). Chris Rojek explains that writers have often described the beach as associated with relaxation and rest as well as a site of transgression, a place of license, bodily disclosures and excess (Rojek 1990, pp. 189). However, I would suggest that is it also possible to read the rise of beach tourism along the shores of the Mediterranean as shaped by the economically backward nature of the rural regions of Southern Europe. As noted above, the activity of tourism can best be defined as an experience of the place and such experiences are generated by geographic and cultural differences which are generally sustained by territorial distance but also by the ideational or cultural constructs they generate. What drives tourism development and expansion is the dual process of difference generation coupled with difference reduction, resulting in increases access to experiences of a familiar other usually understood and framed within a hierarchical ordering which in this case was increasingly viewed as measured along a narrative of modernization. For Northern Europeans living through an era of rapid industrialization in the 1950s regions of Southern Spain, Italy, and Greece, by contrast, were generally viewed by tourists as less developed with lower costs of living and a more relaxed (read pre-modern) pace of life.

This cultural difference (read as a temporal/modernization distance) between guest and host might suggest that some of the dynamics driving the rise of mass beach tourism in Europe closely resemble those driving both contemporary historical tourism in Europe (such as visiting 19th century factory towns in depressed region of England) and cultural tourism in the non-industrialized world (such as visiting indigenous villages in Central America). Thus another way to understand mass beach tourism is to view it as a form of familiar other which is highly accessible and highly familiar but only slightly exotic. The exotic element, however, was crucial as it became a measure along which slight variations of the product could be offered in different locations, in particular as tourism moved across to the Southern shore of the Mediterranean. But as Lfgren describes these degrees and variations of otherness would be produced in virtually the same manner by tour operators and their local associates such that there was a constant standardization of cultural difference (1999, p. 191). The mass tourist expectations of local cultural were so standardized, such that entrepreneurs in Malta developed a new more flamboyant kind of folklore dance to meet the expectations of those tourists who had been to Spain or Greece (ibid.) and handicrafts made in India might be sold as local crafts on the beach in Moroccan.

It is worth recalling that Waters suggested that tourism could help promote industrial development and the local appreciation of native culture.

forms of tourism. Most other monographs on beach tourism have been written by non-academic writers of social history, such as Lencek and Bosker (1998).

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In other words, tourism would help bring developing regions into modernity while at the same time encouraging them to preserve aspects of traditional local culture. But as mass beach tourism became the dominant cultural and economic model for tourism development, international tourism came to play a role in erasing the specificity of cultures and locations in the non-Western world which became simply members of a larger geocultural grouping of the non-modern, developing world. As Lfgren notes, In many Northern European settings the Mediterranean simply became the South and this south stretched easily to include other sun destinations like Gambia and Thailand. South became the territorialization of a certain kind of holiday, rather than a fixed geographical region (1999, p. 205).

The central mechanism driving the expansion of beach tourism was that, as it became increasingly standardized, its production could reap greater economies of scale further reducing the price. This feature of Fordist mass production is critical for understanding the connection between culture and economics. Piore and Sabel suggest that in the development of mass production consumption patterns result from the interplay of culture and relative costs where the consumers acceptance [of standardized goods] facilitated the extension of the market and the reduction of prices, through increasing economies of scale; and thus the growing gap between the price of mass-produced goods and that of customized goods further encouraged the clustering of demand around homogeneous products (Piore and Sabel 1984, p. 190-191). Even as beach vacations became highly standardized products many tourists did not mind being like everyone else (Poon 1993, p. 39) because gaining access to similarly standardized goods, such as prefabricated houses and washing machines, both marked ones inclusion into the growing middle class as well as allowed one to mimic leisure practices which a generation ago where limited to the social and economic elites.16 Mass tourism was an early example of a production technique which Theodore Levitt (1983), would advocate for firms wishing to expand their market overseas. Levitt suggested that firms should operate as if the world were one large market and they should ignore regional variations in markets. With enough marketing, Levitt argued, consumers in all countries would choose the cheaper good over the more expensive customized goods because as firms increased their economies of scale the cost benefits of the cheaper goods would outweigh the taste variations and eventually they would be condition into a new set of nearly globally homogeneous, standardized tastes.

16 Furlough (1998, p. 248) explains that Mass tourisms success and appeal from the middle of the twentieth century was due to its ability both to be popularly accessible and to express social distinction and cultural difference. This paradox of seeming both obtainable and exclusive was a central engine in the making of mass consumer culture and society of which vacations were a part.

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Beach tourism exhibited a feature not common to all standardized goods with allowed for it appeal to range of consumer tastes and social incomes. With the same coastal territory and limited investment in fixed capital formation the highly standardized beach tourism product could provide a range of leisure experiences. For example, leisure experiences at the beachdepending on the desires and tastes of the touristcould center around athletic activities, experiences of nature, restful lethargy, or excessive gluttony and inebriation. The beach could be a family-friendly vacation option for parents where parents relax by the pool while their children take part in numerous recreation activities all within the confined plot of the hotel grounds. At the same time, the beach resort could also serve as a venue to for new forms of sexual expression, experimentation, and adventure in a world removed from the everyday life. Different hotels or resorts might specialize in one type of experience or the other, but these differences did not require different production techniques and heavy sunk costs.

In the 1960s beach became a site of mass production, a product of Fordist industrialization, as the production of beach holidays was able to reap economies of scale and could be built in a wide range of coastal locations. Driven by more homogenized consumer tastes, cheaper mass produced building materials, and the business strategies of hotel chains (Rojek 1990)the architecture of beach hotels became highly standardized, cheaper, and easy to replicate. As tourism flows grew hotels were built with larger capacities and requiring larger amounts of capital. Coastal towns and villages in and around the Mediterranean where previously a few family run hotels existed soon saw multinational corporations coming in to build and manage large resort complexes.

Globally organized production: The development of international tour operators

While developments in popular culture, hotel architecture, airline capacity, and labor legislation were increasing the volume of tourism demand and decreasing the price of tourism supply, the expanding supply markets needed to be coordinated with the increasing demand markets, as in mass production factories. Following in the footsteps of Thomas Cook and Son, more firmscalled tour operatorssprang up accelerating the development of mass tourism by aggregating ever larger number of tourists and negotiating contracts for the large-scale supply of transportation, lodging, and other services by local providers which led to an overall reduction in the cost of tourism (Bray and Raitz 2001).

The building of the international tourism economy as a whole required many large-scale fixed costs capital projects, particularly in the airline

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sector, airport building and maintenance operations, and road infrastructure. These costs were generally covered or highly subsidized by national governments, often with the help of international lending agencies. At the end of the Second World War some small islands were able to enter the global tourism economy more cheaply and quickly r because the Allies had built transportation infrastructure, such as airstrips, in locations which would not have been warranted by previous economic activity.

The next largest fixed-cost capital requirement was the hotel sector, which was usually carried out by a large number of investors, such that ownership in the hotel sector is often dominated a large number of medium-sized investors.17 The large-scale capacity created by these firms with large fixed costs, but much lower marginal variable cost, created opportunities for tour operators.18 This began with the advent of passenger jet aircraft in the late 1950s which resulted initially in excess capacity and the airline companies realized that tour operators could help achieve higher passenger load factors by filling empty seats and providing these at significantly discounted fares in various combinations with other elements that make up packaged inclusive tours (Ioannides 1998, p. 141). Being able to insure a high volume of sale was critical. For a regular airline flight to break even requires that 60% of the plane be filled, but a charter company needs to fill 90% of their capacity to break even (Feifer 1985, p. 222). At the same time, tour operators became the life blood of independent hotel operators which had limited means to market directly to their potential clients.

What is critical to note about tour operators is that, unlike many transnational corporations, while they thrive on economies of scale they do not require large initial amounts of capital. As travelers are required to pay a deposit, which the tour operator rarely does to its suppliers, it can often be assured steady cash flows. The low cost of entry into the tour operator business increased competition and drove prices even lower. Profit margins in the early 1970s became razor thin encouraging the development of even larger

17 Large transnational corporations, however, dominate the hotel management

sector, which are responsible for the design, organization, and day to day operation of these establishments. These name brand firms, such as Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Inter Continental, generally do not own the physical hotels or the land they are built on, but are paid fees or commissions by the individual owners of each hotel. See UN (1982), Jones and Lockwood (1989).18 This problem is analogous to the one faced by Hungarian railroad operators

in the late 19th century who were struck by the great underused capacity of their trains. Because of the high capital costs of the railroad, tickets priced at the average marginal cost per passenger-distance could only be afforded by the wealthy. In response they replaced their ticket system based on the distance traveled by each passenger (requiring tickets be sold and checked at each station), reflecting marginal costs, with a zone-tariff system with a fixed maximum rate making long distance travel much cheaper and greatly standardizing the ticketing system. The result was to increase their total passenger traffic and revenues, while not increasing operating costs (since previously the cars were only a third full) and in some cases even

16

economies of scale, often accomplished through the merger of failing firms (Burkart and Medlik 1981, pp. 186-7). Increasingly tourism providers improved their efficiency and lowered their costs by creating dedicated systems of mass production such as specialized charter flights and large beach hotels with stripped down generic services (such as buffet meals). Large hotel chains emerged to provide accommodation services. They often did not own but managed hotel operations, providing hotel investors with a internationally recognized brand. And as a result, the chains occupy the most lucrative links of the commodity chain while simultaneously minimizing their own risk (Clancy 1998, p. 134).

At the height of the mass tourism market in the early 1970s, large segments of the low-cost destinations had nearly all sense of relative place removed. As Burkart and Medlik note To judge from the tour operators brochures, the product being demanded by the consumer is a fortnights holiday in a modern white concrete hotel with a swimming pool and a bar, the whole bathed in sunlight under a cloudless sky. Little or no concern is shown about the country in which the resort is situated, and it may be inferred that the international tourism passenger is quite indifferent to the nature or status of that country (Burkart and Medlik 1981, p. 189).

Tourism and the politics of development

In the 1960s and 1970s, as the beaches of Southern Europe became more crowded and overdeveloped19 and the demand for tourism continued to increase, tour operators searched out new locations for expansion as well as to find cheaper suppliers. The extra distance to new destinations such as Morocco, Cyprus, Turkey and Tunisia was outweighed by the lower labor costs and government incentives as states in developing countries began to promote tourism development in the late 1960s. By 1975, in their book The Golden Hordes, Louis Turner and John Ash would note with alarm and dread that what we are thus seeing is the rapid conversion of the whole of the Mediterranean coast into the Pleasure Periphery of Europe (p. 100).

The birth of modern tourism industries along the southern shore of the Mediterranean and other parts of the developing world came about soon after these states had established independence and were seeking to forge national economies and promote industrialization. In promoting tourism as a new

allowing them to reduce the number of ticket offices. For a study of this experiment in railroad management, see James (1890).

17

development strategy these states were reviving the notion popular in the 1950s that international tourism could assist national economic development. That era saw the rapid expansion of global tourism spurred on by northern European industrial growth. Tourism development is generally understood as helping southern European states in their post-war efforts to modernize their economies by diversifying their sources of foreign exchange and by generating job growth in underdeveloped regions (EIU 1973, p. 53; Sinclair and Gmez 1996). Often noted is the Spanish example where tourism could be held to be the stimulus behind a whole economys expansion and has seemingly enabled the largely farming communities of Spains Mediterranean seaboard to move, relatively painlessly, from a life lived at near-subsistence level to one enjoying a relatively high material prosperity in less than two decades (EIU, 1973 p. 53).

Since Turner and Ashs pioneering book the academic literature on the relationship between tourism and development has expanded, presenting both critical and supportive perspectives. This paper will not describe these efforts (see de Kadt 1979; Clancy 1999), but it can be read as prequel to this literature tracing how both tourism and the cultural constructs of tourism became deterritorialized. What is critical here is that deterritorialization shaped the terms of the incorporation of developing regions into the global tourism economy. Tourism, much earlier than other sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture, was a sector where transnational flows of people and capital met few national barriers, production processes were globally organized, and the local private sector faced market pressures to produce services which competed in a global market place. Mass tourism flows were first to exhibit some of the travel habits which have come to be mastered by what Tom Friedman calls the electronic herd, making and changing itineraries based on shifts in relative currency rate adjusted prices and unexpected political events. As such, the states in developing countries were often not able regulate the tourism sector or effectively promote tourism development with protectionist barriers, Keynesian fiscal policies, price control, or through negotiating international regimes. The deterritorialization of tourism development allowed developing countries to expand their tourism industries in the 1960s by quickly becoming a substitute destination for mass beach tourism along the Northern Mediterranean coast. But, the cost of this easy and rapid incorporation, was that international capital in both the hotel and tour operator sectors quickly came to dominate the processes of tourism development shape its evolution (see Turner 1976).20

19 On the evolution cycle of resorts see the influential model first presented

by Butler (1980). See also the attempt by Smith (1990) to model the patterns of spatial evolution and urbanization of beach resorts.20 For a detailed study of the politics of deterritorialization in the case of

Tunisian tourism development in the 1970s, see Hazbun (2002). The limits of

18

the deterritorialization of tourism development and what I call the re-territorialization of tourism development (where specific locational features become increasingly important) is explored in Hazbun (2002, 2004). The full picture of the political economy of tourism development is only visible when both of these factors are considered. Much of the dependency inspired literature on tourism development focuses only on deterritorialization. The purpose of this current paper is to recognize that feature of tourism development but to put it in historical perspective. As explored in Hazbun (2002,2004), much of tourism development since the late 1970s has been characterized by reterritorialization and this dominated by a different sort of politics.

19

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