Writing in 1997, Britain's leading historian of tourism John K. Walton lamented that ‘tourism has not been accepted into the charmed circle of acceptable themes in European history’.Footnote ¹ While it would be premature to suggest that tourism has now been welcomed into this select inner circle on equal terms with more traditional fields of research, there is nevertheless much for historians of tourism to be positive about. Over the course of the last two decades, a growing body of scholarship has demonstrated not only that tourism needs to be taken seriously as a factor that shaped the modern world but also that the study of tourist practices has the potential to shed new light on seemingly familiar historical issues and debates. The complex range of factors that have enabled and hindered tourism's rise towards respectability within historical studies have been discussed in detail elsewhere by prominent exponents of the genre and will not be reiterated here.Footnote ² However, three flourishing and interconnected fields of historical inquiry, to which historians of tourism are making valuable contributions, deserve particular mention. Each of the works discussed below can be situated broadly within these three historiographical trends.

Firstly, tourism is gradually and somewhat belatedly gaining recognition as an important factor in the history of globalisation. Given the fact that millions of people travel across national boundaries as tourists every year, it is perhaps unsurprising that tourism is attracting increased scholarly attention as part of a wider trend for writing histories that transcend national boundaries and explore transnational processes (although some may argue that, as the world's largest industry, tourism merits a more central position within this field than it has so far been accorded).Footnote ³ While tourism is certainly a global phenomenon, its promoters also invariably seek to emphasise the local, regional and national distinctiveness of their particular ‘products’. Secondly, therefore, histories of tourism have been able to offer new angles from which to approach the question of how local, regional and national ‘identities’ have been shaped and (in tourism's case) marketed within an increasingly interconnected world.Footnote ⁴ Finally, important steps have been made to overcome assumptions that tourism is a trivial or marginal topic of research, particularly in the study of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. Among others, monographs by Kristin Semmens and Sasha D. Pack, and a collection of essays edited by Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker have ably demonstrated that tourism has profound political implications and can provide a useful lens through which to examine both the relationship between the state and society and the interactions between these regimes and the outside world.Footnote ⁵

All three of these historiographical trends have been brought together in the collection of essays Touring beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History. As its editor Eric G. E. Zuelow concedes in his introduction, tourism scholars will hardly be surprised by the fact that ‘tourism is inherently a transnational phenomenon’ (p. 12) and, as such, it would be fair to say that the ‘transnational approach’ heralded in the book's title is not so much a radically new methodological departure as it is evidence of increased willingness to explore these transnational processes in all their complexity. The ten essays in this collection do so extremely successfully, showing that national tourist industries, which have too often been studied in isolation from each other, can only be properly understood when situated within the broader European and global contexts in which they operated.

A first group of essays examines a set of ‘transnational spaces’: seaside resorts, mountains and World's Fairs. John K. Walton's magisterial survey of recent research on seaside tourism offers a valuable introduction to the complex transnational dynamics that have shaped this global phenomenon. Stephen L. Harp then highlights how local and national concerns can variously coincide and conflict with the demands of international tourists by examining the controversial case of the Mediterranean nudist resort of Cap d’Agde from its ‘naturist’ origins in 1950s to its present-day role as a site of international sex tourism. Turning to the case of mountain tourism, Laurent Tissot analyses the extraordinary process through which a particular brand of Swiss-style Alpine tourism was able to become the key point of reference for mountain tourism around the world. Finally, Angela Schwarz examines tourism within the more deliberately international spaces of World's Fairs, arguing that these events, while involving a high degree of international competition, also ‘prompted a rapprochement and finally a synthesis of national styles on various levels of culture and consumerism’ (p. 81).

A second set of essays, entitled ‘selling the national in a transnational context’ addresses the construction and contestation of national images more directly, demonstrating how national tourist ‘products’ were shaped by a process of negotiation between the expectations of international tourists and the priorities of nation-building projects. Alexander Vari shows the competing transnational forces at work in local struggles over the tourist image of the city of Budapest between 1885 and 1940, where Magyar nationalists, intent on making the city a symbol of Hungarian distinctiveness, clashed with those in the tourist trade who hoped to transform the city into a cosmopolitan ‘Paris of the East’ complete with casino gambling and (even more incongruously) Spanish-style bull-fighting. The uneasy compromise that emerged from this competition after the First World War, Vari shows, was an image of Budapest as the ‘Queen of the Danube’ that combined traditional Magyar imagery with some of the less offensive foreign imports such as firework displays. Patrick Young's study of tourist planning in early twentieth-century France explores a similar set of tensions between the desire to offer the public something that was distinctively French and the need to meet the ‘international’ standards of comfort, hygiene and professionalism that tourists had come to expect. In this way, Young argues, ‘tourism became a means through which nations both integrated and distinguished themselves within a changing European order’ (p. 129). Zuelow demonstrates that similar dynamics were at work in the case of Ireland after the civil war, where attempts to sell a uniquely Irish tourist ‘product’ were shaped by wider European and transatlantic developments, as well as prompting more introspective debates about the nature of Irishness itself.

The final three essays demonstrate that such transnational processes of influence and competition even influenced the evolution of tourist sites and practices in the seemingly isolated authoritarian states of twentieth-century Europe. Examining the case of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1941, Christian Noack explores the successes, limitations and contradictions of attempts to create a genuinely Soviet and proletarian variant of tourism that was defined in direct opposition to the supposedly apolitical forms of bourgeois pleasure-seeking that characterised tourism in the capitalist West. A focus on providing sites for workers’ ‘recuperation’ (otdykh) nevertheless led Soviet planners to appropriate one of the key transnational sites of pre-revolutionary bourgeois tourism: the spa resort or Kurort. Equally, tourism in National Socialist Germany did not operate in an international vacuum, despite the drive towards national autarky. In her analysis of international tourism conferences, Kristin Semmens provides compelling evidence of ‘a surprising commitment to international co-operation that transcended and even at times blatantly opposed the regime's principles and policies aimed at self-sufficiency’ (p. 213). In the final chapter, Michelle Standley explores tourism's role in cold war cultural competition by focusing on East Berlin's TV Tower Information Centre, which was used not only to underline the German Democratic Republic's claims for global recognition (by showing that it could meet ‘world standards’ of innovation) but also to demonstrate the superiority the GDR's brand of socialist modernity to foreign visitors.

Within this international context of competing national ‘products’ or ‘brands’, the case of Switzerland represents a remarkable success story. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Swiss Alps were transformed from a mere route of passage on Grand Tour itineraries between the Rhine and Northern Italy into one of the world's leading tourist destinations in its own right. Switzerland's rising reputation for luxury and comfort, the expansion of medical tourism and the widening social appeal of alpine sports combined to allow this growth to continue well into the twentieth century. Edited by Cédric Humair and Laurent Tissot, Le Tourisme suisse et son rayonnement international seeks to examine this success story within broader international and cross-border contexts, underlining the active role played by the Swiss themselves in shaping, promoting and exporting a ‘Swiss model’ of tourism from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Despite the narrow geographical focus of the majority of the case studies – which look only at developments in the ‘arc lémanique’, a small corner of francophone Switzerland on the banks of Lake Geneva – the collected essays successfully highlight the complex ways in which local histories of tourism in Switzerland intersected with national and transnational histories in such diverse fields as transport, publicity, technological innovation, medical science, economics and diplomacy. Humair's detailed introduction provides a solid contextual foundation and helps situate these diverse case studies within the broader historiography of Swiss tourism.

The first group of essays examines the role played by tourism in the construction, contestation and diffusion of national images of Switzerland. As Roberto Garavaglia demonstrates in his essay on Swiss tourist promotion in France, the last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed extensive Swiss efforts to co-ordinate Swiss tourism nationally and market it internationally, a task which had previously been left to foreign travel agencies. Such initiatives included the foundation of the Société Suisse des Hoteliers in 1882, the federalisation of the train network in 1902, the creation of the national tourist office (Office national suisse du tourisme, ONST) in 1917 and finally the opening of the Central Swiss Tourist Office (Office central suisse du tourisme) in 1939. Efforts to promote Swiss tourism also took advantage of the new media technologies of the early twentieth century, as Raphaëlle Ruppen Coutaz demonstrates in the case of foreign and domestic radio broadcasting. This increased co-ordination did not mean, however, that there was unanimous agreement on the image of Switzerland that should be promoted, or that this image remained static. In an essay examining the controversial introduction of gambling into spa establishments (Kursäle) in Lausanne and Geneva, Mathieu Narindal reveals how attempts to promote Switzerland as a playground for the entertainment of foreigners came up against stiff opposition from those, including many within the tourist trade, intent on maintaining a clean moral image and protecting Swiss culture from excessive foreign influence (Überfremdung).

The second group of essays demonstrates how technological innovations were of crucial importance in attracting international visitors to Switzerland in an increasingly competitive European tourist market, exploring the intersections between local histories of tourism and transnational histories of technology. As Julie Lapointe Guigoz observes, the international reputation of Swiss hotels for luxury comfort and modern amenities was bolstered by the installation of hydraulic lifts from 1867 onwards. These lifts brought not only practical commercial advantages – allowing higher prices to be charged for upper-floor rooms – but also greatly enhanced the prestige of the hotels concerned. In other sectors of the tourist trade, the prestige attached to new technologies could even outweigh more mundane concerns about cost efficiency, as Stefano Sulmoni demonstrates with regard to the installation of expensive electric lighting on Lake Geneva's steamboats. The synergies between new technologies and the development of medical tourism in Switzerland are explored by Florian Kissling, who demonstrates the importance of tourist revenues – and the role of a particularly entrepreneurial kind of doctor – in making the introduction of X-ray technology profitable in medical establishments in the Vaud canton.

The two final essays focus on the role of Swiss (and particularly Genevan) entrepreneurs in the development of tourism across the relatively porous national frontier on the southern side of Lake Geneva, a region ruled by the House of Savoy until ceded to France in 1860. Françoise Breuillaud-Sottas highlights the decisive role of Swiss capital and know-how in developing spa tourism in Évian-les-Bains, while Marc Gigase examines the part played by Geneva in the construction of Europe's first electric rack and pinion railway on the Salève, a mountain overlooking the city from the other side of the national border. Even though these two projects were only a few kilometres away from Swiss territory, they neatly illustrate the opportunities and difficulties encountered in exporting ‘Swiss’ models abroad. Together these essays contain many valuable insights into the international and cross-border dynamics of tourism in the Lake Geneva region and into the remarkable story of Switzerland's rise to prominence as a tourist model against which all others were measured. Crucially, as Laurent Tissot notes in the book's conclusion, this success was not based on a fixed formula but rather on an ability to adapt to changing circumstances, to anticipate demand and to combine an image of modernity, progress and democratic freedom with visions of seemingly untouched natural beauty and unchanging regional tradition. The essays in this collection demonstrate that the issue of how best to strike this delicate balance between tradition and modernity, and how to sell it to the world, was the source of much debate. In so doing, they highlight a central tension within the history of tourism in general: how to develop a modern tourist infrastructure catering for large numbers of visitors while at the same time preserving the ‘authentic’ cultural traditions and ‘untouched’ natural landscape which draw tourists to particular sites in the first place.

This fundamental paradox, that the expansion of tourism might also pose a grave threat to precisely those natural and cultural attributes that tourists value most highly, lies at the heart of Patrick Young's Enacting Brittany: Tourism and Culture in Provincial France, 1871–1939. Covering a period of profound cultural transformation in Brittany between the age of elite tourism in the nineteenth century and the introduction of paid holidays for the working class by the Popular Front government of 1936, Young's study reveals that tourist sites in Brittany became key areas for the negotiation of social and cultural change. In the minds of many outside observers during this period, Brittany represented ‘a last bastion of authenticity in a modern world headed inexorably towards cosmopolitan sameness and superficiality’ (p. 2). However, by examining these themes of cultural preservation, transformation and loss through the lens of tourism, Young is able to reveal the complex and contradictory nature of the seemingly binary opposition between modernity and tradition. His account reveals that it was partly the establishment of a commercial tourist economy in Brittany that led to Breton culture becoming ‘more prominently an object of possession, exchange and enactment in the twentieth century’ (p. 8). Tourism, in other words, both sustained and imperilled the ‘authentic’ culture and landscapes of Brittany.

Enacting Brittany is structured around four broadly chronological chapters, which navigate skilfully between local and national initiatives, and between multiple foreign and French tourist audiences, and three thematic chapters addressing key features of Brittany's cultural and natural heritage that, in the course of being ‘preserved’ as objects of tourism, were also fundamentally transformed. Through case studies of Breton costumes, festivals and religious processions, Young demonstrates that these markers of seemingly undisturbed cultural continuity in Brittany were also modern and evolving phenomena that were ‘performed’ or ‘enacted’ for tourist audiences. The focus then shifts to the equally revealing case study of landscape preservation and campaigns against unsightly commercial advertising that, ironically, was most heavily concentrated in areas of natural beauty precisely because of the presence of tourist crowds. By marking off natural sites as protected patrimony and tourist attractions, a host of (mainly bourgeois) preservationists and tourist advocates appropriated the Breton landscape as a regional and/or national ‘possession’, which often brought them into conflict with those local communities that depended more on the functional value of the landscape than on its picturesque qualities.

Young's scholarly and richly detailed study provides compelling evidence of the ways in which disputes over tourism in Brittany intersected with and shaped wider debates over Breton cultural specificity within the French national community during the Third Republic.Footnote ⁶ The case study of tourism demonstrates that the relationship between local and national claims was by no means straightforward. While tourism provided new ways of demarcating and celebrating local distinctiveness, it also served to integrate Brittany within French national structures. The preservation of the ‘Breton’ landscape and the preservation of the ‘French’ landscape often went hand in hand, and tourists who travelled to France's west coast in search of an ‘authentic’ Brittany could simultaneously be pursuing an idealised vision of an ‘untouched’ rural France. As well as highlighting the complexities and contradictions that lie beneath the imagined binary opposition between tradition and modernity, Enacting Brittany is thus able to shed light on unexplored aspects of the relationship between the region (pays) and the French nation during this key period of French nation-building. The history of tourism in Brittany certainly offers an innovative means of approaching the broader history of the negotiation of regional identities within the French nation, although the fact that tourism is primarily concerned with visual symbols and specific ways of seeing cultures and landscapes means that the crucial question of the Breton language can only be addressed indirectly. Despite regularly noting the central importance of the Breton language in debates over Breton cultural distinctiveness, Young does not take the opportunity to reflect on whether hearing an ‘authentic’ Brittany played any part in tourists’ expectations and experiences. The limited geographic scope of the Breton language within Brittany might also have helped Young address the question of whether certain parts of the province came to be seen by tourists as more distinctive, more authentic and in a sense ‘more Breton’ than others.

While Young's study skilfully uses the history of tourism as means of addressing the broader question of what it meant to be Breton (and, indeed, French) during a period of profound cultural transition, Anne E. Gorsuch's excellent study All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin uses tourism as a lens through which to examine what it meant to be Soviet during the post-Stalinist ‘thaw’ of the late 1950s and 1960s. During this crucial period in the Soviet Union's tentative ‘opening’ to the outside world, Gorsuch argues, increased possibilities of foreign travel ‘signalled a shift away from the ideological rigidity and unalloyed fear of the other under Stalin toward the comparative openness of the Khrushchev era’ (p. 1). The structure of All This is Your World reflects these gradually expanding horizons. After an opening chapter on domestic tourism in the patriotic and xenophobic atmosphere of the late Stalinist period, the focus shifts outwards in expanding concentric circles, first to the Soviet ‘inner abroad’ of Estonia, then to ‘near abroad’ of socialist Eastern Europe, and finally to the capitalist West. As such, the initial discussion of domestic tourism under Stalin serves as the point of departure for a more detailed analysis of foreign travel abroad, while domestic tourism after Stalin largely disappears from view. That said, Gorsuch's chapter on the case of Estonia, a region referred to by the ambiguous term nasha zagranitsa (‘our abroad’), offers a great deal of insight into how the notions of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ were themselves shaped by tourist practices. The old town of Tallinn, with its medieval architecture and lively café scene, offered Soviet visitors a taste of ‘European’ culture and a degree of cultural permissiveness unseen elsewhere in the Soviet Union, revealing the degree to which regional differences could be tolerated, and even celebrated, in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Gorsuch argues, these ‘Western’ aspects of Estonia's tourist image were only rendered acceptable by virtue of Soviet political control.

Opening up the new socialist republics of Eastern Europe to Soviet tourism presented a different set of risks and challenges. Official historical narratives presented the Soviet Union as a kind of older, wiser and more advanced brother to the younger Eastern European siblings it had freed from Fascism. This preconception tended to diverge from the experiences of Soviet tourists, however, who instead encountered a degree of ideological freedom and a range of futuristic consumer products, such as East German plastics, that were not yet widely available in the Soviet Union. If such discoveries in Central and Eastern Europe had the potential to make tourists question the supposed superiority of the Soviet system, opening up even limited travel to the capitalist West potentially represented an even greater risk. Gorsuch concludes, however, that seeing the capitalist West did not necessarily endanger loyalties to the Soviet Union or lead tourists to question the system to which they returned home. Opportunities to travel to the West and to purchase Western consumer items more often than not reaffirmed tourists’ sense of their own privileged status within the Soviet system rather than encouraging them to view this system in a negative light.

In her discussion of Soviet tourism in the capitalist West, Gorsuch makes a strong case for viewing tourism as a crucial (yet hitherto relatively unknown) sphere of cold war cultural competition. In so doing, she underlines the performative function of Soviet tourism in the West: having been vetted for their trustworthiness and even, in some cases, selected to reflect the ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union, Soviet tourists abroad were expected to act as ambassadors for Soviet Socialism. Attempts to stage-manage interactions with foreign populations, however, rarely produce the desired effect. Western observers generally felt that encounters were too carefully choreographed to be believed, despite the fact that some Soviet tourists deviated wildly from the recommended script when responding to questions about their homeland.

Gorsuch is thus able to use tourism as means of assessing both how Soviet citizens accepted and internalised Soviet norms and how they ‘eluded official efforts to regulate their experiences and their understandings in pursuit of individual agendas’ (p. 190). This tension between the demands and goals of the Socialist state and the aspirations of individual citizens also lies at the heart of Christopher Görlich's study of East German tourism Urlaub vom Staat: Tourismus in der DDR. The intentional double meaning of its title, literally ‘holidays from the state’, underlines the fact that tourism in the GDR was both co-ordinated by the state and also presented opportunities for individual citizens to escape from the demands and expectations of the state. Since travel outside the GDR is not treated in any detail in Görlich's study, the notion that tourism abroad might have offered another, rather different, form of escape from the East German state (albeit while remaining within the Soviet sphere) is not explored. However, many of the tensions between state goals and individual aspirations highlighted in Gorsuch's account of Soviet tourists abroad are also revealed in Görlich's account of GDR tourists at home.

Urlaub vom Staat traces the aims, achievement and shortcomings of state-run tourist provision in the GDR, centring on the case of the ‘FDGB-Feriendienst’, the holiday service of the Free German Trade Union Federation (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund). Görlich meticulously reconstructs the history of this institution from its foundation in the Soviet Zone in 1947 to its unsuccessful attempts to hold its own against capitalist competition after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In terms of the scale of its operations, the forty-year history of the FDGB-Feriensdienst could certainly be seen as a success story: it was catering for over a million people each year by 1955 and provided as many as 5 million holidays annually by the late 1980s. Neither the quantity nor the quality of state holiday provision kept pace with popular expectations, however, and these failings had important political implications. The state itself was held responsible for these shortcomings in mass leisure provision, Görlich argues, yet it also proved unable to gain sufficient credit from its achievements for its leisure programmes to be a source of political legitimation (in marked contrast to the Kraft durch Freude organisation under National Socialism).

The history of state-run tourism in the GDR was also, Görlich argues, one of Utopieverlust: the failure of an ideological vision. Hopes for a new, socialist form of tourism, in which workers would enjoy periods of healthy and educational ‘recuperation’ (Erholung) as a natural complement to their labour, gradually gave way to the provision of services to meet the demands of citizens as consumers, ‘guests’ and, increasingly, as families. Individual East Germans, Görlich argues, were more likely to view their holiday as a moment of individual or family escapism from the day-to-day demands of the state and workplace than to see it as an extension of these political and social worlds. The frustrations of state tourism officials were not, moreover, confined to attitudes of holidaymakers. Much to their disappointment, for instance, the ‘Heimleiter’ who ran holiday homes showed little enthusiasm for the political education of their guests and seemed only to be interested in obtaining permission to set up kiosks to sell them sausages and cigarettes. Since Görlich's account draws almost exclusively on official sources, his assessments of the aspirations of individual citizens can occasionally appear less subtle and less well-grounded in documentary evidence than his more nuanced and rigorous analysis of how state functionaries planned their work, gauged its success and adapted their approach in accordance with popular demands. Nevertheless, Görlich's detailed analysis of the internal dynamics of state-organised tourism makes an important contribution to the study of tourism in the GDR, particularly regarding the first two decades after 1945 which have been neglected in previous studies.Footnote ⁷

While their approaches are as different as the societies on which they focus, these recent works on the history of tourism all make a strong case for the fact that tourism, far from being a frivolous or marginal issue, has played an important role in the social transformations and inter-cultural encounters that have shaped the history of contemporary Europe. Collectively, they demonstrate that writing the history of tourism has the potential to shed new light on seemingly familiar subjects. They are particularly successful, for example, at teasing out the complex and contradictory processes that lie beneath seemingly straightforward binary oppositions: between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, between individual desires and state agendas, between local communities and nation-building projects, and between national distinctiveness and the homogenising demands of ‘international standards’. From Tallinn's old town to the Breton coast, the landscapes and cultures of Europe have been variously preserved, endangered, reinvented and politicised by becoming the objects of tourism. These studies ably demonstrate how, in the process, they have also been fundamentally transformed. As European tourism continues to expand in the twenty-first century, the need to understand these historical transformations and their impact on how Europeans have viewed themselves, their neighbours, their leisure time and their natural environment will only grow in importance.