A Place of Your Own on Tito’s Adriatic: Club Med and Czechoslovak Trade Union Holiday Resorts in the 1960s

Location: at the end of the world

As early as 1953, 3 years after its founding, Club Med’s magazine, Le Trident, featured not only sites in Greece and Italy, but also a resort in Bečići, Yugoslavia. This, Club Med’s first foray into Eastern Europe, was marked both by the nascent conception of tourist accommodations that characterized the company’s other locations—a village of Polynesian-style huts—and by the exoticism of its location, which was, as promotional material announced, “different from everything you have ever experienced” (Le Trident, 1953: 3). In a book on the Club’s history, vacationers emphasize this characterization, explaining that after the exhausting trip to Montenegro, they encountered a revelatory view: “The perfectly wild coast’s mountainous brutality bordering a violent sea, glinting blue under the sun. The end of the world” (Peyre and Raynouard, 1971: 69). The epic proportions of their voyage contributed to this feeling: in 1953, Club Med vacationers destined for the Montenegro resort traveled by train from Paris to Venice, and subsequently on a 29-hour boat trip (with no bunks) from Rijeka to their final destination (Le Trident, 1953: 9). While this end-of-the-world exoticism concurred with the Club’s founders’ early ideals, the Bečići site was beset with numerous problems. “Located in a very remote region, difficult to reach, isolated, and only barely tolerated by Yugoslav authorities, who were not willing to provide the necessary means for a pleasant daily life,” this village “lasted only a summer.” (Trigano and Trigano, 1998: 51).

Although this first project in Yugoslavia did not survive, it was nevertheless defined by Montenegro’s exoticism, authenticity, and Yugoslavia’s attractive aspects, which remained a draw for Club Med. Indeed, in the early 1960s, Gilbert Trigano (who became the Club Med’s president in 1963) obtained the support of the Yugoslav embassy in Paris for re-establishing a village in Yugoslavia. While it is unclear what this support entailed, it is worth noting that the Yugoslav ambassador warned that refusing to support Trigano could have irreparable consequences (Yugoslav Ministry of Foreign Affairs (YMFA), 1960). His warnings seem to bear fruit, as later in 1960, a new Club Med village opened in Pakoštane, Croatia, with more than 3000 tourists signing up to visit that spring—a number that made Club Med, at the time, the foreign agency bringing the largest contingents of tourists to Yugoslavia (YMFA, May 1961). In 1963, Trigano secured a 10-year agreement for this village. According to Zoran Popović—a tourism official from Yugoslav travel agency, Putnik—Trigano then promptly set his sights on the island of Sveti Marko, Montenegro, to which Popović accompanied Trigano in November 1962 (Popović, 2008). Given the relative ease of building its Polynesian-style huts, Club Med’s Sveti Marko village opened for the 1963 season. As elsewhere, these villages consisted of circular grass-roofed huts with no water, toilets, showers, or electricity (which were limited to the villages’ common facilities). These huts’ very rudimentary features did not rebuff most tourists, with a lack of amenities becoming Club Med’s trademark (Furlough, 2009).

While the Club’s 1953 attempt in Bečići was experimental, the site selection was no accident. The village shared features with all of the Club’s other villages: it was isolated, surrounded by nature, and on the seaside. Naturally, the Sveti Marko site was similarly situated, and the Club’s magazine described it using a common language in tourism rhetoric, underscoring the location’s untouched nature, which the tourist was invited to discover—or even, as the magazine described in neocolonialist and sexist terms, conquer. “Montenegro,” it wrote, “has remained tough and authentic”; “the Club village respects this rude virginity. It is hidden on its own island, very small and entirely wooded, to such an extent that the huts are guessed more than seen”; the “welcoming savagery of the region gives to each step a character of conquest, discovery, and individual experience” (Le Nouveau Trident, February 1965: 21, 23). In comparison with its French counterpart, the Czechoslovak Trade Union’s official publication, Práce (Labor) depicted Montenegro’s “savagery” with relative restraint, although Bečići’s remoteness was always favorably perceived. Indeed, Montenegro was well known to Práce’s readers, as Czechs had, since the nineteenth century, cultivated cultural interactions with the region through novels, travel accounts, and films (Šístek, 2011). In the journal, one could read recurring promises of sunny vacations in Montenegro, while a 1965 article commemorating ROH’s Bečići resort’s opening (15 August 1965) describes one beach as favored for decades for “its beauty, its distance from known centers and its difficult access” (Práce, 7 March 1965a and 13 August 1965c).

While Yugoslavia’s political and social context naturally featured centrally in essays on the ROH resort, they were hardly mentioned in Club Med’s magazine. At times, Le Trident and its successors positively assessed Yugoslav socialism—noting, for instance, the “passionate economic and social experience” taking place in the country—though comments such as these remained rare and peripheral to the magazine’s primary focus on the villages’ offerings (activities, comfort, etc.) (Le Nouveau Trident, February 1963: 17). Of course, it was impossible to ignore the political environment, and indeed, on Tuesdays, wrote a vacationer at Pakoštane, “a representative of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia gave [informative talks] on Tito and what he has done for Yugoslavia,” but “this was part of what the Club agreed to in order to be in this enchanting bay” (Arnould, 2013: 115). Club Med’s debut was thus a success not due to the country in which its villages were located, but rather for the novelty of its vacation experiences, which offered all-inclusive packages in nearly interchangeable environments. Nor was Yugoslavia interesting for Trigano because of its socio-political features, but rather because it diversified the Club’s offerings with a sunny, exotic, increasingly popular, and potentially high-profit destination during a period (1962–1963) when Edmond de Rothschild became the Club’s major stockholder. Indeed, Club Med faced competition with about 20 other French travel agencies (such as the Touring Club de France) that also worked with Yugoslav tourist associations, although Club Med surpassed other French initiatives in its importance.

In short, the nature of Club Med vacation projects seems to indicate that location specificity was relatively unimportant. For early Club Med vacationers, collective dining, sport activities, and group cultural events formed the core of the Club’s experience. The playful rationale behind-Club initiatives evoked not only a world of hedonistic pleasure, but also one of simplicity and opportunities to flirt. Equality between vacationers was prompted with the use of beads instead of real money, the use of “tu” (the French familiar pronoun) among vacationers, and the mandatory wearing of sarongs (De Raedt, 2010; Furlough, 1993; Réau, 2007). Bertrand Réau (2011), sociologist of leisure practices, has underscored this insularity:

A small ceremony is scheduled for the arrival at the village: a welcome reception by the group leaders, music, the carrying of luggage, etc. Here one can see an institutional rite: […] the village is a closed physical space with two entrances/exits controlled by barriers. […]. Inside, it is a space of openness and loosening of control. (p. 195)

Writer Alain Laurent observes something similar—“When one goes to Cefalù, one does not go to Sicily: one goes to the Club. The same holds true for Greece, Morocco, and Spain” (Laurent, 1973 cited in Urbain, 2003: 227). Club Med villages in Yugoslavia were no exception. The added value of vacationing in Club Med villages was their facilities and the activities they offered, not their specific locales.

Were Czechoslovak trade unionists in Bečići living in a similar parallel universe? It is far from certain, but their resort’s insularity and the experience of difference it offered, as well as several aspects of vacationers’ daily life—which also stressed collective dining, sports, and so on—diverged less from the French example than one may think. Indeed, this matrix of experiences and services constitutes a common feature that cuts through the ideological distinctions between the (capitalist) Club Med and (socialist) ROH resorts.

Politics were nevertheless a ubiquitous feature of the ROH project, which was made possible only by high-level government interventions. In 1963, in keeping with their desire to develop international tourism, Yugoslav leaders proposed that their Czechoslovak counterparts build a tourist resort on the Adriatic (Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), 1964). Yugoslavia suggested a few sites, and Czechoslovakia chose Bečići over an island location for the practical reason that it was connected to water and electrical networks (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1965a). From its beginnings, Czechoslovak officials were concerned about the cost of the project, which required important initial investments and promised no immediate returns.

After technical issues and border-crossing regulations between the two countries were settled, at a September 1964 meeting, Yugoslav leader, Tito, and Czechoslovak President, Antonín Novotný, publicly announced the construction project of a resort—tellingly named Praha (Prague), after his country’s capital city—for Czechoslovak trade unionists. The meeting’s atmosphere was friendly—Tito, for instance, talked of giving Czechoslovakia an island—yet, Novotný expressed concerns. He voiced a desire to give priority to collective over individual tourism and asserted the need to tackle illegal trade: “We want to prevent smuggling and make sure our people behave with dignity and decently. […] Smuggling is not a good thing. Our citizens enter in contact with Americans, English, and West Germans, and this is not a good thing.” Tito adopted a benevolent attitude, explaining that these were normal occurrences (Archives of Yugoslav History Museum (AYHM), 1964). Here, we can see Yugoslavia’s relatively liberal position toward both tourism’s development and consumerism. In addition, this meeting translates the ideal type of travel to Yugoslavia that Czechoslovak authorities envisioned: a collective experience, with vacationers’ mobility carefully managed, involving few or no contacts with other foreigners. If the ROH’s vacation experience did not differ entirely from Club Med’s pleasure-driven insularity, the rationale behind it may also have been the fact that sending Czechoslovak trade unionists to the relatively remote site of Bečići guaranteed that they would be less likely to see and experience the success—in terms of access to consumer goods and opportunities—of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Of course, this remains hypothetical given lack of evidence, but the meeting between Tito and Novotný and subsequent meetings between both countries’ trade union organizations and Putnik reveal that the ROH project, in contrast to Club Med’s, was driven by political interests and the goal of developing social tourism.

Modern cottages and Polynesian huts

The Czechoslovak-Yugoslav agreement about the construction of the Praha village was quickly concluded in the spring of 1965, and involved negotiations between, on the one hand, the ROH and, on the other hand, the union of Yugoslav trade unions and Putnik. Praha’s first phase was quickly assembled: after 104 days, 25 two-story cottages with a capacity of 200 beds were completed. The inauguration occurred in August 1965 and was followed by the first cohort of vacationers (see Figure 4). In 1966, a second phase was completed (with an additional capacity of 162 beds). Moreover, the resort in Bečići stood out as the first and only ROH construction project abroad (with the exception of an ambitious resort project on Rab island, which ended abruptly in 1948), as most ROH efforts regarding leisure and recreation had hitherto targeted domestic tourism and resort-building within Czechoslovakia (Práce, 1965b). While approximately 150 agreements about exchanging vacationers were signed between Czechoslovak and Yugoslav enterprises between 1965 and 1969, the Praha project was also unique because it consisted of foreign investments that exclusively benefited Czechoslovak vacationers, and not merely the exchange of vacationers between countries (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1970a).

Given its scale and the fact that the Czechoslovak Trade Union was responsible for the construction expenses, this project required an intense level of collaboration. In addition to trade unions and Putnik, the municipality of Budva and engineering firms from both countries were involved in the resort’s construction. While this project, like Club Med’s, sparked considerable enthusiasm on the part of Yugoslav newspapers, television, and tourist media, it was encumbered by a series of challenges and disagreements (M. K., 1965: 2). Among these was the fact that, although Yugoslav legislation allowed foreign entities to own real estate, the land on which the property stood could not be sold to foreign entities (Grol, 1963). This complicated situation led to the following arrangement: Putnik bought the land, and was responsible for its maintenance. Although Czechoslovakia was initially permitted to export prefabricated two-story bungalows to Yugoslavia duty-free, Yugoslavia insisted that they pay custom taxes, which increased the project’s overall cost by about six percent (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1965b). Moreover, Yugoslav contractors had the tendency, chronicled in ROH’s final reports, to speculate and ask for higher prices for their services (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1964).

Among all of the problems this construction project presented, the central bone of contention was Putnik’s role in it. While for Czechoslovakia, the project’s rationale was largely political, this was not the case for Yugoslavia. Soon after the initial meetings, Putnik became the local coordinator and manager of the project and gradually the sole Yugoslav interlocutor. According to ROH, the nature of the project for Yugoslavia thus became primarily economic, even commercial. In addition to increasing construction costs between the two phases, Putnik requested that Czechoslovakia contribute financially to management expenses, the Budva municipality demanded a beach tax; in 1970, Putnik also requested a reassessment of the original 1965 agreement, and increased its service prices (for trips to Dubrovnik and transport from and to the nearby Tivat international airport). With a more conservative budget for currency allocation in the early 1970s, the ROH noted that running the resort was becoming increasingly difficult, and wondered if Putnik’s new leadership (with Zoran Popović as first assistant) contributed to this commercial orientation (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1970b). It would be inaccurate to blame Czechoslovakia’s challenges on Putnik’s directors, given Putnik’s long-standing commercial orientation. This situation rather speaks to Putnik’s active role in securing income for Yugoslavia through foreign tourism, with partners from both socialist and market economies.

From its creation in 1963, Club Med’s Sveti Marko village became Putnik’s flagship collaboration with a foreign tourist agency, and a profitable one: “We made lot of money with Club Med,” recalls Popović. This is not an exaggeration, as the Sveti Marko village brought in a striking 43 percent of the Republic of Montenegro’s hard currency income in 1963 (Putnik, 1966b: 2). In 2000, on the occasion of Club Med’s 50th anniversary, the club was described as “Putnik’s biggest partner of all time” (Stošić, 2000: 6). The scarcity of available sources from Putnik prevents an adequate comparison between ROH and Club Med negotiations with Putnik, but the Club’s economic impact in Yugoslavia certainly drove Yugoslav officials to strongly support this type of collaboration. Indeed, the economic benefits associated with Club Med were not only more substantial than those generated by the ROH project, but were also in line with the program of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, which aimed to increase Yugoslavia’s hard currency income from tourism to 100 million dollars for 1963 and renew the country’s hotel capacity in order to satisfy international clientele (Četvrti plenum CK SKJ, 1962: 17, 121–122).

The degree to which the modern cottages of the ROH vacation village echoed Western projects such as the Club Med resorts is striking—although at first glance, the architectural layout and ideological rationale behind these projects seem poles apart. The Polynesian huts, Club Med’s trademark, evoke an exotic world, while ROH’s prefabricated cottages come across as standardized and unoriginal, albeit with modern amenities (electricity, a toilet, and a shower in each unit). If the architecture and the setting of the ROH village seem conformist, the latter nevertheless echoes Western projects in its capacity to offer an experience of difference to vacationers. Club Med’s staged Polynesian villages did so by offering an escape from modernity. ROH did the opposite, for the prefabricated cottages’ rapid, efficient process of production epitomized Czechoslovakia’s state modernity, while underscoring the prestige and pleasure associated with vacations abroad. Indeed, in Czechoslovakia as elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, vacations abroad were not a right, but a privilege, and thus remained a strong marker of prestige among its citizens in the 1960s. Time spent abroad, and particularly by the sea, became a stage for experiences impossible, unsafe, or complicated at home. Beyond the expected time in and by the water, business opportunities (selling or exchanging on the black market) and extramarital affairs also made up vacationers’ social universe. ⁴ Additionally, as the following section, “The familiar foreign,” explains, the symbiotic relationship that Czechs had and still cultivate with the Adriatic Sea gave the ROH village a flavor that allowed the trade unionists to be themselves on Tito’s Adriatic.

The familiar foreign

Both ROH and Club Med’s resorts purposefully balanced the familiar with the unfamiliar or exotic. Each created reassuring conditions that featured customary aspects of vacationers’ home countries and cultures, so as not to seem excessively “foreign.” At the same time, each resort stressed the exoticism and opportunities for discovery offered precisely by the fact that one was vacationing away from home. This “familiar foreignness” was not a minor point for vacationers from both the East and the West, for, during the 1950s and 1960s, an entire generation of people experienced foreign travel for the first time. Building on a core function of the language of tourism, post-World War II guidebooks took into account tourists’ conceivable anxiety regarding the novelty of traveling abroad and strove to reassure their readership (Endy, 2004: 134). The presence of a series of pedagogically oriented articles in Práce, entitled Nebojte se cestování [Don’t Be Afraid of Traveling], suggests that reassuring this new generation of travelers was key to assuring the tourism sector’s growth. For some Czechoslovaks, it was probably reassuring to visit a resort named Praha and find it filled exclusively with fellow trade unionists, and discover, as the picture the well-ordered dining hall suggests, a standard modern, cultured Czechoslovak environment ⁵ (see Figure 1). The opportunity to eat Czech-style meals among Czechs while abroad was a continued leitmotiv throughout the twentieth century in Czechoslovak tourist brochures and guidebooks on Yugoslavia, and the dining facilities at the ROH resort are consistent with this. Indeed, the aim of affordable all-inclusive packages was to create a convivial environment among vacationers: prepared familiar meals with a free quarter liter of wine or beer were taken in a common 200-seat dining hall.

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Figure 1.

Dining hall, Praha resort in Bečići.

Two factors contributed to this feeling of “familiar foreignness.” First was the resort’s location, which was relatively sheltered and exclusively open to trade unionists. Sports equipment, such as inflatable rafts and skiffs for beach activities, and equipment for table tennis, badminton, and volleyball, were provided, and short excursions in the vicinity of Bečići were offered. According to an inventory list, the ROH resort was supplied with Sonet tape recorders, televisions, accordions, guitars, bicycles, volleyball nets, motorcycles, air mattresses, chess boards, playing cards, and glasses for cognac, liquor, wine, and beer (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1965c). Vacationers were led in group activities such as athletic events at the beach or cultural visits in the region with a staff very familiar with Yugoslavia, to a level that Club Med’s group leaders could not have achieved, as most of the ROH resort staff had work, cultural, or travel experiences in Yugoslavia prior to the 1960s. Second, the historical relationship between the Czech and South Slavic lands, as well as the linguistic proximity between Czech, Slovak, Croatian, and Serbian, facilitated occasional encounters between or contact with Yugoslavs working at Bečići. “We spoke to them in Czech and they answered in their language, but we understood each other,” recalled a Czech vacationer who took part in a ROH trip to a different location, the Yugoslav-owned and -managed Plavi Horizont hotel in Tivat in 1983 (Čornejová, 2014).

This linguistic proximity did not exist for French vacationers at Club Med villages, but the latter strove to reassure potential vacationers and create a well-managed environment for its clients’ vacations. A 1963 French tourist’s account of his trips to Yugoslavia asserts, for instance, that there was no adventure with Club Med. “If you travel with the Club […] you can sleep tight. They fix an appointment in Paris, at the Gare de Lyon. Your train is ‘special,’ your seat numbered and then they drive you to a village called Pakostane [sic]” (Bénamou, 1963: 11–12). Despite his sarcastic attitude toward mass tourism, this author nevertheless stresses the certainty that Club Med vacations offered. From its 1953 promotion for Bečići that announced “sun, remoteness and no worries,” to the French tourists who, 25 years later, succinctly defined Club Med with the equation “sport + sun + food,” the same foundations remained: the Club offered a safe and fun environment (Le Trident, March 1953; postcard, 8 August 1979). Finally, this spirit can also be encapsulated in the following formula, expressed by Le Nouveau Trident about its Pakoštane village: “we are at home there, living according to our tastes” (February 1965: 27).

Despite its different rationale, the ROH project’s desire for insularity also remained a key mechanism in creating the feeling of familiarity. First, the collective nature and relative remoteness of the Praha resort may have facilitated feelings of home, for contacts with Yugoslavs were minimal. Second, but probably even more important, were the project’s political dimensions. The level of cooperation between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and their twin flags adorning the Praha dining hall, speak to the normalization of their relations by the mid-1960s. The location of the ROH resort was thus extremely significant in this political context, and the preambles to ROH reports positively assessed the project’s potential to strengthen the countries’ relationships and traditional links. Third, with its resort in Bečići, ROH was able to make international tourism a national project by creating a place where Czechoslovak vacationers behaved like they did at home and, not unlike the Club Med’s formula, according to their own tastes.

Moreover, this resort in Bečići answered Czechoslovaks’ increasing demands for seaside vacations (Franc and Knapík, 2013: 367). Indeed, the Adriatic Sea has been an extremely significant destination for Central Europeans, and Czechs in particular, since the end of the nineteenth century (Klabjan, 2007). Czech fascination with this sea has very much defined their experience in the Adriatic region and shaped a specific travel culture that persists today. The resort’s direct access to the sea was central, and photographs convey this, picturing vacationers playing in the water and sunbathing on the beach. Special outbuildings were also erected in order to offer beverages (so vacationers would not have to return to the kitchen for refreshments) and store beach paraphernalia (see Figure 2) (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1965c). Connection with the sea was not unique to the ROH resort—the Club Med village on Sveti Marko was also branded as a space in symbiosis with the sea: “Sveti Marko is Saint Mark, Venice’s patron. We are always near the water, in water, under water. […] Even better than Corfu, Sveti Marko is our saint of saints of water skiing,” states Le Nouveau Trident (February 1965: 23). Yet, in the case of the French resort, this relationship was nowhere near as deeply culturally rooted as it was for Czech travelers on the Adriatic.

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Figure 2.

Water games at the Praha resort beach.

Helping vacationers relax in a familiar environment was also a goal of Club Med, but it operated slightly differently and through paradoxical rhetoric that both stressed the familiarity of the place (among fellow Frenchmen and -women, eating French-oriented cuisine, etc.) and the excitement of being elsewhere, in an “exotic” setting detached from everyday life. If French references were present in Club Med villages, this aspect was not pivotal to the Club messages, which stressed hedonistic pleasures. Moreover, Club Med villages were not for exclusive French use, but open to all tourists (provided, of course, that they had sufficient financial means). Postcards of Club Med villages in Pakoštane and Sveti Marko show flags from prosperous Western countries. These flags indicate that Club Med did not operate within a defined national context, but engaged with vacationers of the whole world (see Figure 3), and as we will see in the next section, “Competing models: social and commercial tourism,” Club Med welcomed a heterogeneous group of middle-class or upper-class vacationers.

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Figure 3.

Postcard showing Club Med village in Pakoštane (private collection of Philippe Legrand, used by permission).

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Figure 4.

ROH prefabricated two-story bungalows in Bečići.

Competing models: social and commercial tourism

Since Czechoslovakia had limited hard currency resources, the construction of a resort for the exclusive use of the country’s trade union presented clear advantages. Daily expenses per vacationer were calculated as less than what Čedok, the Czechoslovak state tourist agency, offered; the ROH resort allowed more people to go on vacation without over-taxing state resources (it was considered that the investment would be paid off in 10 to 12 years and that the resort’s life-cycle would be 35–40 years). The project was also supposed to ease a crucial shortage of vouchers ⁶ for vacations abroad and fulfill Czechoslovaks’ desire to go to Yugoslavia (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1966a). The ROH project represented a model of social tourism among whose guiding principles was making vacations accessible to the masses through relatively low package prices. It was argued that many workers would not enroll in excursions organized by travel agencies, but would do so if they were organized by ROH (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1966b). If this model was distinct from that of commercial tourism, it, too, sought to offer an exceptional experience of pleasure, learning, and novelty (Pattieu, 2009). Thus, the goals and functions of the ROH and Club Med resorts were similar: both were located in remote and quiet places, featured collective aspects, and established breaks in the working routines of its vacationers who, in turn, were promised a pleasurable vacation among their peers. In addition, both projects catered to a specific clientele: the Bečići resort was not only exclusive to ROH members and their families, but more specifically to those working in harsh conditions, such as miners, to whom priority was given in the opening season of 1965 (Práce, 1966a). The rationale for the access to this resort was thus somehow paradoxical: while ROH asserted—not without pride—that vacations in its Yugoslav resort were less expensive than Čedok’s, it also stressed that these vacations were reserved for the best workers. Given the limited vouchers (for which there was also a black market) available for Bečići and the priority given to certain categories of workers, ROH’s social function as a vacation-provider for the masses was ultimately not fulfilled—at least when it came to sending workers abroad.

Albeit in a different way, the Club Med also gradually became an exclusive club, which, as historian Ellen Furlough and sociologist Bertrand Réau argue, exacerbated rather than flattened cultural and class differences. While Club Med’s beginnings can be characterized by a strong measure of amateurism and spontaneity, and by its non-overt profit seeking, its profits, popularity, and success grew from the 1960s onward. In the 2000s, the Club abandoned its Polynesian-style huts and moved upmarket with investments from international conglomerates. In winter 2015, the Chinese investment group, Fosun (2015), bought Club Med, and plans to make of China the Club’s second largest market after France. Club Med currently banks on luxury resorts not only around the Mediterranean Sea, but also in China, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, and elsewhere.

Thus, while they converged in the 1960s, the institutional and managerial differences between these two models grew over time. One managerial feature of the Club Med that distinguished it quickly from its Czechoslovak counterpart was that Trigano, with the goal of creating his villages’ specific universe, sent Yugoslav employees to Switzerland for training in order to bring the new staff up to the Club’s standards (Federal Committee for Tourism (FCT), 1964). Given this practice of foreign training, Club Med’s influences on Yugoslavia were multifaceted; in addition to bringing in hard currency, it also enhanced its employees’ mobility and trained Yugoslavs in Western tourist norms that, in this case, embodied a leisure-oriented model of consumerism. According to Gilbert and Serge Trigano, the Club Med came to be accepted among locals because it gave them employment opportunities:

In some towns, the Club is considered the expression of life […]. In this way, the little Yugoslav village of Biograd [the village, located near Pakoštane, is in fact called Biograd na Moru] became ‘a village of millionaires’ because most of its inhabitants have worked for the Club for a long time […] and for them, this represented quite a substantial social and economic revolution. (Trigano and Trigano, 1998: 163)

If the ROH resort’s fate was obviously bound to the end of socialist Czechoslovakia in 1989, elsewhere, social tourism had already been challenged by commercial tourism. According to historian Sylvain Pattieu (2009) in his work on the French social tourism organization Tourism & Labor, the 1980s witnessed a decline in social tourism, but this, he argues, did not signal that individual tastes and experiences were impossible to express in social tourism organizations, which offered sui generis “spaces of mobilization” (pp. 352–358). While some of these trends were certainly more prominent in non-socialist settings, scholars have stressed the autonomy of the socialist social sphere vis-a-vis high politics and ideological frameworks. In the case of the Soviet Union, Koenker (2013) shows that the collective principles at the core of its project of social vacations helped promote the development of individual autonomy or Soviet citizens’ modern selves, demonstrating, as she explains, the country’s “contested transition […] from a producer to a consumer society” (p. 2). Given these observations, there is no doubt that social tourism in Yugoslavia also offered “spaces of mobilization” for Czechoslovak vacationers. The latter might have disliked social tourism, with its heavy oversight of leisure time, but with alternatives sometimes nonexistent, social tourism was often the simplest way to travel abroad, and vacationers seized the opportunities these trips offered. While more research is required into the history of ROH as a model of social tourism (Čornejová, 2014), the growth of individual tourism—that is, the possibility for Czechoslovaks to travel abroad without all-inclusive packages—that emerged in the 1960s, around the same time the ROH resort was built, gradually challenged the predominance of collective trips through ROH, or even through travel agencies such as Čedok. The increased popularity of individual, non-organized travel in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere also bears witness to tourists’ growing travel skills, desire for agency and mobility, and eagerness to enjoy tourism abroad and benefit from its advantages (Koenker, 2013: 276–277; Noack, 2006). Numerous articles published in Práce in 1965–1966 discuss vacations abroad (either in socialist or capitalist countries), stress the importance of automobiles, camping, and even hitchhiking for people’s mobility.

Conclusion

Taken together, both the Club Med and ROH projects reflected the values of the 1960s, which experienced leisure travel on a scale never before seen, as leisure time and access to paid vacation expanded in many countries. In France, a third week of paid vacation was introduced in 1956, and was followed with a fourth in 1969. In Czechoslovakia, the 5-day workweek was introduced in the early 1960s, and two to three weeks of paid vacation were guaranteed. Given this context and the projects’ overlapping chronologies, it is productive to examine them comparatively; as this article discusses, this comparison reveals both striking similarities and idiosyncratic differences. Each case prefigured, albeit in different ways, contemporary tourism’s complexities. In each, distinctions between home and abroad, the familiar and the foreign, dwindled—through different mechanisms. Czechoslovaks found a way to act national abroad, while the Club Med’s “Frenchness” gradually intermingled, through the presence of tourists from other countries, with international practices. In a historical context, in which the taste for travel and vacation abroad gradually penetrated wider social strata, vacationers in these villages came to embody the “tourist’s” postmodern strategy of unfixedness, to borrow sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s conception. In this “schizophrenic dilemma,” because he has a home, the tourist wants to travel, but in the process of this “game” (going on a trip), the destination becomes the tourist’s new reality (his home). And it is due to such a trip that the tourist comes to appreciate his home (Bauman, 1996). This situation hints at a condition with no clear-cut distinctions between home and abroad, and in this vein, the two examples presented in this article also call into question “destination Yugoslavia’s” status as a purposeful marker for vacationers. In its promotional materials, Club Med said little about the destination itself: Tito’s Yugoslavia remained insubstantial as long as there was a sunny beach on the sea (and the multiplication of the Club’s village formula along the Mediterranean coastline illustrates how these villages could be transplanted relatively easily). In the Pakoštane and Sveti Marko cases, the Club Med barely produced a “destination Yugoslavia,” either textually or through an on-site emphasis on the country’s assets beyond its sunny coastline. The case of the Praha village is slightly different. ROH did not unequivocally produce a “destination Yugoslavia,” although the host country was more present due to the framework within which these vacations occurred—from the political machinations central to Praha’s inception to the dual flags adorning the dining hall. As this article has discussed, the long-standing Czech travel culture, as well as the Cold War political context (in which Yugoslavia served as a potential escape gateway to the West for East Europeans) also contributed to producing a “destination Yugoslavia.” Nevertheless, the degree of insularity was very high in Praha, in which a small part of Adriatic coastline effectively became Czechoslovak. And, indeed, for vacationers, both resorts’ insularity effectively overrode local understandings of place, which sometimes had little in common with Club Med’s or ROH’s. From a regional or national point of view, these sites epitomized the extension of tourism territory within the country, as well as the social, economic, and political issues that accompanied it: for example, on a local level, new employment opportunities; and on a national level, disagreement about the authority granted to different levels of Yugoslav governance in tourism administration, and conflict over how tourism revenue would be distributed.

Despite their formal differences, both the ROH and Club Med projects helped make the modern experience of tourism more widely available. On the one hand, ROH vacations upheld a social tourism model whose rationale lay in the redistributive capacity of the socialist state, which also encouraged collective tourism to the detriment of individual tourism. On the other hand, the privately owned Club Med sold “tourist experiences” to its middle- and upper-class members, and challenged conformist vacation packages and traditional habits. Ultimately, and regardless of the ideological differences between their management, both projects aimed to allow vacationers to experience something different, and underscored the joys of insularity, while symbolically at least, their vacationers were not wholly isolated in their “insular resorts,” as they participated in the broader shared experience of vacation abroad. All in all, both of these projects embodied core features of the modern, time-restricted, spatially managed, and pleasure-oriented experience of vacation. Moreover, in the case of the Czechoslovak trade union, trans-systemic comparisons such as that with Club Med appear to be fruitful for debunking assumptions about tourists’ incapability to act independently of imposed socialist structures, and for stressing tourism’s intrinsically modern values within socialist contexts.

From today’s perspective, the ROH’s experiment in Bečići seems at odds with Club Med’s expansion throughout the world, but there was a converging undercurrent in the mid-1960s. Indeed, during this brief moment, the Czechoslovak leadership and Putnik considered the possibility of undertaking three to five resort projects in Yugoslavia (potentially echoing Club Med’s assemblage of hut villages around the Mediterranean). Given the problems with the Bečići resort’s construction and Czechoslovakia’s negative tourism balance with Yugoslavia, however, Czechoslovak authorities decided in late 1966 that no other construction project would occur in Yugoslavia (The Central Council of Trade Unions (CCTU), 1966a). If the Club Med’s model proved more flexible and thus replicable (nor foreign to the market principles that drove it), the one-of-a-kind ROH project in Bečići does not account for the possibilities (albeit unrealized) that were sketched at a certain moment in the 1960s. Finally, the co-presence of Club Med’s and ROH’s resorts on the Adriatic coast marked the success of Yugoslavia’s carefully designed position on the world stage and its relative success in the Mediterranean tourist market. The presence in the country of tourists and resorts from both sides of the Iron Curtain speak to the country’s atypical position within the contexts of the expansion of mass tourism and Cold War geopolitics. In the 1950s and the 1960s, all socialist states, along with developing countries, realized the potential advantages of international tourism. State officials in Moscow, Prague, Lisbon, and Madrid were equally obsessed with generating income from tourism, although tourism and mobility did not become, as they did in Yugoslavia, trademarks of their country’s social and foreign policies. While the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European socialist countries continued to cultivate an ambivalent relationship with foreign tourism, Yugoslavia’s ruling elite embraced, without major conflict, trends such as increasing workforce mobility and the development of global tourism. These, in turn, became defining features of the country’s idiosyncratic socialism.