Abstract
Tourism is today considered as a crucial employment sector in many developing countries. In the growing field of historical tourism research, however, the relationships between tourism and development, and the role of international organizations, above all the UN, have been given little attention to date. My paper will illuminate how during the 1960s tourism first became the subject of UN policies and a praised solution for developing countries. Examples from expert consultancy missions in developing countries such as Ethiopia, India and Nepal will be contextualized within the more general debates and programme activities for heritage conservation and also the first UN development decade. Drawing on sources from the archives of UNESCO, as well as tourism promotion material, it will be possible to understand how tourism sectors in many so-called developing countries were shaped considerably by this international cooperation. Like in other areas of development aid, activities in tourism were grounded in scientific studies and based on statistical data and analysis by international experts. Examining this knowledge production is a telling exercise in understanding development histories colonial legacies under the umbrella of the UN during the 1960s and 1970s.
The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, a major pilgrimage site for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, offer an impressive sight. The 12 churches were hewn from the rock in the twelfth century by the order of the famed king Lalibela to create a copy of Jerusalem for the pious believers unable to perform the pilgrimage to the holy land. Yet, in 1967, B.G. Gaidoni, a tourism consultant sent by United Nation’s Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO) at the request of the Ethiopian government, did not think too highly of the site’s tourism potential: Entertainment is totally lacking. At least a small cafe or bar should be built […]. A miniature golf and a swimming pool would add diversion for the tourist, because visiting the churches in the villages […] would take more than one day.
The involvement of the UNESCO in this whole affair might seem surprising, unless we come to think of the 1960s as the first UN development decade. During this period, the first large-scale international development programmes were implemented within the UN system and the operational budget of the UN specialized agencies grew significantly. In this context, investments in cultural tourism became popular with Western planners and international bureaucrats eager to assist developing countries in bringing their economies back on track.
In this paper, I will explore UNESCO activities of providing aid for tourism development to several developing countries during the 1960s and 1970s. It is commonly accepted that these two decades mark a turning point for the international order due to decolonization and Cold War politics. It is perhaps less well known that they were also a period of crucial growth for international tourism with an exceptional growth rate of 10% on average every year, reaching a total of 168 million tourist arrivals by 1970. 3 Cultural tourism aid happened at the intersection of the cultural diplomacy battlefield of the Global Cold War, the global competition for market shares in one of the fastest growing industries and the promotion of postcolonial national projects on an international stage. At the centre of my analysis will be examples from selected reports of UNESCO consultants. To better understand the relevance of these reports to their contemporaries, I have included information from a selection of national development plans, tourism promotion material and scientific studies on tourism and development from the same period. Focussing on knowledge production in the context of these cultural tourism missions contributes to our understanding of the pervasive and all-encompassing development paradigm while also laying bare the underlying paternalistic and technocratic principles of UN development programmes during that time. After contextualizing tourism and development as issues for international organizations within the historiography of the UN and the Cold War period, I will explain UNESCO’s role in the planning of tourism in developing countries and give a more in-depth analysis of the Ethiopian example, drawing from my dissertation research on the relationship between Ethiopia and UNESCO in the 1960s and 1970s. I will show how tourism was identified as an economic resource of developing countries, and I will show the problems that resulted from this commodification of both natural and cultural heritage. Today, often local communities are facing an ambivalence between the disruptive and beneficial effects of international tourism flows, especially at UNESCO World Heritage sites in the Global South. The problems of unsustainable or even destructive tourism development are often attributed to effects of recent neoliberal policies and globalization. The foundations for this expressed focus of governments on commercial exploitation of tourist destinations, however, were laid in the 1960s. 4 Through tourism development, the local, the national and the international interpretation and production of cultural heritage became intertwined, but not always on equal terms. In many cases, such a development paved the way for a political re-appropriation of local cultures in a national context, supporting harmful politics towards indigenous populations.
The process of decolonization had reached a high point in 1960. Successively, the newly independent nation states joined the UN system – 32 in the beginning of the decade – causing the UN to undergo a metamorphosis. The imperial powers and their conservative interests had to make way for anti-colonial platform and eventually, the developing countries gained a majority representation in the UN General Assembly. 5 This new majority pushed for a programmatic shift to an understanding of development as empowerment, to overturn the idea of under-development that had underwritten one of the strongest arguments for ongoing colonial occupation in the first half of the twentieth century. 6
It is in this framework that the notion of development as a predominantly economic enterprise was conceived. This notion would dominate development policies and actions for the following decades. 7 In this new understanding of development, the UN was supposed to provide apolitical and request-driven assistance through their specialized agencies as a replacement for earlier top-down and donor-driven aid programmes. Some experts argued that this aid, termed ‘technical assistance’ was the most affordable, cost-saving way of solving the problem of poverty and inequality in the world. 8 For the bureaucrats of the UN, this became an opportunity to argue for a new ‘global mission’ 9 of the organization, which seemed unable to effectively influence the destabilizing peace and security situation of the Cold War. In fact, the UN’s first large-scale humanitarian aid programme, UNRRA was discontinued after only two years of existence, in 1947, as US American politicians refused to invest in a programme that provided emergency relief to socialist countries. The evolving UN system was permeated by a technocratic concern for economic development with some of the specialized agencies turning into outright development agencies. Building on a decade of programmatic work, a 1961 UN resolution officially declared the 1960s to be the first development decade. This set the tone for discourse and practice for years to come, reaching well beyond the official UN programmes. 10
It was only in the 1970s that the very concepts of technical assistance and development received criticism for justifying the continued dependency of former colonies from their former colonial powers through development projects in the Global South. 11 The most recent scholarship on the history of international development, however, questions this idea of development simply as ‘colonialism by other means’. 12 Governments of developing countries took advantage and fostered the competition between newly industrialized and former colonial powers during the Global Cold War, probing different development models and adapting them nationally. A similar reappraisal can be found in recent historiography of the UN and UN specialized agencies, pointing out the dualism between anti-colonial and anti-racist universalism on the one hand and development as a civilizing mission of advanced Western expertise on the other. 13
The historiography on the history of tourism to date remains largely confined to a Eurocentric perspective. Therefore, if one wants to study the history of tourism from the wider perspective of Global History, one needs to bear in mind that most of the relevant research will be found under the different labels of ‘travel’ and ‘mobility’. 14 Recently, in his work on the evolution of tourism in post-war Spain, Moritz Glaser has demonstrated that tourism was a major economic development issue within Europe as well. He is suggesting a general methodology for analysing tourism development from a Global History perspective, starting with a consideration of the conceptual history of ‘tourism’. In the cultural tourism reports analysed here, two particular concepts of tourism are relevant: one is the European, especially British, tradition of the nobility touring other countries as part of their education, referred to as the Grand Tour. The other one is the emergence of tourism as an industry. The transformation of work–life–organization in the context of industrialization in Western societies, the evolution of modern transportation technology and the increasing wealth of the North-Atlantic and Australian middle classes, led to growing numbers of international tourists at the beginning of the twentieth century. After 1945, tourism quickly gained in importance for many national economies, including tour operators and all parts of the hospitality industry. 15
Still, even though in 1971 the UN published statistical guidelines for tourism, there was no binding definition for the term tourism. 16 This means that historical tourism statistics in general should not always be taken at face value. When collecting data, most countries did not differentiate between travel for leisure, diplomatic and business travel, family visits or any other forms or travel. The numbers for Ethiopia in the 1960s, for example, need to be adjusted for Addis Ababa was then a growing diplomatic and air transport hub, with the headquarters of the OAU and the UNECA, as well as regional offices for several UN specialized agencies. It is likely that Addis Ababa’s large expatriate population as well as the many diplomatic visits accounted for much of the foreign arrivals and overnight stays. In the Global South, on the other hand, domestic or subaltern forms of tourism, especially pilgrimage, easily outnumbered the number of international leisure tourism but were not accounted for in tourism statistics. 17 The technical assistance for the development of tourism was confined to developing countries; however, the experts were of Western provenance. 18 When these experts discussed tourism in their reports, what they had in mind was the imagined potential of cultural and leisure tourism from Western countries to the so-called developing ones.
The historiography of tourism rarely engages with the issue of tourism and development beyond Europe, but the few existing historical works on Western tourism to Africa suggest a need for a more wide-ranging history of tourism and development. 19 De Kadt’s volume of 1976 is considered an inaugural work in addressing tourism research from a development perspective. Scholars following his approach investigate the positive impact of sustainable tourism, the opportunities for entrepreneurship and the potential and real financial revenue. 20 Others point out the legacy of colonialism in modern tourism and stress the industry’s negative impact, the exploitation of local populations and a questionable impact on local culture and lifestyle. 21 This holds true in particular for Safari Tourism, which is often intertwined with conflicts regarding land rights and pastoralist and hunting livelihood between local communities and national or international environmental governance. 22 This ‘tourism-development dilemma’ is something all tourist destinations are facing, but it is of much larger significance for developing countries with weak national economies. 23
The role of the UN and its specialized agencies in the evolution of international tourism deserves more analytical attention. In particular during the 1960s, the belief in tourism as a panacea for many developing countries corresponded with the technocratic modernist visions underpinning UN policies. Over the past few years, the intertwined histories of development and international organizations have come into focus in the historiography of international organizations. Two main research trends have shaped this historiography. First, a consensus has emerged according to which international organizations were largely responsible for the global career of the concept of development. 24 And second, studying international bureaucrats and consultants, the international experts as individual actors, has proven to be the most fruitful avenue to better understand this career of development in the twentieth century. 25
Because of their key role in producing, circulating and implementing tourism expertise, international organizations provide a rich body of sources for understanding international and transnational dimensions of tourism – and the relationship between tourism and development. The UN and its specialized agencies were at the centre of global policy-making regarding both development and tourism. Through their archives, we are able to connect national tourism case studies and international activities, to write a global history that connects individual actors and places to concepts and dynamics of tourism. A source-based historiography is an important complementary to those anthropological studies that are able to let the ‘subaltern speak in tourism’, 26 from a regional or local point of view, because through these consultant’s reports we gain a deeper understanding of the political and technical work of tourism planning as well as the power relations prevalent in these networks. 27 While consultants’ reports are rich and layered documents, and therefore invaluable as historical sources, they have the obvious limitation of being an official published source of an international organization, approved by the respective national government. Countless rounds of redactions and varying degrees of censorship become invisible in the final version of the report, that can be accessed easily through the digital archive of, say, UNESCO. Only through archival records, it is possible to reconstruct some context through correspondences, draft versions and administrative documents.
Initially, there was a more idealistic notion among internationalist minded thinkers working in international organizations, that tourism could contribute to international understanding and peace, especially in post-war Europe. The first international organizations and networks – the most important of these was the International Union of Travel Organizations (IUOTO), established in 1946 concerned themselves with issues of travel conditions, especially visa and passport regulations, but also joint regional advertising and the definition of standards. In 1970, IUOTO was transformed into a UN organization, the UN World Tourism Organisation. 28
The inclusion of tourism planning in the UN’s economic development policies, however, has to be understood in the context of decolonization and the political push towards the New International Economic Order. The first internationally oriented development programmes took shape in US foreign policy, with the Marshall Plan and the Point Four programme, and in the foundation of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which was soon changed into the World Bank (WB). While already in the 1940s experts working at the UN demanded that similar programmes should be set up within the UN, many Western countries and in particular US politicians strongly opposed providing large amounts of money for funds which would be managed and could be used by socialist countries. The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) created regional economic commissions for Africa (UN ECA), Latin America (UN ECLA) and Asia and the Far East (UN ECAFE). In these commissions, development economists and social scientists produced numerous studies towards new international policies and programmes. Eventually, creating programmes big enough to give out large-scale loans for industrialization projects (such as dams or railways) or country-wide development planning was given up, instead smaller funds and organizations were created, focussing on research and preinvestment studies. 29
As a more decidedly political platform for developing countries, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) emerged from networks of UN development experts and political leaders from developing countries which agreed that globalization would widen the trade gap between developing and developed countries and result in a loss of sovereignty and increased dependency. This Third World political platform also enabled the foundation of the group of 77 and coordinated the political actions of these countries. At the core of the 77 and UNCTAD’s claim was the principle ‘Trade, not aid’, opposing global trade restrictions in favour of European countries and the US. 30 Its main strength should, however, remain a discursive power in identifying problems and norms for global policy-making. 31
In 1963, following a UN conference on travel and tourism that was held in Rome, the UN economic and social council (ECOSOC) prompted several policies ‘inviting the international financing agencies to provide the developing countries […] assistance for the promotion of tourism’. 32
In 1966, the UNCTAD released a recommendation ‘urging […] particularly the developing countries to promote tourism, which makes a vital contribution to their economic growth’. 33 Finally, for 1968, the UN declared an international tourism year. 34 Behind the overarching development policies of the UN during that time was an extensive roster of scientific expertise, with economics being the dominant field for wording out the doctrines for the UN development decade. One very influential doctrine held was that many developing countries, especially in Africa, were virtually bare of resources or surplus production for export or that they lacked the potential to modernize and industrialize fast enough to keep pace with a growing global economy. To increase earnings in foreign currencies, the key objective for these countries was to find a trade that would make it possible to achieve the maximum amount of commodification without requiring a large investment or any industrial production. 35 Tourism promised to readily deliver on that expectation: Specifically, cultural and natural tourism was proposed and hailed for some developing countries as their most promising economic potential. According to the second Ethiopian five-year development plan of 1962, for example, ‘the pleasant climate, mineral hot springs, natural beauty, historical monuments and hunting possibilities […] constitute untapped sources of the national wealth and offer great possibilities for the development of planned tourism’. 36 The plan foresaw selected government investment in building hotels and accommodation as well as organizing tourist-information centres abroad, restoring historical monuments and the development of one selected site with additional facilities as a showcase-project. As a side note, the establishment of game-reserves and national parks as tourist attractions was included in the ‘Fishing & Forestry’ section of the plan.
In the 1969 Ethiopian Tourist Development Plan, commissioned from an Italian planning firm, high expectations for tourism were clearly expressed. In just eight years, the investment planned for tourism was believed to have returned equivalent benefits in full, in addition turning a capital investment of 92 million Ethiopian dollars into a total profit of 450 million Ethiopian dollars within 13 years, with indirect benefits to the Ethiopian economy estimated to be worth four times as much. 37
Mainly through US economic and technical assistance, which was strategically pursued by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I since the 190s, Ethiopia had been able to make the necessary investments for a significant growth of the trade volume throughout the 1950s. This complemented the modernization and state-building efforts of the emperor, who had to reclaim his reign internally and regionally after the Italian occupation of Ethiopia was defeated with the help of British military forces in 1941. Foreign experts, who served as advisors to the government, and technical consultants became a central institution of Haile Selassie’s government, not only to facilitate the expansion of the bureaucratic infrastructure, but also to strengthen the central government vis a vis regional rulers. 38
Ambitious goals such as the ones stated in the tourism development plan required substantial investments in the tourism industry. In 1968, the Ethiopian Minister for Development, Belai Abbai, tried to make full use of the existing collaboration between UNESCO and the Ethiopian government in order to attract the necessary seed capital. In a letter to UNESCO’s Assistant Director General, he stated that ‘it was envisaged that much more attention will be given to the possibilities of tourism as a potential source of foreign currency than has been possible in the past’. 39 In the following years, UNESCO and UNDP rolled out a programme of extensive cultural and natural heritage assistance in Ethiopia, including a seven-year programme for ‘The Development of Cultural Tourism: Preservation and Presentation of Sites and Monuments’. 40
This tourism development strategy successfully attracted further international assistance. According to an assessment of the IBRD, ‘tourism would be the second most important source of foreign trade for Ethiopia (following the export of coffee)’ and considered a crucial factor for economic development, as it seemed capable of considerable expansion. 41 Subsequently, a WB loan for the development of tourism – including the preservation of sites and monuments – was approved. 42 For a few years, tourism was played up as a panacea for all of Ethiopia’s development problems.
As agricultural and tax reforms had failed to respond to the growing demand in raw materials for export and bring about the much-needed social change and modernization, the political climate grew more and more hostile against the imperial government and the alleged ‘deterioration’ of the nation’s resources and the need to find ways to earn the revenue necessary for further economic development became more urgent. 43 Tourism, it was also believed, could act as a vehicle for key infrastructure projects such as transportation and electricity that had failed to be realized on their own. Additionally, tourism was valued for increasing the visibility of the country and its image at an international level.
The growing relevance of the intertwined paradigms of tourism and development in the 1960s can be traced through UNESCO’s programmes, resolutions and operations. Until then the organization had mainly been involved in educational efforts of the UN development schemes. The staff at UNESCO’s division for cultural heritage, however, were quick to realize the potential of tourism for their organization. Both of the main arguments for development through tourism – that tourism promotes cultural exchange while also being a source of economic development – resonated well with these officials. They argued that UNESCO’s contribution to tourism would counterbalance the purely economic interest in tourism research and planning with educational, cultural and scientific impulses. Over the course of the 1960s, the organization developed a more detailed position, advocating the preservation of natural and cultural heritage as a ‘major contribution to the social and economic development of countries’. 44
In 1966, the executive council of UNESCO ratified an assistance programme for cultural tourism for its member states. 45 The main thrust of this programme was the protection and promotion of cultural heritage for tourism. In practice, this resulted in a number of consultancy missions concerned with tourism, based on requests from developing countries. Between 1966 and 1969 alone, several of these missions were carried out to 13 countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Malta, Nepal, Pakistan, Peru, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Republic and Thailand – and several more would follow in the 1970s and 1980s. 46 The tourism development missions were all very similar in approach. The consultants were supposed to advise the government how to establish tourism as a source of economic development. To this end, they were instructed to identify existing natural or cultural resources, potential heritage sites that is, and identify the means to develop them as tourist destinations. First and foremost, this meant that the consultants travelled to the respective countries and assessed the sites in question and the country in general according to their destination value. In doing so, all consultants operated strictly on the premise that historical sites and natural landscapes presented the main focus points of touristic interest. In most cases, the experts were affiliated not with the field of tourism or economic planning, but came from architecture, art history or natural science. Nonetheless, they were also tasked with analysing the tourism potential from a more technical point of view: They counted hotel beds and smooth surface road-kilometres, evaluated the quality of service and attractions offered and delivered investment and profitability recommendations. Finally, they developed concrete plans and proposals, ranging from legislative and administrative changes, to social and urban planning to specific restoration works.
From UNESCO’s viewpoint, as economic development became the ultima ratio for all sizeable amounts of funding within the UN system, the surge of tourism development policies was a welcome opportunity to connect a chronically under-financed activity, the conservation of cultural and natural heritage sites, to existing cashflows. 47 From its foundation on, UNESCO had been an important platform to promote international heritage conservation efforts. 48 In 1964, with the help of UNESCO, the International Council for Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) was founded as international expert association for historic monuments. ICOMOS was supposed to constitute, in the words of its first President Piero Gazzola, ‘the court of highest appeal in the area of the restoration of monuments, and of the conservation of ancient historical centres, for the landscape and in general of places of artistic and historical importance’. 49 In parallel, a number of global legal instruments such as the 1954 Hague Convention, were drafted in the following years, all written with the intention of paving the way towards globally binding standards of conservation. 50
One of the first concerted efforts on behalf of UNESCO with regards to a universal heritage of mankind was a ‘monuments campaign’ that took place from 1957 on, with the aim to stimulate interest in conservation of cultural heritage on several levels, in the public but also in national legislators and at the level of the UN system. Next to promotional activities, important goals in the campaign were to fashion existing historical sites into cultural monuments in the sense of European conservation experts, through ‘classifying and listing monuments’ and ‘ways of making it easier to locate monuments – e.g. signposts on roads and in cities.’ 51
As another part of the monuments campaign, an older idea of the staff of the museums and monuments division of UNESCO appeared to be finally within reach: a selection of sites to be presented in the form of a touristic itinerary. A Swiss professor of art history, Conrad André Beerli, was commissioned to prepare and conceptualize the monuments campaign for UNESCO. 52 As the core of the campaign, he presented a ‘monumental itinerary’ for the International Tourism Alliance in collaboration with UNESCO. Beerli, who laid substantial groundwork for the monuments campaign with this itinerary, was also the corresponding expert for cultural questions of the Swiss Touring Club and the International Alliance of Tourism. The itinerary of the monuments campaign would lead from Turkey through sites in Syria, Lebanon, and Jerusalem. Beerli argued that touring along these sites would lead the tourists through an exceptional encounter of the occidental and oriental civilizations in the region. On a more practical level, the cultural heritage department of UNESCO suggested the itinerary in relation to the consultancy missions regarding the conservation of monuments that had taken place in Syria and Lebanon just shortly beforehand. 53
The orientalist imaginaries of international conservation experts, picturing crumbling testaments of ancient civilization in remote regions of the world, that awaited their attention, truly came to live in the plans for a movie for the campaign. In the movie, through a selection of historic monuments from all over the world, the problems faced by monuments in the modern world were to be mediated to the broader public. Alongside with the movie, a small publication with a selection of 12 images of monuments would be distributed in all participating countries. Yet, due to budget cuts, the commissioning of original photographs of monuments had to be cancelled. 54 In search for pre-existing images that would still align with the overall vision to present a template version of monuments in the public perception, Conrad André Beerli wrote to colleagues, mainly museum directors, all over Western Europe. He requested images of ‘universally known’ monuments and sketched out the portfolio he had in mind: ruins of Persepolis, a deteriorated building in a tropical environment (‘lianes, moss, wooden beams’), monuments destroyed by volcanos or earthquakes, a Dutch windmill, a Russian orthodox church destroyed in the war, the Grand Buddhas of Bamyan, the discovery of the Buhen fortress in Sudan, the salvaging of the ‘Vasa’, restoration works in the Rouen Cathedral, students in Oxford in front of Magdalene Hall, a canal in Amsterdam, a baroque park, a diver among the submarine ruins of Halicarnasse and the fortress of Paramonga in Peru. 55
Despite the year-long preparations, the campaign was withdrawn in favour of the first international safeguarding campaign, executed to protect the Nubian Monuments of Egypt from the damage caused by the large-scale engineering project of the Aswan Dam. The planning documents of the monuments campaign, however, provide an insight into the construction of universal heritage that also informed the cultural tourism consultancies. This idea of universal heritage was based exclusively on a classicist European curriculum of archaeology and art history, not cultural diversity, a discourse that become increasingly relevant for UNESCOs decolonization agenda. 56
And while the array of thinkers and activists from the Global South that joined UNESCO during the 1960s fostered this discourse, the Eurocentric concept of universal heritage, that guided the planning and programming of the conservation and tourism experts working with UNESCO, prevailed. Already during the monuments campaign, developing countries had proved very responsive to UNESCO’s call for engaging in heritage-making. 57 The Nubian Monuments Campaign, as Chloé Maurel has explained, marked a shift in the general orientation of UNESCO towards specific projects and away from providing programmatic intellectual output. This reorientation was made possible at least in part by greater financial assistance from UNDP. In the context of providing development aid for nation-building, an era of conservation activities and heritage-making in developing countries commenced. 58 The success of the Nubian Monuments Campaign led to several more safeguarding campaigns in developing countries, labelled as ‘Triumphs in Restoration and Development’ in UNESCO’s communication efforts. 59
The cultural tourism reports share a deeply invasive way of representing individual countries, their people and their culture, which is highly reminiscent of John Urry’s concept of the ‘tourist gaze’. 60 Thus, Urry conceptualizes the way tourists view their surroundings, which is based on a set of assumptions in the tourists’ mind and which leads to the objectification of people, places and cultural practices. The tourism experts, through their gaze, created proper new narratives of national history from a tourism point of view. The history that counted was history of interest to the tourist, one that corresponded in many aspects to the contemporaneous orientalist scientific discourse of the 1960s and the narratives of the national elites of the newly independent states. 61
A stand-out characteristic of the experts’ tourist gaze was to ascribe touristic value and economic potential to sites and practices of cultural and natural heritage for their perceived authenticity. What counted as authentic was left to the discretion of the experts writing the reports. The consultants compiled and ranked the country’s existing historical sites and natural landscapes according to their interest and potential as tourist destinations. In so doing, they often completely re-contextualized sites in a way that brought them into conflict with the local context. A standard recommendation, repeated throughout many of the reports, was the mise-en-scène and mis-en-valeur of monuments for tourism through the installation of floodlighting: ‘If the Taj Mahal merits a moonlight visit, it might also be said to merit a visit if it were well floodlit on a moonless night’, 62 argued the British archaeologist Raymond Allchin, who wrote the report on India. 63 Other measures included signposting, walkways and vistas as well as the demarcation of historical urban zones with strict impositions on modernization and development, for example in the city of Isfahan in Iran, where the consultant, British urban planner David Walton, fearfully stated that ‘the character of the city will be lost until we learn how to control […] development’. 64
Suggesting this kind of zoning and regulating land use for the development of tourism was not the only aspect in which the local population was regarded merely as an inhibitor to making profit from a business point of view. Especially for rural areas, the need to educate local populations about the true value of their natural and cultural monuments was emphasized by many of the consultants, stressing the need to conform to tourist principles in and around the site. For the national parks of Bolivia, the consultant team of German Geographer and Biologist Hartmut Jungius and French Ethnographer Raymond Pujol proposed several programmes encouraging people to abandon their pastoral and agricultural land use and to focus instead on generating revenue through the touristic exploitation of their environment, which he assumed to be more suitable to preserving the local ecosystem. 65 In a different approach, programmes in Cambodia were initiated, incentives were given and subsidies paid for the local population to do the exact opposite, namely engage in traditional production and continue making their livelihood in agriculture, so as to preserve a bucolic idyll for its destination value and to avoid a ‘parasitic existence’ of locals in tourist centres. 66
This demonstrates the widespread assumption of tourism experts that tourists would only visit sites and experiences perceived to be authentic. This authenticity was evaluated and approved by Western experts and tour operators according to pre-existing Western concepts and expectations of untamed nature and indigenous culture. Consequently, in the recommendations and planning of experts, local populations were educated in how best to perform their own culture for the touristic onlooker as well as how to distinguish nature from other types of environment and how to identify important sites of historical heritage.
According to the consultants’ assessments, the greatest obstacle to the transformation of heritage sites into tourist destinations was an insufficient standard in accommodation, service, food and entertainment. The enhancement of cultural and natural attractions with leisure and recreation facilities like the mini-golf Gaidoni had suggested for Lalibela, was deemed necessary in most countries. In Nepal, tours to the historic monuments alone the UNESCO consultant believed, would not offer enough variety and appeal for tourists. Hence, he recommended to combine them in a package with domestic flights to the spectacular scenery of Mount Everest and the Annapurna. Additionally, in his report, he recommends introducing sports clubs with golf courses and swimming pools, a game reserve and a botanical garden. 67 For India, the consultant identified the lack of after-dinner entertainment and prohibition policies as a major cause of dissatisfaction. Yet, the overall goal was to provide for the consumption of both, non-Western authentic cultural experiences and Western leisure experiences. The report also encouraged hotels and restaurants to not emulate Western culture: ‘it is time that Indian hoteliers recognized that the real thing, though Indian, is to be preferred to mere aping of western forms’. 68
Increasing such standards, however, needed careful and sensitive planning not to compromise the authenticity of the sites. In his report on Nepal, the consultant, US American archaeologist Ernest Allen Connally warned that ‘the rush to modernity poses a serious threat to those values […] which provide the magnet for cultural tourism’. 69 Finding this balance amounted to a double standard, a supremacist, neo-colonial division of tourists and local populations. The consultants universally argued for improvements in terms of hygiene, transport and facilities. In the case of India, Frank Raymond Allchin argued, referring to the decades of local experience he and his wife had gathered through their archaeological field work, that the general standard of living presented an obstacle to the development of mass tourism: ‘The foreign visitor is almost universally appalled by the absence of a sense of hygiene among the mass of the population he encounters’. 70 In the report on Thailand, the consultant team of the US American conservator Robert Garvey (also vice-president of ICOMOS from 1965 to 1974) and the Japanese architectural historian Bunji Kobayashi accused the local population of ‘a lack of appreciation of the self-imposed restraints by tourists against the use of untreated water, raw foods and crude sanitary facilities’. 71
Where modernization was declared essential to the interest of the tourist, modernization in the interest of or initiated by the local population was presented as a threat to the destination value, diagnosed as a ‘misguidedly pursued modernity’ and an unnecessary imitation of Western status symbols of urban modernization, such as with concrete buildings. 72 Protecting the tourist experience at every cost, seemed the condition sine qua non in other countries as well: ‘It would be a pity to destroy the possibility of the elation of discovery by building a macadam road’ stated B.G. Gaidoni in his report on Ethiopia. 73 He argued to only improve the road infrastructure where it is relevant to the shortening of travel time in between destinations, but not for the local surroundings of towns. In Cambodia, the consultant even proposed a detailed plan to confine the local population to their traditional lifestyle in small villages, insisting on the need to maintain the façade of authentic peasantry despite their villages being connected by modern roads, and then providing separate tourist facilities in urban centres, planned and built specifically as tourist towns. 74
The tourist gaze was by no means irrelevant at a political level as it facilitated a politicization of heritage and historical narratives in favour of a ruling elite. In the case of Ethiopia, the narrative and image of Ethiopia as an ancient empire was used to stress its continuity with modern-day imperial Ethiopia. The establishment of national heritage sites for tourism allowed for the installation of a physical government presence in crisis areas. It also supported the external political goal of representing Ethiopia as a politically sovereign country, built on the foundations of an ancient empire, which was just turning its back on a brief, unfortunate episode of economic weakness in an otherwise glorious history reaching back centuries. This image was used to attract foreign investments and development assistance well beyond the tourism sector.
In the case of Nepal, this meant an emphasis on the image of the ‘remote and mysterious kingdom of Nepal’, 75 likewise in the case of Pakistan the consultant, Dutch architect Rob M.H. Magnée, decided: ‘In the presentation of Pakistan to the tourist, the main theme will […] be the splendour of Muslim architecture and art’. 76 In this manner, the experts readily provided assistance in streamlining the country’s history according to the political elites’ and Western tourists’ worldview, and in reconfiguring local spaces into heritage sites representative of said narratives. Notably, for Nepal and Ethiopia, the tourism consultancy was not the first contact with UNESCO but embedded in year-long preceding work on the conservation of heritage sites and the built-up of an administrative infrastructure for cultural heritage. This preceding work itself was embedded in a tradition of Western historical and archaeological research, which had begun in the context of colonial expansion around the beginning of the twentieth century. 77
The destination-building, enabled through the cultural-tourism-expert gaze, can best be observed in tourism promotion material. In Ethiopia, tourism promotion started already in the 1950s, through the National Airline Ethiopian Airlines (EAL). EAL’s early tourism promotion operated with catchy slogans, such as ‘The Wonderland Route’ or ‘The Land of Queen of Sheba’, alluding to the Western fascination with Ethiopian heritage and history. 78 From 1964 on, the government-owned Ethiopian Tourism Organization (ETO) operated a brand of duty-free shops named ‘King Solomon's Mines’, which sold ‘tourist art’, that is handicraft articles in addition to regular duty-free items such as liquor and tobacco. These articles resembled traditional cultural items and were specifically designed and produced in work-shops operated by the ETO. This generated additional income, enabling the ETO to operate tours and hotels of a standard deemed suitable to most international travellers and tourists. 79
Most importantly, the ETO developed a marketing strategy as well as extensive tourism promotion material. The promotion was centred around Ethiopia’s main asset in terms of tourism, its ‘appeal […] to the well-to-do, sophisticated sightseeing tourists’.
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For the UNESCO mission, Gaidoni stated that the first and most urgent task in the process of building a tourist industry in Ethiopia must be the creation and diffusion of the tourist image of the country: First, like Egypt, Ethiopia has its own unique architectural and historical reality, with sites like Gondar, Axum, and Lalibela as outstanding tourist offerings. Secondly, like Kenya, Ethiopia boasts the wildlife resources of its national parks […]. This Ethiopia can offer a triple image, but because Ethiopia is also an African country, this image must be thoroughly African. What I mean is this. Even if Ethiopia is building modern cities and new industrial enterprises, it has to offer the tourist points of interest he does not find at home, be that in Europe or North America. It is this other world image which must be established to attract the attention of the prospective tourist. The proper tourist image, then, is the first thing an ETO team of experts should establish.
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By the 1960s, many developing countries indeed started to see the arrival of tourists, but the situation and the results varied tremendously between the countries. 85 In some countries, for example Morocco and Tunisia, the tourism sectors were economically beneficial, but the necessary sectoral investments still left the tourism sector as a net consumer of surplus, meaning that the overall profit from tourism was still lower than the investments, thus creating a positive balance for the economic development but a negative one for the gross national product. 86
Statistics from several developing countries in the 1960s, including Kenya and Tanzania, seemed to confirm the initially positive economic expectations. Earnings through tourism were weak, but still a major contributor to the GNP and presented, for some years at least, the largest source of foreign currency in otherwise weak economies. In the end, there remained significant differences between individual developing countries. These differences were hard to explain, and stood in the way of transferring policies from one country to another, in effect rendering the prognosis behind the tourism development policies of ECOSOC, UNCTAD and the respective expert studies pure speculation.
Nonetheless, these countries served as examples for a positive impact of tourism on the economic development. Presenting exaggerated prognoses for the economic benefit was a common strategy in consultants’ reports to stimulate a maximum amount of investment and follow-up funding. Tourism development opened up yet another avenue to large projects from the WB or similar donor organizations, as shown by the Ethiopian example.
The magic acceleration of development through tourism, however, was to remain a dream in most countries, at least in the short term. The rise of a social studies approach to cultural tourism, starting as early as the late 1960s and under UNESCO’s very own umbrella, was an acknowledgment of the failed promise of development through tourism. In 1974 Peter Lengyel, who was the editor of the International Social Science Journal (ISSJ), then published by UNESCO, wrote a report on cultural tourism in Bali. In a half critical, half derogatory tone Lengyel pointed out the shortcomings of the Indonesian government’s profit-oriented approach to tourism planning, which was based on a strict segregation of tourists and locals as well as the ‘freezing’ of cultural and artistic traditions to cater to tourists’ taste. His concern was for the Balinese people to be cut off their cultural roots, and he concludes the report stressing that he observed similar processes in other countries, singling out Kenya, Mexico, Tahiti and Morocco in particular. In his view, it was the duty of UNESCO to prevent the decline of traditional Balinese culture. 87
In a joint WB–UNESCO study, following a seminar in 1976 and published in 1979, controversies and problems of tourism development were discussed by researchers and practitioners, some of whom were former consultants. 88 The seminars’ papers were published in the volume Tourism: Passport for Development, edited by Manuel De Kadt, mentioned earlier in this text. Then, in 1980, another issue of the ISSJ engaged with tourism in developing countries, building on the chapters in De Kadts volume, and arguing that UNESCO’s role was to promote a new type of tourist, one with an intelligent, sympathetic interest in the cultural and social peculiarities of the host country. 89
The outcomes of these studies presented a more balanced evaluation of economic and social aspects. The emphasis of most contributions to De Kadts volume was on the negative, that is ‘non-economic’ or sociocultural impacts of tourism, and a more general scepticism about the possibility of combating global inequalities merely by pursuing economic growth. The British development expert Reginald Herbold Green outlined the problems of tourism planning in his contribution to the volume. In many countries, the growth of a national tourism sector was inhibited by the lack of effective state policies. Furthermore, the allocation of resources, consistent sectorial planning and a feasible integration of tourism in national development plans proved to be beyond the capacity of most governments. Another major obstacle was international market infrastructures geared towards the profit interests of national airlines and tour operators from the Global North. It was often the case that an increase in tourist arrivals did not result in an increased turnover of the tourist sector. Package tours, organized by European or North American tour operators, were often completely devoid of having any effect on the national economy of the destination country, as profits were earned in the tourists’ country of origin. Consequently, there was but a very low rate of gross foreign exchange inflow, with the operators having no viable interest in buying and hiring locally, justifying their decision with the allegedly insufficient local standards. Add to that the introduction of protectionist European airport and charter-flight regulations that made it impossible for African and Asian airlines to operate touristic flights from Europe to their countries. 90 As a matter of fact, many developing countries found themselves in a catch-22 situation due to a lack of funds to provide the sufficient infrastructures on the one hand and a lack of tourists to generate critical amounts of income on the other. In many places, this situation continues up until this day.
One of the less tangible outcomes of the tourism development assistance through international organizations to developing countries was that these activities complemented the development aid for nation-building efforts of the UN and its specialized agencies, which were carried out by the international bureaucrats. 91 The presence of international tourism experts casted a more favourable light on many countries than most other development-related activities, the main reason being that assistance for tourism development was based on the premise that there was at least one important resource to be exploited, namely the richness of cultural and natural heritage. For many countries, this appeared as a desirable opportunity to present themselves in a more positive light and be associated with heritage via tourism promotion materials that would advertise the developing nation states in the language of Western commercial advertising. From a long-term perspective, the tourism missions created a lasting value for nation-building in developing countries, in so far as they had a significant impact on the evolution of national heritage conservation. The consultants, through their reports, established and unlocked funding for collaboration and for expert activity in the heritage sector. This also contributed to the success of the UNESCO World Heritage Programme in its early years, as many countries could provide at least a few heritage sites that would meet the required standards for a World Heritage nomination. 92
As regards UNESCO and the experts working as consultants on these missions, the tourism assistance offers a glimpse of the mechanics and workings of the international system during a crucial growing period. Having another area of operations in the field of tourism development presented a means to increase their influence and relevance. Carrying out these studies helped UNESCO and the commissioned experts to strengthen their role as producers and brokers of knowledge in the development discourse and beyond. It sheds light on the fact that international organizations like UNESCO and their programmes provided a hub for a multitude of interests, providing a label that could easily be appropriated in different ways by the different actors involved. For many governments, as already stated above, one of the largest immediate economic benefit of tourism development was its potential to open up more possibilities for accessing large-scale infrastructural development funding. Another promising benefit was the chance to take charge of constructing and mediating a positive image of the government that would radiate into other areas.
Through the tourism development missions, the knowledge production in the context of the development decade was furnished with a particular dimension of tourist imaginary that needs to be critically re-evaluated today. First, the recommendations in the reports were based on the premise of a so-called developing world in which development can only be achieved by a redistribution of wealth, not out of a country’s own potential. Not long after the 1960s, this idea would become one of the most heavily criticized assumptions in the development discourse, as it enshrines the developing country in its dependent position. Second, through tourism development, the conservation of cultural and natural heritage was introduced as a duty towards the economic development of a country. Cultural heritage and traditions, often perceived to be an obstacle to technical and social modernization needed for economic growth, were rendered into commodities, to be performed and displayed to tourists, thus transforming the role they played in the social fabric of local or national communities.
Within many countries, the tourist imaginary and the paternalistic, racist and classist development ideologies behind the missions were not far from the local ruling elites’ perspective on the people living at sites of potential tourist interest, and the experts assessment of what constitutes the country’s most relevant history did not differ much from the idea of those internationally well connected and educated elites. It would be desirable to further explore national development planning and the overall political context in all of the participating countries for a more in-depth comparison of the phenomenon.
Today, the development of heritage sites as global tourism destinations has turned the UNESCO World Heritage Programme into a powerful label seen as much as an opportunity for conservation as a guarantor for tourism marketing by national governments. This kind of cultural tourism development has opened up economic opportunities for remote local communities, for example in the Nepalese mountain regions or in the Central Amazon in Brazil. 93 However, it has also, in some places, infringed upon fundamental issues of indigenous rights. For the town of Lalibela, Marie Bridonneau has shown that heritage conservation and economic development have been utilized as ‘globalized imperatives’ for forced resettlement. 94
Tourism development is located in the tense spectrum between culture and folklore and ambiguous constellations of benefit and exploitation, an aspect largely neglected in the tourism development reports presented here. This renders the paradigms and images that were often at the root of a country’s tourism sector very questionable and consequently puts into questions today’s continued or renewed efforts to promote tourism industries. Today’s tourism development needs to be confronted with questions about where it is still operating on these premises and over who is harmed through that.
