Abstract
Despite tourism being one of the largest industries in the world and key to the economies of many countries, there has been little effort to systematically connect the nation-state to global circuits of tourism. Most theoretical work centres around international flows of capital and issues of policy choice, sidelining how states as sovereign, territorial institutions are constructed through global travel. Using a constructivist approach to the state, the present paper redresses these gaps by building a theory of the state-tourism nexus that synthesises multiple historic and contemporary examples, demonstrating the major mechanisms connecting tourism to the global institutionalisation and positioning of states. Including both domestic and foreign travel, this theoretic illustrates how travel flows are useful for state leaders in constituting, imagining, legitimising and territorialising the nation-state.
Introduction
Tourism is considered one of the largest industries in the world. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, which measures both direct and indirect effects, tourism before the pandemic contributed 10.4% of global GDP and nearly 1 in 10 jobs. 1 Even with its central importance to many economies, many tourism scholars have noted the relative neglect of politics and the state in the study of tourism. 2 While rich analyses exist on the politics of particular cases, there has been little attempt at integration of these cases into a broader theoretic. Most studies asking ‘why tourism?’ focus on its economic potential, how it increases GDP and improves trade imbalances. 3 Often when politics is investigated, it is under a lens of policy choice: a constrained government chooses policy options to maximise market returns amidst global competition. While a valid approach, I want to supplement the economic focus by investigating the inherent political reasons for choosing tourism.
It is not simply political functioning but the foundational presence of the state that makes tourism essential to international orderings. Tourism is not just one type of potentially sponsorable industry; its very employment of culture, territory, movement and placemaking welds it tightly to the institutionalisation and reproduction of the nation-state unit itself. Domestic and international tourism are useful for state leaders in constituting, imagining, legitimising, territorialising and stabilising the nation-state.
This paper is an attempt to build a broad theory of the connection between the nation-state and global tourism. The aim is to show how the global is endogenous to the nation, 4 and that states have both transformed themselves and been transformed in the expansion of tourist mobilities. The monopoly on legitimate movement allows nation-states great material and symbolic control over belongingness. 5 As Graham asserted, ‘states are becoming internationally organised systems geared toward trying to separate people in circulations deemed risky or malign from those deemed risk-free or worthy of protection’. 6 Analysing tourism sheds light on how this sorting of circulations works in practice, as states angle themselves towards particular types of movements that protect their imagined territorial sovereignty and models of peoplehood. Understanding the state’s relation to tourism is helpful in understanding how the contemporary state functions in an interconnected world.
This theoretic explores how states capture, either strategically or inadvertently, the symbolic authority, cultural prestige and external legitimacy resulting from tourism circulations. Synthesising various cases, I identify the recurrent processual mechanisms that connect tourism to state-building. Importantly, the purpose is not so much a tightly sealed, all-encompassing theoretic but a general sensitisation to the significance of tourist flows for sovereign states, a road map to facilitate further research.
The plan for the paper is as follows. First, I briefly review previous work on the politics of tourism and address new approaches in the literature; I demonstrate the connection between tourism and the construction of the state as institution. Second, I build a theoretical framework elaborating the processual connections between states and domestic tourism. Next, I apply a similar framework to incoming tourism. Finally, I conclude by reviewing the overall contributions and pointing towards future research directions.
Politics in Tourism Scholarship
The absence of theoretical synthesis of tourist mobilities and state-level politics is probably related to preexisting biases in tourism research. Scholarship on tourism is usually framed from a business or developmentalist perspective, such that many publications have a strong concentration on marketing, that is, ‘selling destinations’ and analysing consumer behaviour. This perspective presumes that economistic logics of supply and demand take precedence over political and other forms of power. 7 The central actors here are the desiring consumer, with activated preferences for leisure and novelty, and the rational producer, who supplies the means of fulfilment. Where governmental activities enter is usually as strategic actors who solve questions of appropriate tourist development: how to lure tourists, how to build infrastructure, how to redistribute income or how to protect the environment. As Jenkins et al. argue, tourism policy scholarship fixates on models of governing and governance that have overlooked policy consequences from a global field of tourism movement. 8 I argue that tourism is not just one project for the political apparatus to engage in but shapes the very structure of the political apparatus itself.
This work establishes a frame of reference for a larger contextualisation of the politicisation of tourism at the nation-state level. As such, it builds off a few bodies of literature. Richter was one of the early proponents of considering how tourism was an independent variable affecting polities. 9 Her work laid the initial groundwork for investigating tourism as a political modality, as she explained how both national integration and international cooperation were implicated into tourism policy. In her paper with Matthews, she establishes four political factors impacted by tourism: ideology, political socialisation, power/authority and political development – ideas which have inspired my approach below. 10
Second, an emergent literature on the geopolitics of tourism suggests that tourism produces socio-cultural and political exclusions/inclusions at various scales. 11 To these scholars, tourism is central to place specification, defining the territoriality and scale of political authority: at local, national or transnational levels, among others. 12 Ways of thinking about the world are given sanction and produced through the routine actions of tourists, who through various intermediaries – schedules, mobile technologies, museums, etc. – enact international ontologies of how the world works. As such, this body of literature takes a constructivist stand on political units, meaning they are not presumed to be based on primordial ties but produced through various ascriptive processes – practices, rituals, texts, material infrastructures and technologies of communication.
Often positioning themselves against those who celebrate globalisation as unabated interconnectedness, these scholars challenge the idea that global tourism is part of deterritorialisation (geography mattering less) and disembedding (local context subjugated to broader social forms). In particular, travel works through institutions, discourses and practices to create shared understandings of the world, 13 a means of imagining and articulating spatial and territorial relationships. 14 For my purposes, I am concerned with the scale of the nation-state and the construction of belief systems that instruct in the dogma that ‘the world is (and should be) divided into identifiable nations, that each person should belong to a nation, that an individual’s nationality has some influence on how they think and behave and also leads to certain responsibilities and entitlements’. 15 Put differently, I analyse the ways that tourism continually reinscribes national formations of belonging and exclusive territorial units.
Many elegant anthropological studies also consider the implications of cultural tourism for nation-building, how toured populations negotiate with state officials for recognition and resources amidst commodification. 16 Much emphasis is laid on the invention or reinvention of culture to match expectations of visitors and how national imagery are performed as part of state goals of cultural classification and differentiation. 17 While economic growth and tourism activation still play a paramount role in these studies, other factors such as cultural preservation, authenticity, land claims, identities and justice reveal the significance of international tourism in people-making.
Borrowing from these perspectives, I also claim that both the material causes of global flows and the meanings invested in them are readily caught and framed under the purview of states, which are still the preeminent managers of group membership and the social imaginary. 18 This article attempts to build a broad synthesis of tourism research based around this theoretical problem: how does tourism constitute the nation-state? In other words, how does the circulation of tourist bodies and imagery reproduce the nation-state as global institution, particularly its territorial sovereignty, social closure and international recognition? It is both a review of the literature and a theoretical scaffolding to help think through the problem.
Considering Nation-State Formation in Tourism
To shed light on how tourism becomes instrumental to the very coherence of the nation-state itself, I bring in culturalist approaches to the state, 19 which posit that the reification of the state depends greatly on the sense-making of regular persons. 20 This literature considers state-ness as ‘in-process’, variable and apprehended through prosaic experiences. 21 States are symbolic constructions that require constant cognitive and material affirmation, their ‘naturalness’ subject to open and covert contestation. Tourist flows are one means by which a perception of common-sensical, exclusive political units becomes manifested.
What distinguishes tourist encounters from other means of triggering identifications is that spatial and territorial performances make both national units and state authority appear intelligible, coherent and concrete – the physical encounters prompting collective representations of place and space that can be captured under existential political categories. Mann labels this constructivist process ‘caging’, that is, how social relations become bounded into uniform territorial conceptions, usually of the state unit. 22 This paper will address political recognition and caging resulting from overt contacts between travellers and state paraphernalia such as borders, police, passports, museums, highways and monuments. This aligns with some recent contributions that characterise tourism as a thoroughly territorialising process, increasing the salience of boundaries and distance. 23 Thus, I urge consideration of how the very concept of sovereign statehood, 24 is a globalised phenomenon 25 and spread through travel practices.
Borrowing a few elements from Richter, there are four fundamental elements of nation-states that demand further attention in theorising the politics of tourism. 26
First, is the idea of sovereign authority. This means the nation-state must have within its borders final control over the dispensation of space, security and citizenship rights. No doubt tourism plays a role in extending control through development of infrastructure. Additionally, international tourists must travel with paraphernalia of sovereignty, such as passports, visas and vaccination cards. Cross-national flights depend on bilateral agreements to allow movement. Franklin has challenged tourism studies to look beyond desire and experience and see how people are interpellated into travel subjectivities. He calls for more work on tourism as an ordering, meaning a combination of heterogeneous elements that form distinct patterns of belonging. Part of state authority is the ability to authenticate, to make meaningful and desirable the touring of the grounds that correspond to national identifications and singular political control. 27 By ordering and organising spaces, tourism-scapes are instrumental in parsing the world into categories of us-and-them, here-and-there. 28
The second idea is territorialisation. As Murphy states, most political geography has shifted from ‘treating territories as a priori givens to focusing on how political-territorial structures, practices, and relationships come into being, what political-territorial arrangements mean or represent, and how they function in relation to other geographical processes and patterns’. 29 Both Hazbun and Rowen speak to tourism as a technology of territorialisation, as a measure of competition between different regimes of power to administer and legitimate space. 30 In a loose but telling analogy, Franklin compared the British empire to a travel agency – mapping, coordinating and easing the movement of people and their attendant resources. 31 Thus, the meanings of space and spatial practices that set up political power are deeply implicated in tourism.
Third, Richter’s concept of political socialisation is a useful term for suggesting that meanings of the nation-state, its journey from abstraction to a felt-concreteness, and its reproduction in everyday life through education, are tightly linked to tourism. Since national identities are not innate, the creation and sustenance of common histories, practices, heroes and landscapes are necessary to make the imagined community feel extensive over a defined territory. 32 Travellers often receive a political education, as do the toured. In fact, cultural productions are essential to tourism revenues. Hence, tourism is a form of political socialisation, acquainting and deepening the bonds with the material culture and the narratives that posit a unique, inalienable national essence.
Finally, tourism is important for global recognition as a nation-state. States produce knowledge not only to educate their citizens but also for foreign consumption. 33 Territory, authority and national identity are fostered jointly for domestic and foreign tourists, producing potential tensions. 34 The performative element of tourism also implies a need for some standardisation and adoption of global norms. As circuits of global imagery and prestige, tourists are accorded special sensory and physical cradling. 35 Beyond tourism, international recognition is essential to marketing cultural products and receiving aid. In an interesting counterfactual, Lisle suggested that if Rwanda had been a major tourist destination, there would have been more international concern with its 1994 genocide. 36 Recognition is important for both domestic legitimacy and positioning within the larger body of states.
In sum, to build upon the literature that addresses tourism and the state, I develop a theory that demonstrates how tourism is a type of pivot that draws local processes into global scales, and international flows into the construction of national priorities. Tourism implicates four elements of nation-state construction: sovereign authority, territorialisation, political socialisation and global recognition. By mapping the processes by which tourism connects to these elements of nation-state construction, it is hoped this theoretic serves as a concrete step in advancing political studies of tourism and pointing out directions for future inquiry.
Methodologically, this paper may be defined as a form of conceptual research, 37 which has the advantage of asking broader, macroscopic questions that do not accord with single empirical projects and bridge different empirical zones of inquiry. Such work requires wide-ranging literature reviews, soft verification (meaning to include counter evidence and contradictions), triangulation of different concepts and logical presentation, among others. This paper seeks to link two major concepts – the state and tourism – through openness to its varied connections and consideration of diverse political contexts. To do so, I synthesise various case studies across the world. Because so much tourism research considers how single sites can benefit from tourism, it tends to have more depth than breadth. Even literature on the geopolitics of tourism, which frame interstate relations as consequential to tourism’s development, tend to be more case-focused, so that linkages across time and place are not well-articulated. The generalisations here are intended to put into conversation various contexts, regardless of world region or level of development.
Another reason for conceptual research is to indicate conceptual gaps by highlighting where further research should take place to fill in theoretical holes. A major purpose here is to reflect on the concept of the state as less as a policymaker and policy-pusher for tourism than as an entity made through tourism. To do this, I avoid ‘avoid any methodological strait-jacketing’ and use eclectic sources from different disciplines (history, geography, tourism studies, sociology, nationalism studies and anthropology) to bridge top-down and bottom-up approaches to state-making and link both discursive and material approaches to tourism. 38 This results in analytical sensitisation to potential conceptual linkages that can substantiate follow-up inquiries.
The next two major sections will describe some of the mechanisms by which tourism connects to nation-state construction within domestic tourism, followed by a similar elaboration by which tourism connects to nation-state construction within international tourism.
Connecting Domestic Tourism to the State
Despite making up a large proportion of the global tourism market, domestic tourism has been relatively neglected in comparison to international travel. As Franklin observed, much of the tourist literature studies interactions between an assumed coherent population confronting an assumed exotic, differing population. 39 That tourism could explore one’s own society and intensify affinity to one’s own group is underappreciated. 40 In many states across the world (e.g. United Kingdom, Chile, Mexico, Germany and Peru) domestic tourism (in terms of visitor nights and revenues) far exceeds foreign tourism. The tensions and power imbalances that arise from these visitations are just as instrumental to political relationships as foreign contacts. Furthermore, domestic and international tourism are somewhat related: both as complements (in infrastructure, workforce and imagery) and substitutes (during economic slumps and pandemics).
Travel is often a useful way for building a nation through Anthony Smith’s classic formula of community, territory, history, destiny, golden ages and glorious dead. 41 Part of the state’s infrastructural power is mobilising people into spaces of legitimation and tying the nation together materially and symbolically. 42 Here domestic tourism plays an important phenomenological role in shaping the contours of the national states. Yet it is also interlaced with notions of sovereignty, proving autonomy, naturalised territory, governmental control and civilised habits. In this manner, domestic tourism has a strong international performance element, that is, acting out an internationally recognisable nation-state.
I suggest five main connecting lines of the state and domestic tourism: national integration, implementing of orthodox histories, economic growth and stability, linking micro and macro spaces and disciplining a population. Each mechanism plays a role in constructing sovereign authority, territorialisation, political socialisation and global recognition.
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.
Connecting Inbound Tourism to the State
Even though I stress domestic tourism as crucial to state institutionalisation, it is still true that in many parts of the world, tourism is nearly synonymous with foreign contact. This is especially true for developing economies, where the domestic market is limited vis-à-vis international travel. Many states do not even collect data on domestic tourists, including large ones like Brazil. Domestic tourists may be seen as less lucrative than foreign ones, and in places like Bali the most deprecated of visitors is likely to be the fellow national. 83 Moreover, the foreign tourist is more symbolically fraught with implications for global recognition and prestige, so that their securitisation and protection from incident is often prioritised at the national level. 84 Although there is more need for research into domestic tourism, particularly in the developing world, we should not forget that the sought-after ideal tourist is still often foreign, wealthy and speaking English.
I identify six mechanisms that connect state-building (and the four major constituent elements of state-making) with tourism regarding incoming international tourists: marking national cultural value, gaining resources and support from diasporas, upholding a moral economy, promoting economic growth and balance of payments, conforming to norms in state-making and building alliances and ideology.
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.
Discussion
In this paper, I focus on how tourism has a constitutive role in ongoing state-making. The reasons for tourism are often explained by market factors and not enough research has considered the various politically instrumental reasons behind tourism, and the tensions produced by them. Tourism serves as a powerful geopolitical mechanism by which people reach conclusions about how things are in the world, and how things should be. 136 Tourism is one of the largest industries worldwide, and the continuous flows of insiders and outsiders across boundaries both creates stress on political actors (to build infrastructure, exact cultural training and regulate customs) but also presents opportunities for state-making (to forge imaginaries, transform space and modernise). This paper shows the construction of the nation-state through global tourism. Synthesising various literatures, both historical and contemporary, I place tourism within a state political framework and provide a theoretical base for future research. I demonstrate that global travel involves a process of political socialisation and social closure, territorialisation and boundary-making, substantiation of sovereign authority and positioning within an international field of recognition and prestige.
This theoretical investigation has entailed showing the reciprocal formation of global flows and territorial states. I show how the crucial factors that belong to ‘stateness’ (a coherent ‘nation’, the appearance as structural actor on the world stage, the sovereign opposition to other states and territorial integrity) are interwoven and become cages of meaning through tourism. This makes tourism a force of boundary-building, 137 a way of sustaining the global order of nation-states through travel performances. To borrow from Rowen, ‘performance of tourism—executed at tourist sites, performed on the streets, and inscribed in passports—articulate state power through space and form the ontological cradle of the tourists and the toured as national subjects’. 138 There are additional parallels here to other work within the mobilities paradigm that views control of movement, even tourism, as central to bordering, othering and securitisation processes. 139
For domestic tourism, I suggest five mechanisms through which tourism constructs the nation-state: (1) national integration, (2) implementing orthodox histories, (3) economic growth and stability, (4) linking micro and macro spaces and (5) disciplining a population. Similarly, for international tourism, I suggest six mechanisms linking tourism to the nation-state: (1) marking national cultural value, (2) gaining resources and support from diasporas, (3) upholding a moral economy, (4) promoting economic growth and balance of payments, (5) conforming to norms in state-making and (6) building alliances and ideology. As tourism plays a significant role in all these functions, it is significant in constructing and reproducing the nation-state as an institution, as part of geopolitical common-sense.
While I make no direct, predictive hypotheses about how these mechanisms definitively produce the state, there are recurring patterns to tourism and state politics. For example, the role of international tourism in redressing balance of payments deficits is more significant in isolated, closed economies. Border tourism with sovereignty at stake is rather rare in the Americas and Western Europe, so it is only with particular interstate structures and relations that this micro space is linked with national identity. Furthermore, the intensification of state control and management of tourism does appear to be more intense during recessions, global crises and in response to reputational losses. Finally, interpretational tensions between domestic and foreign tourists, including the diaspora, shapes presentational styles in museums and other public places.
The framework considered here constitutes an attempt to advance theory connecting tourism to political formations, and how this relationship constructs nation-states as material and discursive entities. It is hoped that it sets the stage for future investigations. Theoretical development could, for example, focus upon the interactions between domestic and foreign interpretations of similar nationalistic sites. Some scholarship has already explored this aspect, for example, with Dracula tourism, 140 with Scottish diaspora tourism 141 and with Pearl Harbor, 142 but we still lack a broader comparative framework for how this process works. Similarly, representational power would be a useful notion to further explore. What factors shape who has the wherewithal and the authority to create historical memory? What determines the outcome of interpretive contests between foreign visitors (who might be sources of foreign currency and global recognition) and domestic visitors (who might bring about legitimacy and political socialisation)?
Another avenue of further theorisation is to consider the variability within different mechanisms of state construction. Why do some states collect detailed data on domestic tourism while others do not? Why do some nation-states downplay ethnicity and their post-colonial status in tourism while others attempt to indigenise their national identities? Why are some forms of cultural tourism based on multicultural views, some on indigenous heritage and others more purely national? What roles do different segments and classes of tourists have on these belief systems? How can we account for the positioning of tourism as simply one-industry-among-many, as in the United States, and as a core economic, cultural and ideological force in other contexts? Why do some states actively create visitor policies towards the diaspora, but others remain less interventionist?
We should also consider extending this framework beyond the state scale. Supplemental analyses should incorporate international and regional associations in relating tourism to states. For instance, the slogans of Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines address themselves as part of ‘Asia’, Kenya and Tanzania ‘Africa’. Imagination is not wholly captive to state units and extends to various ranges of belongingness. Supranational organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank promote the flow of capital to tourist production, potentially creating mechanisms that challenge state sovereignty and legitimacy. Additionally, much economic activity is at local, city levels, 143 so that networks of tourism do not reduce down to state–state relations alone but involve more multiscalar processes. What influence do different scales of political activity have on the nation-state as sovereign, territorial institution?
Finally, the undesirability of tourism requires further theoretical elaboration. Some states have been reluctant to fully synchronise with global tourism circulation, while others, particularly those in Western Europe, have experienced so-called over-tourism, complicating state policy by making tourism an unwanted flow. The state effects entailed in reducing tourism requires future examination. No doubt the recent COVID-19 pandemic greatly undermines any assumptions of unhindered global mobilities and once again reveals the nation-state as crucial actor in mobility control. For many states, mobilities have been double-edged swords: they are needed for economic growth, stability and appearances of normality, but have also been key vectors for disease spread. Because some states, for example, China, have staked their reputations on control of COVID-19, foreign tourists, instead of substantiating their authority, could potentially mar their global prestige. Other states are avowedly seeking foreign tourists as returns to normality. These cases illustrate that tourism will continue to play a key role in constructing the sovereignty and global reputation of nation-states.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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