Oh the dog days of the northern summer — out-of-office messages on, vacation mode activated, and noise-cancelling earphones packed. Once you switch into destination bliss, vacationers expect it to be good times galore, right?
Instead, some vacationers are being met with frustrated locals:
- In Barcelona (🇪🇸), protesters sprayed visitors with water guns last month, shouting “tourists go home” and “Barcelona is not for sale”, and
- That’s after (for example) locals in Hallstatt (🇦🇹) and Fujikawaguchiko (🇯🇵) legit erected anti-selfie barriers to fend off the tourist hordes.
How’d we get here?
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It actually makes for a fun geopolitical journey through modern history:
- Passenger transport got modern tourism going from the 1800s
- The idealistic League of Nations then standardised passports in the 1920s
- Air travel started getting more mainstream from the 1950s
- China and other major destinations started opening up from the 1970s
- And the internet age then hit the accelerator from the 1990s.
There’ve been dips along the way – the 1970s energy crisis, the ‘war on terror’, plus recessions and pandemics – but tourism’s overall trajectory has been from a niche activity for the hyper rich to one for the masses today. And it’s made the global travel industry a $10T machine, now returning to pre-Covid levels.
Against that backdrop, sure, many cash-strapped and debt-laden governments have seen tourism as a way to drive growth, employment, and development. And that rush is contributing to these bouts of local irritation and resentment.
But many governments are also now using tourism in some intriguing ways:
- We’re still seeing ‘coercive tourism’ – the clearest example is China, which exercises a high degree of control over its citizens, who also make up the world’s largest outbound tourist market. In practice, this has meant restricting Chinese tourism to punish (say) Sweden for restricting market access for China’s tech firms; South Korea for hosting a US missile defence system; or tiny Palau for enjoying warm ties with Taiwan.
- Tourism also pops up in border disputes: it’s no coincidence, for example, that the very same year (2016) an international court rejected China’s claims to 90% of the South China Sea, two cruise lines suddenly started ferrying tourists from the mainland to the disputed waterways, to reiterate and normalise Beijing’s presence and control there.
- And tourism also crosses paths with independence movements – it’s no coincidence that some of the anti-tourist sentiment in (for example) Spain has popped up in regions with independence movements, like the Canaries, Catalonia, or the Basque Country. There’s a range of factors at play, but one is the feared impacts of tourism on local identity.
But don’t let us put you off booking that flight, dear Intriguer. Take heart knowing that tourism can also help reconcile foes. An example playing out right now is in South Korea, where a ‘no Japan’ movement saw a crash in visits to Korea’s former coloniser (Japan) back in 2019.
But here we are, a couple of historic leader summits later, and Koreans are now Japan’s largest source of visitors again, smashing monthly records. They even maxed out holiday packages to Japan during Korea’s independence weekend, marking its independence movement… against Japan.
INTRIGUE’S TAKE
When you think about it, tourism oozes geopolitics, right? It’s the wholesale movement of citizens around the world, all colliding with different identities, philosophies, and political systems.
And you can see that in the way the international community grapples with tourism, too. Take a look at the World Tourism Organization’s Global Code of Ethics, which captures some of the sector’s noble aims, while in the process implying the existence of a darker side.
Specifically, the Code vows to contribute to “economic development, international understanding, peace, prosperity and universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms”. And interestingly, it aims to “pay particular attention to the interests of the developing countries”.
Anyway, it’s a tough industry facing some valid criticism, but as former diplomats, we can’t help but sympathise with what Mark Twain wrote after visiting Europe: “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth”.