Theorising the Politics of Tourism: Global Travel and the Nation-State

National Integration

While nations are imagined, ⁴³ what they include and exclude gains credence through travel contacts. State leaders often bring travel practices and possibilities in line with their desired model of integration. In some cases, the search for a particular, exclusive national essence can form an explicit goal of central authorities. The German National Socialist Party (1933–45) sought to use tourism to create a pure race, untainted by regional or minority elements. Tourism, both on the newly constructed autobahn and on boat cruises, was intended to show off the German countryside and inculcate citizens in a glorified history. Simultaneously it was expected to provide outlets for working class grievances and diminish the allure of Communism. ⁴⁴ The Reich further regulated tourism through the Propaganda Ministry, ensuring that tourism workers were politically reliable and non-Jewish and that tourism destinations fit an image of Germany’s particular historic destiny. ⁴⁵

If the Nazis reconciled nationhood and travel by means of ethnic expression in purely Aryan sites, other nation-states have sought to employ their very diversity as contributors to the greater glory of the perceived political body. Indonesia has given strong backing to domestic travel as a means to cross-educate peoples about each other and form a plural, though entwined, nation. In this model of political socialisation, regional cultures are ‘seen as a “resource”. . .[and] regarded as the “peaks” of each regional culture. . ., expected to provide “nuances of color” to the national culture’. ⁴⁶ This ethos is revealed in the popular destination Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (or ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ Mini Park) in Jakarta, where official minorities are gathered in an open-air park, displaying characteristic clothing, crafts and lifeways. As a nod to territorial integrity, the park’s grounds and landscaping replicate in microcosm the map of Indonesia. Here the attempt to foster domestic tourism takes an explicitly multicultural ideology, asserting a need for cultural distinction and integrity, but in line with legitimising state territorial control.

While Nazi Germany sits at one extreme in purifying the landscape through domestic travel and Indonesia on the other in showing diversity, many nation-states have tried to form mythical, collective identities in more hybrid ways. As Urry noted, ‘identity almost everywhere has to be produced partly out of the images constructed for tourists’. ⁴⁷ Probably most nation-states have disproportionately promoted one type of indigenous identity as emblematic of their genesis. The political, and tourist, iconography of Peru would include the Inca mountaineer ⁴⁸ ; Kenya, the Maasai herder ⁴⁹ ; and New Zealand, the Maori warrior. ⁵⁰ Indigenous peoples are a particularly useful resource because they can be employed as both genetic and spiritual ancestors, proving the sovereign, eternal essence of the national culture. Paradoxically, this means the very people shunned or discriminated against during national modernisation projects – for example, the hill-tribes of Thailand or indigenous groups in Costa Rica – eventually earn a form of reverence as bearers of unique representational power, both for domestic and foreign tourists. ⁵¹

On the whole, there are multiple models out of which a nation becomes intentionally aggregated through tourism, including assimilation into the majority culture, multiculturalism and consolidation around an indigenous identity. In the cases of Autobahn travel, mapping space in Jakarta, and cues of ancestral empires, domestic travel circuits insinuate state territorial authority over a cultural community. Whereas I depict strategic cultural work here, domestic travellers might resist lines of demarcation, repurpose state labels or instate their own categories. It is probably the case that the effects on national integration through domestic tourism are more potent in larger state land masses with more heterogeneous topographies and regional customs.

Implementing Orthodox Histories

Unlike schooling, a well-studied mechanism for political socialisation, ⁵² travel seems more freely chosen and more liberated from injections of doctrine. Yet because of this separation from compulsive education, domestic tourism presents an excellent state-making opportunity for creating sites of collective memory, reinforcing historic claims and injustices and celebrating classical ‘golden ages’. The same sites of memory frequented by grade-school field trips are also enjoyed by tourists.

Infrastructures and tourist maps are typically encoded within discourses of progressive, linear history that naturalise continuous cultural persistence. Highways borrow from historic routings and expansions such as the Santa Fe Trail in the United States, the Yellowhead Highway in Northwest Canada and the Silk Road of Northwest China. Martyrs and secular saints – their birthplaces, gravesites, etc. – are easily promoted through highway markers, rest areas, park receipts, train stations, statues and government websites. Signage demarcates ancient provinces presented in official textbooks. Circulating tourist maps include contested territories and draw maximal boundaries of sovereignty. The infrastructural accompaniments of tourism are thus wreathed in symbolic values that emphasise an integrated, enduring population – socialising people through material things into a sui generis territorial entity.

The museum, the key site of transforming archaeology and ethnology into political narrative, allows an imagined past to be concrete and tourable, and proudly exclusive to the domestic group. Curated histories exclude just as much as include, especially with regard to inside-outside relations. Museums in India stress a temporary Muslim intermezzo in the longer march of an eternal Hindu India. ⁵³ Similarly, the constructed past of Jordanian historic sites glosses over its Ottoman period. ⁵⁴ Tourist sites might juggle historical content to appeal to both foreign and domestic tourists. The Hoa Lo Prison museum in Hanoi, initially a celebration of revolutionary struggle against France, has gradually added more content on the Vietnam War to meet the desires of foreign patrons. ⁵⁵ While museums might readily connect national selves to cosmopolitan histories, they almost always imply a form of cultural autonomy, a teleological reading that makes past prologue of the current, distinct political authority.

Museums of trauma are particularly useful for orienting domestic travellers to the tragedies of the past. Poland utilises its holocaust sites to sharpen the nation’s victimhood, stressing the Fascist atrocities to Poles, not just Jews. ⁵⁶ Iran’s Martyr’s Museum uses imagery of blood and everyday soldier relics to revive memories of struggle against Iraq. ⁵⁷ Recent battle zones in the Sri Lankan civil war have been used by the government to portray Tamil Tigers as vicious, selfish terrorists that were only brought low by heroic Sinhalese soldiers. ⁵⁸ Even so, domestic travellers might prefer to forget what foreign tourists want to remember. This contradiction faces many post-Soviet nation-states that have attempted to re-position narratives of belongingness into a wider congress of states and minimise their supposed aberrant (but touristically fascinating) Communist period. ⁵⁹ Hence, the public display of internal trauma and victimisation as tools of nation-building are probably less feasible in state economies that rely more heavily on international tourism relative to domestic tourism.

Economic Growth and Stability

As an industry requiring the very resources many developing countries have, such as pristine scenery and un-modern looking people, tourism is seen as a preeminent tool of economic growth in many areas of the world. Although this essay has tried to emphasise the political dimensions of tourism instead of the economic side, the importance of tourism for macroeconomic stability are too important to leave out of a political framework. For instance, in South and Southeast Asia, almost all states have established a cabinet-level ministry or department with ‘Tourism’ in the title. While luring international travellers is their main concern, the push for domestic travel is particularly relevant for economic stabilisation during worldwide recessions, or when the state’s reputation is damaged by war, disaster or political instability.

Typically a luxury good, foreign tourism declines steeply as income falls. ⁶⁰ Hence, international economic recessions or disasters often quickly result in empty hotel rooms and restaurants in host countries, pressuring central states to reorient policy to foster domestic travel. For example, in response to terrorist attacks and the 2004 tsunami, the Indonesian government recognised the value of domestic travel, creating a logo and campaign urging people to ‘Know your country, Love your country’. ⁶¹ In the midst of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Japan launched the ‘Go to Travel’ campaign, providing discounts for domestic travel in transportation and lodging. ⁶² While political socialisation is one of the selling points for such programs, it is usually an accessory to the more pressing need of keeping the tourism industry afloat.

Ghimire argued that less developed nations tend to ignore domestic tourists. ⁶³ This could be because domestic tourism demand is relatively low, because domestic tourists do not improve balance of trade, or because internal travel is not intrinsically linked to a state’s reputation the same way international travel is. Overall, unlike the more alluring foreign tourist market, domestic tourism is likely to receive economic promotion in many countries only because of shocks or sociopolitical disruption.

Linking Micro and Macro Spaces

In addition to its economic importance, domestic tourism is a key node in linking micro and macro spaces, in tying territory to central control or engendering mental relationships among places. Social scientists have shown that in many monarchical systems, the regal tour was a means of connecting people to the royal body, a form of ritual that sacralised hierarchical ties to the throne. ⁶⁴ In modern political systems of mass mobilisation, spreading bodies across the landscape has a similar value, cognitively binding citizens to sacred spaces and palpably revealing geographic dimensions, a dispersed form of caging the state. Pretes likens tourists to lay archaeologists, dredging up the past and finding in their territorial experience specific artefacts to imagine the nation. ⁶⁵ Landscapes and the built environment become effective synecdoche, parts representing wholes and triggering schemas of a bounded cultural unit.

Foundationally, state activity greatly matters for tourism because of control of major infrastructure like public transport, airports and nature reserves. ⁶⁶ Tourism depends on regulation of movement – the delineation of time zones, the marking of national roadways with standardised symbols, ticketing and taxation and the superintendence of military police. These material state projects link peripheral, rural regions to core, typically metropolitan areas, creating opportunities for exploration and engagement with territory. Touring can be an unintended sequela of infrastructural construction. For example, the railroad mainly intended to boost agricultural production in the Peruvian highlands was vital to building tourism access to Cusco and Machu Picchu. ⁶⁷

However, the linkage of peoples to territories is often an explicit state strategy. Featured in stamps and popular culture, the Malvinas Islands (contested between Argentina and Great Britain) have appeared on signage in various places across Argentina, from public transportation to Tierra del Fuego. Stein shows how the national intelligibility of the Israeli nation and its foreign relations after the Oslo Accords was significantly interpreted through the access of Jewish travellers to Palestinian spaces. ⁶⁸ In both cases, tourism is a technology of territorialisation.

Landscapes often play a pivotal role in the building of nationally identified territory. The tourism of Mussolini’s Italy sought to bring people to Rome, to have them tour the monuments, see the grandeur of the empire, and thereby submerge their provincial identity. ⁶⁹ Conversely, other discourses take the city as site of decadence and artifice, the aim of travel being to recapture one’s soul amidst fields and forests. The Nazi tourism project described above guaranteed contact with pure German soil, as did inter-war Austrian tourism, which saw the double alchemy of having urbanites in the countryside refreshing their bodies and recapturing their heritage, while simultaneously enlightening the rural regions with modern ideas. ⁷⁰ For some domestic parties, simply providing access to once-roiling provinces is a political victory, legitimising territorial pacification. Middle-class Colombians applauded the Uribe regime for quelling domestic turmoil and making the national landscape safe for travel again. ⁷¹ In all these cases, tourism is a capable mode of forming social citizenship and providing apprehension of common, standardised cartographies.

A distinct form of micro-space instrumental to the state is the border or frontier region. Here, tourism plays the role of legitimising one’s claim to a region, or at least naturalising the presence of borders so vital to the idealised nation-state system. Since all borders are less physical space than cognition of a system of signs, ⁷² border tourism is especially beneficial to states in impressing virtual lines onto territory and performing place. ⁷³

Tourism can be used for border confirmation through both banal practices of caging and spectacular rituals. Practices such as crossing checkpoints, touching fences, eyeing welcome signs, saluting soldiers, reading historic markers and viewing landscapes through binoculars reproduce divisions in the landscape. Although border tourism may actually reflect a lack of serious state control, such as those with a reputation for moral looseness – for example, Cambodia’s border with Vietnam and Laos, or Tijuana, Mexico – they are often stages for political spectacles of competition and bellicosity. The Pakistan–India border, as well as the 49th parallel dividing the Koreas, feature regular military ceremonies that are probably solemn to some and ridiculous to others. Nonetheless, they provide prosaic opportunities for non-enlisted citizens to participate in rituals that demarcate sovereign divisions among nation-states.

Tourism is also a means to get the right people with the right ideas into contested areas and thereby buttress state control. For example, India’s sovereign claims to Jammu and Kashmir depends on connecting the mountainous region by road and railway with New Delhi and promoting tourism into this seemingly sublime region. ⁷⁴ In the Chinese region of Xinjiang tourism plays the part of image control; the presence of a thriving tourist industry proclaims domestically and internationally an ostensibly safe, prosperous jurisdiction. ⁷⁵ But the mutual sympathy desired by internal tourism does not always work. Although Rowen does not analytically treat the case as internal tourism, ⁷⁶ travel from the People’s Republic of China to Taiwan reveals the difficulties of state-backed efforts to domesticate a region. Despite the expectation of the Chinese government of bringing the two territories closer, Rowen finds that mainland Chinese visits to Taiwan lead to stronger identification of the tourists with the Taiwanese as fellow Chinese nationals but alienation of the Taiwanese with the culture and politics of mainland China. Regular flows between multiple portions of a presumed unified state may be symbolically important for appearances of holistic ‘stateness’ but do not necessarily produce the desired imagined community.

Disciplining the Population

Not just a territorial strategy, tourism is also enjoined as a cultural strategy, a form of social engineering. To create modern-acting people, a populace recognising nation-oriented responsibilities and fit for global recognition, requires particular habits, trainings and civilised behaviours. Sometimes the travellers themselves are targets for this form of political socialisation. For example, the collective travel arranged by the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s was integrated with militarisation, that is, preparing a tenacious soldier-civilian, one ready to sacrifice and deploy itself to the greater good. ⁷⁷ Regional tourism boards in Indonesia have frequently emulated the successes of the Balinese, who have putatively been re-made by tourism. The director of one province contended that local tourism could bring visitors to meaningful, clean sites where they would encounter modern toilets and children’s playgrounds, integrating these underlying concepts into their daily lives. ⁷⁸

Tourism is also expected to improve the cast of mind of the hosts. Incorporating indigenous peoples into market economies through cultural tourism has been a means for aligning them with development policies and cultivating business skills. ⁷⁹ In the 1920s, German car tourists, and many officials in favour of national roadways, believed that part of the role of automobile touring was to foster better understandings of technology by the rural population, to alleviate their fears of the new and align them with current European thinking. ⁸⁰ Many government leaders in China contend that tourism reverses the mindset of ethnic minorities, incorporating them into the modern world through cultural transformation. ⁸¹ The former director of the China National Tourism Administration, Shao Qiwei, once posited that rural tourism not only creates markets and raises incomes, but also ‘benefits the raising of rural people’s quality and countryside civilisation’. ⁸² These benefits included the spreading of new ideas, learning proper Mandarin and foreign languages and becoming computer literate.

Although these examples stress intra-state travel, the disciplinary power of tourism is probably more relevant with respect to international travel. Given its implications for global reputation, appeals for good order, hygiene and courtesy are especially concentrated in those zones with regular contact with overseas tourists.

Marking National Cultural Value

International and domestic tourists often have sharply differentiated goals in tourism, with domestic travellers more likely to perform pilgrimages and overseas visitors more likely to seek representative sites. ⁸⁵ Yet it is through the envisionings of the foreign traveller that many national imaginaries and sacred sites are perceived and granted value in the first place. In other words, what comes to define the essence of the nation is refracted through representations of international media carried by tourists. The tourist in North Africa looks for the sites, styles and characters depicted by Flaubert, in the Middle East Arabian Nights.

As in domestic tourism, the museum, archaeological site and historic trail are common institutions for proving exclusive national continuity from antiquity to the present. International actors often initiate and substantiate such cultural claims. In Mexico, the revolutionary governments ambitions to root modern Mexico in its indigenous, non-European past received great financial support from affluent, mobile Americans, who funded the rebuilding of Teotihuacan and re-energised native artwork and handicraft. ⁸⁶ Italy’s self-image as a sensuous land of beauty was partly produced through both the Grand Tour and Thomas Cook’s mass travel itineraries. ⁸⁷ Tourists develop and modify the array of images that bespeak a nation, so that tourism boards must continually readjust their opportunities for market position based on ever-shifting potentialities. Or they might take initiative and generate imaginaries themselves through sponsorship of film boards or foreign artists. Tourist notions can be immensely important for the cultural wealth of the nation and the demand for its artistic/artisanal products. ⁸⁸

Drawing foreign visitors to heritage sites not only stimulates economies, but also plays a role in international competition over sovereign authority. The opening of Tai Empire sites by Thailand and the UN recognition of Cambodia’s claim to Preah Vihear are part of an interpretive contest of historic narratives in Southeast Asia, each country employing tourism instrumentally as claims signifiers. ⁸⁹ Since World War II, Poland has solicited its museums to emphasise the autochthonous nature of Polish settlement that antedate and counter rival Germanic claims. ⁹⁰ Incoming tourists are often considered levers for soft power, captive audiences to be persuaded of the good-natured, peaceable, cultured aspects of the nation. ⁹¹ These framings not only offer comparative advantage in international markets, they assert norms of identification that potentially influence and constrain international relations. ⁹²

States have strategic power to enter international markets with authentic peoplehoods, to build up their cultural wealth around bounded communities. Typically, this requires self-orientalisation around established generalisations, publicising exotica and axes of distinction that accord value to their cultural essence or to recognisable subpopulations. One example is the authoritarian, modernity-chasing Singaporean government, which spent much of the 1960s and 1970s conforming to international development patterns such as building skyscrapers, boosting hygiene and upgrading airports – only to realise that its de-emphasis on ethnic enclaves and cultural tradition deprived its Chinese, Malay and Indian minority groups of any competitive advantage in tourist markets. In the words of their Tourism Task Force, urban projects left the city-state bereft of the ‘Oriental mystique and charm best symbolised in old buildings, traditional activities and bustling road activities’. ⁹³ Thus, its Tourism Product Development Plan of 1986 brought back pre-modern imagery and a newfound stress on Chinatowns and street cuisines. Tourism was essential in re-framing national priorities around ethnic urban spaces – and investing groups with state-sanctioned meanings.

Although strategic self-orientalism and bowing to prevailing international imagery have many benefits in international competitions, it can concentrate benefits into a tiny portion of the population and frustrate wider social policy goals. South Africa has had to confront the drawbacks to its preeminent iconography. Motivated to enjoy natural beauty, climate and animal tours, tourists concentrate on relatively fixed paths, usually involving Cape Town and wildlife safaris, and little in-between. The central government has tried repeatedly to re-tool tourism to redistribute incomes and assist neglected regions. ⁹⁴ Depending on state goals and the number of represented social groups, tourism can extend social benefits and recognition to new cultural groups or funnel them to a few well-positioned ones. Because international tourists are unlikely to be as cognisant of multiple cultural legacies as domestic tourists, projects of multiculturalism and diffusing benefits are challenging; thus, states often simply self-Orientalise by exploiting macroscopic axes of national-level difference that can be readily recognised by incoming travellers and travel-promoting organisations.

Gaining Resources and Support from Diasporas

The nation and state diverge around emigration. Emigrants often retain some identification with their national places of origin while living in another state’s territories. Thus, instilling fealty and extracting resources from diasporas have become prevalent practices in recent decades. Resources that diasporas can provide include foreign lobbying, hard currency, political donations and external recognition.

Marketed as passages back into heritage, ‘homeland tours’ have appeared in China, Malaysia and Israel offering discounted or free travel circuits for nationals living abroad. The Israeli ‘Birthright Tour’, for example, provides a free trip that attempts to emotionally connect younger members of the Jewish diaspora with Israeli struggles for statehood. Funded mainly by philanthropists, the Israeli state and private organisations in North America, its classic route weaves exclusively through Israeli territories, even spanning occupied areas such as the West Bank. ⁹⁵ Eritrea, the tiny African nation-state led by a one-party government, has invited back many of its political supporters to revisit the victorious battle sites in its independence struggle against Ethiopia. ⁹⁶ Diaspora tourism need not involve those who have extensive childhood or family experience with their homelands; for those generations removed from their migration or exit, the return might involve little interaction with family networks and be more imaginative. Additionally, a diasporic visitor’s mindset as tourist might depend on their mode of exit, with refugees, fugitives and economic migrants having different opportunities and motivations for return visits. ⁹⁷

Catering tourism to the diaspora does not always harmonise relations and can make salient new social tensions. ⁹⁸ Indeed, travellers coming from abroad are typically more leisure-centred than activist states prefer and can easily slake off propaganda. Furthermore, their ostentatious consumption may be repulsive to hosts. In recent years, many participants in Israeli Birthright Tours have left the tours, protesting the suppression of Palestinian voices in the program. ⁹⁹ Partly due to language barriers, Eritreans returning to their homeland might spend more time bonding with fellow expatriates in nightclubs and restaurants than with Eritrean politics and history, possibly reinforcing a distinct identity from Eritreans-in-Eritrea. ¹⁰⁰ As much as diasporic tourists attempt to fend off the tourist label, they often cannot conceal their outsider status. ¹⁰¹ Thus, the political socialisation of the diaspora and its fostering of external legitimacy through tourism may be chimerical.

In some cases, diasporas fervently profess political notions that are incongruent with their hosts. The Scottish diaspora in North America have often been disappointed with the treatment of history in Scotland. In their eyes, there is insufficient marking of the traumatic upheavals that eliminated core elements of Highland Culture. ¹⁰² Similarly, the African diaspora visiting Ghana might demand more preservation of slave dungeons and the historic past than local officials are willing to consider or implement. ¹⁰³ The Eritrean case shows a push for remembrance onto the tourists, while these cases reveal a push for remembrance from the tourists. In both scenarios, there is contestation over authority over historical interpretation and collective memory, over who matters to the national community.

Upholding the Moral Economy

International tourism also reflects attitudes within the nation’s moral economy, usually connected to ideology. State-articulated moral commitments – ingenuous or not – shape tourism’s impact on internal groups and perceptions towards outsiders. Both conservative and revolutionary parties frequently shut down casinos, which are seen as hives of hedonistic excess, and regulate intemperate female sexuality through statutory controls on prostitution. To retain economic foundations without contamination, officials might delineate tourist zones where foreigners are free to trespass moral legislation yet shield locals from illicit contact. Dubai, for example, permits alcohol consumption by non-Muslims in licensed hotels and bars but bans the consumption for Muslims and in public places. The government of Saudi Arabia has allowed foreign couples to register for hotel rooms without proving relation, yet for Saudi citizens still checks identification for proper relationship. ¹⁰⁴

To combat perceived immorality and shore up global reputation, the tourism industry might undergo state-backed reformation. Fearing its international image has veered too far to the licentious side, the Thai government has embarked on a strategy of ‘bars to bells’, shifting its tourist infrastructure and advertisements from nightlife (bars) to temples (bells). ¹⁰⁵ Fidel Castro, though initially tolerating gambling and narcotics as an essential source of Cuban employment, shunned the gambling economy of Havana and eventually closed the country to American tourists. ¹⁰⁶ In recent decades, Cuba has revamped its tourism industry, creating contradictions for the socialist economy. Officially ‘eliminated’, prostitution has nevertheless become a central part of economic life in tourist zones – a stain on Cuba’s ideological reputation. Consequently, Cuba has embarked on moral reclamation of women who have relationships with foreign men, setting up reformatories to correct their perceived disorders. ¹⁰⁷

Through tourism, elites might enjoin moral standards as a line of demarcation with supposed foreign values and as a means to discriminate between internal populations. The enclave-style resorts that has long defined tourism in the Maldives not only insulates the mostly Muslim population from alcohol consumption and debauchery but also privileges the upper classes, who can procure the land deals necessary to establish all-inclusive island resorts. ¹⁰⁸ The Cuban campaigns against licentious sexuality mostly target mulata women. ¹⁰⁹ One interesting observation is that states led by conservative regimes (e.g. Spain under Franco) tend to view foreign contagion more in terms of sexual licentiousness and democratic ideals, while socialist regimes (Eastern Europe under the Iron Curtain) decry more the presence of foreign currencies and capitalist behaviours. ¹¹⁰

Economic Growth and Balance of Payments

Tourism is often conceived as a derivative industry, meaning that state economic and social policies foster the aggregate correlates (income, education, urbanisation, life expectancy, public safety, etc.) of travel preferences. In particular, increases in bilateral trade and capital flows are positively correlated with international tourist flows. ¹¹¹ Immigration tends to be positively related to tourism as well. ¹¹² Thus, supply and demand are greatly derived from other developmental and political processes not directly concerned with tourism. Even so, there are strategic actions over-and-above a ‘natural’ tourism flow that influence tourist circulation and meanings.

Incoming tourism is taken seriously by state leaders as a source of foreign currency, a way to maintain balance of payments and to foster economic development. ¹¹³ Many socialist and post-socialist states, for example, Cuba and Albania, have had to forego models of self-reliance and open themselves to foreign travellers simply to attain foreign currency. States dependent on a few dominant industries often pursue tourism as a means of diversification or a way to stabilise employment during off-seasons.

Yet in some cases, political indifference persists until an internal or external shock directs government attention to substantive policymaking regarding tourism. The loss of Soviet financial support led to the opening of the Cuban economy to tourism in the early 1990s. ¹¹⁴ Traditionally favouring its fishing and agricultural industries as core industries, the Icelandic government only really began promoting and subsidising incoming travel after the financial crisis of 2008. ¹¹⁵ Up-and-coming tourism destinations, states experiencing debts or credit crises, states in intensely competitive fields, or those recovering from a traumatic, stigmatised national experience, are probably more likely to seek a proactive, unified tourism strategy. Sönmez et al. argue natural disasters cause less disconcertment and might even elicit sympathy from prospective tourists, whereas terrorism and political violence instigate sharper deterrence of tourists. ¹¹⁶ Coordinating a coherent national tourism slogan is nearly essential for states that need to expurgate or cloak international stigmas of violence, ¹¹⁷ revealing the connection between global recognition and policies of tourism promotion.

Conforming to Norms in State-Making

According to World Society theory and some theorists of international relations, ¹¹⁸ states conform to global norms to participate in world culture and appear modern. Much of state-making in tourism thus involves routine conformance to global institutions, such as performing background checks, issuing passports, regulating borders, exchanging currency, marking tourist sites, registering guests, quarantining entrants and publishing tourism statistics. Being isomorphic with the norms of other states shields one from criticism and implies belongingness to the ‘community of states’. Consider how Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu advocated for Taiwan’s global inclusion by referencing travel documents: ‘We issue visas, we issue passports. We have a military and a currency. . .Taiwan exists by itself; Taiwan is not part of any other country’. ¹¹⁹ Attempting to exert exclusive control of regions in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers have held ‘border check’ rituals for foreign visitors. ¹²⁰ Regulating passage is intrinsic to statehood and signals sovereign power.

Furthermore, not being open to outsiders, either because of xenophobia, poor facilities or ideological commitments brings about international ridicule and shame. Limiting visitors and restricting their movements invites stigmas: for example, Eritrea being labelled the ‘North Korea of Africa’ or Turkmenistan the ‘North Korea of Central Asia’. States are thus recognised and adjudicated by how they regulate movement, part of maintaining a modicum of symbolic authority.

Banal practices of movement regulation, such as in aviation and customs, entail specific political commitments and national priorities. One of the standard means of drawing foreign visitors is sponsoring a national airline, something up-and-coming economies do with regularity. This allows control over the routing into airports and the introductory national symbols that tourists encounter. The national airline carries expectations as much as passengers, receiving state subsidies and policy preferments in return for positive propaganda and a visible presence among the business elite. While the introduction of the passport puts one in line with United Nations legal standards, it also possesses symbolic dimensions in geopolitical forays. ¹²¹ In East Asia, the People’s Republic of China released a passport with images of contested areas in the Himalayas and Pacific Ocean. Other states like India, Vietnam and the Philippines have refused to stamp these passports. ¹²² States manipulate common paraphernalia of nationhood for aligning global passage with their visions of territorial sovereignty.

Part of becoming isomorphic with global patterns is demonstrating that the state is ‘open for business’. Officials are often quick to equate affluent tourists with potential benefactors. The governor of Puerto Rico, Teodoro Moscoso, was known to say, ‘scratch a tourist, and you’ll find an investor underneath’. ¹²³ After the fall of Idi Amin in Uganda, tourism leaders believed the industry could supply the means to show their country as being stable and free, one that was open to the globe and where different people were welcome. ¹²⁴ Given that tourism development, like many capital investments, depends greatly on security and stability, the presence of gleeful foreign tourists confirms the appearance of pacified spaces, or at least the absence of domestic turmoil. Under the Apartheid regime, South African tourism leaders were keen to attract wealthy, powerful visitors, who they believed could best debunk international perceptions of repressiveness. ¹²⁵ Furthermore, most mega-events have a strong ideological component and are useful in demonstrating successful material and social projects, ¹²⁶ making them popular tourism components in non-democratic, developing countries. Sporting events such as the ‘Thrilla in Manila’ and ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ were feathers in the cap of both Ferdinand Marcos and Mobuto Sese Seko, proving on the world stage they could pull off an uninterrupted performance of statehood.

A subspecies of this showcase tourism might be called ‘Potemkin tourism’, which is the ordered arrangement of routes and visual tableau to display particular achievements or forfend particular public relations problems. As part of their proselytism of Communism, Stalin invited foreign visitors to tour the automobile factories, Khrushchev the reformed prisons. Zhou Enlai was masterful at guiding concerned foreigners into the few thriving Buddhist monasteries after the Communist takeover of China, conveniently skirting the many more that had been neglected or converted to other uses. ¹²⁷ Tourists of Pyongyang are required to enter the Friendship Museum, where the gifts to the great leader from other world leaders are proudly shelved. ¹²⁸ Other states manage mobilities by passing laws limiting the contact of hosts and guests (e.g. Uzbekistan), limiting tourist arrival sites and autonomy of traversal (Chinese Tibet) or restricting tourists to regulated tourist districts (Cuba): either for fear of ideological contagion or simply to maintain a proffered image of order. Nonetheless, Potemkin tourism invites political controversy, especially in politically fraught cases like Burma, where tourists are discouraged (both domestically and globally) from giving succor and financial backing to the ruling regime by visiting government-approved sites. This type of tourism seeks to improve international prestige but is itself grounds for stigmatisation.

Building, Maintaining Alliances and Ideology

As the Burmese case shows, Potemkin tourism can easily slide into a form of activist tourism, where visits and non-visits take on meanings of political struggle and ideological commitment. States regulate the flows of visitors in line with political ideologies, bilateral and multilateral competition and foreign alliances. ¹²⁹ Much of tourism during the Cold War was coloured with presumptions of aiding one side in a global chess game. Communist states of the 20th century – for example, Albania, USSR and Cuba – filtered their incoming visitors for politically reliable persons, usually members of the Communist Party. Tourism under the Soviet Union required state organs to impress on overseas visitors the recognisably normal and the extraordinarily modern nature of the political system. A visitor in the 1930s would, from the state’s ideal perspective, find nothing suggestive about the penitential system yet find the Moscow Metro emblematic of artistic and proletariat glory. ¹³⁰ The Comintern, along with other organs of the state, sought to invite fellow Communists and sympathisers from Western Europe and Asia to report approvingly on their achievements.

Tourism also manifests global political commitments and aspirations. Negotiations over visa structures are part-and-parcel of foreign policy: identifying acceptable nations and isolating others. ¹³¹ For example, China has weaponised its tourists, ¹³² encouraging visits to friendly nations and withholding to others, for example, as reprisal for not sufficiently recognising the One China Policy. Not just conforming to worldwide norms, developing states might attempt to align their national brandings with more progressive, prestigious groupings, to claim a more privileged identity. China fosters tourism as a claim on modernity, creating cultured people that fit within paradigms of civilised sophistication. ¹³³ Official Croatian tourism materials suggest to visitors they are firmly part of (Western) Europe, and less Islamic than Christian. ¹³⁴ Kazakhstan, in part to cloak its anti-democratic regime, has participated in the transnational anti-Communism memory movement, erecting numerous monuments to the victims of Stalinism. ¹³⁵ Thus, tourism both projects and is projected by global hierarchies. Part of political socialisation is not simply building national-level knowledge and sentiments, but insinuating commitment to international networks, alliances, ideologies and distinctions of friend and enemy.