Preliminary Programme

Between 1918 and 1957, European tourism transformed from an exclusive, largely undefined and unregulated phenomenon to being accessible, academically institutionalized, and intergovernmentally regulated. This paper examines the politics of European tourism as new national and international institutions emerged to govern the tourism sector. It analyses how these institutions acted as vehicles for European integration by pushing for harmonized tourism policies including on visas, customs, currency, and marketing. Drawing on institutional archives disregarded by European integration research, the paper thus contributes to the reconceptualization of integration as a process with a long pre-war history and involving international organisations beyond the EC/EU institutions. (Show less)

Sara Fieldston is Assistant Professor of History at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. She is the author of Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century (Harvard, 2015), which was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. She is also co-editor, with Susan Eckelmann Berghel and Paul M. Renfro, of Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945 (forthcoming with the University of Georgia Press). Her current book project, Shopping for Empire: American Tourists, Consumption, and Power after World War II, is a history of American postwar tourism abroad with a focus on shopping and consumption. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University. (Show less)

In the years after the Second World War, the older tradition of visiting Europe or the ‘Old World’ as an act for North Americans to re-discover, re-connect with and re-possess one’s heritage became a mode of cultural justification for the political alliance between Europe and the United States. As legitimate heirs and caretakers of a particular form of ‘Western civilization’, North-Americans consciously combined elements of European culture and history with US models of consumerism and production into what they started to perceive and practice as shared common identity: that of ‘the West’.
In this process of defining ‘the West’, US policy-makers recognized the potential of tourism as an instrument to promote the construction of ‘Western civilization’ to strengthen the relation between Europe and the United States in the context of the Cold War. Tourism development was also a key component of the Marshall Plan (officially European Recovery Program, 1948-1952), to aid in the recovery of war-torn Europe. The Marshall Plan explicitly stimulated US tourists to bring dollars to Europe and encouraged European partners to adapt their tourist infrastructure to the needs of US tourists. This way, the Marshall Plan employed tourism as a way to propagate US ideals of modernization, the consumer citizen, technological progress and capitalist internationalism. Besides its economic benefits, tourism thus functioned as an important diplomatic tool in American policy.
This paper discusses how US tourism to Europe contributed to the postwar idea of ‘the West’ in relation to the Cold War politics of enforcing an alliance between the US and Western Europe. My paper zooms in on Berlin as postwar tourist destination for North American tourists, predominantly through a detailed analysis of a propagandistic photobook. It will highlight the symbolic and political importance of Berlin as tourist destination and beyond, especially in relation to the idea of ‘The West’. (Show less)

Historians have written on the multiple linkages between East and West during the Cold War, and tourism offers indeed a wonderful lens through which to examine the ways in which both camps interacted. Despite this interest, little attention has been directed towards the individuals who worked in international tourism-related organizations. To fill this gap, this paper explores the notions of these “experts,” and argues that these experts—as well as the institutions and professional networks in which they operated—did not only have normative and converging impacts on tourism development and the tourism industry, but also became central actors in contemporary debates about the postwar reconstruction and integration of Europe, European identity, mass consumption, and technical assistance to developing countries. These experts and their works can also help us understand the interconnectedness between East and West, and its limits. (Show less)