Tourism And Dictatorship

Following WWII, the authoritarian and morally austere dictatorship of General Francisco Franco's Spain became the playground for millions of carefree tourists from Europe's prosperous democracies. This book chronicles how this helped to strengthen Franco's regime and economic and political standing.

Following WWII, the authoritarian and morally austere dictatorship of General Francisco Franco's Spain became the playground for millions of carefree tourists from Europe's prosperous democracies. This book chronicles how this helped to strengthen Franco's regime and economic and political standing.

When the right-wing military dictatorship of Francisco Franco decided in 1959 to devalue the Spanish currency and liberalize the economy, the country's already steadily growing tourist industry suddenly ballooned to astounding proportions. Throughout the 1960s, glossy images of high-rise hotels, crowded beaches, and blondes in bikinis flooded public space in Spain as the Franco regime showcased its success. In Destination Dictatorship, Justin Crumbaugh argues that the spectacle of the tourist boom took on a sociopolitical life of its own, allowing the Franco regime to change in radical and profound ways, to symbolize those changes in a self-serving way, and to mobilize new reactionary social logics that might square with the structural and cultural transformations that came with economic liberalization. Crumbaugh's illuminating analysis of the representation of tourism in Spanish commercial cinema, newsreels, political essays, and other cultural products overturns dominant assumptions about both the local impact of tourism development and the Franco regime's final years.

Vacationing in Dictatorships examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two dictatorial regimes at the start of the Cold War, significant similarities existed as both states took advantage of international tourism to improve their image abroad and pursued processes of economic modernization to acquire hard currencies. By the end of the 1970s though, the two countries achieved rather different results in terms of tourism development, despite the fact that both shared many features in the 1940s and 1950s. By comparing the rise and evolution of international tourism on different sides of the Iron Curtain, Adelina Stefan provides a different assessment of the geopolitics of postwar Europe and that further refines the Cold War's geographies separating eastern and western Europe. As a result, Vacationing in Dictatorships reveals a new perspective on the Cold War that reveals not only the developmental similarities between Eastern and Southern Europe, but also the ideological struggle that pitted socialist East against capitalist West.

East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party aimed to placate a public well aware of the higher standards of living enjoyed elsewhere by encouraging them to participate in outdoor activities and take vacations in the countryside. Scott Moranda considers East Germany’s rural landscapes from the perspective of both technical experts (landscape architects, biologists, and physicians) who hoped to dictate how vacationers interacted with nature, and the vacationers themselves, whose outdoor experience shaped their understanding of environmental change. As authorities eliminated traditional tourist and nature conservation organizations, dissident conservationists demanded better protection of natural spaces. At the same time, many East Germans shared their government’s expectations for economic development that had real consequences for the land. By the 1980s, environmentalists saw themselves as outsiders struggling against the state and a public that had embraced mainstream ideas about limitless economic growth and material pleasures.

Written as a book for undergraduate students as well as scholars, Surviving Dictatorship is a work of visual sociology and oral history, and a case study that communicates the lived experience of poverty, repression, and resistance in an authoritarian society: Pinochetâe(tm)s Chile. It focuses on shantytown women, examining how they join groups to cope with exacerbated impoverishment and targeted repression, and how this leads them into very varied forms of resistance aimed at self-protection, community-building, and mounting an offensive. Drawing on a visual database of shantytown photographs, art, posters, flyers, and bulletins, as well as on interviews, photo elicitation, and archival research, the book is an example of how multiple methods might be successfully employed to examine dictatorship from the perspective of some of the least powerful members of society. It is ideal for courses in social inequalities, poverty, race/class/gender, political sociology, global studies, urban studies, womenâe(tm)s studies, human rights, oral history, and qualitative methods.

A decade after the collapse of communism, this volume presents a historical reflection on the perplexing nature of the East German dictatorship. In contrast to most political rhetoric, it seeks to establish a middle ground between totalitarianism theory, stressing the repressive features of the SED-regime, and apologetics of the socialist experiment, emphasizing the normality of daily lives. The book transcends the polarization of public debate by stressing the tensions and contradictions within the East German system that combined both aspects by using dictatorial means to achieve its emancipatory aims. By analyzing a range of political, social, cultural, and chronological topics, the contributors sketch a differentiated picture of the GDR which emphasizes both its repressive and its welfare features. The sixteen original essays, especially written for this volume by historians from both east and west Germany, represent the cutting edge of current research and suggest new theoretical perspectives. They explore political, social, and cultural mechanisms of control as well as analyze their limits and discuss the mixture of dynamism and stagnation that was typical of the GDR.

Accounts of U.S. empire building in Latin America typically portray politically and economically powerful North Americans descending on their southerly neighbors to engage in lopsided negotiations. Dennis Merrill's comparative history of U.S. tourism in L