Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union [1st ed. 2020] 978-981-15-0217-0, 978-981-15-0218-7

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction (Max Holleran)....Pages 1-12
Tourism and Europe’s Shifting Periphery: Post-Franco Spain and Post-Socialist Bulgaria (Max Holleran)....Pages 13-43
Coasts of Aspiration: Climbing the Tourism ‘Ladder’ (Max Holleran)....Pages 45-81
Leisure Spaces and the Aesthetics of Europe (Max Holleran)....Pages 83-108
Conclusion: Returning to Peripherality: The Social Experience of Urban Crisis (Max Holleran)....Pages 109-119
Back Matter ....Pages 121-124

Citation preview

Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union

Max Holleran

Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union “This original and timely book insists that we cannot see the crisis of the EU-modernization project only by looking at its institutional core. Emerging from a geographically ambitious project that explored the connections in cultures of leisure and tourism between southern and eastern Europe, this book charts the rise and fall of hopes of the development and convergence as a transnational and comparative story as seen from the continent’s peripheries.” —James Mark, Professor of History, University of Exeter

Max Holleran

Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union

Max Holleran School of Social and Political Sciences University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-981-15-0217-0    ISBN 978-981-15-0218-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0218-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

The early development of the European Union (EU) was a post-national project that was both political and economic: the EU was meant to bolster European democracy by de-intensifying nationalism, supporting the rule of law, and, most of all, opening internal borders to trade and migration. This book examines how the tourism industry played a key role in that mission as a means to reinvigorate laggard economies as well as a symbol of borderless Europe. Using the two successive cases of Spanish and Bulgarian democratization, integration into the EU, and rapid growth in mass tourism, the project examines how urbanization for tourism was encouraged by the EU cohesion process and how it was interpreted by local residents in coastal areas. Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union investigates the paradoxical place of tourism in urban economies through comparative case studies of Spain’s Costa Blanca, after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, and Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast after 1989. Drawing on participant observation in coastal communities in the two countries, 150 interviews with developers, architects, and tourism promoters, and analysis of a broad range of primary and secondary written sources, the book shows how intra-European tourism and EU-funded urbanization helped new democracies cast off previous conceptions of living on the political and economic edges of Europe. Local residents first interpreted the ludic spaces produced for tourists by state-developer partnerships as colorful signs of the end of political isolation. However, the economic and political crisis of 2008 profoundly undermined these cities’ v

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sense of European integration due to corruption, overbuilding, and environmental harm. In both cases, the aesthetics and international milieu of new leisure spaces, the rapid urbanization of rural lands, and the uneven enforcement of environmental policy were physical changes that were symbolically linked to the political forces of European integration and flows of visitors and capital. I develop the concept of ‘peripherality’ as a social experience while also tying it to the EU policy prerogative of creating post-national ‘Social Europe,’ a project currently in dismal condition. Emphasizing that the development of the EU has always been tied to a modernization drive of the near-periphery, fueled by the legacy of dictatorship and communism, I show how residents and those involved in the construction industry reacted to the dramatically changing built environment, both during boom years and after the onset of the 2008 sovereign debt crisis. The book adds to literature in urban sociology on the experience of living in rapidly growing ‘leisure cities’ with increasingly cosmopolitan demographics. While the work engages closely with the specificities of the European context, it speaks to the broader global tendency of cities to seek, in tourism and leisure, an elusive integration with hyper-competitive global markets. Melbourne, Australia

Max Holleran

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the faculty of the Sociology Department at New York University (NYU) where this book was born out of my dissertation. My committee members, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Craig Calhoun, and Lynne Haney, provided outstanding support in my development as a scholar and I am particularly thankful to my advisor, Eric Klinenberg, who shepherded this project to completion. I would also like to thank Iddo Tavory, Neil Brenner, Ruth Horowitz, Tom Sugrue, and George Schulman. I am indebted to the academic community who I worked and studied with at NYU, in particular my fellow graduate students: Daniel Aldana Cohen, Michael Gould-Wartofsky, Caitlin Petre, Anna Skarpelis, Hillary Angelo, Adaner Usmani, David Wachsmuth, Max Besbris, Shelly Ronen, Liz Koslov, Abigail Weitzman, Ned Crowley, Robert Taylor, Naima Brown, Jacob Faber, Michelle O’Brien, Adam Murphree, Ihsan Ercan Sadi, Hassan El Menyawi, and Francisco Vieyra. Also, thanks to Gordon Douglas, Becky Amato, Cristel Jusino Díaz, Cengiz Haksoz, Mariya Ivancheva, Diana Petkova, Sophie Gonick, Maria Veleva, and Orlin Manolov. I appreciate the editors of Contemporary European History, Radical History Review, and City & Society who have permitted the reprinting of materials that originally appeared in article form in those journals. I am exceedingly thankful for the gracious support of my friends who listened to my ideas and talked me through fieldwork: Julianne Chandler, David Sánchez Timón, Pedro Rodriguez, Alejandro Lopez, Lauren Roberts, Roy Kimmey, Elana Resnick, Brett Miller, Megan Lessard, Helen vii

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Mastache, Laura Graber, Ignacio Hinojosa, Seth Prins, and Sangita Vyas. The biggest thanks is for my family for their unwavering support: Tia Lessin, Carl Deal, Michael Holleran, James Grunberger, and Sam Holleran.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 Literature on World Systems, EU Studies, and Tourism  5 1.2 Tourism as a Transformative Factor of Peripherality  7 1.3 Methods  9 References 12 2 Tourism and Europe’s Shifting Periphery: Post-Franco Spain and Post-Socialist Bulgaria 13 2.1 Europeans Together at Last 16 2.2 The Mediterranean Emerges from Fascism, 30 Years Too Late 19 2.3 Spain’s Triumphant Re-emergence 21 2.4 Going East 27 2.5 From Socialist to Capitalist Tourism in Bulgaria 29 2.6 Reassessing Tourism and Urbanization as a Peripheral Growth Strategy 36 References 40 3 Coasts of Aspiration: Climbing the Tourism ‘Ladder’ 45 3.1 Introduction 45 3.2 The Grand Tour No More: Mass Tourism and the European Good Life 48 3.3 Spain Reopens Its Doors at Last 52 ix

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3.4 Up Goes Benidorm 56 3.5 The Tourism Ladder 61 3.6 From Visiting to Staying: The Rise of Residential Tourism 64 3.7 The Second Periphery: The Spanish Model Goes East, Bulgaria 1990–2008  67 3.8 Workers’ Paradise: The Black Sea as a ‘Red Riviera’ 69 3.9 Creating Global Beach Culture: Sunny Beach 72 3.10 Leisure and Reimagining the Nation at Europe’s Edges 75 References 78 4 Leisure Spaces and the Aesthetics of Europe 83 4.1 Introduction 83 4.2 Other European Urbanisms: Southern and Eastern European Underdevelopment 86 4.3 What Does Modernization Look Like? 91 4.4 Cities of Visitors: Sozopol, Bulgaria 94 4.5 The Town and the Sprawl: Tourist Suburbs in the Costa Blanca 99 4.6 Conclusion104 References106 5 Conclusion: Returning to Peripherality: The Social Experience of Urban Crisis109 5.1 The EU Torn Asunder 110 5.2 Post Post-Nationalism 113 5.3 Lessons from the Tourist City 116 References118 Index121

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 A holdout house surrounded by beachfront apartments on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast. (Photo by the author) 92 Fig. 4.2 New construction in the historic center of Sozopol. (Photo by the author) 96 Fig. 4.3 Fancifully designed hotel in the Black Sea city of Sinemorets. (Photo by the author) 97 Fig. 5.1 Mural in the city of Zaragoza reading ‘24% unemployed.’ (Photo by the author 2014) 115

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Introduction

Abstract  This first chapter examines coastal development for tourism in the European Union from the 1970s until shortly after the 2008 financial crisis. It shows how Spanish tourism development became a celebrated but problematic model for the European Union’s regional development strategy, and then analyzes how this approach was later employed in post-­ socialist Europe, using the case study of the Bulgarian Black Sea. It lays out why development for tourism is an economic strategy that is attractive to democratizing countries and how it came to be a defining feature of European Union cohesion in the 1990s and early 2000s, for symbolic as well as practical reasons. Keywords  Tourism • Bulgaria • Spain • Democratization In 2008, with the onset of the global financial crisis, Spain’s real estate market fell apart. Millions of homes were left half-finished or vacant; in major cities low-income owners were evicted by the thousands for mortgage default, and ‘white elephant’ projects, such as airports and cultural centers, sat unused despite the millions of euros in public debt saddled on cities. Given the spectacular burst of the real estate bubble in Spain, it is hard to remember that the country was once a model of European economic development and property played a starring role in that success © The Author(s) 2020 M. Holleran, Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0218-7_1

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story. During the 1990s, from Barcelona to Almería, swaths of homes and hotels were created for tourism using foreign capital and infrastructure subsidized by European Union (EU) regional development grants. These new peri-urban coastal strips took advantage of European cohesion policies to attract visitors, homebuyers, and investors. By the mid-1990s, this method of urbanization was so successful that it was dubbed “the Spanish Model” (López and Rodríguez 2011) and became a development strategy for other struggling European regions, most notably newly democratic Eastern Europe. I examine this diffusion, using the case of Bulgaria’s Black Sea, which rapidly became a low-cost destination in the late 1990s as the country attempted to discard the social, aesthetic, and economic effects of state socialism. This book shows how coastal property development shifted the narrative of European identity, from the 1980s until the financial crisis of 2008, in the Costa Blanca in Spain and the Black Sea in Bulgaria. The book develops the concept of European peripherality, poorer countries new to the union that joined later in the cohesion process and often also suffered from previous undemocratic government, in an explanation of how urban growth for tourism was a strategy deployed by new democracies to integrate into Europe: first used by Southern economies emerging from dictatorship in the 1980s, and then recycled by post-communist Eastern European states a decade later. The project examines this growth model from two perspectives: the institutional level of EU development policy and then, with greater detail, the personal experiences of those living in radically urbanized coastal communities in Spain and Bulgaria. Emphasizing that the development of the EU has always been tied to a modernization project of the periphery, the book shows how the defining edge of the Continent was first conceived of as the Mediterranean South and later as the post-socialist East. In both of these configurations, knowing where Europe ‘ended’ was vital to understanding its position in the post-colonial world and comprehending the task of European integration as a new form of economic governance. Emerging from very different kinds of dictatorship—one anchored on the Left, the other on the Right—Bulgaria and Spain aimed to become European in remarkably similar ways and with tragically analogous consequences of tourism overdevelopment. This book argues that real estate development for tourism was a defining feature of both the Mediterranean and post-socialist peripheries and residents experienced these new landscapes of leisure as a metaphor of induction into the European ‘core.’ It

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then traces the disintegration of this development model after 2008, when newly urbanized spaces became markers of stalled progress and a renewed delineation between Europe’s center and its ‘problematic edges.’ While other scholarly works have shown how the European Project is vulnerable at the Eastern and Southern edges for geopolitical and economic reasons, this project considers peripherality as a problem that can be located in actual urban spaces and that has been experienced socially. Using nearly three years of ethnographic participatory observation and 150 interviews, the book shows what the dream of European integration looked like on the ground. It analyzes how this dream was tied to a specific kind of urbanization that changed the social relationship with the built environment and provided a symbolic template by which to discuss Europeanness. Many of the infrastructure projects, supported by EU funds, attempted to revitalize rural areas through tourism development and, particularly, mass budget tourism to coastal areas—a strategy that became more popular as EU cohesion eliminated barriers to international travel. Since the 2008 crisis, it has become clear that EU cohesion helped to speed overdevelopment and degradation of the seashore because of abundant and badly used loans, credit, capital, and grants. In Spain, swaths of coastal development, with thousands of empty homes, are increasingly derided as physical examples of the European Union’s inability to incorporate the ‘edges.’ In Bulgaria, blatant disregard for the environment was a major catalyst for a national anti-corruption movement in 2013 that toppled the government after months of demonstrations and multiple self-­ immolations in protest of mafia involvement in politics. In both cases, the spectacle of coastal regions left with the detritus of failed construction projects and constant revelations of corruption and graft sparked social movements that questioned the efficacy of European cohesion and the sustainability of the tourist economy. Urban growth for tourism has been a constitutive experience of two separate peripheries and of the EU cohesion process as a whole. As Juan Díez Medrano states in Framing Europe (2010), each country that undergoes the cohesion process has a paradigmatic way of discussing integration. The general public and political elites in both Spain and Bulgaria used their tourism economies and changing coastlines as a synecdoche of the entire process of democratization. Yet, this symbol started to fall apart with the problematic role that property markets played in the 2008 crisis and was exacerbated by graft and environmental harm, which were innate characteristics of the model’s emphasis on fast urbanization with little

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oversight. In the years since the 2008 crisis, the overbuilt edges of Southern and Eastern Europe have become a moniker of defeated aspirations and the false hopes of a more integrated and prosperous Europe. This book will help scholars to understand how this symbolic shift occurred and why European cohesion has produced a distinct model of urbanization. In both the Spanish and Bulgarian cases, beach culture and the property boom of development for tourists heralded a new era of Europeanization in which their flagging industrial economies were transformed by loans and foreign investment. The rapid change of coastal areas became symbolic of modernization and progress for local residents, who were eager to see promised economic change after recent political transformation. Formerly rural locales opened their doors to fast-paced construction and attempted to attract visitors from the increasingly competitive European budget holidays market. Residents interpreted the arrival of wealthy visitors as a harbinger of a new era. In both the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, people believed that building up their tourism economies would make them into prosperous members of the European core. But land use and development would also become metaphors of a divided Europe, moving at two speeds: one, home to people who took beach holidays and owned second homes and, the other, perpetual hosts, or as an indignant Bulgarian informant put it: “forever bartenders, busboys, and towel folders.” This book examines the process of coastal urbanization to compare the integration of Southern and Eastern Europe into the EU economy, which privileged industrialization in core countries, like Germany, while urging the ‘edges’ of Europe to find new solutions for de-industrialization. The analysis of the EU policies of cohesion lays the foundation for a detailed ethnographic study of what this mass urbanization looked like on the ground in two successive peripheral areas. The growth of sprawling tourist cities fostered new and very different relationships between those living at the edges of Europe and the landscapes they grew up with, particularly because these changes came during times of political transition. Using extensive interviews and participant observation with architects, urban planners, property developers, politicians, and anti-growth activists, the book shows how the style and pace of coastal development was seen as a means to distinguish the present from the past. The pastel colors of leisure spaces and new beachfront cultural tropes of fun, sun, and sex were often regarded as important harbingers of abundance and economic betterment. In the case of 1980s Spain, these changes

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marked the end of Franco’s social order of militant Catholicism; in post-­ 1989 Bulgaria, capitalist beach culture came to represent the banishment of ‘second world’ leisure aesthetics from the coastline. In both cases, the construction of new, often brightly colored tourism strips was tied up with feelings of aspiration, political revolution, and European unity. The ethnographic sections of the book explore how this urban model was greeted by local residents and how it became a means to discuss changing notions of European identity. These chapters will also show how the very same spaces of ludic energy and promised prosperity slowly came to represent both inequality within the urbanizing coasts—where corruption and land grabbing were rife—and the persistent lack of economic leveling between the European core (who came to vacation) and the Eastern and Southern peripheries (who served them).

1.1   Literature on World Systems, EU Studies, and Tourism The question of what designates the ‘edge’ of Europe has been a motivating question among World Systems scholars and historical sociologists for a generation. For many scholars involved in World Systems Theory, the limits of the European Continent in the South and the East form a semi-­ periphery that has historically interacted with the world periphery of non-­ European regions and, most importantly, former colonies. The question of the semi-periphery is particularly important because, unlike colonial peripheries where raw materials are accrued, these spaces have often occupied more complex economies and the aspirations of “marcher states” (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). The semi-periphery is a place of mixed economies that not only combine the functions of the center (trade, manufacturing, and investment) and the periphery (agriculture and extraction of raw materials) but also mix social and political practices of center and periphery, sometimes acting as a mediator between the two zones. In the European context, the semi-periphery builds off of foundational historical research from the Annales School that emphasizes accounts of the importance of the Mediterranean region to European development (Braudel 1996) and later theories of evolving systems proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) and Giovanni Arrighi (1994). This section will not attempt an exhaustive account of the European semi-periphery as an evolving concept but rather will focus on the European Union and how

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it navigated two previous spatial and political configurations: post-­ dictatorial Southern Europe (Spain, Greece, and Portugal), using the case of Spain, and post-socialist Eastern and Central Europe, using the case of Bulgaria. These two forms of peripherality, Mediterranean and post-­ socialist, were the two central core-periphery dynamics operating in Europe during the era of intensified European cohesion that began in the 1980s and ended with the 2008 financial crisis. The European Union’s chronology tracks onto two important periods of geopolitical rearrangement that dramatically affected the relationship between the core and the semi-peripheries. First, the EU was founded as a French-German steel and coal agreement but the primary goal was always to use economic integration as a means to prevent future wars. The specter of fascism and World War II loomed large for early EU architects, such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. Creating an economic federation was a strategy that addressed underlying problems of nationalism and scale within Europe. A large trading block would reduce incentives for military conquest by bringing countries together through treaties and governing their relationship using the interplay of the free market. The belief that economic ties could forge political and social bonds was a motivating factor based in the optimism of Bretton Woods-era globalization as well as a paucity of other options. Second, correcting regional imbalances within the European Union and moving the peripheral economies closer to the living status of the European core became an issue starting in the 1950s and 1960s when attempts were made to improve infrastructure, water treatment, and sewage disposal in rural regions. The concept of distributive economic development between countries was seen as a means to creating macro-political stability but also a system to increase markets for products from the European core while helping to export the Northern European welfare state to Southern Europe, where it was regarded as immature or inchoate (Ferrera 2005). With the new concern for political stability came implicit goals of social and cultural modernization based on proper dwellings and hygiene for populations regarded as in need of tutelage from the European core of France, Germany, and the Benelux countries. As the European Union expanded, so did its mandate to correct regional economic inequality, first in countries in the Mediterranean South of Europe, that completed the EU accession process in the 1980s, and later in post-socialist Europe, after 1989 and until the present day. This process of development, while ostensibly economic, has always been paired

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with the encouragement of democratic governance, while also tracking onto pre-EU cultural ideas about the European peripheries. Peripheries were considered frontier regions in need of development as well as lessons in governing. Post-dictatorial Southern Europe and post-socialist Eastern Europe were viewed as insufficiently democratic in their respective eras of assimilation into the European Community and the project of supporting transitioning institutions became a paramount test for the ability of the European Community to play a role in both economic development and experimentation with new forms of governance. The meaning of the periphery also carried with it a range of connotations. Pervasive negative ideas of political instability and economic insufficiency were paired with earlier racialized ideas of social and cultural backwardness (a kind of intra-­ Continental Orientalism [Bakić-Hayden 1995]). Positive notions of frontiers as spaces of possibility also existed and many preferred to regard the edges of Europe as marching toward progress and freedom as well as lucrative market opportunities.

1.2   Tourism as a Transformative Factor of Peripherality Tourism as a point of contact between center and periphery has long been of interest to anthropologists but the importance of tourism as social and economic aspects of the center-periphery relationship has been understudied in the European context because of preexisting cultural contacts between hosts and guests. Part of the under-emphasis of this center-­ periphery dynamic arises from the absence of spectacular ‘first contact’ narratives popular in some literature on tourism. The relationship also lacks racial difference that has come to frame much of the anthropology of tourism. This lack of attention is also due to the fact that mass tourism, as a global phenomenon, is quite new and has not played a sizable role in the economy of any world system until after World War II (Rojek 1995; Urbain 2003). Yet, since then, mass leisure, and especially beachfront holidays, has emerged as one of the world’s largest industries (Becker 2013). The first expansion of this industry in the postwar era was to the liminal zones of the semi-periphery that were often reachable without air travel, had long existing ties with the European core, and enjoyed institutional forms and quality of public safety on par with wealthier core countries. Thus, the semi-periphery became a contact zone first settled for trade and

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mixed economies involving raw materials and agriculture but, later, after this basic form of geographic economic hierarchy was established, people from the center began to visit the semi-periphery, first as traders, then as administrators, and finally as travelers and tourists. With more frequent visits came popular ideas about racial, cultural, and religious hierarchies that separated the center from its semi-peripheries but many travelers viewed the near edges of their center as in a process of modernization. In the European context, travel to the edges of Europe has a long history and is well-recorded in European Studies as a means by which early Renaissance travelers came to form their imagination of the European World and place other powers into context, often using geographic and cultural schema to rationalize the form and extent of colonial domination that would be appropriate. Travelogues of wealthy young men often illuminated the ancient past of Southern Europe to contemporaries, creating a historical narrative in which the European North had technologically and industrially supplanted the South but should still honor the cultural legacy of Greece, Italy, and Spain through architecture and decorative arts (Chambers 2008). Eastern Europe also served as a cultural foil to Western Europe with many young men of means taking expeditions to the Balkans and Carpathians in the nineteenth century to locate true European village and peasant culture, a form of life seen to be disappearing in Northwestern Europe with industrialization and modernized farming (Wolff 1994). With the emergence of modern tourism in the nineteenth century, many more middle-class Europeans began to explore the edges of their own countries, such as the boom in beachfront tourism in Brighton, England, but few had the means to safely and comfortably reach the semi-periphery of Southern or Eastern Europe. Yet, this began to change as rail connections improved in the early twentieth century and a larger international leisure culture traveled to spa towns, the coast of Southern France, and Italian cities. By 1900, holidays were internationalized on a continental basis and the leisure industry became increasingly more competitive between countries and regions. The prewar relationship between the center and the near-periphery, formed in the industry of mass tourism, often involved building increased economic connections between the two zones while denying the cultural importance of these connections. As transportation links were fortified, banking services were made more available, and foreign capital was funding development projects, many officials in tourism-based economies simultaneously marketed their regions as pure, exotic, or unchanging. The

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process of exoticizing locals for visitors is often not just to highlight untrammeled nature but also to show a version of cultural authenticity that has supposedly been lost in the visitors’ home countries (Clifford 1997). This is somewhat evident in the European semi-periphery in which the fishermen of Naples or Cossacks of Russia serve as the Europeans of the past; they are still members of the wider ethno-religious cultural group but they are lost in time. Later, as tourism was made increasingly global in the 1960s, through more available intercontinental air travel, the contact zone would widen, geographically distributing the search for past and cultural authenticity (Urbain 2003). This became increasingly problematic as travelers from the center visited the postcolonial periphery and incorporated racial difference and tribal cultures into elaborately fetishized narratives of authenticity, development, and civilization (MacCannell 2013 [1976]). In the early to mid-twentieth century, the European semi-­ periphery, in both Southern and Eastern Europe, served as a testing ground for these interactions, often using religious and ethnic categorizations of intra-European groups as a template for classification of non-­ European peoples. Lastly, visits to Europe’s edges often came at the same time as those edges were undergoing other profound economic changes independent of tourism. Visitors flocked to Naples and Athens in the 1950s at the same time as those cities were undergoing vast transformations in housing modernization, infrastructure development, and consolidation of agricultural, fishing, and shipping economies. In many ways, the urge to visit the edges of Europe and to market tourism in these places was a rush to explore authentic spaces on the eve of their transformation. The European Community’s advocacy of tourism that started in the 1960s was a development policy meant to spur investment and modernization in Southern Europe that would make places deemed ‘romantically stuck in time’ more like the European center. Thus, success in the tourism industry often meant marketing that which was meant to be ameliorated: picturesquely decaying stucco buildings, fishermen mending their own hand-woven nets, and rural farmers plowing their field with oxen.

1.3   Methods This project uses ethnography, broadly understood, to track the explosion of property development for tourism in Spain and Bulgaria before and after the financial crisis of 2008. It is based on one year of fieldwork on

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Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast (2012–2013) as well as one year on the Costa Blanca (2013–2014). It is also aided by a previous year spent living in Sofia, Bulgaria, working at the University of Sofia as a Fulbright Scholar researching the contentious process of housing restitution after 1989 (2008–2009). The book makes use of 150 interviews conducted with professionals involved in the urban development process or those affected by urban development for tourism. Those contacted for interviews were primarily involved in regulation at the municipal level through departments of urban planning. Others were environmental activists, architects, property developers, real estate agents, second homeowners, lawyers, tourism promoters, and journalists writing about development. By far the largest number of people interviewed were urban planners (63), followed by second homeowners, architects, and anti-development/environmentalist activists. Some of those interviewed fit into multiple categories. They were recruited either through existing contacts, using online searches, social media groups based on urban growth issues, or by recommendation of past participants using a snowball sampling technique. While the interviews used in the book help to establish how tourist cities were built and managed, the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Costa Blanca and the Black Sea was aimed at determining how these new spaces were experienced by average residents. During two years of fieldwork, I spoke with local residents within spaces of daily life, such as plazas, grocery stores, bars and restaurants, gyms, beach promenades, and shopping malls, about their views on development. I was deeply aided by cultural openness toward strangers inherent in tourism communities as well as the spatial configurations of the places I was studying, where public space and plazas are visited daily and retain a central role in both cultures despite new development that often seeks to create more private space. I was also aided by the timetable of the tourism economy in which many people are constantly working but also waiting. The nature of service sector jobs (servers at restaurants, shopkeepers, sporadically employed tour guides, and real estate brokers with scattered appointments) allowed for me to dip into people’s lives and during daytime hours and to find them ready and willing to talk at length without interrupting their work schedules. Finally, community members who I spoke to about development often insisted that I hear both sides of the tourism development debate, frequently referring me to a friend

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or neighbor who they had disagreed with in the past and urging me to speak with that person next. All of the names of interviewees have been replaced with pseudonyms. The interviews were conducted in Bulgarian, Spanish, and English (although most Bulgarian informants were interviewed in English or a mixture of English and Bulgarian). Methodologically, the project is multi-­ sited (Hannerz 2003) and also includes structured interviews and archival research. Through participant observation with informants involved in debates over coastal urbanization, the book assesses the current discussion around urban growth while also reconstructing the recent past (the processes of democratization in both countries that began in Spain [in 1975] and in Bulgaria [in 1989]). Using interviews, court cases, press stories, and documents from architecture and development firms, the book examines how debates around growth often invoked the concepts or Europeanness and peripherality, particularly what styles were proper for representing new European leisure spaces (Rojek 1995; Judd 2002). Ethnographic fieldwork adds to the historical chapters of the book in order to establish the ways that different stakeholders in the development process attempted to harness ‘proper Europeanness’ to advocate for particular styles and speed of development as well as financial and environmental regulation. The two cases were not selected for absolute parity but in order to show the ways that tourist-oriented growth became a widely used model for economic development in a number of countries where the real estate sector grew in economic importance (Degen and García 2012). The interview-­based fieldwork with those working in urban development helps to establish how property, and particularly spaces of leisure, not only became essential to the macroeconomic health of many peripheral EU countries but also became symbols of economic cohesion and interconnectedness. However, new spaces gained symbolic currency in different ways and sometimes illustrated extremely contradictory trends. Some groups saw these spaces as goldmines of investment that would bring a sorely needed reorientation in public opinion about the economic possibilities of the periphery while others viewed them as models of corruption and environmental recklessness. The ethnographic and interview portions of this study help to parse out these views and deliver a detailed picture of how different narratives about space and national change were used first in the Costa Blanca and later in the Black Sea Coast.

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References Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso. Bakić-Hayden, Milica. 1995. Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review 54 (4): 917–931. Becker, Elizabeth. 2013. Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism. New York: Simon & Schuster. Braudel, Fernand. 1996. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 1. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chambers, Iain. 2008. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Thomas D.  Hall. 1997. Rise and Demise: Comparing World Systems. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Degen, Mónica, and Marisol García. 2012. The Transformation of the ‘Barcelona Model’: An Analysis of Culture, Urban Regeneration and Governance. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (5): 1022–1038. Ferrera, Maurizio. 2005. Welfare State Reform in Southern Europe: Fighting Poverty and Social Exclusion in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. London; New York: Routledge. Hannerz, Ulf. 2003. Being there … and there … and there!: Reflections on Multi-­ Site Ethnography. Ethnography 4 (2): 201–216. Judd, Dennis R. 2002. The Infrastructure of Play: Building the Tourist City. New York: Routledge. López, Isidro, and Emmanuel Rodríguez. 2011. The Spanish Model. New Left Review 69 (June): 5–29. MacCannell, Dean. 2013. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Medrano, Juan Díez. 2010. Framing Europe: Attitudes to European Integration in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rojek, Chris. 1995. Decentring Leisure Rethinking Leisure Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Urbain, Jean-Didier. 2003. At the Beach. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Tourism and Europe’s Shifting Periphery: Post-Franco Spain and Post-Socialist Bulgaria

Abstract  This chapter shows how the efforts to spur cohesion between the wealthier European core and the poorer periphery yielded thriving property markets due to infrastructure grants, dismantling of foreign investment barriers, and increased international tourism. Coastal tourism spaces were particularly attractive because of the early Spanish success at re-orienting the economy using tourism and construction in the late Franco years. Much of this growth was also an effort, started by the European Community in the 1980s, to shore up post-dictatorial societies in Southern Europe by improving their economies in the hopes of nurturing fledgling democratic institutions. This model was then used in post-­ socialist Europe, illustrated in this chapter using the case of Black Sea tourism in post-socialist Bulgaria. This chapter shows that the grant-­ making process for infrastructure loans always had political goals but that these goals often went unrealized after economic priorities were achieved. Keywords  EU cohesion • Tourism • Development grants • Post-socialism Europe was in a confident mood in 1992 as the Maastricht Treaty was signed.1 The shock of 1989 and the quick crumbling of the Iron Curtain seemed less of a threat to internal stability, and more of an opportunity to © The Author(s) 2020 M. Holleran, Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0218-7_2

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tighten the bonds between East and West that had frayed during a ­half-­century of communism. The signatories to the Agreement were eager to use the moment to push for greater European integration, having worked for a decade to secure the political compromises necessary to bring the process of cohesion into ‘second gear.’ They saw economic cohesion— based on regional trade, tax codes, and, most notably, the creation of the common currency—as the most convenient and efficacious means to move toward political union. Officials saw economic treaties as both an easier goal than political cohesion and also a catalyst for future governmental reforms (Parsons 2006). When the euro was created at Maastricht, it was intended to signify not just a more muscular, quicker-moving European Union (EU) but also the extension of regional development commitments to potential member countries of the East. This chapter offers a perspective on how EU regional development policy moved from the economic support of the Mediterranean, in the 1980s, to Eastern Europe, in the late 1990s, using the growth strategies of infrastructure improvement and urbanization to bolster tourism. The search for post-industrial economic possibilities became a key part of regional development policy: first, in post-dictatorship Spain, Portugal, and Greece and, later, in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Drawing on neo-­ functionalist arguments regarding the EU’s transition from economic to political cooperation (Schmitter 2000), this chapter argues that Spain’s economic ascent in the 1980s and 1990s served as a model for EU regional development policy and gave a special primacy to urban development and the burgeoning tourism industry (García 2010). Tourism, as a distinct area of economic interest, followed the neo-functionalist philosophy of discrete methods of integration in markets that would in turn create networks that would later mobilize for non-commercial forms of cooperation (Rosamond 2000). Using the case of Bulgaria in the 1990s and early 2000s, the chapter shows that the EU re-deployed strategies tested in Spain in an effort to invigorate tourism markets and improve infrastructure in post-socialist Eastern Europe, where land reform and property development were quintessential aspects of post-socialism. Both Spain and Bulgaria had a pre-democratic move toward the tourism economy that tracks onto attempts of the two regimes to liberalize. In Franco’s Spain, the industry was part of modest political and economic reforms in the 1960s meant to reconnect with democratic Europe. During the same period, the Bulgarian Communist Party, led by Todor Zhivkov, used Black Sea tourism for Warsaw Pact countries (along with limited

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visitors from Western Europe) to provide foreign currency. Yet, both ­countries’ tourism industries achieved a greater economic scale during the democratization process and, because improvement of the tourism economy took place during times of political transition, it became associated with cultural openness and the strengthening of pan-European political and economic ties. Drawing on secondary historical sources and, to a lesser extent, interviews with policymakers, economists, tourism promoters, and property developers, the chapter examines urban development for tourism as an often used regional development strategy for two different, chronologically successive peripheries. New spaces of leisure, such as coastal strips of hotels and second homes, were often publicly associated with European cohesion (Urbain 2003). Starting in the 1990s, multinational construction companies, hotel chains, and tourism conglomerates prospered in both Mediterranean and Eastern Europe making the public-private infrastructure investment strategy, pioneered in Spain, a lasting EU development method. While the 2008 crisis has re-problematized regional incorporation, a shared sense of post-­ authoritarian sequential incorporation into the European Union in Southern and Eastern Europe persists (Linz 1996). It has created a development narrative that articulates notions of Europeanness drawing on tourism as a common trope of modernization as well as democratization (Rojek 1995). This ideology, which began in the early Mediterranean periphery of the European Community, took on new resonance in post-­ socialist Europe where recreating private property markets was a paramount concern of newly democratic governments. However, both Southern and Eastern Europe struggled with overdevelopment and corruption in the construction industry and the 2008 crisis has raised questions about the effectiveness and environmental costs of the tourism development model. The chapter ends by showing how this development logic comes from a long history of Western European countries viewing the Southern and Eastern peripheries as incompletely European due to poverty and underdevelopment, a problem of EU solidarity exacerbated by conflicts arising from the 2008 economic crisis (Wallerstein 2004; Anderson 2009). It also reflects on the more general global trend of peripheries drawn into commercial relationships with regional political-­ economic centers of power, often ending in disappointment for countries on the ‘edges’ when development promises are not met or end in environmental or social conflict (Wallerstein 2004).

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2.1   Europeans Together at Last One of the major achievements of the European Economic Community (EEC), before passing the Maastricht Agreement, was the solidaristic development of Mediterranean Europe in the 1980s when wealthier Northern countries began supplying infrastructure development grants to their poorer Southern neighbors (Judt 2006). The level of expenditure, number of programs, and intricacy of their institutional architecture made it clear to those in the European Community that wealthy countries would henceforth treat developing countries in Europe as if they were struggling regions within their own nation (Parsons 2006). This strategy had the effect not just of alleviating regional inequality but also of mollifying EU critics by demonstrating that EU cohesion would seek to build, protect, and spread basic tenets of welfare state society rather than promote economic liberalization and state divestment (Gamble 1994). To the delight of the postwar political class, nationalism seemed to be waning in some countries and spending across the European Community served as a basic litmus test of continental solidarity. The expert-led European Regional Development Fund (ERDF; established in 1975) quickly exceeded member countries’ individual preference for lower spending and disbursed funds following a Keynesian model of economic stimulus via large long-­ term grants (Marks et al. 1996). Yet, some regions became more adept at attracting consecutive grants, while others never developed the local political capacity to effectively petition for support. The general theme of regional policy, starting as far back as the Werner Plan in 1969 (which first made the case for monetary union), was maturation: Mediterranean countries would need significant assistance to create infrastructure and institutions that would develop the economic health necessary for monetary integration. Neo-functionalist critics have derided this pathway as overly simplistic and willfully blind to the ways in which EU nations followed their own interests while pursuing cohesion, particularly wealthier export-driven economies in the EU core (Scharpf 1999). However, many political scientists and EU policymakers have emphasized sacrifice and solidarity between regions and countries as a major ideal and reality behind European cohesion, beyond a simple search for regional stability (Judt 2006). EU policymakers often saw regional cohesion as an evolving project that started in Southern Europe but faced its real test in Eastern Europe, starting in the 1990s and continuing to the present. Indeed,

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just three weeks before the Berlin Wall fell (17 October 1989) Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission, attempted to persuade an audience at the College of Europe that a new era of regional cooperation must be embraced and, like in Southern Europe, what was needed was vast amounts of money: The European Community, and the peoples and nations that it encompasses, will exist truly only if it has the means to defend its values and to apply them for the benefit of all, in short, to be generous… And, Ladies and Gentlemen, if I insisted so much on the Institutions it is very simply because the matter is urgent. History does not wait. Given the major upheavals experienced by the world today, and more particularly by the other ‘Europes’, it is essential for the Community, made strong by renewed dynamism, to reinforce its cohesion and to set objectives commensurate with the challenges that History recently confronted us with. (Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance de l’Europe 1989)

Delors used the idea of ‘other Europes’ (meant primarily to refer to European countries behind the Iron Curtain) to emphasize the EU, not as an entity but as a process. This process began as a modernization drive in post-dictatorial Portugal, Spain, and Greece—bearing some resemblance to French colonial infrastructure modernization projects in North Africa—but, in contrast, fielding the idea of the manageable European semi-­periphery unlike the untenable and outmoded colonial development projects in the world periphery (Rabinow 1995). Delors felt that this ethos of dual political and economic development had to be reaffirmed in order to assist and absorb post-socialist Europe. The task of strengthening the poorer and less stable ‘Europes’ was primarily a fiscal and technocratic task but, one can assume, this economic project would have a major political reward. The identification of ‘other Europes’ is also an extension of the concept of ‘peripherality’ in which a European nucleus—based in the Benelux countries, France, Italy, and Germany— offers tutelage and material resources to the ‘edges’ of Europe. Finally, it is not incidental that economic support was linked to political stability at the exact same moment as war and ethnic conflict were erupting in the former Yugoslavia. Early efforts at EU integration were encouraged by two interconnected logics of development. The first was the belief that wealthier European nations had the obligation to fund and help manage the development of

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their poorer Mediterranean neighbors. The second was the conviction that the welfare state was the greatest triumph of postwar politics and that the only means to protect it, in an era of rapid globalization, was by internationalizing it as a pan-European commitment (Moyn 2012). This meant regional economies would have to be liberalized and combined in order to avoid more severe effects from non-regional forces in the US and Asia. Integration was a fiscal imperative that mended together two contradictory logics: the economic liberalization advocated for by Milton Friedman (and gustily taken up by Reagan and Thatcher) and distributive goals of the social-democratic welfare state more common in continental Europe. While advocates of these two competing economic philosophies found cooperation difficult both saw their own priorities reflected in greater European integration and both sides hoped to best their competitor in the actual logistics of the integration process. Until the 1992 signing of the Maastricht Treaty, the solidarity of EU members was most often expressed through the commitment of structural funds to address regional inequality. This was mostly a North-South transfer (with the exception of the first years of German re-integration and Ireland). Members such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands shouldered the burden of infrastructural development in Southern Europe. An early and notable success was a partnership with the Italian government in Rome to bankroll and supervise extensive modernization of roads, water treatment, public housing, and essential infrastructure in historically poor Southern Italy. This plan, called La Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, was initiated in 1950 and wrapped up by the mid-1980s. It was hailed as a critical success for the EEC, which had previously focused on trade agreements, because international experts built a great deal in what was (and perhaps still is) a region singularly known for official corruption and mafia influence. The achievements of this endeavor buoyed the EEC despite the challenging economic environment of the 1980s and focused many politicians to the task of using the funding, expertise, and public-private model advocated by Brussels. Increasingly, the EEC saw itself as an important conduit for development funds to be used for the specific purpose of urbanization and modernization of infrastructure. While its policies in the European core, specifically Germany, stressed industrial modernization and more aggressive competition with the US through expanded internal markets, its policies in the periphery were often focused on transport and infrastructure development for the growing industry of tourism (Walton 2011).

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2.2   The Mediterranean Emerges from Fascism, 30 Years Too Late When the EEC began contemplating ways to develop Europe’s national and regional economies more evenly in the 1980s they combined two goals. The first was to ameliorate the Continent’s historically varying degrees of development between North and South, through enormous development grants. The second was to promote good governance and to prevent any country from embracing dictatorship or euro-communism. The latter was primarily an issue in Italy where the Italian Communist Party had many impressive electoral victories in the 1970s, but the former applied to the entire swath of Mediterranean Europe, which had been governed by military dictatorships. Portugal, Greece, and Spain started the 1980s as newly—but shakily—democratic countries. Developing these countries’ economies was thought of as a political necessity to ensure a solid fiscal path to democratic statehood. Officials at the highest level of the European Community believed that economic development would promote civil society and prevent the formation of weak states susceptible to military coup, authoritarian leadership, or electoral victories for the Communist Party (Berman 2006). Spain is the most important model in this trio because of the length of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and the sheer amount of funding that Spain received from the EEC.2 All of the Mediterranean, including Spain, was developed using a strategy that emphasized drastic improvement of aging infrastructure, compromises by organized labor, and a shift in focus from manufacturing to tourism and services. The EEC was also deeply invested in creating credit economies in Southern Europe, where they had not previously been strong or existed at all. This occurred at the level of both the individual borrower—who was encouraged to consume more—and the state, which was given a line of credit and grants to make long-awaited urban improvements. Spain, and much of the rest of Mediterranean Europe, started the 1970s as economic and political outcasts. While France had enjoyed the trente glorieuses, Spain’s economy was moribund, its dictator infirm but still in control, and its political class soaked in the radically conservative Catholicism of Opus Dei. Like Portugal and Greece, dictatorship had partially severed Spain’s political ties with the rest of Western Europe and military rule had stifled economic growth due to mismanagement and lack of cooperation from wary neighbors. When Spain did ratify a democratic constitution in 1978, Brussels expanded every relevant institution to

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s­upport development grants, loans, and other forms of assistance to the new government, particularly modernization of rail and highway networks (Crespo MacLennan 2000). Development of Southern European economies was accepted as an important enough mission that it was worth a sizable regional wealth transfer which took place during the economic uncertainty of the early 1980s. However, due to Germany’s preeminence in industrial production and technology, the European ‘center’ tended to encourage Southern European countries to look beyond industry and manufacturing as areas for investment. This was not simply a German-backed means to limit internal competition, as EU trade barriers went down, but a very real economic forecast about the viability of manufactured products from Southern Europe given Asian and North American competition. For this reason, EU funds were often deployed to stimulate the growth sectors of tourism, housing, and urban modernization. In this sense, the global dimension of EU economic integration was a form of ‘soft’—or regional and thereby incomplete—globalization coupled with modest compromises from organized labor. While a specific variety of tourism development, which prioritized regional travel and investment, flourished in the 1980s, it reflected the global growth of the industry and its propensity to seek out public-­ private investment strategies (Zuelow 2016). During the 1980s, Spain became a unique example of how European cohesion could jumpstart a languishing economy and how the dismantling of barriers to international investment and travel could dramatically change Mediterranean Europe economically, socially, and physically. Paradoxically, this strategy had already begun in the late Franco years, when the combination of tourism and construction became a well-­ regarded antidote to industrial malaise. By the early 1980s, cities like Málaga, Benidorm, and Alicante exploded with new hotels, coastal resorts, and entertainment facilities as well as growing populations brought from interior provinces for jobs. Spain’s successes, given its considerable national size, were hailed widely and soon had economic ministers visiting from all corners of the globe (Degen and García 2012). Tourism made good fiscal sense given a long history of Northern Europeans coming south. The warm climate along with the promise of easier travel between countries, with the dismantling of borders, helped a truly mass tourism culture emerge in Europe that was being internationalized more and more each year (especially with the deregulation of national airline monopolies in the 1990s and the emergence of value airlines).

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Southern European countries were particularly excited by tourism development because it fit into a popular narrative of virtuous economic advancement, in which regions could start at the ‘bottom’ of mass tourism and—using skills, infrastructure, and investment accrued during this stage—could build modern economies. In post-socialist Eastern Europe, a decade later, this ideology would be even more triumphantly embraced because of the symbolism of tourism development as a return to the norms of private ownership and the physical freedom to travel internationally (Gorsuch and Koenker 2006). In this development narrative, the social and environmental effects of tourism pay off because they lead to international investment and transferrable skills that can be used in a future knowledge economy. A 1987 article, in an Australian newspaper, about the dramatic success of the Spanish tourism industry makes this progression, as well as its significant risks, clear in discussing mass tourism: “Indeed as an agent of social change and an economic force in Spain, tourism cannot be overestimated… It is a tribute to the strength of the Spanish character that the scale of tourism in the country has not caused tremendous havoc, especially on the beach resorts along the costas” (McCathie 1987). Leisure spaces—like umbrella-dotted beaches filled with cheerful tourists from a variety of countries—were popular symbols of the post-Franco success narrative and as a formerly repressive and closed society the search for examples that mixed cultural with political change was a top priority for national re-branding to the wider European public (Aronczyk 2013). As the 1980s progressed, tourism came to serve as a synecdoche of the entire country’s recent political and economic history.

2.3   Spain’s Triumphant Re-emergence Spain became a model of how to acquire and spend EEC development grants in the 1980s by harnessing the Franco-era tourism industry and scaling up the size of resorts with foreign investment.3 At the same time that tourism was being touted, the socialist government of Felipe González agreed to policies that ignored industrial development in favor of leisure, services, and real estate (López and Rodríguez 2011). Underinvestment and lack of modernization had left many factories in poor condition and regional leaders saw infrastructure for tourism—including new roads, trains, and airports—as essential to their survival. Many regions, such as Andalusia, had consigned themselves to agricultural production and out-­ migration to cities during the Franco era. EEC investment funds threw

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these regions an economic lifeline and both the conservative Partido Popular and the socialists (Partido Socialista Obrero Español or PSOE) used structural grants as means to win favor and solidify their power within regions and provinces. As Spanish regions were empowered with access to new EEC funding they also demanded more autonomy in political affairs, which had long been suppressed by Franco (Moreno 2013). This new regional independence gave places like Valencia and Andalusia (and, more notably, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Catalonia) increased leeway to operate without financial oversight from Madrid, but also entered them into competition with each other to attract foreign investment, EEC grants, visitors, and, increasingly, homebuyers and semi-permanent residents. Tourism and construction began in earnest in Spain during the late 1950s when Franco realized that the economic isolation of the previous two decades would lead to catastrophic fiscal repercussions (Pack 2006). The EEC, the US State Department, and the World Bank all sought recognition of the growing interdependence between Spain and the rest of Western Europe. In 1962, the World Bank published a report stating that a major way forward for Spain would be through tourism, an economic shift already supported by reformers in the Franco government like Manuel Fraga (who served as the Minister of Tourism and was a key figure in softening the dictator’s negative image to other European countries) (Velarde 1994). The political reward for this reform was the right to host the UN World Tourism Organization’s (UNWTO) conference in 1966 and the eventual permanent relocation of UNWTO to Madrid the year of Franco’s death (1975). When democracy came to the Iberian Peninsula in the 1970s, members of the European Community commenced offering infrastructure grants. In short order, Spain’s rural regions were transformed by modern highways that increasingly carried summer holidaymakers from France, Belgium, and Germany. Northern Europeans were initially attracted to Valencia, Catalonia, and Andalusia because of its rural charm and a sense of timelessness (Crespo MacLennan 2000). However, this began to change as regional developers, enriched by the growth of the tourism industry and better access to credit, built new hotels and resorts. Cities like Benidorm, on the Costa Blanca, quickly sported international hotel chains and tourism facilities and were embarking on further infrastructure projects, such as rail and airports, using newly available loans. The physical transformation of touristic coastal areas also cannot be overstated: by the early 1990s, Benidorm had more high-rises than Madrid.

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The first disbursements of European Regional Development Funds (ERDF) that began to reach Spanish regions in the late 1980s were earmarked almost entirely (98.24%) for infrastructure development because improvement of manufacturing was not a priority. Poor regions, such as Andalusia, were the main beneficiaries and many of the funds were spent on projects ostensibly aimed at local residents but also meant to bolster the tourism economy. Of the 1987 budget, 39% of the total assistance for Spain was directed to projects in Andalusia, the most substantial of which was the modernization of Málaga airport, an essential piece of tourism infrastructure (Commission of the European Communities 1987). At the same time, the socialist government was trying to maintain the velocity of the rising tourism industry by decentralizing it to the regional level, where autonomous regional governments could work with hoteliers to improve quality (Aranda and Martínez 2015). Starting in the early 1990s, ERDF funds began to directly contribute to tourism as well as to continue to support tourism-related infrastructure. Tourism was the second largest category of ERDF funds that received additional private investment and investments began to mushroom, such as in Valencia where funding for tourism went over budget by 235% in 1994 assisting 1456 private firms (Centro de Estudios Económicos Tomillo 1999). The enormity of the European loans, which were several billion US dollars a year in the 1980s, increased the likelihood of garnering support from more voters at the regional level through savvy disbursement of funds by local politicians. Grants from the European Community provided funds for regional politicians to solidify their clientelistic networks and local power bases. The transformation of the coasts from fishing and agricultural hamlets was bemoaned by few who still remembered the post-­Civil War days of intense poverty. Many saw, in the rapid construction of hotels and homes, a confirmation that Spain was ‘rejoining’ Europe. Little dissent existed because residents of depopulating formerly rural areas saw the tourism economy as a change that could help stem out-migration of young people and bring economic resources. By 1985, tourism accounted for 10.5% of the national economy and tourism offices were being opened as far away as Toronto. Just two years later, when Spain was enjoying its first year in the European Community, tourism brought in $12.05 billion (1985 US dollars) and lured 47.3 million visitors—numbers that held steady and were expanded through the 1990s (Martin 1985). Much of this booming sector was thanks to European Community (EC)-funded highways and airports that took people to their destinations. The perceived largesse of development

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funds confirmed, for many, that wealthier Europeans were committed to Spain’s progress, even if they had to foot the bill. As North-South tourism became a seasonal way of life, many developers also began to court wealthier Europeans, from the ‘center,’ to buy second homes on the shores of Spain. These semi-permanent residents often kept their primary homes in England, the Netherlands, or Germany, while using a second flat for vacations and, increasingly, retirement. The mixing of Northern and Southern Europeans often took place through the construction of enclaves in formerly rural areas. Yet, the social pressure of new foreign residents was kept at bay by the robustness of the Spanish economy and the improved quality of life amongst the rural poor, not to mention the social isolation of semi-permanent residents who often had little interaction with local communities. Indeed, on both levels, institutional and social, it seemed that European cohesion was working: Spain was modernizing and political stability was slowly being achieved, while outsiders were expressing their confidence about the country through frequent visits and purchasing property. There were, of course, speed bumps. In 1981, renegade soldiers entered the national parliament, shot up the central chamber, and demanded a return to military leadership. While the golpe de estado was narrowly avoided and democracy was preserved, this instance demonstrated to the European Community the need for a continued role in the political and economic development of the Mediterranean, which was, to Brussels, simply two sides to a single coin. A means to accomplish this was opening the country to other European visitors and building new spaces of leisure—bright cheery beachfront paradises—that symbolized a future free of want or hardship. Spain has also long been a country of property owners rather than renters (supported by Franco’s conviction that owners do not become proletarianized) and by the early 1980s ownership was at over 70% (Naredo 2010; Allen et al. 2004). Investment in creating new housing and second homes for Spaniards, as well as foreign residents, was regarded as an economic goal with a strong secondary social purpose of creating an ownership society that was less likely to be radicalized. The second home market grew dramatically in the last years of Franco and continued to grow through the 1990s: in 1970, when the Franco regime turned forcefully to the tourism market, second homes made up 7.4% of the housing stock, in 1981 the number had jumped to 12.9%, and by 2000 it was 16% and still growing—one of the highest rates in the world (Allen et al. 2004). The European Community supported this project by making credit readily

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available: first, through the trickle down of regional grants, which improved local economies and expanded the number of dwellings, and, later, on the private level via the vastly cheaper credit granted to euro-area members. Improving housing stock through infrastructure grants was an important goal of the Spanish Right to promote political stability but also for the Left, who saw the expansion of homeownership as a means to bolster the working class during a time of industrial decline. The European Community, inspired by the privatization campaign of council flats in Great Britain by Margaret Thatcher, concurred that expanding homebuying was an important induction into the credit economy which was lacking in Southern Europe and generally complemented the already thriving tourism construction business. Lastly, while homeownership was lauded as a stabilizing mechanism for the middle class in Spain, it also served as a speculative tool as more families bought coastal second homes to rent out during the tourist-saturated Spanish summers. Indeed, this practice became so successful that many foreign nationals bought multiple second homes in coastal Spain for personal use and leasing for profit during prime tourism months. By the time the Berlin Wall fell and Europe’s attention turned to the fate of the East, Spain had already established itself as a developmental role model and not just for Europe but for the world: hotels were full, sun and sangria holidays had begun to shift toward older more prosperous cultural tourism, and Barcelona had been selected as the site for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games beginning a decade of extensive construction for mega-­ events (González 2011). Previously, the perpetually unfinished spires of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia had symbolized Spanish lethargy, as many visitors liked to smugly comment: “the mañana mentality” characterized work culture. By the 1990s, new suburbs, rows of coastal hotels, and the frantically beach-ified industrial waterfront represented Barcelona to the world. Behind the facade of this tourism paradise lurked the potential for economic instability, due to homogenizing economic output into tourism and construction, overly liberal personal and public credit lines, and environmental damage. Overbuilding was also made far more probable by the passage of the 1998 national land use law that dramatically liberalized the procedure for developers to construct new suburbs and coastal vacation communities. Spain’s post-Franco regionalism also decentralized the state, often creating problematic alliances between clientelistic regional politicians, with control over zoning and EU funds at their disposal, and local property developers.

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Yet, as the physical landscape changed from olive groves to five-star hotels, and incomes responded accordingly, these factors were given little thought by elected officials. The miracle of the Spanish tourism market, much of which was aided by billions of Deutschmarks in development grants, had emerged as an economic force spoken about in cultural terms. Mass tourism shifted to more lucrative and less environmentally damaging cultural, heritage, and gastronomic tourism. During just the first years of the 1990s, Spain hosted the Olympics in Barcelona and the World Expo in Seville, and saw the first Guggenheim Museum franchise opened in Bilbao. The success at attracting major funding to the de-industrializing city of Bilbao was so pronounced that the New York Times architecture critic entitled his effusive article “The Miracle in Bilbao” (Muschamp 1997). These projects were not only greeted as good news by investors but they were also hailed by the local residents as a sign of the growing economic and cultural clout of the country that had done so well in the business of mass tourism that it could now climb to the upper echelons of the industry. Increasingly, EU grants went to projects that promised innovation in the tourism industry through the niche markets of heritage or art. With a growing reputation as a fine arts and culinary destination, there was an element of ‘cultural uplift’ in the evolving industry that would bring wealthier visitors as well as cement the new image of Spain as a place for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) travelers rather than just an inexpensive option for abundant sun and cheap drinks. The changing nature of the tourism industry also took place at a time when the general profile of Spain as an EU member state was transforming from a poor Southern neighbor to an equal partner in the European future with a robust economy and stable democratic institutions. Indeed, in just 15 years, Spain had been transformed from a European bette noire, in danger of relapse into military dictatorship, to a bon enfant that the rest of Europe and the world was pining to visit and invest in. This transformation, which was echoed in the rest of the Mediterranean periphery, elevated Spain from the category of the ‘other Europe’ to a central player that could be used as an example for the Eastern periphery on economic and political advancement, as well as on-the-ground support from eager construction firms (Manera and Garau-Taberner 2009). This model—based on heavy investment in tourism and construction with help from European public loans—became a relevant development model for European politicians and business people looking East in the 1990s.

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­ ost-­socialist political leaders were particularly eager to enhance obsolete P infrastructure that could support a shift away from the industrial command economy while boosting nascent property markets (Verdery 1996). Western European politicians and business people were simultaneously excited about the end of state socialism but, fearful of the imploding industrial economies of Eastern and Central Europe, now sought to employ this model eastward.

2.4   Going East By the mid-1990s, the European Community had created a dedicated system for regional development. While these funds were primarily for the use of less-developed members of the European Union, they were also spent on potential members and struggling Eastern European countries that could not yet be considered for membership. The structuralist argument for this outlay of national wealth makes the case that each creditor country made decisions based on a cost-benefit analysis that eventually led them to the resolution to continue to support cohesion and the use of structural funds. The institutionalist approach, taken here, argues that the European Commission took a more active role in liberalization, management of development funds, and disciplining of member countries (Parsons 2006). A key feature of the Maastricht Treaty was not just the knocking down of trade barriers and freedom of movement for individuals, but also a very sizable regional wealth transfer (Judt 2006). Theorists of the welfare state have detailed the ways in which EU development policy was a response to globalization and an effort to contain it (Marks et al. 1996). By liberalizing trade amongst European nations, leaders hoped they could—through political and economic unification—avoid a “race to the bottom” in terms of stripping away workers’ protection, pensions, and welfare state provisions. The great irony of this move was that Brussels embraced the very disease it was afraid of (liberalization of trade). The question of whether regional liberalization has created an antibody or simply introduced the virus into a new host is one that is still frequently being asked within the European political spectrum. Yet, in the early 1990s, many EC officials hoped to avoid the rapid and often under-regulated privatization going on in Russia by assisting Eastern European countries emerging from behind the Iron Curtain. While EC officials stressed the need for much privatization, economic reform, and political restructuring, they saw themselves as a voice of reason and moderation compared with

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their American colleagues—the so-called Chicago Boys—who, under the sway of Milton Friedman’s radical liberalization theories, were transforming the former Soviet Union using under-supervised shock therapy (Derluguian 2005). A major sector for Eastern European development was real estate. Maastricht established a more formal funding mechanism and constant source of loans for use in Eastern European infrastructure projects and Brussels began to address these acute problems. Also, the US committed billions of dollars a year to building private businesses, improving infrastructure, and setting up think tanks and research institutes, often given the sole mission of figuring out the best ways to privatize all public goods. One of the first problems was a chronic shortage of housing. Cities like Bucharest, Sofia, and Budapest had exploded in the 1950s and 1960s with the influx of rural residents, coming to work in titanic industrial development projects, and new neighborhoods of block housing were quickly erected. Yet, by the 1970s and 1980s, the queues for apartments had grown to decade-long waiting lists and prewar housing stock was in miserable condition (Stanilov 2007). This problem only worsened after 1989 with the new primacy of capital cities for Eastern Europeans searching for economic opportunity. As Eastern Europeans began to establish themselves in the post-socialist economy, they also sought post-socialist dwellings. This need was basic—housing shortages continued as industrial cities failed and capitals expanded—but also psychological: few wanted to live in concrete ‘blocks’ that represented the past ideologically defeated era. Secondly, infrastructure was lacking and regions that hoped to attract Western European investment were deeply concerned that socialist roads, bridges, and trains would be laughed at by potential investors. The European Community saw the need to invest in all of these development areas in order to modernize socialist cities and to provide a platform for the post-socialist economy. Like in Franco’s Spain, the last years of state socialism brought reforms to socialist countries that encouraged tourism but, without private land ownership, these efforts were difficult to scale up and visa restrictions confined the industry largely to visits between Warsaw Pact nations rather than sizable West-East holidaymaking. The telling area that the EC chose not to vigorously invest in was industrial production. There were two primary reasons for this. Germany was concerned that low-paid competition in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland would attract industries which it had been cultivating for years and offer unwanted competition. The second and more important

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c­ onsideration was simply that EU and local officials saw these industries as beyond saving. Indeed, many were the brainchildren of the command economy: their supply lines were hopelessly long, their products dismally unwanted, and their machinery only worthy for being stripped for parts. So, with ailing industrial sectors in almost every post-socialist country, European officials were gravely concerned about what economic opportunities could be offered to Eastern Europe and how they could seize them quickly before financial and political instability wreaked havoc from Gdansk to Tirana. The former Soviet Union’s new and blatantly corrupt class of oligarchs, who consolidated national economies around the energy sector alone, became a model of what to avoid when dealing with Eastern Europe (Dunn 2004). Additionally, most Western European politicians understood that many Eastern European countries would eventually be granted EC membership and freedom of movement for their citizens, despite nativist political objections in Britain and other countries. Therefore, developing strong post-socialist economies that dealt with unemployment in Eastern Europe was seen as a valuable countervailing force against migration to the West and, thus, a motivation for wealthier countries worried over the prospect of Eastern immigrants.

2.5   From Socialist to Capitalist Tourism in Bulgaria Using the model of Spain’s ascent was a popular strategy for addressing the problems of many post-socialist countries because infrastructural improvement was often needed and the development of real estate was an economic avenue as well as an ideological demonstration of the importance of private property in the democratization process. Places like Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw had pent-up demand for suburban housing and had the potential for tourism ventures. The EC also advocated for countries like Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania to embrace the tourism growth model by building mass tourism hubs either in places where there had been a smattering of socialist tourism or in rural areas where uplift of the regional economy was strongly valued. EC, and later EU, funds were made available to improve infrastructure that could bring tourists as well as provide grants that would promote tourism education programs in universities (European Commission 2002). The European Commission cited Spain as a prime example of a country that has made tourism a major

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e­ conomic sector with intelligent development of the industry that diversified it, effectively arguing that tourism and its attendant urban growth could be a major part of post-socialist development without jeopardizing the larger economy through overconcentration (European Commission 2007). Funds from EU pre-accession programs were often modeled after successful tourism programs in Spain, such as an EU-funded sustainable coastal tourism in Mallorca and rural and culinary tourism in the Basque Country (European Commission 2000). While cultural tourism and high-­ revenue, low-impact programs were promoted by EU funding authorities, much of the development in Eastern Europe occurred in mass tourism for package beach deals and stag party tours. Bulgaria, above all, was well positioned to emulate the rapid coastal development that Spain went through in the 1980s because of ample Black Sea beachfront and a long history of socialist-era tourism in which the Bulgarian coast served as a privileged place for socialist tourists from Eastern Europe to visit that was on par with Crimea in the Soviet Union (Ghodsee 2005). While the Black Sea did not attract as many Western European visitors as the Dalmatian Coast in Tito’s non-aligned Yugoslavia, there were significant numbers of visitors from non-socialist countries before 1989. Already in 1989, 70% Bulgaria’s hotels were concentrated on the Black Sea, most of which were administered by the state tourism organization, Balkantourist (Urbain 2003). Bulgaria, which joined the European Union in 2007, was an early adherent to the tourism and service economy direction that was advocated by the EU institutions distributing development funds. It also received over $50 million annually from the US government, much of which went to tourism endeavors such as small hotels (Seed Act 2007). By the mid-­ 1990s, Bulgaria was suffering from acute de-industrialization that, along with pyramid schemes and mafia problems, significantly destabilized the economy. Loans for construction, distributed by more reliable foreign banks (mostly German), were seen as both fiscally and politically wise. While tourism development was viewed as a new path forward that embraced the free market and made use of new connections westward that brought visitors and capital, it was also a continuation of the leisure economy that existed during the socialist period and, in this sense, it carried a similar geopolitical dynamic: previously wealthier socialist tourists visited from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, now more affluent Western Europeans came from EU ‘core’ countries. While both arrangements emphasized Bulgaria’s economic dependence, many

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Bulgarians hoping to start small businesses in the tourism sector were happy to finally have a continental European market rather than just customers from behind the Iron Curtain. Bulgaria was largely underdeveloped in terms of urbanization and industry before World War II and, after 1989, industries disintegrated without Soviet support. Yet, Bulgaria also had a long history of Eastern European tourism given its vineyards, relatively temperate weather, and abundant Black Sea Coast. While the country was led by Todor Zhivkov, the longest-serving leader in the Eastern Bloc, considerable funds and political energy were invested in mountain retreats and seaside resorts to entertain visiting nomenklatura as well as locals. Cultural tourism was also advocated for by Zhivkov’s daughter, Lyudmila, who was the Minister of Culture and heir apparent to his leadership before her untimely death in 1981. Socialist-era tourism was a symbolically mixed venture: officials worked hard to promote an image of enjoyable leisure for the socialist ‘everyman,’ yet the vast majority of visitors were from Warsaw Pact countries and stayed in hotels far too reminiscent of block apartments. For tourists from Western Europe, visiting the Bulgarian Black Sea produced a sense of semi-peripheral exoticism but also of inferior “second class tourism” for guests mainly from ‘Second World’ socialist countries (Zinganel et al. 2013). By 1989, the Black Sea Coast was a rather basic but very functional collection of small beach towns where Bulgarian families holidayed alongside Poles, East Germans, and Hungarians. Unlike Spain, the cosmopolitan mixture of visitors was mostly confined to Eastern Europe with Russian sometimes serving as a lingua franca. Tourism zones acted as spaces removed from the complete authority of the state where international mixing was permissible (although supervised) and those employed by state-run hotels often had access to foreign products that were extremely sought after. After 1989, Black Sea tourism cities experienced a brief decline as socialist tourists were no longer confined to visiting Warsaw Pact countries and Western European tourists preferred to explore well-­ known capital cities such as Prague and Budapest. During the 1990s, attention began to shift toward tourism as manufacturing swiftly declined. Many local officials asked: could Bulgaria attract foreign visitors but from the West rather than the East? The true challenge would be to modernize facilities meant for socialist guests, a problem of infrastructure improvement that was occurring in numerous post-socialist economic sectors in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing wealthier

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Western European visitors seemed like an attainable goal given the EU’s previous largesse toward projects that addressed urban and infrastructural improvement in Spain and Southern Europe. The sense that Eastern European development should follow the Mediterranean made sense to EU officials, not just economically and politically, but also as a metaphor of regional hierarchy in Europe. While many in post-socialist Central Europe lamented their fall from Austro-Hungarian fortune to mere ‘goulash communism,’ there were also countries like Bulgaria, with a long and stigmatizing history of Balkan ‘semi-orientalism,’ that were happy to be part of Europe at all (in contrast to the Russian or Turkish geopolitical orbit formerly occupied) and to be following in the footsteps of Mediterranean development. Spain’s economic successes and seemingly thorough public reconciliation with the legacy of dictatorship4 was a well-­ liked model of national rebirth and transnational partnership (Todorova 2009). By the mid-1990s, the ascent of the Spanish tourism market had left a hole in the bottom end of the European package tourism business that many other countries were trying to fill (such as Turkey and Egypt). Spanish firms noticed this gap and many of the new budget ventures in Bulgaria were started by Spanish companies, including numerous purchases by resort franchises Melia and Iberostar who saw the mass European tourism market that started in Spain, moving East (Manera and Garau-­ Taberner 2009). These firms are an example of economic actors who regarded the recently opened Eastern periphery of the EU as an economic opportunity to create new markets rather than to simply fulfill a political obligation to build democratic institutions: these two ideologies frequently melded together in EU policy circles that were influenced by priorities of corporations from core countries (or newly non-peripheral countries like Spain). Officials based in Brussels hoped that, like Spain, Eastern Europe could also attract tourists in search of low prices, good weather, and cheap cocktails. If they managed to do so and to win over new non-Eastern Bloc tourists, this would help rehabilitate the image of Bulgaria to Western European lenders and investors, a prospect also very exciting for the struggling newly democratic government. Bulgaria presents an interesting example of EU urbanization logic because, despite high levels of corruption and a banking crisis in 1995– 1996, which caused the collapse of its currency, it followed Spain’s model of attempting to secure infrastructure grants while embracing mass beach tourism as a major economic engine. The new monetary unit, a­ ppropriately

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titled the New Bulgarian Lev, was tied to the Deutschmark (and now the euro) in order to provide exchange-rate stability and, while not explicitly stated, to give foreign banks and the European Central Bank a greater role in the country’s economic choices. Despite endemic corruption, Bulgaria managed to attract considerable infrastructure funding around the turn of the millennium even while its application to the EU was anything but guaranteed. Part of this was due to the efforts of politicians who spanned the gap between the socialist and democratic eras and had seen the relative success of the state-managed Balkantourist, which they hoped to emulate and expand using privatization of existing state assets and foreign investment to build new hotels. A major supporter was the pro-­business centerright president Petar Stoyanov, in office from 1997 until 2002, who had been involved in tourism development in the early 1990s when he was a member of parliament. Despite considerable private investment, European Union officials were often unimpressed with the transparency of the bidding processes in which their funds were used to modernize airports, build roads, and update trains, but they accepted corruption in many cases (Ganev 2007). Like in Italy’s Mezzogiorno, embezzlement and nepotism were seen as the cost of doing business. Also, economic development and the improvement of infrastructure were valued higher than full transparency because failure to reboot the post-­socialist economy was viewed as a geopolitical threat to the European core. Tourism-based urbanization was a strategy not just advocated for by lending institutions but it was very appealing to the wider public because of the symbolic cachet of hospitality, leisure culture, and the aesthetics of coastal retreats dedicated to rest and play. Many gravitated to this model because of Bulgaria’s history of Eastern Bloc tourism and a strong belief in homeownership as an important economic asset and sign of political modernization. Before 1989, Bulgaria had the highest level of private property ownership in Eastern Europe (76% as measured in 1985)—a surprising figure given that, in all other aspects of perestroika and glasnost, the country was an extreme laggard (Stanilov 2007). Homeownership became economically important in the 1990s as the currency experienced traumatic inflation and collapse and some families were left with their flat as their sole asset. This trajectory paved the way for a robust tourism construction industry in the early 2000s, when the number of hotel beds on the Black Sea increased by 261% in four years, as well as a growing second home market for Western Europeans (Anderson et al. 2012). Often, this new urbanization was completed in colorful styles that dramatically stood

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out against the concrete buildings of the socialist era and seemed to offer citizens a glimpse of a future within the European core, where leisure was seen as a right and not a privilege available only to elites. A Bulgarian developer working for a Spanish company since 1998 noted that this style, which he was employing in the construction of luxury villas near Varna, was modeled on the Costa Del Sol (Belcheva 2008). He also observed that one of the main innovations was not aesthetic but creating leisure spaces in gated enclaves with 24-hour security, a trend of loss of public access to coastal spaces that has been a hallmark of the post-1989 transformations (Hirt 2012). In Bulgaria, the embrace of the service sector (and tourism) came as a reflexive rebuke to the socialist-era industrial development policy, which was widely seen to have failed and marginalized Bulgarians (Ditchev 2003). As in Spain, tourism and urbanization were viewed in Eastern Europe as the means to a more robust economy that eventually would use superior infrastructure to create a more sustainable and better-­compensated economy. Resort communities such as Golden Sands and Sunny Beach on the Black Sea Coast boomed with budget tourism trips from Western Europe, Russia, and Israel in the early 2000s. Bulgarian officials often saw the leisure industry as a transitional stage that would pave the way for a less environmentally damaging form of economic development. The European Development Bank concurred with this viewpoint but both sources offered few tangible examples of how high-skilled, well-paid jobs emerge from mass tourism or breakneck construction growth. Instead, the ‘Spanish Model’ of mass tourism growth implies upfront environmental and social sacrifices with the promise of a future reward (López and Rodríguez 2011). This model is based on the progression from mass leisure to the successful promotion of cultural assets that appeal to higher social-economic status visitors, such as UNESCO heritage sites and regional cities with arts and crafts; many countries do not have these resources in comparable abundance despite copious marketing efforts claiming the contrary. Before Bulgaria gained entrance to the EU in 2007, many of the grants administered by the EU’s pre-accession program were for roads in major urban areas and tourism destinations meant to bolster antiquated infrastructure. In 2004–2007 alone, more than €650 million in grants was given by the EU (European Commission 2008). An additional €879 million was set aside just for infrastructure, but Bulgaria was only able to spend a fraction of this amount because of continual freezes on funding

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because of official corruption. This problem reached the highest levels, including accusations from officials and major newspapers that the Executive Director of Regional Development, charged with distributing EU funds, was compromised by corruption (European Commission 2008). These incidents fed a popular critique within the EU that Bulgaria was unready for EU membership due to corruption. Some journalists have even likened the mindset of official profiteering to a defect with cultural roots, not in communism, but based on a nineteenth-century ‘Balkan mentality’ of backwardness (Todorova 2009). Others, involved in development policy, have wondered publicly if the EU has the economic and political capacity to assist Eastern Europe in the same way they helped Southern Europe, arguing that corruption may not be a transitional problem but an ingrained facet of political life. By the 2008 crisis, Bulgaria had built a range of new cities and suburbs along the Black Sea Coast filling almost every kilometer with rental villas and hotels. Due to almost non-existent environmental enforcement, much protected land was also illegally developed (some even receiving post-facto pardons from the courts). There has been widespread tolerance for illegal development—ranging from hotels built without permits to developers brazenly erecting houses on national parks—that has occurred in much of the Black Sea Coast, particularly the Strandja National Park. Quick coastal urbanization has led to the foreclosure of public space and intensified pollution (Hirt 2012). The EU has warned that involvement of the mafia in construction for tourism in coastal cities, like Varna, has transcended the bounds of simple corruption and now looks something like state capture on the municipal level (Ganev 2007). The WikiLeaks files on Bulgaria revealed that the American ambassador considered Varna, Bulgaria’s third largest city and one of the most important tourism markets, to be entirely controlled by a mafia group composed of socialist-era navy commandos who started in drug-running and prostitution before eventually owning stakes in most of the city’s major businesses, including tourism construction. At the same time, much of the EU money earmarked for Bulgaria is still destined for projects for improving tourism, such as Varna’s €58.5 million transport update, started in 2007, which took in €39.5 million from cohesion funds (European Commission 2015). This situation, according to several consultants and developers on the Black Sea, has created a feeding frenzy of politicians, backed by organized crime groups in the construction industry, to solicit infrastructure funds. However, many still support this model and hope that the decline in regional solidarity

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within the EU will not mean that urban development programs in post-­ socialist Europe will not be cut far short of the expenditure given to Southern Europe a generation earlier.

2.6   Reassessing Tourism and Urbanization as a Peripheral Growth Strategy Tourism was an attractive development strategy for Eastern European countries where newly privatized land attracted foreign real estate investors and the EU integration process brought financial assistance for improving transit infrastructure but these strategies were efficacious in boom years and much harder to maintain after the 2008 financial crisis. While Bulgaria has followed a development model for the European periphery that emphasizes tourism and construction as economic mainstays, this strategy has significantly faltered in Spain, Ireland, and Cyprus. Indeed, the tourism and construction-intensive development model— which was once lauded for its financial as well as symbolic cachet—has become a spectacle even in the tumult of the European sovereign debt crisis (Degen and García 2012). Much of this comes from the way in which the model was geared to large-scale tourism and construction firms that built resorts using public subsidies for infrastructure and cultural projects, while many local residents worked in badly remunerated service jobs, quashing the prevalent notion that tourism economies are effective in providing skills training or financial uplift. In Spain, revelations of illegal development, high-level corruption, and environmental degradation have filled newspapers from 2008 until the present. The country not only has a glut of newly built homes that have never been lived in, but major airports that have never seen a flight take off and public works (such as Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia) that have saddled municipalities with a generation of debt. Foreign governments once visited Spanish cities like Valencia for ideas about how to bolster their tourism economies with public grants for infrastructure to support heritage and cultural tourism, now the City of Arts and Sciences is a pit stop on a ‘corruption tour’ which showcases Valencia’s misuse of public funds (National Public Radio 2013). Bulgarian tourism promoters and other former adherents to the Spanish tourism development model paid close attention to the Spanish property bubble in order to learn from it before the same factors of overdevelopment, unpayable

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loans, and lack of market demand affected their own industries. As the Deutsche Welle put it in an editorial: “[T]he Mediterranean island of Mallorca has come to symbolize everything bad about cheap, mass tourism: crowded beaches full of drunken louts and cheapskates. Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast wants to avoid the same fate” (Deutsche Welle 2007). While the property market cannot be fully used as a synecdoche for Spain’s entire political and economic trajectory over the past 30 years, it is an interesting starting point. Spain is the most emblematic model of EU incorporation that successfully bolstered international investment and urban growth; this process was echoed in Bulgaria with less capital and a shorter time frame. As the Spanish Model of urbanization continues to attract scrutiny as both a corruption machine, for a politically connected rentier class, and an environmental burden for future generations, it has also come under suspicion as a reliable growth strategy and model for the Eastern periphery. By comparing tourism markets and urbanization in the South and East of Europe, we can better understand not just how newly democratic governments used post-industrial economic strategies, but how these economic choices served as public metaphors. Particularly, the image of previously closed societies inviting visitors and constructing leisure spaces to aesthetically represent a new era has been a powerful symbol of both peripheries. Both Spain and Bulgaria were forced to re-brand their post-­ authoritarian societies in order to attract EU loans, foreign investment, and visitors using their peripheral position as a source of exoticism and the authenticity of less-modernized Europe (Urbain 2003). Leisure culture boosters emphasized economic ascent and social rebirth after repression, but these meanings were not always received as intended. Before the crisis of 2008 brought renewed skepticism over this model, many in the ‘other Europes’ asked who leisure spaces would serve and how they would benefit the broader public. After 2008, with many abandoned homes and hotels from the boom years in both Southern and Eastern Europe, this viewpoint has attracted more adherents and disused spaces have opened debates about the many sacrifices made during the EU cohesion years. Middle-class Bulgarians, faced with economic stagnation, intractable corruption, and a stalled property sector, have increasingly doubted the tourism urbanization model, particularly as environmental collateral damage becomes all too apparent. In Spain itself, much of the property ‘boom’ period has been reassessed as a time of graft and excessive construction that has left a

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l­andscape of empty and half-finished homes. In both countries, new urban development as an analytical category—especially when associated with tourism—offers a means to see two very different concepts of the European periphery pre- and post-2008 crisis. The former is a space of aspiration in which tourism represented a catching-up with the European core and the ability to one day enjoy the vacation allotments of advanced capitalist welfare states. Yet, the problematic redrawing of Europe’s regions in the post-­ crisis era—between both the ‘second’ post-socialist Eastern periphery and the first debt-stricken Mediterranean periphery and the European core— makes the dream of pan-European economic parity seem farther off than ever. Both Spain and Bulgaria show an uncomfortable negotiation between the European center and periphery in the field of urbanization. In Spain, much of this anger has hinged on frustration with the explosion of the property bubble but also with EU institutions that lent money for development. The question of bad faith incorporation in the European Union has been raised by many indebted countries as they struggle with austerity politics. Entire Spanish regions devoted to the tourism economy, including enclaves of hundreds of thousands of foreign residents, also show a new tension between Mediterranean tourism ‘hosts’ and wealthier long-­ term ‘guests’ from the EU core. While the tourism economy and its attendant urbanization was previously a badge of economic success and European cosmopolitanism, it is being rethought as the entire Southern European periphery feels that it must put ‘for sale’ signs on all public assets in order to cope with the fiscal demands of austerity. Bulgaria started the 2000s as a promising case of touristic development aided by EU grants and professional support. Yet, it never managed to progress from the early stages of mass tourism centered on low-cost flights and seaside strips offering cheap alcohol (Anderson et al. 2012). This stagnation began with the problematic influence of the mafia in the construction industry, which alarmed foreign investors. The industry was brought to a firm halt with the 2008 crisis, leaving many half-finished buildings. The lack of success of the tourism industry and problems of environmental damage and corruption have left a profound sense of failure on the Black Sea Coast where, during national economic unrest and civil disobedience, a young environmentalist fatally self-immolated in protest of corruption in the city of Varna in 2013 (Holleran 2015). The palatable sense of re-­ peripheralization in Bulgaria harkens back to the special sense of semi-­ peripherality in the Balkans—by which many feel estranged from not only

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the EU, but Europe itself (Todorova 2009). Yet, today the Bulgarian public has a conflicted relationship with the European Union in which they feel that political corruption is a Balkan ‘disease’ but that the ‘doctor,’ represented as EU lending and regulatory institutions, should have recognized the illness when the country was admitted in 2007 and helped it to recover. In both Spain and Bulgaria, economic failures are inscribed into the physical landscape: from empty homes to projects associated with massive graft and environmental destruction of coasts and wildlife areas. Urbanization, which was long associated with modernization and Europeanization, has come to represent a source of folly and outside influence. This sense of once again ‘living on the outside of Europe’ has rekindled new interpretations of post-dictatorial history and, in some cases, nostalgia for less open economies and more nationalistic cultural spaces. It has also cast doubt on the ability of the EU to initiate new members through the system of development grants, given first to the Southern and then to the Eastern periphery in periods of political democratization. With the surge in both Right populism in Eastern Europe and Left populism in Southern Europe, the political consequences of stalled integration on these two peripheries remain uncertain but tracing the process of tourism development from South to East offers a means by which to understand some of the institutional dynamics that were set in motion and how average citizens experienced those policies through the changing built environment.

Notes 1. Parts of this chapter originally appeared in Holleran, Max. 2017. “Tourism and Europe’s Shifting Periphery: Post-Franco Spain and Post-Socialist Bulgaria.” Contemporary European History 26(4): 691–715. It is reproduced with permission from Cambridge University Press. 2. By 1993, Spain was receiving 58% of European cohesion funds followed by Ireland, Greece, and Portugal, which were all target areas that were prioritized to update infrastructure using approximately US$2 billion annually (Annual Report Cohesion Financial Instrument, Commission of the European Communities 1993/1994). http://aei.pitt.edu/3992/1/3992. pdf. 3. Many have persuasively argued that Spain faced a major infrastructural deficit when it emerged from fascism in 1975 because it was never the beneficiary of Marshall Plan financial support in the wake of World War II. Indeed,

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there is an interesting historical parallel between Germany’s support for Southern European infrastructural development in the 1980s and 1990s as a means of recognition of all that was accomplished using Marshall Plan funds in that country. 4. This process was well regarded in Eastern Europe and drawn upon by political leaders from the Center Right who admired the role of King Juan Carlos I in the transition (this was particularly true of Bulgaria’s former king— Simeon Borisov Saxe-Coburg-Gotha—who also served as Bulgarian Prime Minister, 2001–2005). This opinion remains, despite a new generation of Spanish historians who have problematized the process and its insistence on ‘forgetting.’

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Crespo MacLennan, Julio. 2000. Spain and the Process of European Integration, 1957–85. In Political Change and Europeanism. London: Palgrave. Degen, Mónica, and Marisol García. 2012. The Transformation of the ‘Barcelona Model’: An Analysis of Culture, Urban Regeneration and Governance. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (5): 1022–1038. Derluguian, Georgi M. 2005. Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deutsche Welle. 2007. Bulgaria Tries to Avoid Mass-Tourism Quagmire, 12/08/2007. https://www.dw.com/en/bulgaria-tries-to-avoid-mass-tourismquagmire/a-2728301. Ditchev, Ivaylo. 2003. Sotsialisticheskata urbanizatsiya i krŭgovete na grazhdanstvo. Sotsiologicheski Problemi 1–2: 33–63. Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. European Commission. 2000. Towards Quality Coastal Tourism. European Commission. http://www.pedz.uni-mannheim.de/daten/edz-h/gdb/00/ iqm_coastal_en.pdf. ———. 2002. EU Support for Tourism Enterprises and Tourist Destinations. European Commission Report. http://www.tourisminsights.info/ ONLINEPUB/ONLINEP/PDFS/EC%20PDFS/EU%20SUPPORT.pdf. ———. 2007. The European Tourism Industry in the Enlarged Community: Gaps Are Potentials and Opportunities. European Commission. http://news.designforall.org/publico/index.php?opc=documento&document=%274114%27. ———. 2008. Assistance to Bulgaria and Romania Under the CVM. European Commission. https://ec.europa.eu/info/policies/justice-and-fundamentalrights/effective-justice/rule-law/assistance-bulgaria-and-romania-undercvm_en. ———. 2015. Cohesion Policy and Bulgaria. Cohesion Policy. European Commission. https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/information/ cohesion-policy-achievement-and-future-investment/factsheet/bulgaria_ en.pdf. Gamble, Andrew. 1994. The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ganev, Venelin I. 2007. Preying on the State: The Transformation of Bulgaria after 1989. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. García, Marisol. 2010. The Breakdown of the Spanish Urban Growth Model: Social and Territorial Effects of the Global Crisis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34 (4): 967–980. Ghodsee, Kristen Rogheh. 2005. The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. González, Sara. 2011. Bilbao and Barcelona ‘in Motion’. How Urban Regeneration ‘Models’ Travel and Mutate in the Global Flows of Policy Tourism. Urban Studies 48 (7): 1397–1418.

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Gorsuch, Anne E., and Diane Koenker. 2006. Turizm. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hirt, Sonia. 2012. Iron Curtains Gates, Suburbs, and Privatization of Space in the Post-Socialist City. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons. Holleran, Max. 2015. On the Beach: The Changing Meaning of the Bulgarian Coast after 1989. City & Society 27 (3): 232–249. Judt, Tony. 2006. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin. Linz, Juan José. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. López, Isidro, and Emmanuel Rodríguez. 2011. The Spanish Model. New Left Review 69 (June): 5–29. Manera, Carlos, and Jaume Garau-Taberner. 2009. The Transformation of the Economic Model of the Balearic Islands: The Pioneers of Mass Tourism. In Europe at the Seaside: The Economic History of Mass Tourism in the Mediterranean, ed. Luciano Segreto et al. London: Berghahn. Marks, Gary, et al. 1996. Governance in the European Union. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Martin, Robert. 1985. Tourists Pour like Rain on Spain. The Globe and Mail. 16 February. McCathie, Andrew. 1987. Spain Seeks to Change Its Tourist Image. Australian Financial Review 28 (October): 80. Moreno, Luis. 2013. The Federalization of Spain. New York: Routledge. Moyn, Samuel. 2012. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Muschamp, Herbert. 1997. The Miracle in Bilbao. New York Times. 7 September. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/07/magazine/the-miracle-inbilbao.html. Naredo, José Manuel. 2010. El Modelo Inmobiliario Español Y Sus Consecuencias. Boletín CF+S, no. 44. http://habitat.aq.upm.es/boletin/n44/ajnar.html. National Public Radio. 2013. Activists Offer Protest Tour of Spain’s Modern Ruins. Podcast. Weekend Edition Saturday. https://www.npr.org/2013/ 02/16/172003485/activists-offer-protest-tour-of-spains-modern-ruins. Pack, Sasha. 2006. Tourism and Dictatorship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Parsons, Craig. 2006. A Certain Idea of Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1995. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rojek, Chris. 1995. Decentring Leisure Rethinking Leisure Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Rosamond, Ben. 2000. Theories of European Integration. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Scharpf, Fritz W. 1999. Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? New York: Oxford University Press. Schmitter, Philippe C. 2000. How to Democratize the European Union … and Why Bother? Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Seed Act. 2007. Enterprise Funds in Central And Eastern Europe And Central Asia 1990–2007. The Enterprise Funds Exchange of Experiences. Seed Act. http://www.seedact.com/files/pdfy/enterprise_funds_at_a_glance.pdf. Stanilov, Kiril. 2007. The Post-Socialist City Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Verlag. Todorova, Maria. 2009. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Urbain, Jean-Didier. 2003. At The Beach. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Velarde, Juan. 1994. La nueva política económica española y el informe del Banco Mundial. Cuadernos de Información Económica 90: 209–224. Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Walton, John K. 2011. Seaside Resorts and International Tourism. In Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History, ed. Eric G.E. Zuelow. New York: Routledge. Zinganel, Michael, Elke Beyer, and Hagemann Anke. 2013. Holidays after the Fall: Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia. Berlin: Jovis. Zuelow, Eric G.E. 2016. A History of Modern Tourism. New York: Palgrave.

CHAPTER 3

Coasts of Aspiration: Climbing the Tourism ‘Ladder’

Abstract  This chapter discusses the leisure industry in Europe, from mass tourism in the Mediterranean of the 1960s to the new cut-rate market in Eastern Europe in the 2000s. It charts the transformation of late-Franco beach culture in Spain (1960s) to the 1990s, when the Costa Blanca was transformed into a destination for modern architecture and molecular gastronomy, providing a tourism industry metaphor for effective Europeanization and the casting-off of peripherality. It then turns to the case study of Bulgaria, which sought to emulate this model but was bogged down by the remnants of the socialist era tourism industry and the involvement of the mafia in hotel ownership and construction. This chapter shows that coastal spaces of leisure, where mixing of foreigners and locals is prevalent, are highly important spaces by which to examine ideas about Europeanness. Keywords  Cultural tourism • Francisco Franco • Black Sea • Costa Blanca

3.1   Introduction Tourism, as an industry, exploded in postwar Europe with incredible force.1 The economic sector of tourism was once confined to modest country houses in the rural suburbs and the wandering Grand Tours of © The Author(s) 2020 M. Holleran, Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0218-7_3

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young gentlemen in the nineteenth century: by the twentieth century, it grew into one of the world’s largest industries (Becker 2013). As European cities grew in the 1960s, more people wanted to get out of them (Spirou 2010) and, increasingly, a greater percentage of the population had the means to do so. The negotiations between labor, the state, and industry— which produced the contemporary welfare state—also factored leisure into the demand-making process (Rojek 1995): often using a rubric by which off-time was conceived of in terms of health and well-being rather than recreation and amusement. As industrial laborers in countries like France, Britain, and Germany won wage victories in the 1950s and 1960s, they also pushed for increasingly lengthy summer vacations: enabling a generation of workers to holiday longer and farther from their factories. Similarly, some socialist countries in Eastern Europe began to take leisure time seriously, not just to save face against their bourgeois Western counterparts, but also operating under the conviction that strong, healthy, and rested workers were essential to the push for an effective industrial sector. Leisure was, bit by bit, coming to be understood as a social right of the laboring classes in a range of countries in the ‘first’ and ‘second’ worlds. While it ranked higher-up—and therefore less consequential on any European nations’ hierarchy of needs (Pearce et  al. 2010)—leisure was becoming far more essential to modern European society and, with it, building new spaces of leisure—whether collections of modest bungalows or entire coastal cities—was as an essential component. In this chapter, I will briefly outline the origins of mass tourism and how leisure came to occupy an important space in the cultural life of postwar Europe as well as an essential part of the global economy (Becker 2013). I will argue that the Mediterranean ‘edge’ of Europe became particularly important to the tourism industry. The imaginary of the Southern periphery promised relaxation away from Northwestern Europe and its ‘rational’ use of time and Calvinist morals—a Weberian conception of European regionalism which, while not fully believed, is also not entirely banished from the collective European imaginary. The beach holiday, while rapidly transforming Mediterranean Europe, culturally and environmentally (Pilkey et  al. 2011), became the emblematic escape from ­conventional society, and promised, at minimum, a de-intensification of daily stress and time norms. Yet, the Mediterranean was also seen as the near-­periphery and sometimes conceived of as a space for a more ribald approach to sexual experiences and alcohol consumption. Drawing on the idea of nested orientalism (Bakić-Hayden 1995), or the notion that one’s

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neighbor can be seen as a slightly more exotic version of one’s own national imaginary, I show that this was the case between Spain and Northwestern Europe which was profitably utilized by the newly democratic government to attract tourists. While this strategy brought mass tourism to Spain’s coasts, it presented a problem for the post-Franco modernization project because low-budget holidays confirmed a North-South hierarchy (Urry 1990). I show how Spain attempted to dismantle this hierarchy, again using the tourism industry, by revamping tourist cities with cultural projects (Degen and García 2012). I then follow this strategy to the Eastern periphery and explore how the Black Sea Coast in Bulgaria was conceived of as a second periphery that offered a refuge from the European core, focusing particularly on how tourism promoters viewed the successful transition from socialist to capitalist tourism and urbanization as a means to demonstrate modernization (Ghodsee 2005; Todorova and Gille 2012; Hirt 2012; Holleran 2014). Spain became a particularly large player in coastal tourism because of the post-Franco government’s desire to expand the tourism economy and make use of tourism to improve infrastructure, urbanize, and market ‘American style’ suburban tourism (Judd and Fainstein 1999) and retirement colonies to wealthier European homebuyers. Spain became a global model of how to transform mass tourism into a thriving real estate industry and a variegated cultural economy. The Spanish economic transformation—accomplished with billions of euros in grants and loans—became a trusted economic development model. Of more material concern, there were vast amounts of undeveloped land in Mediterranean Europe that could be cheaply bought and turned into tourism hubs. Particularly for post-Franco Spain, coastal tourism became a means to invigorate a laggard economy, demonstrate modernity through an economic growth sector that seemed intrinsically future oriented and ‘modern,’ and to erase the memories of 1970s dictatorships (in Spain, Greece, and Portugal) in which beachfront morality and expressions of sexuality were carefully policed (Pavlovic 2002). What’s more, Spain’s ability to construct entire tourist cities ex nihilo, and then to refine those spaces of mass tourism into architectural, culinary, and arts centers, became far more than a simple ­development model: it was seen as means to transcend the Southern and Eastern European histories of partial incorporation in the imagined community of Europe (Anderson 2006; Parsons 2006). Through the proper management of tourism, and the radical changes made to the built environment in order to accommodate tourism, many in

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both Spain and Bulgaria saw a means to better integrate with the rest of Europe, yet they were also painfully aware of continued differences between the leisure economy of the periphery and the industry, finance, and professional services economy of the core. Desislava, a 19-year-old worker and tourism student in the Bulgarian Black Sea tourist city of Golden Sands, expressed this fear to me while acknowledging the symbolic and financial power of the tourism industry in Bulgaria: “There are some places in Europe here to serve, like us, and other peoples to be [sic] waited-on … this is a happy place: it is colorful, fun, sunny … it’s just happier if you are actually on the beach … not preparing the towels … most people working here feel they will forever be bartenders, busboys, and towel folders.” Indeed, while tourism and its attendant urbanization have created an entire new urban form of hotels, suburbs, and cities of leisure and play that stretch from Andalusia to Antalya, there is a common sentiment that the touristic development of the Mediterranean has been a process of modernization by selective underdevelopment (Anderson 2009; Wallerstein et al. 2013). Rather than providing economic uplift to struggling regions, it has reified categories of center and periphery: between places that are visited on the ‘edges’ and places of economic affluence and political power that send visitors.

3.2   The Grand Tour No More: Mass Tourism and the European Good Life Classical tourism, between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, involved long journeys by the wealthy for a type of spiritual self-­ actualization: something flitting between the sacred Odyssean quest that blots out banal and quotidian daily life (Durkheim 2008 [1912]) and the jocular semi-imperialist practice of young lords sowing their wild oats. The original form of Industrial Age tourism came from the spiritual and physical separation from the countryside (the halving of the German term landvolk, country folk, is a case in point). With the onset of enclosure movements and industrial production, people were cleaved from the land and increasingly driven into cities and towns. The start of mass urbanization also brought the beginning of tourism as a phenomenon, removing it from the historic journey of the wealthy. Increasingly, tourism was seen as a temporally abbreviated respite, first, from the city and, later, from quotidian daily life.

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In the nineteenth century, pastoral tourism became a popular version of middle-class leisure and it allowed those who had recently urbanized to reconnect with their past through a change of place. Yet, as the sociologist of leisure Jean-Didier Urbain makes clear (2003), travel was seldom a true search for nature completely bereft of culture but, more often, a means to submit nature to human needs and to fetishize an archetype of nature that deviated from daily life. By the beginning of the twentieth century, some of the better-paid industrial laborers were able to take part in pastoral leisure as well: often at the encouragement of their bosses who were afraid that free time would be consumed by drink and card playing. Workers on holiday engaged in the salubrious joys of the countryside, which was increasingly becoming the ever-smaller ‘lungs’ for ever larger sootier cities. With the advent of rail travel, the middle classes were able to widen the geography of their leisure time. Seaside outings in Brighton, England, became fashionable for Londoners suffocating in the coal-fueled city (Urry and Larsen 2011), and similar patterns emerged in France and Germany. As the population of Victorian cities ballooned, those with sufficient means were driven to the coasts to escape urban life (Shields 1991). The ability to be mobile and to ‘summer’ at a spa town or seaside retreat also became an extremely important class marker (Walton 2013; Rojek 1995), which—as the travel industry ballooned and became more variegated—was infinitely refined depending on where one went, what activities they pursued, and the mode of transport they used. Coastal vacations also had the benefit of being health-promoting activities that were seen as particularly beneficial to the constitution of children who, increasingly, were regarded as too cloistered in cities and not able to develop an appreciation of nature. Particular attention was given to the developing bodies of children, using physical problems of asthma, fever, and ‘sickliness’ as corporeal manifestations of the moral failings of city life, which parents were increasingly worried would infect children at a young age (Walkowitz 1992). Families were encouraged to take time from work in order to refresh themselves physically and spiritually, but also to reconnect as a family unit. This was a value often promoted by Victorian society, but consistently harder to enact given a greater separation between home and work as well as demanding hours. However, middle- and low-wage workers incorporated vacation time (first just weekends) into labor negotiations using a two-pronged argument of leisure to build national character, particularly through outdoor experiences like scouting, and leisure for economic benefit (rested workers were more productive and less likely to

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hurt themselves or agitate for higher wages). Indeed, employers were more and more likely to see days or weeks at the beach, not as a form of frivolity, but as an essential component of the Protestant Ethic work engine which kept Anglo-Saxon society chugging toward progress. As demand grew around the turn of the twentieth century, coastal tourism became a facet of the summertime in continental Europe for the upper and middle classes. It also became an extensive business based on hotels, second homes, resorts, and casinos. The idea of leisure, and particularly beachfront vacations, changed quickly as the Victorian Era passed: from respite and facilitator of work to a season and place for personal reinvention and revelry. Resort towns in the French Riviera, particularly, became known as sites of ribald escape from more conventional daily life. Coastal tourism, while still a family practice, also became associated with a relaxation of social rules (Urbain 2003), although this occurred only step-by-­ step and still with a socially beneficial mission. Skimpy bathing costumes and mixed gender beaches were regarded by many as moral pressure valves that could be entered and enjoyed for a certain portion of the year but would also aid in maintaining the moral rectitude of everyday life for most of the year. Coastal tourism in Europe also had important geopolitical implications, as many anthropologists have demonstrated (Graburn 1986; Clifford 1997). Increasingly, tourists from Britain, France, and Germany sought hotter, more exotic, and cheaper destinations than their own beaches. Tourism in Southern France, Italy, and Spain took wealthier Northern Europeans to the semi-periphery and visiting enforced the status of Southern Europe as somewhere away from but related to the ‘center’ (Christaller 1964). This tradition began centuries before with elite journeyers, like the American Washington Irving who chronicled, with fascination and mild fear, Roma living out-of-doors in the ruins of the great Alhambra palace in Andalusia (Irving 2013 [1851]). As depictions of semi-peripheral Europe shifted from Byronesque exaltations of nineteenth-­ century Greece to more consumable versions, aimed at a wider tourist market, the Southern semi-periphery was inducted into a social arrangement to Northern Europe via tourism that mimicked their economic and political status: that is to say there was a great deal of asymmetry. Countries like Spain, Portugal, and Greece were visited, but rarely produced visitors. For those who visited their beaches, these spaces represented not only the physical but conceptual end of European society. Often, even the beaches outside of major cities were imaginatively rendered as sites of ‘tribal’ ritual

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where people could safely play at Robinsonade removal from society before reentering the constraints of urban European life (Urbain 2003). While these associations faded with the end of any notion of tourism-as-­ journey and the inception of mass tourism, they were still a latent force and a cultural subtext that added to the notion of the culture of the Mediterranean periphery as a good to be consumed (Nunez 1963). During the course of the twentieth century, Southern Europe became a space of even more fetishized European otherness as Portugal, Spain, and Greece failed to modernize at the same pace as Northern Europe. The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, only reified the cultural difference between North and South further: first with bloodshed, and then with political isolation. The postwar generation was the first to embrace international tourism with gusto. Finally, borders were open, safe, and convenient to cross for the purpose of adventure and relaxation, and not necessity. Middle-class families, newly equipped with automobiles, were interested in exploring the South of Europe which had been closed off during the War and the growth of the welfare state had given them the money and time to do so (codified by the widespread adoption of the paid vacation in the mid-­ 1930s). As an elderly Norwegian told me in the Spanish city of Calpe, one of the Costa Blanca’s most highly developed hubs which now sports dozens of high-rise apartments: “[Y]ou have to understand that this place, in the 1960s, was a completely different world: it felt tropical and away from Europe. It was like an island, almost.” Indeed, Southern Europe, with its comparable lack of industrial development, represented a contrast to the metropoles of Northwest Europe. While some anthropologists have followed Wallerstein to suggest that the Mediterranean represented a semi-­ periphery in contrast to the decolonizing actual periphery, it is also important to regard Italy, Portugal, Greece, and, most notably, Spain, on the basis of a regional center-periphery dichotomy. While often put into perspective with the wider non-European world and the end of European imperialism, this zone also had its own separate and sometimes autonomous dynamic with wealthier and more developed European countries. Tourism was thought of in terms of ‘discovery’ and imbibing in authentic, that is, less modern culture, and was also considered beneficial to those regions visited. In this reading of Mediterranean postwar tourism, places like Andalusia, Naples, and Cyprus were regarded as hyphenated in their Europeanness. The very things that made them interesting to visit—their rural beauty, cultural authenticity, and relative poverty—would be

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ameliorated through successive visits and development, making these qualities eventually fade, and bringing them into a state of ‘fuller’ Europeanness. Thus, while Mediterranean countries broadcast an exoticized version of their culture for touristic consumption, including reifications of their peripherality and connections to the Arab World (Said 1994), this strategy was meant to transform the Mediterranean periphery into just another part of Europe.

3.3   Spain Reopens Its Doors at Last In the 1950s, Spain’s Costa Blanca emerged as a major tourist destination. Following the Spanish Civil War, Valencia’s cities had continued to produce textiles and engage in Mediterranean trade while village life was dominated by citrus farming and fishing. Accounts from European travelers during the 1950s, and even from tourists from nearby Madrid, recount a rural existence. One elderly informant in the town of Xàbia reminisced that life in the Costa Blanca during the 1950s had not changed much since her mother’s childhood at the turn of the twentieth century: “[M]en worked in agriculture and women stayed home and did housework … people came to visit for the beaches but they wore traditional bathing costumes and caps over their hair.” Yet, life in coastal Spain was anything but stable. By the early 1950s, it was obvious to the Franco government that without economic reform Spain would have more in common, economically, with North Africa than with France or Italy. Its economic output was 40% of the European average and black markets thrived because of centralized interventionist policies and lack of market integration with the rest of Europe (Prados de la Escosura et al. 2012). By 1959, the Franco regime initiated the Stabilization and Liberalization Plan in order to reinvigorate the economy before it declined even more and threatened the dictatorship. The Plan brought a new laissez faire pro-market attitude to Spain that had been absent in the first two decades of Franco’s reign. It also mended relationships with the rest of Europe and the US (which horse-­ traded aid money for the placement of military bases in Spain). While free market fiscal reforms helped the US begin to regard the Franco regime as an important Cold War anti-communist ally, the late 1950s also brought a large-scale reconfiguration of the national economy toward externally valued goods and services. One of the most popular was tourism.

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The 1960s began an important era in Spanish tourism in which the Franco government recognized the country’s poverty and isolation as a pressing reason to promote foreign visitors in order to revitalize the economy, but also used withdrawal from Europe as a marketing tool. The Costa Blanca, Andalusia, and other locales were presented as the ‘other’ unknown Europe. Or, as an elderly Dane who first came to Alicante in 1958 told me: “It was off an exotic postcard [the landscape] but when you got there, and saw it in three dimensions, you could see regular apartment buildings, just in bad condition.” Regional governments used a set of stock imagery from Spain that utilized flamenco and bullfighting as well as the Al Andalus Empire and Roma culture. While many of these images were Iberian tropes for centuries, they had a new immediacy because they reinvigorated a sense of Spain as a segment of Europe sealed-off for two decades by war and fascism and once again accessible (although not reformed politically). Tourism organizations proliferated as French and German tourists began to arrange for coastal holidays in Valencia. By the early 1960s, the pioneer British firm Thomas Cook arranged for package tours to the Costa Blanca offering cheap package deals. They were focused on many hours of beach time with a splash of culture, such as a flamenco concert, a dance performance, or a visit to a citadel or village. Most of the tourism of this era was solidly middle class and centered on Spain’s ample coastline. Valencia was a key destination that began building large apartment blocks to house tourists who wished to wean themselves of middling quality hotels or in order to rent a flat for the entire summer. A major factor in early tourism was price. Most involved in the coastal tourism business had no illusions that they were engaged in battle for high-quality market share or a mission to rejuvenate the international standing of Spain: they were participants in a price war with the French Mediterranean, which they handily won. Early tourists in Valencia felt that they were traveling to the edge of Europe. Many focused their knowledge of the country on the Spanish Civil War and the triumph of Franco, which had led the country to inhabit a semi-pariah status within the community of European nations, but others used much older geocultural configurations. Dutch tourists saw Spain as the Catholic south, memorialized by their own country’s Catholic parts, many of which had been under Spanish rule (in the seventeenth century). One Dutch woman even remarked that Spain was a natural destination for Dutch people because “they took over our country and now we get to

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have a bit of theirs … I’m Catholic too … so maybe I will be meeting [sic] in the street with a Spanish ‘cousin.’” Still more Europeans categorized Spain as a cultural-other for its 500-year-old Moorish past which had severed them from Medieval Europe. While these designations were old enough as to be incredibly tenuous, they still were culturally resonant in the tourism industry which trafficked in exoticism in order to add a complimentary cultural element to good weather and abundant beaches. Even in 2013, an elderly Norwegian informant remembered: “We came here in the 1960s and it was like going to Africa … yes there were hotels and cars and trains but it was also very rural.” The Franco regime did not view underdevelopment as romantic or economically beneficial. In fact, by the 1950s, the government in Madrid was keenly aware of its place in the European periphery: occupying a liminal economic and social position somewhere between France and French Algeria. To use Wallerstein’s terms, Spain had cemented its status in the European semi-periphery after the Civil War because of its stalled economy as well as its political isolation. While other parts of Western Europe had used and expanded the Marshall Plan to improve infrastructure and modernize industry, Spain had subsided on a largely agricultural economy. By the mid-1950s, this underdevelopment was becoming painfully obvious. The liberalization of the Spanish economy was aided by three key factors: diminished centralization and liberalization, a more positive relationship with the US because of Franco’s hardline anti-communist stance which opened the floodgates for American loans, and a thawing of the tense relationship with other Western European economies culminating with membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1961. During this period, the Franco government turned its attention to tourism as a major area of potential competition with the rest of Europe. Unlike the industrial sector, which was retrograde compared with Italy and hopelessly behind when held to the standards of West Germany, Spain had ample beaches and excellent weather. Tourism, as an industry, was also becoming an economic mainstay of the semi-periphery: more mobility and better wages in France and the UK meant a boom in Spanish tourism. While most of these holidays were of small scale and concentrated in camps, pensions, and rented ­bungalows, entrepreneurs and economists in the Franco regime had far-­ reaching ambitions. The expansion of tourism in the Valencia Province was an obvious choice: its proximity to France allowed for international access by car, and

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many hoteliers had a tradition of serving elites from Madrid and the City of Valencia who rented homes by the beach in August. These communities were modest collections of homes that were vacant for the rest of the year. But this began to change in the 1960s, when Northern holidaymakers expanded the beach season beyond the Spanish vacation norms and developers bought up vacant lands from fishing families. One woman in her 70s, named Marisol, remembers the city of Altea, a picturesque white village now home to wealthy tourists looking for a respite from overdevelopment, in the 1960s: It was still a place where the siestas were uninterrupted … people knew who you were and who your family was … We saw tourists coming here frequently but they usually were the same families every year and they had to learn Spanish to get by because no one here spoke English or German. I actually forget where these first tourists were from but they were very blond and, for us, very exciting … like extraterrestrials who spoke some Spanish… They weren’t like the people now … with their huge houses or package holidays … they came here to live like us … like villagers.

Preliminary experiences with foreign tourism in Spain were socially acceptable given the glut of underutilized land in places like Andalusia and Valencia and the minimal footprint of working-class tourists. Often, family holidays were only a step-up from camping, and visitors were forced to learn some Spanish in order to communicate with their rural hosts. One Dutchman remembered his trips to Calpe in 1968 as “one of the most memorable experiences of my young life … we played with Spanish kids and they played with us … now you can find a Dutch menu in every restaurant and sometimes even Dutch music playing.” Indeed, the primary image of 1960s Spain, for foreign tourists, was of European life only slightly touched by modernity. This was a carefully curated experience by local tourism promoters and one that could not last as the number of visitors dramatically increased through the 1960s and their demands for modern comforts grew in turn. The gap between genuine village life and the rural façade created on the sidelines of beach resorts was becoming more and more noticeable as urbanization picked up pace and the simulacra of rurality increasingly did not merit suspension of disbelief (Urbain 2003; Urry and Larsen 2011). Thus, by the late 1960s—armed with an influx of foreign capital— many coastal cities in Spain began to remodel themselves in the image of

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American modernist architecture and to replace the rural charm of ‘authentic’ Europe with the glamour of Palm Beach and a thoroughly internationalized tourism culture. This was both a response to the increased demands of tourists, who, as their travel options increased, requested more comfortable amenities and better services, and a concerted move to represent the Spanish tourism industry as world class and competitive with the standards of the European core. The professionalization and modernization of the tourism industry can be seen as an essential exemplar of the economic development policies of the late Franco regime, which sought to integrate itself with the rest of Europe through travel and economic cooperation in order to normalize the dictatorship as a political fact. Franco’s regime attempted to mend its relationship with the rest of Europe by producing a durable sense of nationalism that transcended peripheral nationalisms in Spain (Catalan and Basque and, to a lesser extent, Galician, Valencian, and  Andalusian) at the very moment that Basque militants (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna or ETA) were taking up arms against the dictatorship. By presenting Spain to the rest of Europe as a coherent and unified block that shared a common past and was destined for a common future together, Franco’s Ministry of Tourism accomplished a valuable marketing task not only for French and German tourists but also for dissatisfied Spaniards. But this strategy, of national symbolism mixed with 1960s advertising, was a bit too blatant for many Spaniards, and when Manuel Fraga, the minister of tourism and a member of the new reformist falangistas, created the slogan “Spain is Different” (often accompanied by photos of sevillanas dancers), it quickly became a joke (Garcia García and Ruiz Carnicer 2001). A simple change of tone could convey all that was still different politically, culturally, and economically in Franco’s Spain compared to the rest of Europe, and the phrase is still used today when people try to wrap their heads around the current sovereign debt crisis or political corruption.

3.4   Up Goes Benidorm The most noticeable landscape of Spanish tourism in the 1960s—and perhaps in the entire country—was the development of Benidorm: a fishing village which, within the space of two decades, was transformed into a beachfront strip of high-rise hotels. The city, which is now a symbol of European mass leisure, was little more than a village in the 1950s before being developed by an aggressive policy for tourism, which coincided with Franco’s economic reforms (Ferrer Marsal 2002). In 1963, the Tourism

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Ministry created a list of zones and centers of interest for tourism, which later became a national law, that helped plan and finance tourism projects, the vast majority of which were in coastal Valencia and Andalusia (García 2010a). The law (Ley de Zonas y Centros de Interés Turístico) was required not just to stimulate the industry, but to control it and codify where development could and could not occur as previously rural lands were quickly bulldozed. Raquel, a resident of a community near Benidorm, which today resembles a typical California suburb, noted that her mother’s family was from Benidorm and she remembered, from her childhood in the 1940s, that beachgoers wore full bathing suits reminiscent of the nineteenth century and the beaches were divided by gender. “Back then, there was the idea that Spain was left behind by time and by Europe,” Raquel noted. Benidorm changed the romanticized semi-orientalist characterization of Spain. All at once, the landscape projected by international tourism agencies was not whitewashed pueblos, but ten-story modernist hotels in the style of Miami. Inns (pensiónes) were phased out as massive, and increasingly all-inclusive, hotels took their place in the late 1960s. The travel culture of wandering through villages in search of a bed and a hot meal, procured through interactions with locals in pidgin Spanish, was replaced by manicured hotel gardens, multilingual tourism professionals, buffets, and cocktail bars. The vertical ascent of Benidorm, both in profits and skyline, became an important symbol of Spain’s embrace of mass tourism and its commitment to revitalizing the industry through urbanization and modernization. Jean-Didier Urbain succinctly describes the commodification of beach regions, like Valencia, undergoing dramatic social changes in the name of creating a dynamic tourism economy: What happens with fishermen also happens with seaweed. Rejected, expelled, or eliminated from the shore, these elements are reintroduced into the vacation universe only when they have been transformed into exotic curiosities… They are no longer natural but naturalized, turned folkloric in one case, dried in the other, sweetened in all cases, like the varnished seashell whose inhabitant has been expropriated. (Urbain 2003, 138)

An important aspect of Benidorm’s growth was that starting in the 1970s it did not look like a stereotypical beach town filled with low-hung buildings, bungalows, and motels. Rather, its verticality proclaimed the birth of a new city. The surrounding areas of the Valencia Province were

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indeed being developed with a more sprawling urban logic but Benidorm was distinctly city-like, dense, and home to a skyline nearly as tall as most of downtown Madrid or Barcelona. In the city’s second urban development plan of 1963, height limitations were abolished and the tourism hub was awarded permission to build skyscrapers (Ivars i Baidal et al. 2013). By 1970, an airport in the neighboring city of Alicante was opened for primarily touristic purposes, bringing visitors year-round from the UK. Yet, the cosmopolitan aesthetics of the tourist city did not always mesh with the cultural politics of Franco’s Spain. Despite a concerted push to increase tourism as a major new sector of the ailing economy, the international appeal of beachfront vacations was an unstable mixture of family rejuvenation and erotic abandon. By the late 1960s, the latter was ascending in appeal and market pull. Vacations to the edges of Europe were no longer just a way for families to escape cities and spend time together but also a space for discovery and release. As Rob Shields demonstrates (1991), ‘ludic spaces’ were important sites of annual pilgrimage for middle-class Europeans to separate their years into times of work and play. Increasingly, this division was not just a temporal division, for instance between Mardi Gras and Lent, but a spatial division: such as between New Orleans and Dallas or, more relevantly, between Benidorm and Rotterdam or Manchester. Paradoxically, while the periphery of Europe, and the Franco regime in particular, instilled the drive for modernization into building up beachfront tourism, many visitors saw Europe’s Southern edge as a place to strip down, revel in the primal elements of sea and sand, and ignore social mores. The Franco regime’s cultural rubric was deeply influenced by its relationship with the fundamentalist Catholic order of Opus Dei, which directed universities and had tremendous influence over social policy. This closeness to religious fervor gave the fascist government moral cover for some of its abuses while complicating its modernization plans. The policing of sexuality in all parts of national life (Pavlovic 2002) had, among its less pernicious effects, led to a ban on the bikini in coastal Spain. By the 1950s, foreign tourists were routinely receiving tickets from the Guardia Civil for their improperly immodest beach attire. Perhaps no story epitomizes the shift in tourism culture and the rise of cities like Benidorm more than the ‘bikini legend’ of Benidorm’s mayor (from 1950 to 1967) Pedro Zaragoza. The story is well known to tourists and residents of the Comunidad Valenciana and has become something of a foundational myth. Mayor Zaragoza is said to have ridden his motorbike all the way to

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Madrid in 1953 for a personal audience with General Franco in order to beg for lifting the bikini ban, so as not to deter foreign visitors who may not have shared Franquista morals but were helping to revive the economy. Whether the trip to Madrid is mostly fact or fiction, the city of Benidorm was granted special permission for tourists to wear bikinis without risk of being ticketed. This marked a shift in tourism culture from a means to integrate Franco’s Spain with the rest of Europe socially and economically to a glimpse of the cultural revolt that would come after Franco’s death in 1975 and turn Spanish society upside down with an embrace of premarital sex (against the wishes of the Catholic Church), pop music and drug culture (the countercultural Movida movement in Madrid), and tolerance of homosexuality (the films of Pedro Almodovar from the 1980s are a great exemplar of the speed and extent of this change). Indeed, coastal cities, enjoyed mostly by foreign visitors, offered a glimpse of a more permissive and tolerant Spanish society that was being tried out on tourists before being put into practice at-large. Tourism helped the Spanish economy so much from the 1960s until 1974 that Franco vigorously petitioned the United Nations to locate its new World Tourism Organization (UWTO) in Madrid: a wish finally granted after Franco’s death in 1975. While Franco had wanted the office to legitimate his government to the world, it ended up accrediting tourism as a profession and a valuable economic sector, as well as establishing Spain as a particularly good practitioner in the field. This signaled a major shift in the European understanding of international travel from a mainly upper-class pursuit, dominated by famous hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants, to a firmly middle-class industry consisting of local travel agents, all-inclusive packages, and sprawling beach complexes like those that had sprung up in Benidorm. Spain’s success at marketing itself as a mass destination for the European everyman was a stroke of luck given that the first governments of the Spanish democracy would also emphasize the leisure industry as a way forward that re-connected the country with its estranged neighbors and bucked the trend of de-industrialization. The securing of the UWTO was also the first act in Spain’s slow and complex accession to the European Community: a process hindered by incomplete political reforms. Finally, the very presence of cities like Benidorm, which along with other hubs in Catalonia and Andalusia, was helping to draw 30 million tourists to Spain by 1975 (Gillespie et al. 1995), was a form of soft diplomacy in which municipalities and regions that attracted tourists were used to demonstrate a symbolic mixing of Europeans, suggesting that

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what was possible on the individual level of holidaymakers could also work at a European societal level. Yet, as Spain democratized in the late 1970s and 1980s, so did the tourism market on the costa levante in Valencia. Increasingly, Benidorm was thought of as a party city where young people could descend for holiday merriment. Long gone were the days of risqué bikini wearing and much of the city’s coastal promenade was packed with loud bars, discotheques, and, increasingly, drugs and prostitution. By the 1990s—as Spain’s coasts were urbanized for hundreds of smaller Benidorm-like tourist settlements—Benidorm itself was increasingly maligned as a place for ‘low class’ visitors from the UK who liked to fight and vomit on the street more than they liked to spend money in local businesses. This viewpoint was a reflection of both the genuine ease of European travel and the competitive prices which drew more working-class visitors, as well as Benidorm’s own cycle as a has-been destination marred by too many previous visitors. By 2007, Benidorm became enough of a punch line, for its combination of cut-rate retiree trips and alcohol-soaked stag parties, that it inspired a British comedy series on television of the same name. The show embraces a kind of bawdy slapstick humor that makes clear that tourists, intent on having a good time while losing sobriety and dignity, should be celebrated as a kind of British exceptionalism from continental Europe. Yet, a growing number of British transplants in Spain, who began buying property in the 1980s and visiting the country regularly, were not amused by the new more debauched tourism culture. For many, the democratization of tourism had oversaturated desirable areas and an ethos of excitement and escape had morphed into reckless revelry and abandon. Yet, tourism was increasingly seen as a right in affluent countries and not a privilege, as the United Nations World Tourism Organization put it in 1982: “The right to rest, a natural consequence of the right to work, must be affirmed as a fundamental right in terms of human happiness. It implicitly entails the right to the use of leisure time and, in particular, the broadest possible access to holidays” (UNWTO 1982). But greater access to leisure in Europe was not seen as a universally good thing, particularly among more affluent second homeowners who had been enjoying Mediterranean Spain for years and did not appreciate more company. Or, as a Norwegian ­homeowner in her mid-1960s told me after I announced my plans to drive to Benidorm from her luxurious coastal home: “Why are you going there? It’s for the British tattoo people, who come here on nine euro RyanAir flights.”

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Mass tourism aided in cementing the notion in the European psyche, since the 1970s, of Spain as a land of vacations, good weather, and parties. Behind the successful evolution of Spain’s late-Franco nation branding (Aronczyk 2013) lay another more pernicious characterization: that of a national lack of seriousness, idleness, and what every traveler or foreign resident casually dubs the ‘mañana mentality.’ As a middle-aged Spanish acquaintance in Madrid put it to me: “In the 1980s, everyone loved to come here. They would drink with us, sing with us, spend all summer … but doing business with us … that was different.” Indeed, by the 1980s, like many places with strong mass tourism economies, Spanish politicians, economists, and business elites had to ask themselves how they could progress beyond ‘sun and fun’ package tourism and how the national economy could move beyond tourism altogether.

3.5   The Tourism Ladder Indeed, the reputational decline of Benidorm demonstrates the vicissitudes of coastal tourism (some locations are eventually victims of their own popularity through global trends and, more importantly, by environmental degradation) but it also shows the maturation of Valencia and Spain’s overall coastal tourism market into a more variegated sector. Spain’s tourism industry grew to the third largest in the world in the 1980s (after France and the US), thanks mostly to a surge in ‘fly and flop’ tourism that marketed low-cost beach vacations to Northern Europeans (Boissevain 1996). While this type of tourism was increasingly regarded as a working-class holiday, in contrast to more individuated middle-class and upper-class vacations, it was profitable and did not lead to major social conflict between visitors and locals. Many people in the region benefited, even those who simply sold agricultural lands. Juan Fernando and his son, Miguel, natives of a small town near Alicante, explained the cultural change succinctly: “[T]here was one major occupation in this region before tourism, and that was farming, that’s what I did and what every man in my family did … since forever.” He explained how he and Miguel eventually decided to sell their land to real estate developers from Valencia in the early 1990s. They discussed the change as a family and Miguel, who was the youngest son, agreed to go to school for tourism management— something his family could better support with the sale of their land. Juan Fernando smiled at me and pointed to Miguel: “[A]nd you can ask him if

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that was the right choice or if he would rather be a farmer today … go ahead ask him … you can ask him in English, French, or German.” By the early 1990s, the tourism market in Spain had become a major part of the national economy and had followed two distinct trajectories from its origins in budget package tourism: cultural tourism, aimed at wealthier and older travelers, was pursued by municipalities seeking more revenue from fewer visitors, and residential tourism—second homes and retirement—was invested in by more rural municipalities where Northern Europeans went in search of cheap property deals and abundant sunshine. These two new ‘rungs’ on the tourism ladder were aggressively experimented with by the regional governments of Catalonia, Valencia, Andalusia, and the Basque Country, with special marketing campaigns, tax breaks, and infrastructure funds. When Spain’s economy became synonymous with tourism, politicians and entrepreneurs hoped to demonstrate that this industry was robust and could innovate and create new markets. One of the key goals of the Valencia Region was to harness the income from beach tourism and direct some of the cash flow toward more sustainable tourism such as heritage, culinary, or arts tourism (Degen and García 2012). This had long been the ideal progression of tourism-oriented regional economies, but often the model did not function in practice because developers focused on the bottom line and increased capacity, while natural resources were degraded by improper infrastructure and pollution. Spanish tourism, in its second great boom during the 1990s, was determined not to end up as a has-been destination, marred by ecological oversights and uncreative resort operators. What followed, starting with the Barcelona Olympics of 1992 and ending with Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia (completed just before the 2008 financial crisis), is hailed as one of the all-time tourism success stories and a model of economic development. The reality is quite a bit more complex. The announcement that Barcelona would hold the 1992 Summer Olympics was made in October of 1986, just ten months after Spain was admitted to the European Community. The next ten years of tourism development would radically change the image of the country to the European Community: from an inexpensive haven of sun and cheap drinks to a cultural powerhouse for arts, architecture, and cuisine. Barcelona’s urban renewal program, centered on the Olympics, became the gold ­standard of mega events (González 2011; Degen and García 2012), enlivening the competition among host cities for a generation. That same year, Seville held the World Expo. Five years later, King Juan Carlos I opened

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the doors to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The museum became the first franchise of the New York brand and a paradigmatic example of postindustrial rebirth for a city and a region suffering divestment in its manufacturing industry for decades. Spain’s embrace of cultural tourism—including the success of the ‘kitchen science’ gastronomy movement, new art museums, and heritage tourism—seemed to be a clear sign of the country’s economic and cultural ascent during the period of democratization. Sara, a middle-aged tourism promoter who works for an economic development office in Catalonia, but is originally from Valencia, noted in English that the image of Spain was “dramatically aided by culture … not necessarily our classical culture but new things that were made possible by a different attitude toward cultural production after Franco … it was no accident that this happened after 1975: before, it would have been impossible, almost subversive.” In the realm of urban development, the ‘Bilbao effect’—of remedying de-industrialization—and the ‘Barcelona phenomenon’—of bringing tourists for cultural trips—promised a lighter ecological footprint despite the emphasis on mega-events and new construction. Yet, this was not the case. The popularity of cultural tourism actually helped spur even more construction and the two went hand in hand. Culture, heritage, and gastronomic tours were the public face of a world-renowned economic transformation, while resorts and suburban enclaves of second homes were the perpetually important economic engine behind an economy, which, by 2000, relied on tourism for 15% of the GDP (World Travel and Tourism Council 2014). By the early 2000s, the ‘Spanish Model’ of development was a mixture of high-brow architectural projects, often funded by the European Union (EU) and Spanish development grants, that helped keep a massive property market—centered in major cities and coastal tourism regions—afloat. Many critics of the tremendous urbanization that occurred in the aught years point out that cultural projects such as opera houses, museums, and rail infrastructure were often not needed but taken on, using millions of euros in debt, in order to help stabilize the overheated property market and postpone a crash (García 2010b; López and Rodríguez 2011). In just a decade (1997–2007), Spain built 5.3 million new homes. While construction was started on 210,000 new homes in 1997, by 2006 almost 700,000 home constructions were initiated (Sebastián and Meliveo 2014). Yet, before the 2008 crisis, aside from some environmentalists, few others shared this viewpoint and Spanish tourism, along with the booming construction industry, was regarded as

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the gold standard in the industry. The beautiful structures erected in the early 2000s, such as Santiago Calatrava’s dramatic riverbed park that features a museum and opera house that cost over €1 billion in public debt, resonated with many other regions that were looking for development plans that stressed tourism and leisure. Large amounts of public funding were seen as a governmental commitment to the maturation of the tourism industry and a sign that the industry, with proper stewardship, could transcend some of the more nefarious aspects of mass tourism.

3.6   From Visiting to Staying: The Rise of Residential Tourism Despite the fact that Spain was increasingly known for improving its tourism industry by introducing arts and culture as major draws for visitors, this was not the main direction of the market, nor the source of the thriving construction associated with coastal tourism. Rather, while Spain was marketing itself to the rest of Europe with images of Sagrada Familia, Joan Miró, and the kitchen science marvels found in Ferran Adriá’s restaurant El Bulli: one of the real growth sectors was the second home market and retirement abroad. The second home market clearly delineated Northern and Southern Europe because it internationalized the real estate sector, while also leaving much of the housing stock empty for long periods of the year. To put this market in perspective, 17% of the housing stock in Spain and Portugal was second homes by the early 2000s, compared with just 3.5% in the rest of the EU countries (Allen et  al. 2004). These communities were often also skewed in age and income when compared with nearby Spanish communities (both being much higher). This was particularly true in Valencia, where cities like Calpe and Torrevieja grew dramatically and shifted from tourism to ‘residential tourism’: a term used to denote the proliferation of second home buyers in warmer coastal regions who spend part of the year in their secondary residence and sometimes transform it into a primary residence for retirement (Mazón 2006; O’Reilly 2007). The trend was facilitated by cheap prices that led Northern Europeans to buy Spanish real estate as investment properties to be rented and sporadically used. Also, under the government of José Maria Aznar, land use laws were significantly reformed in 1998 allowing for new developments to be built on virgin, formerly agricultural, lands away from existing cities and villages. This

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allowed for dramatic investment in vast tracks of new homes. Previously, the urban logic had been to keep all development within existing urbanized areas (whether suburbs or densely built villages) in order to limit sprawl and preserve the countryside, but the business-oriented Aznar government eschewed this template to the displeasure of many urban planners and the elation of developers, who bought land cheap and sold parcels to foreign buyers (sometimes sight unseen). The new law (el ley de suelo) reversed the burden of proof for rural construction from real estate investors—who previously had to show that a site was developable—to municipalities and conservationists. Those seeking to limit growth now had to contend with a law that proclaimed all land as buildable unless proven otherwise. As expected, many cities were more than happy to receive the jobs and tax revenue from new and significantly wealthier foreign inhabitants. Particularly British residential tourists, spurred by low prices and existing relationship with the Costa Blanca from frequent visits, began buying property to use and as an investment to cash in on given that Spanish property market was booming. This contributed to the phenomenon, popular from 2000 until 2008, called ‘buying on plan’ in which developers would propose a project and each unit would be sold several times before the first resident owner turned the key in the lock. Selling on plan was particularly popular for Spanish buyers who wished to enter the market before residential tourists and often operated on systems of local contacts: passing apartments from builders to their friends to residential tourism agencies to foreign buyers themselves. While Spanish laws facilitated vast amounts of growth for residential tourism, transforming villages socially was more difficult. Mixed communities of rural Spanish residents in an urban core surrounded by Northern European retirees in new urbanizaciónes was increasingly common as residential tourism grew in popularity. International political economic circumstances also helped boost this trend: European Union cohesion policy normalized property ownership laws across borders and minimized legal procedures for purchasing property in other EU member states (Kelemen 2011). The introduction of the euro in 2001 also allowed for a dramatic uptick in foreign homeownership and the rhetoric of a ‘single Europe’ helped assuage some of the more pernicious aspects of residential tourism. While residential tourists in coastal Spain were still regarded as wealthy guiris (a colloquial and slightly derisive term referring to foreigners and often bringing to mind the image of a sunburnt tourist in flip-flops), they

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were increasingly accepted as a part of life. What’s more, with the increase in salaries in Spain during the 1990s, many Spaniards were visiting wealthier Northern countries helping to counteract the feeling that some places are visited and other places produce visitors. The end of the sense of unidirectional travel was particularly eroded by the European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (ERASMUS) study abroad programs, operated through the EU, which sent many Spanish students abroad, often to acquire linguistic skills to be used for jobs in the flourishing tourism industry at home. Finally, while residential tourism—with its obviously deleterious environmental effects implicit in tearing up formerly rural lands—did not represent the new face of Spanish cultural tourism which was ‘greener’ and more sophisticated, it did help to cast the tourism economy as an essential component of European cosmopolitanism (Beck and Grande 2007; Mantecón and Huete 2008). The international mixing that occurred in real estate markets, while transactional, was seen as a positive sign of more people living transnational lives in the EU. Never mind that many resident tourists lived in special enclaves and never learned Spanish (O’Reilly 2000), the trend of second homeownership was described as a cutting-­edge economic maturation of the tourism market as well as a sign of Spain’s successful opening to the rest of Europe since Franco’s death in 1975. Abelardo, a former urban planner-turned real estate developer in Valencia, approved of the hundreds of thousands of residential tourists in Valencia: “We couldn’t keep this place just for ourselves, some people wanted to … no one would just grow oranges with these beautiful lands today. We used to, but now, that’s just ridiculous.” He continued, saying that he thought foreign residents had transformed the Valencia region by making things more international and a bit more cosmopolitan: “[P]eople are here from all over Europe today. Say ‘Alicante’ to someone in Dubai and they will know where that is.” Yet, others were not so sure about the evolution of tourism, particularly after the devastating crash in property markets in 2008 which left millions of homes in Spain empty and stripped away years of increases in the value of lands and homes (Holleran 2017). Teresa, a worker in a hair salon in Valencia, was less sure of the long-term benefits of tourism: “I see a lot of foreigners here when times are good and they built all those houses for them … but these people have a lot of money and they have seen how things are going. They can leave whenever they want and those houses will be empty … most of them already are.”

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3.7   The Second Periphery: The Spanish Model Goes East, Bulgaria 1990–2008 By the mid-1990s, it had become clear to politicians and economists across Europe that the fate of newly democratic Eastern Europe was at least as tied to the creation of stable institutions and civil society as it was to fostering an economy that reached westward and dealt with de-­ industrialization (Kotkin and Gross 2009). Cut off from the supply chain and raw materials of the former Soviet Union, many former Warsaw Pact countries had entered a process of accelerated de-industrialization (Dunn 2004). Bulgaria was one of the worst hit. The country had urbanized and industrialized with dramatic speed after 1945, creating entire new industrial cities in the center of the country near the historically large metropolitan areas of Plovdiv and Sofia. Yet, without the industrial support of Moscow, manufacturing supply chains no longer made sense and markets for goods contracted, causing the mass shuttering of factories in industrial hubs like Yambol, Dimitrovgrad, Dobrich, and Stara Zagora (Ilieva 2010). Factories in these cities were seen by investors as economically untenable and sold for scrap, creating a demographic convulsion sending many to the capital, Sofia, or abroad (Bulgaria’s population has declined by nearly 20% since 1989 mostly due to emigration [McLaughlin 2018]). By the mid-1990s, despite the fact that national politicians were beset with problems of instability, corruption, and mafia influence, the urgency of finding a new jobs policy, which kept the workforce in Bulgaria, was a top priority. At the same time, many political leaders—despite the worrying level of violence and graft—had set their sights on joining the European Union in order to better access development grants. Ana, a former municipal-level politician from the seaside city of Burgas, noted that joining the EU was an important goal for two reasons: “to use outside forces to reign in our many political problems … and to get money for infrastructure.” She notes that Burgas and Varna, the major cities of the Black Sea Coast, had actually fared quite well during the 1990s when depopulation was a major national concern. She attributes this success to the tourism industry which, during the 1990s, was in the process of transforming itself from a socialist ‘Red Riviera,’ (Ghodsee 2005) to a budget option for Western Europeans. Ana and many tourism promoters who worked with her had their eyes on Spain as a useful model both of political democratization and of economic ascent using coastal tourism as a key factor in its success:

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We never thought that Spain’s process of moving toward democracy was comparable with our emergence from socialism … we thought that our situation was far worse. However, people here who had traveled and who actually pay attention to economics were very excited by what Spain had done with tourism … and they did it with a lot of money from the EU.  We thought: ‘that could be us.’ And, for awhile, it seemed like the EU agreed with that.

Ana’s belief in the development model of intensive coastal tourism, second homes, and public subsidies for infrastructure distributed from wealthy Northern Europe to poorer Southern Europe was a common view of what had happened in Spain and an exciting possibility for Eastern European countries like Croatia, Romania, and Bulgaria where mass beach tourism was a possibility. This was particularly the case in Bulgaria where high property ownership before 1989 and an entrepreneurially focused restitution process after 1989 had given added importance to the real estate market (Andrusz et al. 1996). Bulgaria rapidly privatized the beach enclaves of the socialist era: dividing previously united parcels, selling off public parks and plazas, and quickly providing rights to build on empty land. Bulgaria ascended to the EU in 2007 along with Romania, yet all of Eastern Europe, specifically candidate EU members began enjoying access to development grants and enhanced international investment by the late 1990s. Informants in Bulgaria were excited by not only the promised economic benefits of creating a thriving tourist destination—particularly on the Black Sea Coast and the many skiable mountains in the interior—but also the possibility of rehabilitating the socialist tourism culture and ‘westernizing it.’ As one student of tourism at the University of Varna commented: “We want to make tourism resorts here like anywhere else in Europe … Spain, Greece, even France. If we can do that, maybe people will finally forget socialism and move on.” Sociological studies of post-socialist tourism have often concentrated on how the socialist past is presented to visitors: as an undiluted landscape of repression and suffering (such as Budapest’s House of Terror), as kitsch (Prague’s Museum of Communism), or even occasionally as nostalgic (Sofia’s Museum of Socialist Art or Tito’s Mausoleum in Belgrade). While reckoning with the past and commodifying it for Western European consumption did indeed become a facet of post-socialist holidays, the academic concentration on this form of re-discovering Eastern Europe is

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overstated (Todorova and Gille 2012). The vast amount of tourism that became popular in the 1990s was budget mass tourism for urban visits emphasizing medieval architecture (Krakow), cheap stag parties (Prague), or low-cost coastal tourism on the Black Sea, Adriatic, or Baltic. The majority of tourism promoters sought to modernize tourist facilities, professionalize services, and create new spaces that were indistinguishable from Western European or American counterparts. Despite the many studies showing how vacations in Eastern Europe exoticized the region and drew out regional differences for visitors to feel a sense of entering ‘another Europe,’ the need to adhere to a generic model of tourism development was pronounced and most regions, particularly Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast, endorsed a universal model of budget beachfront tourism that concealed rather than displayed recent history. In many ways, the modernization drive was an echo of the impetus for tourism during socialist times when leaders sought to show improved social welfare through leisure culture. Yet, the opportunity to experience socialist leisure firsthand was mostly open to allied countries on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain. Next, I will briefly describe late socialist tourism on the Bulgarian Black Sea in order to contrast it with the era that immediately followed in the 1990s and early 2000s.

3.8   Workers’ Paradise: The Black Sea as a ‘Red Riviera’ Coastal tourism played a large role in the socialist economy of Bulgaria and its perception by the rest of Eastern Europe. Aside from Yugoslavia— which was nonaligned and thus hard for many Eastern Bloc residents to visit without a visa—it had the most Mediterranean weather, abundant coastline, and a thriving viticulture industry. By the 1950s, coastal urbanization had emerged as a key economic avenue for the Bulgarian Communist Party that created the state-managed Balkantourist in 1948 to undertake touristic development plans for mountain ski parks and coastal resorts. Like in other socialist countries, Bulgarian tourism was meant to serve two purpose: new spaces of leisure, whether coastal strips for sunbathing or mountain parks, aimed to provide spaces to rejuvenate the socialist worker in an egalitarian atmosphere and, secondly, to broadcast the image of health and contentment to the capitalist world which was highly skeptical about leisure opportunities under state socialism. Workers,

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configured in their ideal type as male factory employees, would take their families to the seaside in order to rest their bodies and lift their spirits so they could return to Sofia, Plovdiv, or farther afield to the USSR, East Germany, or Poland and redouble their efforts to improve their respective socialist state and struggle to achieve full communism. While this idealization of the industry was far from the truth of people’s experiences, it was well represented in the propaganda of the time. Early videos of Bulgarian beachfront tourism show smiling proletariats pulling up to the beach in their efficient, yet tiny, Trabants and Ladas. Men hoist sun umbrellas and coolers and their families follow in toe: they are not flashy or sensual; they are merely weary and in need of a well-deserved break. Early Bulgarian tourism, spearheaded by Balkantourist and their construction planning department (Glavproekt), operated under the five-year plan system, which coordinated available apartments and hotel rooms with industrial work groups and helped build resorts like the planned beach resorts of Druzba and Albena. Beyer, Hagemann, and Zinganel, in their book comparing socialist tourism architecture and culture in Croatia and Bulgaria (2013), note that the Black Sea Coast was a particularly fertile ground for Fordist-style tourism and the building of large workers’ resorts. Aside from the cities of Burgas and Varna and the very small historic villages of Nessebar and Sozopol, the Coast was a wide expanse of sandy beaches only interrupted periodically with dunes and fishing villages. While a camping beach culture had existed for many years, the socialist regime of Todor Zhivkov hoped to transform the Black Sea Coast into a site of mass tourism for Bulgarians and others from Eastern Europe who could supplement the national economy’s drive toward industrialization with tourist roubles and marks. Beach development could also be traded, as it was with Czechoslovakia, for industrial development assistance. Yet, the push for mass tourism never quite took off without a market beyond Warsaw Pact countries. Some larger sites were developed such as the alluringly English-named Golden Sands (Zlatni Pyasatsi) and Sunny Beach (Slanchev Bryag), but these resorts were limited to smaller stretches of modernist block hotels which offered no-frills rooms featuring about the same aesthetic sensibility as the famous Khrushchyovka block apartments in Moscow, which utilized material and stylistic minimalism in the name of quick construction and low cost. It would only be at the end of the socialist era that Black Sea architects would begin to experiment with new modernist style which fused socialist modernism with more playful facades, brighter colors, and more ‘tropical’ theme. However, by the 1970s and

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1980s, socialist leisure had reached a nadir as supply diminished, upkeep was postponed, and Bulgarians became more painfully aware of the gap between physically uncomfortable Eastern European beach culture and the coastal tourism of Spain, France, and Greece. Like in Spain, the communist regime in Bulgaria struggled with displays of the body and the sensuality of beachfront tourism and their own visions of socialist propriety. While not constrained by the same religious elements of Franco’s Spain, there was certainly a sense in Bulgaria—the most hardline adherent to Moscow’s policies, sometimes even resisting glasnost and perestroika dictums—that overt displays of drunkenness or sexuality in coastal resorts was decadent and contrary to socialist principles. This is not to say that it did not happen—it most certainly did, likely behind the private gates of nomenklatura privilege as much as anywhere— but it could not be on display and marketed like in Western Europe, where it became a quintessential draw of coastal vacations. The ideal of the sexually restrained socialist body and the family virtue of beach holidays was strong enough to drive many young people to create their own beach culture away from established resorts. Many informants remember the profusion of unmarred sand dunes perfect for camping. Particularly more affluent youth, from better-off urban families with Party connections, were able to access cars and camp in isolated parts of the Black Sea Coast where they could have sex, smoke marijuana, listen to prohibited music, and get drunk around a blazing campfire. An informant from Sofia, who is now 45, remarked that he fondly remembered the Southern portion of the Black Sea near Sinemorets from his adolescence: “[W]e used to go listen to metal music and smoke weed there. It was amazing. Like a microcosm of what we wanted our country to be like. We could imagine we were somewhere else, not in this shitty socialist place. Then, after a few days, we would wake up with a very bad hangover and go home.” By 1989, Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast, or what anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee calls the ‘Red Riviera,’ was decommissioned as a majority socialist destination and the region was left to deal with the vicissitudes of the global tourism marketplace (2005). The transition was not a smooth one. Ghodsee makes clear in her ethnography of tourism sector employees (2005) that Bulgaria was unused to Western European tourism culture because a service culture had not existed within the state-run tourism agencies. What’s more, block-style hotels turned off Western Europeans accustomed to the aesthetics of resort culture in France and Spain. Nascent Bulgarian entrepreneurs were eager to attract visitors using flashy new

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aesthetics but the embrace of the carnivalesque elements of beach culture often went too far and appeared to many coastal residents and visitors as gaudy attempts to enact ‘proper’ vacation culture. Casinos, strip clubs, and loud bars, which sprang up in the 1990s, along with young businessmen using tourism to launder money from arms dealing, prostitution, and drug sales, reinforced the sense that Bulgaria’s Black Sea tourism culture was malformed, peripheral, and unable to compete on a global scale. Yet, despite the challenges of the Bulgarian Lev crashing in 1996 and an entrenched mafia culture, many saw the Black Sea Coast as a potential tourism destination that could fill some of the space in the budget tourism sector vacated by Spain’s ascent. By the late 1990s, US Aid money and EU funds were used to address infrastructure shortfalls while attempting to revamp socialist holiday spaces into European vacation destinations. In the next section, I will show how, unlike Spain, Bulgaria struggled to use beach culture as a metaphor of modernization and life under democracy, because of a lack of state coordination of the industry and the perceived prevalence of a new class of mafia entrepreneurs.

3.9   Creating Global Beach Culture: Sunny Beach One only has to walk down the main promenade of Sunny Beach (Slanchev Bryag) to see the transformation of coastal leisure culture in Bulgaria from socialism to a ludic space resembling a music video for spring break. Large groups of British, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian teenagers walk through a maze of kiosks—selling drinks and cigarettes—tattoo parlors, hamburger cafes, and open-fronted discotheques blaring electronic music. Many of the clubs are filled with fully clothed men amid women in bikinis despite the fact that the sun went down hours ago and the beachfront promenade is jammed with sex workers openly soliciting potential clients. Hawkers shill for bars with drink specials in five languages. One, wearing a shirt with the words Den Glade Viking and a cartoon of an inebriated Viking clutching a beer, approaches me and addresses me in a Scandinavian language. I tell him I don’t understand. After chatting for a while and explaining my project, my family history (not Bulgarian), and my aversion to going to a bar whose theme is drunk Vikings, he introduces himself as Todor. “I wouldn’t go into this bar either, man.” Todor explains that he was drawn to the coastal party city for three reasons: money, the chance to practice his considerable language skills (four fluently), and, more bluntly, to meet women and bask in the atmosphere of

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revelry and summertime freedom. “But honestly, man, we are seriously fucking this place up,” he says. “Just in ten years we built tons of hotels … and attracted some really shitty people [tourists] … these people … don’t even know they are in Bulgaria. They don’t actually care either … they have their beach, their booze….” Todor, like many other informants, felt that the Black Sea Coast in its race to prove itself as a viable region for global beach tourism has created a characterless stretch of urbanization that fails to project a new image of Bulgaria and only succeeds in meeting the basic leisure needs of visitors who will leave without an impression of the country. Like others, he felt that one of the greatest triumphs of urbanization for leisure was to create a relaxing ‘anyplace’ with sand and sun that does not challenge visitors to break out of a comfortably familiar routine that can be reenacted in any tourism hub on any continent. For informants like Todor, proper European beach culture means erecting spaces that are cleansed of national particularities in order that tourists, from all countries, are instantly familiar with them, know how they work, and can immediately get down to having fun. Bulgaria’s embrace of budget beachfront tourism has been hailed by some as a sensible means to reinvigorate an economy that was still shell-­ shocked from 1989 far into the 1990s, but others have countered that the social effects of often-hedonistic summer holidays has tarnished more than just the coastal landscape of dunes and villages. Many critics insist that global tourism culture, aside from the impetus to build quickly and cheaply, has exacerbated some of the worst elements of post-socialism. Ivaneta, a 60-year-old former teacher from Sofia, told me that she generally dislikes the Black Sea Coast because it exemplifies the class differences that have emerged since 1989: “[E]very place you go you have to pay for a seat [lounge chair], otherwise they will kick you out. Nothing is public anymore and everything there is owned by mobsters.” Indeed, the national government in the 1990s (under both rebranded former communists and reformists) swiftly privatized coastal land. Managing an increasingly large number of international guests and the construction of new accommodation became an entirely private task even as cities like Sunny Beach mushroomed to 300,000 beds for guests by the early 2000s (Beyer et al. 2013). Ivaneta also drew on the aesthetic critique of mafia culture based on flashy cars and men with sunglasses and gym-honed muscles (Goscilo and Strukov 2010). She pointed out that they seemed to own most of the coast and had failed to keep the beach as a public asset like it had been during socialism. This was backed up by numerous media reports of hotels

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built on public lands (including nature parks like Strandhza), money laundering through businesses (Ganev 2007), and the rise of the infamous TIM group—a mafia made up of former marines accused by the past American ambassador of controlling the entire city of Varna (Bulgaria’s third largest). What’s more, Ivaneta says that the entire culture of the beach has been changed not just by mafia activity and privatization but an ‘American’ sensibility toward everything from music to private space. The critique of the growing tourism industry has mostly been muted, often because many who dislike loud beachfront bars with a sexually charged atmosphere are older and more nostalgic for the socialist past (Todorova and Gille 2012) and thus often considered by younger Bulgarians as stuck in the past. Younger Bulgarians see the new beach culture, complete with many boisterous spaces for young adults, as a welcome form of Americanization and modernization: from hip-hop music, to clothing brands, to the very names that have taken over the vocabulary of leisure which is dominated by English. However, the generation over 40 often regards the newly constructed coast and its culture as a product of contamination by global forces. Some pinpoint capitalism itself—hewing to a spirit of pre-1989 cultural critique of capitalism—as not only unequal but a generator of social ills relating to sexuality, party culture, and alcohol and drug abuse. Lastly, a small number of informants located the major change in beachfront culture as a result of EU cohesion: they argued that Bulgaria’s position as the poorest member of the EU had made it a dumping ground for the worst kind of tourism. In this sense, tourism, no matter what the economic promise, always represented an unwanted compromise in which the Bulgarian Black Sea was used by unworthy outsiders with little respect for it, before it would eventually be reclaimed by Bulgarians when they had the financial power to take back control. The sense that opening the Black Sea Coast to global tourism markets has been a mixed blessing was one that I encountered often. Like in Spain, the appeal of the periphery and the excitement of visiting the edge of Europe was used as a marketing tactic but was also internalized in ways that could be more hurtful than transcendent. Krassimir, a native of the historic city of Sozopol and of mixed Bulgarian and Greek ancestry, told me that Bulgaria has benefited from being a player in the European beach tourism market even if it is still firmly in the budget category. “We are learning as entrepreneurs and as a country. Sometimes we push too hard and build too much, which could scare people away.” He worried that

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historic buildings are not valued enough and that post-socialism has pushed people too far in the direction of worshiping what is new. “People with money here are most certainly nouveau riche … I won’t deny this. They like things that sparkle … that can be a problem in the tourism business because a lot of people [tourists] like old buildings. People here think these things are decrepit. They say: ‘tear it down.’” In his opinion, unmanaged growth has led Bulgaria down a path of recklessly fast development and Bulgarians, struggling to understand foreign leisure culture and business practices, have been caught off guard. He feels that the ability to properly control the tourism industry was an expression of the entire modernization of Bulgarian society, which he thinks is insufficient. Tourism was almost always conceived of as a cultural and political project: one that would simultaneously import foreign investment and better business practices which would cleanse the post-1989 marketplace of ‘backward’ elements and business practices that were considered to be pejoratively ‘Balkan.’ While American tourism developers represented the highest echelon of professionalism and status, many in the tourism industry were also enthusiastic about working with developers from Southern Europe and Israel because they felt that these countries were more similar in their tourism culture and national histories. While some coastal residents feared that urbanization for tourism would move too quickly and not take into consideration the needs of average citizens, many more welcomed foreign businesses and EU grants and regulatory reforms as a means to revitalize the economy and address the growing clout of organized crime. As one hotelier in Sozopol put it: “By the late 1990s, I had no confidence in Bulgarian tourism … a lot of new things were built … but the owners were mobsters and they just made hotels for them and their friends to hang out in … I was excited by the more professional people from Spain, Israel, and Italy: you never saw these guys sitting behind their own bar all night.”

3.10   Leisure and Reimagining the Nation at Europe’s Edges Leisure spaces have often helped countries to reimagine themselves: the act of organizing labor, capital, and space to appeal to outsiders’ eyes has been a major tool for politicians to help present a new national vision to their constituents. Embedded in this act of remaking is often an idea that

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a prosperous country is one where people can simultaneously work hard and earn well but—once they have done so—they can enjoy the fruits of their labor. Yet, the main problem with this well-marketed notion is that most countries that are heavily invested in tourism are in the global periphery and the overwhelming majority of their inhabitants will never get to enjoy the leisure experience that they offer to tourists day after day. Indeed, like the young Bulgarian informant, Desislava, remarked earlier in the chapter: most people working in the service industry will forever have to fold hotel towels without ever having the opportunity to lie on them. Yet, the semi-periphery—and the geopolitical peripheral spaces that Spain and Bulgaria occupy in the European Union—is quite different from the global periphery. People who work in tourism in these places are actually quite close to enjoying the benefits of the tourism economy, and most of them are highly invested in the idea that the successful management of the tourism industry is indeed a ‘ladder’ and countries that are astute at managing their tourism industry will be able to ‘climb-up’ to something better in the near future. This ascent is often from budget tourism to niche tourism and, with sufficient investment and management, to other industries. The spaces of leisure and, particularly, the archetypical beachfront vacation are thus highly important—down to the smallest seemingly irrelevant nuance—to the public understanding of how well a country is managing the tourism economy and whether they are truly progressing or, as many informants in Bulgaria feel, they have made great sacrifices with few results. In Spain, grandiose and expensive architecture communicated interest in the country from world-famous ‘starchitects,’ such as Norman Foster. This cemented public confidence in the well-managed upward progression of the tourism industry, from ‘fly and flop’ package holidays to cultural uses with more lucrative profits for cities and regions. In Bulgaria, particularly in Sunny Beach, the profusion of stores selling four-ounce bottles of alcohol and the herds of intoxicated teenagers had the effect of making locals question the sacrifices of tourism culture (Urry 2002). While the seafront has always represented a ‘pleasure periphery’ (Turner and Ash 1975) where people go to escape quotidian social mores, the enactment of this ritual is fraught when it is internationalized. The presence of tourists from wealthier countries who are reveling in a poorer, even just a slightly poorer, country often activates a sense of grievance among locals (MacCannell 2013) who often feel that they have sacrificed the most important piece of national patrimony, the environment, to others who enjoy it with little respect and perhaps sully it for good.

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In Spain, there was a sense that peripherality was neutralized through the successes of the tourism sector and the fact that the country became a well-recognized international leader in the field (until the property bubble of 2008). In Bulgaria, the feeling of being on the edge of Europe has intensified. Much of this is a function not only of the ailing Bulgarian economy, which has been aided by tourism but not enough to elevate it from the position of the poorest country in the EU and one of the poorest in all of Europe, but also of the specific history and cultural markers of post-socialist peripherality compared to Mediterranean peripherality. The former has a more contentious position in regard to aesthetic markers of the ‘pleasure periphery,’ because post-communism is intimately interwoven with questions of the proper expression of wealth and sexuality within class culture (Goscilo and Strukov 2010) and the adequate purging of socialist aesthetics from the architectural landscape. Although leisure spaces on the Black Sea were most often enjoyed by Western European foreigners, the money used to build the new hotels, resorts, and casinos was often ‘black money’ (Hirt 2012; Holleran 2014) causing great local consternation, as I will show in a following chapter. Additionally, while young foreigners rowdily descended on resort towns, like Sunny Beach, in various conditions of insobriety and undress, their hedonism was an example of a more prevalent cultural trend that many who grew up in the socialist era were uncomfortable with. The lack of comportment and open sexuality of beachfront tourism was often a sensitive issue for older Bulgarians brought up with a sense of socialist rectitude who still remembered when most of the coast was dominated by Warsaw Pact tourists who exhibited a more staid leisure culture. What’s more, the feeling that everything—from lounge chairs, to beachfront real estate, to knock-off sunglasses—was for sale deeply saddened the older generation who grew up during socialism and felt that the country they had worked hard to build was snapped up by foreign buyers during a ‘clearance sale’ that took place after 1989.

Note 1. Parts of this chapter were originally published in: “Falling off the Tourism Ladder: Spanish Tourism from Franco to the Housing Bubble of 2008” in Radical History Review, Volume 129, pp.  144–163. Copyright, 2017, MARHO: The Radical Historians Organization, Inc. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press.

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CHAPTER 4

Leisure Spaces and the Aesthetics of Europe

Abstract  This chapter mobilizes local discussions of beachfront architecture in the Black Sea and Costa Blanca to investigate the European Union integration through tourism economies. Despite massive urbanization, many sprawling tourism zones do not achieve the elegance that their creators had in mind. Using informants’ experiences of the built environment, the chapter shows how some spaces are perceived to succeed or fail at demonstrating “Europeanness.” For many informants, the physical metamorphosis from rural fishing hamlets to uninterrupted strips of homes, hotels, casinos, and golf courses became a public metaphor for the enrichment that European Union cohesion could deliver. However, it could also become a symbol of environmental harm, corruption, and the loss of local control to make decisions around urban development. Keywords  Aesthetics • Beachfront construction • Cultural geography • European identity

4.1   Introduction Crumbling urban spaces and inferior infrastructure were used as a means to delineate the near periphery of the Mediterranean from the ‘core’ of Europe and these cities—whether Seville, Lisbon, Naples, or Athens— were imbued with stereotypes of Southern European national identity © The Author(s) 2020 M. Holleran, Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0218-7_4

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until the 1950s, although this strain of thought has not entirely disappeared. Eastern European cities were also viewed as retrograde in the late twentieth century. Although 1945 to 1989 saw a tremendous rise in the level of urbanization and the size of cities across Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Andrusz 1996), the means by which these cities grew—by decree of central committees and state planning—was scorned by many Western European countries. In 1959, a flummoxed Nikita Khrushchev retorted to Richard Nixon’s presentation of an American dishwasher in the ‘kitchen debate’: “Your American houses are built to last only 20 years so builders could sell new houses at the end. We build firmly. We build for our children and grandchildren” (Central Intelligence Agency 1959 [2019]). Yet, as most of the audience at the US Embassy in Moscow was aware, the only thing one could say about the quickly erected postwar socialist cities was that they appeared ‘solid’ and not that they had much beauty or comfort for residents. Visitors to cities such as Belgrade, Bucharest, and Warsaw could not help but see their political critique of state socialism in the urban forms themselves. This chapter will outline how both Spain and Bulgaria struggled with urbanization as a means of enacting aesthetic politics during their democratic transitions and integration with the European Union (EU) (Hirt 2012). Coastal cities played an important role in this process because they experienced an increase in construction and investment with European integration due to newly powerful tourism industries that attracted visitors from wealthier ‘core’ countries. In this chapter, I argue that leisure cities often had a particular aesthetic (bright, beckoning, and organized around attracting passing pedestrians to shops and entertainment venues), but as these economies matured, urban space became more diffuse, due to the construction of rental flats and homes in new suburban areas far from the city center. In both the Costa Blanca and the Black Sea, urbanization for tourism brought a dispersed spatial plan that sometimes evoked comparisons to North American cities: both in the positive sense of newness as luxury and in the negative connotation of wastefulness and lack of character. In both case studies, the tourism economy helped to create swaths of development that linked previous cities, towns, and villages forming coastal strips or peri-urban regions (Bachvarov 1999; Yepes and Medina 2005; Salvati and Sabbi 2011). In this chapter, I also explore the public reaction to two kinds of ‘leisure city’ development. First, I analyze the post-socialist expansion of the small town of Sozopol to accommodate tourism on the Black Sea. Much

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of this growth threatened both the socially perceived character of the previous city as a historic place (Molnár 2013) and some of the actual wood buildings from the town’s fishing past. The public struggled to adapt to growth and the bright aesthetics of tourism cities as foreign visitors flooded into the town during the summer. This created a visible metaphor of European integration but with the pessimistic reality of service work in which Bulgarians were often badly paid hotel workers (Ghodsee 2005) waiting on wealthy tourists from core countries, many of whom were taking bargain holidays with a heavy emphasis on alcohol consumption. This created discourses around the specific urban forms of hotels, resorts, shopping malls, and seaside promenades that emphasized both the possibilities of post-socialist urbanization, and EU integration, as well as the potentially negative social and environmental externalities of budget tourism and rapid coastal growth. In the second section of the chapter, I investigate a more evolved form of tourist development in the Costa Blanca. There, I show that after years of mass tourism, local officials, assisted by new national urban planning laws, drastically expedited the construction of gated communities to help establish a new economy of second homes away from the previous urban centers. This growth, which ballooned the Spanish real estate sector between 1997 and 2008, created vast new suburbs, including continuous strips of coastal development. Often, the creation of new housing stock for foreign retirees, second homeowners, or seasonal renters had the effect of splitting coastal areas into the historic urban centers of small towns (el núcleo urbano)—inhabited by long-term residents— and new suburban neighborhoods where larger homes were owned, or leased, by non-­Spaniards. This segmentation of tourism regions by space and kinds of housing was often tolerated due to the beneficial overall effects of the tourism economy in the Costa Blanca (García 2010; Molinas 2013). Also, the previous success of mass tourism had brought a state and private push to diversify the industry in hopes of sustaining its profitability in an increasingly complex European tourism market (Degen and García 2012). Yet, individual residents were sometimes irritated with the influx of foreign residents, who frequently did not attempt to integrate with locals (Oliver and O’Reilly 2010). Some residents even worried that new tourism cities would rearrange urban space to the extent that older housing in town centers would be ‘ghettoized’ and only home to elderly Spaniards or young seasonal service workers, while new areas would be increasingly shut off to local residents, who would

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grow to feel like outsiders in their own ancestral towns. In this sense, the cosmopolitan nature of new leisure spaces and tourism cities was viewed as distributed unequally between class groups: newcomers from wealthier European countries had access to all spaces, while local long-term residents felt that portions of the coast were being carved out as exclusively foreign zones that they could only access through employment in the services industry.

4.2   Other European Urbanisms: Southern and Eastern European Underdevelopment Well into the 1960s, there were abundant examples of a ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 2002) that focused on Southern Europe as a cultural other with relish: piazzas with open-air fish markets, romantically decaying buildings, and rustic cafes, made up a catalogue of Southern European urbanism seared into the wider European imaginary. These spaces were celebrated for ‘color’ and authenticity but never for innovation, industriousness, service culture, nor cleanliness (Pemble 1987). Indeed, authors and artists who admired Southern Europe did so in a way that assumed it would never change, as a museum of the past that somehow managed to lope onward into the present. There was a religious and ethnic undertone present in this imagining of Catholic and Orthodox Southern Europe in the prewar era (Charnon-Deutsch 2004), although with less intensity than between European metropoles and their closest colonies and protectorates in North Africa (Rabinow 1995). The notion of urban inferiority was especially pronounced within Mediterranean countries: between the capitals of Southern Europe—Madrid, Lisbon, Rome, and Athens—and their rural Southern peripheries. However, due to infrastructural projects, this image had faded in the 1950s (even in places like Naples and Andalusia, which were conceived of with semi-orientalist feelings within their respective national imaginaries). Postwar Southern Europe, with the help of EU funds, entered into a vast modernization project starting in the 1960s and continuing into the 1980s. Within Southern Europe, getting urbanism right, both aesthetically and in terms of building adequate infrastructure, was a key European cohesion goal (Swyngedouw 2004) and an important national project in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, where citizens with antiquated cities felt that their new democracies warranted revitalized urban spaces.

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Most of Eastern Europe also stood out as lacking when it came to city life in the immediate postwar period because of destruction during World War II and the predominance of agrarian life. Moscow and the newly socialist governments of Eastern and Central Europe made urbanization, industrialization, and modernization priorities in building state socialism (Verdery 1996). Particularly in Bulgaria, the push for urbanization after 1945 was a priority because it had been mainly rural before the war and often described as a still ‘semi-Ottoman’ corner of Europe (West 2007 [1937]). Bulgaria needed to dramatically improve infrastructure in order to transform the country from an agrarian to an industrial nation, which was largely achieved from the 1950s until 1970s (Creed 1998; Crampton 2006). Urbanization was also seen, by the nomenklatura of the Bulgarian Communist Party, as a central component of creating the ‘New Socialist Man’ who would be freed of rural habits and viewpoints, which were often denigrated not just as anti-modern but ‘oriental’ and a legacy of Ottoman domination (Todorova 1997). New cities built for industrial labor with housing and cultural centers (doma na kultura) were often both economically expedient as well as revealing of the Bulgarian Communist Party’s paternalistic attitude toward rural life: which was celebrated as a vague place of origin but routinely maligned as backward and in need of urgent modernization. However, the spaces that were constructed were done so in haste and most people in Warsaw Pact countries, including Bulgaria, reported a profound dislike of living among the gargantuan-scaled public buildings and shoddily constructed block housing (Boym 1994; Yurchak 2006). Indeed, socialist urbanism since 1989 has become an international punch line for discomfort and ugliness. Post-socialist countries have struggled to integrate a new aesthetic rubric into the urban planning reforms of the 1990s that restituted property and land and, generally, deregulated the construction process in most Eastern European metropolises (Crowley and Reid 2002; Stanilov 2007). For this reason, many Eastern European cities are seen as representative of obsolete urbanism: because of both inadequate formerly state-owned block housing (panelki) and physical organization around long-dormant factories. Peripheral urbanisms at both the Southern and Eastern edges of Europe have run up against charges of anti-modernism: the Southern periphery for its prolonged ‘decay’ in which weak states failed to adequately construct modern housing and infrastructure (Allen et  al. 2004). Eastern Europe, due to overly swift development during socialism with a lack of

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competition and an embrace of a constructivist style now regarded as authoritarianism incarnate (Åman 1992). This was particularly true in the 1980s, when European Community officials compared Western European cities to rural areas in Mediterranean and socialist Europe, finding the differences to be often as large as the gap between developed and developing countries (Molle 2007). In the democratic era, the 1980s in Spain and the 1990s in Bulgaria, new governments attempted to reorient the styles of the past authoritarian regimes in public construction projects, while booming private sector developments sought to successfully implement modernist internationalist styles popular for malls, suburbs, and entertainment complexes with aesthetic connotations of both prosperity and transnational placeless-ness (Sklair 2005). Both countries accelerated urban development and aesthetic re-­ representation through new spaces of mass tourism. Coastal cities, which were built from nearly the ground-up, were easy to construct given the large amounts of underutilized coastline in less-developed zones of the European Community. In Spain, this process began with the reforms of the late Franco period, due to the efforts of the tourism ministry of Manuel Fraga, while in Bulgaria it became a priority after the state-controlled Balkantourist was closed in 1990 and reestablished as the National Tourism Council in 1998, with a formal advertising wing added in 2002 (Ivanov and Dimitrova 2014). Unlike manufacturing hubs, these cities served rather than produced and could be rendered using futuristic styles meant to be inviting to guests (Kavaratzis et al. 2014). Both countries evolved from tourism as part of the economic plan of non-democratic governments to market-based systems that were heavily managed from above by democratic governments (Gotham 2005), often attempting to not just bolster the economy but to introduce a new understanding of the nation (Aronczyk 2013). The beach town, as a variety of urbanization, was not just an economic strategy but an aesthetic statement (Urbain 2003) that embraced a diffuse American use of space (Fishman 1987; Garreau 1991). Colorful styles served as implicit real estate adverts and a surfeit of bars and cafes manifested the primacy of the leisure economy. While the new bright hues of hotels and the loud music of beachfront bars stood out in stark contrast to the previously small town centers and functionalist port cities, new architectural styles did not engender noticeable protest because of the implied connection between tourism and economic improvement. Even when construction disrupted daily life or caused environmental problems, such

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as erosion or a dramatic increase in sewage to be treated, many held back in organizing protest. This was a function of the general economic improvement of Europe’s peripheries from 1990 until 2008. However, following the sovereign debt crisis, coastal overdevelopment became a salient issue and environmental politics were quickly linked to failures of EU integration and regulation. While Spain did not have to significantly alter the built environment to cleanse it of the franquista legacy, in the same way that Bulgaria was forced to destroy or convert the architectural symbols of socialism, there are many similarities in how both countries attempted to create spaces that expressed modernization. Beachfront strips of hotels, second homes, and casinos are significant because they represented a new economic reality based on European interdependence and the growth of foreign investment, the service economy, and travel. Planners, architects, and developers who created these spaces grappled with embracing a kitsch aesthetic that emphasized pleasure and relaxation while also projecting a seriousness that showed the continued development of the periphery and the legitimacy of the new tourism economy. Creating the aesthetics of leisure cities was often a fine balance between playful (for advocates) and puerile (for critics). On both peripheries of Europe, new leisure spaces were experienced by local residents with a mixture of excitement and resentment. On the one hand, the architectural form was a celebration of the European good life and the prosperity of welfare states that allowed most citizens the means and time to vacation. On the other hand, in both Southern and Eastern Europe—lacking strong welfare states and robust economies—these spaces were created not for local residents but for those from the European core. While this began to change in the 1990s, as both underdeveloped edges of Europe improved economically, coastal tourism strips were regarded as spaces built for and filled with foreigners. Many local residents enjoyed these ribald spaces but, given their own immobility, began to feel that coastal tourism towns were holding pens for rowdy young foreigners or retirees manned by locals who were slowly losing control. Juan, a grad student and waiter at a restaurant near Alicante, said: “[T]hese beach towns are all the same … now it is just towers of rental apartments … depending on what time of year they are filled with either old people or young.” While people from the European core countries began to experience the Southern and Eastern edges of the Continent as places for relaxation and play, many residents of coastal communities saw the beginnings of

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two kinds of urban growth. The first was the emblematic European city which had its major growth spurt during the industrial era and was previously organized around factory labor: now displaced in favor of whitecollar industries, such as insurance, finance, and technology. The second kind of city was the Mediterranean—and increasingly Adriatic or Black Sea—leisure city that was created in the twentieth century around port functions but was more and more devoted economically to entertainment. While the tale of both types of cities is similar, in that services gained economic prominence and began to organize urban space, many residents of entertainment cities regarded their urban form as less ‘serious’ due to physical organization around play rather than nontourism sectors that they considered to be more traditional forms of work. Residents saw this discrepancy in several aspects of urban form and social life: colorful and ‘beckoning’ new architecture, the prevalence of badly paid service jobs, the seasonal and transitory nature of leisure cities (even those with several hundred thousand residents), and the boisterous behavior of travelers. For many residents in the Costa Blanca and the Black Sea Coast, these two kinds of urbanism presented the divergent fortunes of the European center and the peripheries. The social experience of living in these cities shows important and lasting differences between core and periphery for local residents. Many residents of booming coastal tourism cities were excited by the growing regional tourism economy but felt that the new spaces created were more of a simulacrum of urban life, frequented by tourists on a seasonal basis, and not ‘first rate’ urban growth (Ghertner 2015) enjoyed in the European core. Informants tended to qualify this opinion by citing the shoddy construction of quickly built second homes; the gaudiness of nightlife-catering strips on coastal promenades; or the bifurcation of dense small town centers occupied by locals and more luxurious and dispersed suburbs home to residential tourists or holiday renters. During a meeting I attended with several Spanish architects, one woman who designed beachfront condominiums turned to her colleague (who had been commissioned to build a high-profile public building in France) and said: “That’s a totally different kind of architecture … you are lucky to be doing that.” The man she addressed, who had previously worked on tourism construction in the Costa Blanca, smiled and said: “You’re right … getting away from the tourism market is good … it reminds you that in some cities people go to work in a suit and a tie … not flip flops.” This idea of the informal city where work in tourism in lacking in respect was

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something that was felt deeply by many, not just because of the quality of jobs in the leisure economy but also the transnational mixture of clients (foreigners) and staff (locals).

4.3   What Does Modernization Look Like? Urban sociologists have long considered how countries, using monuments and urban growth, attempt to transmit a new understanding of the nation. Often, the impetus to use architecture and urban development as a means to project a new understanding of the nation is both a political priority (for elected officials) and a private concern (for firms hoping that altering world opinion about a country or region will drum up business) (Molnár 2013). Since the 1980s, many projects seeking to use urban space as a demonstration of national ascent have also been public-private ventures in the form of mega-events, business parks, or even the creation of entire new cities (Graan 2013). Beginning in the 1990s, the imperative of demonstrating aesthetic modernization and, with it, a vibrant up-to-date economy based on good infrastructure, adequate housing, and recreation is required for countries that see themselves as competing on a world stage for capital, international loans, business outposts, and visitors. This trend fits into a new political-economic vision of cities and city regions as units in competition with each other (Heeley 2015). In the EU, the urban policy of the 1990s was to increasingly acknowledge this competition while helping to forge distinct images of European cities to make them more competitive in specific industries. Tourism was a popular market niche and creating spaces that demonstrated the importance of leisure in urban economies was regarded as a worthy pursuit to be backed with EU loans and grants (Fig. 4.1). The role of tourism in creating inspirational new spaces is important because zones where foreign visitors experience a national culture are intensely assembled to produce a coherent vision of a country to be imparted on guests and consumed by them. Anthropologists have shown the ways in which national heritage and culture are recreated, or simply invented in order to display to visitors and to get the upper hand in the international tourism marketplace (Clifford 1997; Salazar and Graburn 2016). This often means evoking ‘proper luxury’ rather than an imitation (often a covert way to distinguish non-European destinations like Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco) (Rojek 1995), keeping standards high, and becoming active within the professional tourism field to anticipate new market

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Fig. 4.1  A holdout house surrounded by beachfront apartments on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast. (Photo by the author)

niches. The concept of pretending at opulence became a constant concern for those building tourism spaces. Everything from quality of construction to minor differences in what brand clothing stores agreed to rent commercial spaces in shopping malls was regarded as essential to upholding the idea of quality leisure spaces. Ironically, all spaces built for tourism involve some degree of suspended disbelief from patrons, but most developers felt there were major limits on how far to push this fact. On the one hand, visitors could pretend that the facade of a Venetian-style building gave an impression of historic authenticity and elegance but that same visitor would not countenance a building facade that deteriorated and sent chips of paint and stucco onto them. As an architect in the Black Sea resort city of Golden Sands remarked: “People tolerate a lot of hotels that they know are fake but there is a difference between a bad shower head and a … collapsed balcony … most of it is about image but sometimes image and structure come together.”

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Tourism promoters, working for both the state and private companies, in countries and regions in the early stages of tourism development, fretted that they would only be known as discount variations of previously established destinations. They also feared that the economic status of their country would prematurely affect the judgment of potential visitors, that is, low national GDP would place a ceiling on what guests were willing to pay and what segment of the tourism market would visit. Mladen, a bartender in the Black Sea city of Golden Sands, pointed out: “No one thinks they will find some kind of Santorini here … doesn’t matter how good everything is … they know that Bulgaria is Balkan … and [therefore] inferior … they are sure of this even before the plane lands.” These subtle cues delineating levels of the tourism market were often perceived in the built environment by guests and hosts. Cheaper tourism hubs were in need of more forceful advertising and promotion for lower profit margins, many professionals argued. Upscale destinations could limit signage and street-­ level adverts because moneyed travelers had better information and had already made up their minds where to visit for eating and recreation. For those who design urban spaces, creating multiple tourism markets meant treading a fine line between an aesthetic of fun and relaxation and the visual symbols that denoted kitsch: such as neon, hawkers, themed bars, or billboards. Because the European tourism industry began as an intra-European competition to attract those from wealthier ‘core’ countries, many working in that industry were hyperaware of subtle aesthetic differences and related them to a hierarchy of touristic place-making in which some destinations could successfully attract ‘quality tourists’ (Boissevain 1996) while others could not. When singling out this group, most in the industry meant wealthier and older tourists interested in culture and heritage but they also included residential tourism, medical tourism, spiritual retreats, and hikers. In general, they limited the category to those over 40, not purchasing a package, and less interested in beaches or nightclubs. They also maintained that places entirely dependent on mass tourism should be looking for a way to endear their location to wealthier guests. Some tourism promoters even put this mission into historical epochs: until the 1990s, Europeans worked in manufacturing and their Fordist labor led to mass leisure. With the decline of mass production came the waning of one-size-fits-all leisure and the search for individuated leisure began: first with wealthier travelers and then to a broader-class spectrum. Those working in the tourism industry felt that their profession should respond to this

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change, but they were often stymied by the inertia of the mass tourism industry as well as the undeniable economy of scale it provided. While interviewing Mitko, a former hotel owner in a small city in the South of the Black Sea Coast near the Turkish border, I saw an example of the nuanced level of distinction those in the tourism industry were concerned with and which they used to create regional and national hierarchies. When Mitko was served an iced coffee that had obviously been brewed immediately before the waitress brought it and already had fast-­ melting ice, he turned to me and said in English: “What the fuck is this? Some guy from Oslo will not drink this on a hot day. In Greece they would never do this.” Mitko went on to describe his own frequent vacations in the Greek Aegean, which he could afford as a businessman, and which he found preferable to the newer and cheaper resorts on the Bulgarian Black Sea. By bringing up Greece, where one could “order a frappé that will actually be cold,” Mitko used Bulgaria’s Southern neighbor (which has the euro currency and has been an EU member a generation longer than Bulgaria) as a foil for its post-socialist counterpart and an example of the immense, and sometimes fickle, choices that tourists make when deciding where to travel and where to return to. Mitko regarded Greece as a place that was doing a good job managing tourism by concentrating on advertising to ‘quality tourists,’ rather than overall visits. These people, in his opinion, spend more money and, in doing so, enriched those in the Greek tourism industry while helping the country as a whole. Through his own pessimistic view of the Bulgarian tourism industry— which he mentioned had overbuilt on the coast, suffered from poor service quality, and centered on alcohol tourism—he made it clear that the country was still too mired in the “socialist way of doing things.” In his opinion, poorer countries like Bulgaria could not anticipate or fulfill the taste cultures of wealthier visitors. Indeed, anticipating the taste culture of those from a different country, and often a different socioeconomic background, is a major preoccupation in the tourism industry, especially in  locations where tourism promoters hope to move from relatively homogenous mass tourism to niche tourism sectors.

4.4   Cities of Visitors: Sozopol, Bulgaria On both edges of Europe—Mediterranean and post-socialist—the budget tourism economy was both a blessing and a burden. The growth of large hotels was environmentally taxing and new construction often came at the

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price of destroying older structures or neglecting them. In this section, I will show how the changing aesthetics of seaside tourism hubs was interpreted by local residents in the historic and rapidly growing Black Sea town of Sozopol. For many residents, the internationalization of coastal towns, whether with temporary travelers or long-term second homeowners, was an exciting sign of European integration that showed a greater connection to Europe, employment opportunities, and the possibility of rising home values. Others regarded the ludic landscapes of pink and teal hotels and cabana bars blasting music as signs of invasion, often using the aesthetics of leisure spaces as a reminder of the disruption of the tourism industry to local life. The post-socialist beachfront is a particularly important context because exuberant aesthetics were seen as a direct response to the restrained color and form of concrete hotels that dominated coastal resorts during the socialist epoch (Ghodsee 2005; Holleran 2015). Whether residents were for or against this change, they invariably used shifting aesthetics in architectural style as a metaphor for evolving norms of beachfront behavior among both Bulgarians and foreign budget tourists. “I like to get drunk just as much as anyone but some of the people who come here are really extreme … they want to come because it is cheap and they come and the vodka is even cheaper than they imagined it would be.” Ivan tells me this with a wry smile while we sit in a cafe in the Black Sea city of Sozopol. Sozopol was once a small historic town with a center filled with wooden houses in the style of Bulgarian Revival architecture. Since the 1990s, it has mushroomed outward along the coast, away from the original peninsula, for a kilometer or more. Much of this growth took place amid both the uncertainty of post-socialist urban planning laws and the badly managed restitution of land seized after 1945 (Begg and Pickles 1998). A large portion of this land could never be properly given back because of deed problems and new construction, which exempted the land from restitution. This created a new land market for up-and-coming entrepreneurs (Fig. 4.2). While Sozopol’s population has been relatively stable for the past 20 years (about 5000 inhabitants), it built housing for 150,000 guests by the early 2000s: until a new mayor imposed a temporary limit on growth (Leshtarska 2008). The town is also across a bay from the Bulgarian Black Sea’s second largest city, Burgas, making it a natural candidate for investment in hotels. Ivan, who speaks excellent English, has only come back to Sozopol to see family for a few days from Sofia where he lives and works in finance for a German company. Like many other frequent visitors to the

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Fig. 4.2  New construction in the historic center of Sozopol. (Photo by the author)

Black Sea, he likes tourism on an existential level because it has brought jobs to the city and region but he is displeased with both the behavior of young foreign tourists and the development pressures that have been placed on the city. He blames both of these things on being at the ‘edge of Europe’ and having a post-socialist ‘Balkan mentality’ (Todorova 1997) toward development. Ivan tells me: “[P]eople who come here and get excessively drunk might not do the same thing if they thought they were in a civilized country … on the other hand, maybe we would be a bit more careful with development if we still had some respect for this country and were not trying to constantly get on the next flight to Paris or Frankfurt.” Ivan used both behavior and aesthetics to argue that cities on the Black Sea were incompletely European and people who visited them felt freer from social constraints they may have encountered in their home countries in the European ‘core,’ as he said: “[W]e are some kind of colony for them. They can be wild men here and then they must go back to being Europeans when their week of holidays ends.”

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Fig. 4.3  Fancifully designed hotel in the Black Sea city of Sinemorets. (Photo by the author)

Ivan’s frustration with the physical development of Sozopol—which he extends to all resort towns on the Black Sea—comes from the proliferation of tourist architecture of guest houses, small hotels, nightclubs, and rental apartments completed in styles meant to be fun and appealing, such as blue glass, yellow stucco, and bright signs on buildings’ roofs. For many, the architecture itself is not particularly glaring or distinguishable from other cities that make their money from tourism around the world. Mostly, it follows a convention of playful aesthetics meant to communicate relaxation and fun: from bright red terra cotta roofs to images of dolphins. Many structures have nautical elements or fanciful flourishes like turrets (Fig. 4.3). Yet, Ivan, and others I spoke with, regarded tourism aesthetics as a kind of Disneyfication of a previously beautiful fishing town that transformed the rural simplicity of post-Ottoman wood structures, with cantilevered second stories, into a kind of pandering “advertisement architecture.” While many found these new spaces exciting in their total embrace of a

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libidinal leisure economy, they also felt that the new abundance of tourism on the Black Sea bespoke a kind of powerlessness of the periphery. Residents of heavy-traffic Black Sea resort cities found that colorful tourism spaces were a sort of supplication to visitors on the part of a Bulgarian region deeply in need of economic support. Iskra, a 25-year-old waitress in Burgas, remarked: “[T]ourism is essential. We will do anything to get it … mostly the new buildings are trying to be elegant but most people don’t believe that … My parents think they look good compared to the socialist style … but they don’t have the money to live in them.” Iskra, like others interviewed, was not particularly offended by the style of tourism architecture but felt that its presence signaled an increasingly bifurcated real estate market: a fact that others compared to the divide between ‘core-­ country’ travelers and their ‘peripheral’ hosts. On the Black Sea, there was a palpable push to create leisure spaces that would impress Western European tourists and reorient their image of the Balkans. Chavdar, a 45-year-old architect from Varna, told me in an interview that there was real pressure to turn around the architectural profession when he was studying in Varna in the 1990s: No one cared about planning because that was what the state did … the big bad state … but architecture was extremely important, especially here on the Black Sea … at that time people knew the old style [socialist modernism] with all the concrete was not going to work for Western European tourists with … options … those old hotels were torn down … and in classes they told us to build new hotels in the ‘Western styles’ … they said make them elegant, make them classy, but they never said how because these people were all trained during communism … they had no idea.

Chavdar felt that many of the resulting hotels, rental apartments, and malls built in the 1990s and 2000s had the trappings of aesthetic intention and professional authority but were too rococo and often displayed the taste of the developers which he regarded as frequently ostentatious (Holleran 2015). While hotels and resorts were meant to be designed to appeal to the tastes of Western European tourists, Chavdar believed that they frequently failed and many people were put off either by low-quality construction or overly exuberant aesthetics: “[P]eople come here and they find what they expected: bad copies of the original.” Like others, Chavdar felt that budget tourism spaces with ‘cheap aesthetics’ reaffirmed to Europeans from the core that the periphery was doing a bad job imitating

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their genuine luxury and was still struggling to create a properly professional tourism industry as well as quality urban spaces.

4.5   The Town and the Sprawl: Tourist Suburbs in the Costa Blanca Indignation at spaces entirely devoted to the leisure economy did not stop at the brightly colored zones for revelry that dominated coastal promenades. Many residents were also concerned about the new spatial logic of cities created for tourism that were more car reliant, dispersed, and centered on box stores and malls rather than local shops in walkable areas. In both Southern and Eastern Europe (as well as wealthier core countries), the ‘Americanization’ of the built environment was regarded as a sign of increased prosperity as well as a danger to traditional uses of space and social relations. In this section, I will examine how local residents in Spain’s Costa Blanca reacted to the mass urbanization of coastal areas and the creation of diffuse suburbs that were often home to exclusively foreign communities of second homeowners, seasonal renters, and retirees. In Spain’s Costa Blanca, the coast was rapidly urbanized during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly after the Aznar government changed the Spanish land use law in 1998. The new law was a radical reform to a code that previously only allowed for major construction to occur in designated urban zones (town centers) while suburbanization was limited to petitions for specific structures. The new law allowed for the development of entire new suburbs: a windfall to coastal areas where the tourism market for second homes had been ramping up for a generation. For the tourism economy, the rise in residential tourism—a great part of which was retirees—was an important step in attracting wealthier visitors who could make long-­ term contributions to rural economies. The profusion of new suburbs filled with foreign residents came at a time when ‘American style’ suburbs were also gaining in popularity in Madrid and other cities as a sign of newly achieved affluence for the Spanish middle classes, who could now afford multiple cars and a single-family home, made possible by a fast-­ growing economy and, after 2001, loans at a euro (rather than peseta) rate. However, others saw these suburbs as an encroachment onto quickly dwindling coastal open spaces. There was also a foreboding sense that the privatization of Spanish land for foreigners would empower those with more money, while sidelining locals with sentimental attachments to the

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land. This section will show the cultural differences between coastal urban land use between long-term Spanish residents and newcomers from European core countries who purchased land for vacation homes or retirement. The tourism economy threatened traditional uses of space in coastal towns in the Valencia region in a number of ways. First, many aesthetically pleasing urban centers in coastal towns were filled with shops selling scented candles, nautical themed toys, and ice cream. These stores, ubiquitous to tourism-centered beach towns, often had the adverse effect of pushing out more practical local businesses used by long-term residents. While the towns’ housing stock remained ungentrified, because tourists did not generally like traditional homes in the center, commercial real estate was suddenly more valuable and ceased to have a purpose for the local community. This often forced local residents to shop at larger markets, eliminating local stores while also stamping out the important social functions they provided: as centers of gossip and conversation as well as support networks for the large number of elderly village residents about whom the shopkeepers would be worried if they did not come around for several days. Second, with the influx of mass tourism, small towns began to grow outward, often paving over vacant land that had been used for agriculture or recreation. The suburbanization of these coastal strips was not universally disliked among residents in the Costa Blanca and Black Sea, because many people appreciated and aspired to homes away from the city center, but they often felt that this new housing was either out of limits, due to price, or because it was exclusively aimed at foreigner renters or second homeowners who did not speak the local language. A key point of contention was the proliferation of gated communities. A local resident of Altea referred to one such community (Altea Hills), wondering why the wealthy subdivision on a hill needed an encompassing gate and guard station: “I know these people have money,” she said. “But this isn’t Venezuela… There’s basically no crime … what are they hiding from?” For some residents of the Costa Blanca, the answer to this question seemed to be that foreign residents were hiding from them and their affinity for suburban developments had just as much to do with what kind of house they wanted as with their desire to keep locals at an arm’s length. Lastly, when long-term second homeownership occurred—as it did in a nascent form in Bulgaria and in a highly developed market in Spain— residents worried that different urban areas would be split between those

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who worked in the tourism industry and those from wealthier European countries who enjoyed the life of residential tourism. This spatial divide within coastal tourism towns echoed the economic divide between the European center and the peripheries and was visually exacerbated, in the minds of local residents, when permanent community members occupied socialist-era blocks or the deteriorating centers of seaside pueblos, while those who had just arrived bought flats in brand new buildings. “Everyone comes here for fun,” Lupe told me in English as we were sitting near her home in a seaside town near Valencia. Not far from us, a popular city beach was lined with arrocerias (paella restaurants), where young men stood outside hawking expensive meals of seafood paella to foreign tourists in several languages. She switched to Spanish, continuing: “[B]ut people don’t want to see the work that goes on behind that fun … we built cities here that have two parts … there is the beachfront promenade, the apartment towers with the penthouses and their sea views … and there’s the old town … the urban nucleus … that’s where the maids and the bartenders and the cooks live … that’s where the Spanish people live.” Lupe, who spent many years working in hotels up and down the Costa Blanca in the 1990s and 2000s, is now a member of an anti-gentrification group that tries to pressure municipalities into responsible development. She describes herself as not anti-tourism and not xenophobic, adding that her cousin is married to a German man: “I don’t have a problem with people coming here, in fact, they have to come here … that’s how we live … that’s the heart of our economy … we just need to be sure that tourism doesn’t take over our cultural lives.” Lupe and other members of her group who I spoke to were most concerned about two facets of the Spanish tourism economy: budget tourism in large hotels—which they found to be loud, obnoxious, and alcohol-­ soaked—and residential tourism, which they worried would divide small towns into national groups and put growth pressures on municipalities that reflected the wishes of recent arrivals rather than long-term residents. They considered the first phase of tourism development in the Costa Blanca to be a rational and warranted economic step but they worried that the persistence and expansion of budget tourism would irrevocably change preexisting towns. Another group member, Leticia, told me: “[A]lready we have some very large towns that have been divided between the ­historic core (casco antiguo) and new developments of villas for Germans and English people … they don’t talk to us … we are worried that soon they will be in control of the town.” Leticia’s worry was also architectural:

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many coastal towns in Spain were split into an old and a new section: the former was dominated by twisting streets and small shops with historic homes built of white stucco or gray stone, the latter were often gated and filled with California-style modern homes with private yards and garages. Indeed, Alba, a real estate broker working in a similar town near Calpe, explained the housing issue as a fundamental difference in the lifestyles between Spaniards (and all Southern Europeans) and Northern European tourists and second homeowners: We [Spaniards] like to live in dense housing, generally in the center. People don’t mind an old house that is small and relatively dark inside … the house is for relaxing … maybe a siesta or a quick dinner and some television … we like to live life in the open: in cafes and bars or drinking coffee on a terrace. People see their home as a place to rest and everything else is done outside the home… People from Norway or the UK like American style homes. They want a big living room and lots of light. They spend a lot of time in their homes … they want outdoor spaces like big balconies for a couple of people to sit on. We would never do that: why sit at home when you can go to a cafe and be around people for almost the same price?

As Alba’s comments make clear, the dual real estate markets that began to be established in coastal cities created a split between the urban nucleus and new sprawling coastal suburbs that was as much cultural as it was spatial. Despite some shared turf between tourists and locals, the main point of interaction and social mixture was through the service economy professions of restaurants and supermarket clerks but less often through multilingual friendships. For members of Leticia and Lupe’s group, the struggle to cultivate a balance in the coastal tourism economy was based on not just dividing resources between citizens and visitors but also protecting the remnants of small town culture which included the sometimes-decaying historic architecture, the use of public spaces such as plazas and cafes, and a largely pedestrian culture of shopping at small stores and walking to local bars and restaurants. Yet, both were resigned to the fact that new foreign residents and a lack of jobs had altered the long-term possibilities. While both women were in their 50s, they agreed that even more dramatic changes would likely come to their town as tourism affected the real estate market. Lupe added: “I know that I will probably never see this place as full as when I was a child but I really hope they will not tear down any of the old buildings … if they have to, I hope I am already dead when they do it.”

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While Lupe’s fears of the destruction of the urban core are probably overstated, for the time being, her general ambivalence about change is well founded in Costa Blanca during the past 25 years. The region experienced some of the fastest growth between 1997 and 2007, often adding a million new constructions annually (Spanish National Statistics Institute 2007); this change also frequently occurred outside of city centers. Suddenly, many towns that were ringed by open space had suburbs with tens of thousands of residents. The historic centers of small cities were frequently visited by tourists and still used by locals but the housing stock within the city—often small and relatively dark vertical homes—was now an exclusively local and flanked by the larger, more expensive homes of foreign residents. Some felt that the old towns were both fetishized by and in danger from foreign residents. Laura, a 27-year-old bartender in a suburb of Alicante, said: “[M]ost foreign people living here stay away from local places … maybe they don’t feel comfortable … it’s too bad because the town is all old people and the foreigners are all grandfathers and grandmothers too … you would think they would have at least that in common.” For many in the European periphery, embracing an American urban aesthetic was also a means to differentiate the new from the old by integrating new urban growth into a philosophy of urbanism that eschewed historic preservation projects by creating homes that were aesthetically modernist and modeled on a spatial form of private property, suburban enclaves, and car access. This was a particularly popular idea among foreign buyers in search of more square footage. Many were from British or German cities and had grown up in older homes and, looking toward retirement or already well into it, were excited to finally have the opportunity to live in a newly constructed house. One foreign buyer in Spain (originally from Scotland) addressed this head on: “The European Union gave us the opportunity to buy here by making it easier … but no one wants to live in the actual Spain, they want Spanish weather … and to live in Florida.” This often meant a greater appreciation for new spaces while municipalities tried to preserve and revive historic charm: a paradox of the urban growth machine in seaside towns that vexed regulators and tourism promoters. Developers and local officials attempted to simultaneously rehabilitate older portions of the city, while allowing for new suburbs of rental flats and second homes to be built. Yet, these efforts were often only for a handful of commercial buildings which amounted to a fraction of the total

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urban footprint. Architects and urban planners, while often displeased with the speed of the growing Alicante-Valencia coastal region into a single strip, were upbeat about the message this kind of built environment conveyed. Vicent, an architect from Valencia, was satisfied with growth in the Costa Blanca: “[P]eople simply did not want to be so cramped any more. They wanted space. They felt like the old homes they grew up in did not reflect their lives any more.” Vicent felt that the aesthetics of the second home market, which includes hundreds of thousands of foreigners and well-off Spaniards in Valencia, were particularly important: “I think when we created lots of American style urbanizaciones [suburbs/subdivisions] we showed people we could make housing for the 21st century.” He also maintained that the second home market was the vanguard for all new development in Spain and subdivisions built for tourists had helped reorient the tastes of many Spanish buyers toward new constructions and suburban living which fueled the growth of new peripheral neighborhoods in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia which flourished during the years of the construction boom (1997–2008). Vicent was emphatic that the boom in tourism gave Valencia the opportunity to demonstrate something to the rest of Europe: not its natural beauty, its cultural heritage, and autonomous language, but the ability to navigate contemporary architectural aesthetics and produce places that felt current, luxurious, and stylistically innovative rather than kitsch or nostalgic. While his professional training made him hyper-attuned to this task, it was something heard from numerous other informants: construction for tourism had the secondary purpose of offering a complex process that illustrated the proper execution of a cultural ideal. That ideal was a modern city based on a model of the good life imported from American suburban developments and previous large-scale tourist enclave projects in places like Florida and Scottsdale, Arizona. Historic preservation of existing villages was less important because the market for older homes was smaller and many saw those buildings as a marker of a past they would rather forget.

4.6   Conclusion The spatial form and aesthetic styles of leisure cities carry an important symbolic weight for local residents. In the Costa Blanca of Spain, a generation of tourism development, 1975–1997, led to a new urban form and an evolving economic model: the retirement suburb. Due to the

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already-­robust leisure economy and reforms in land use law, suburbanization flourished and second homes filled in the gaps between existing cities and villages. On the Black Sea, the preliminary stages of tourism growth brought a profusion of guest houses, small hotels, and rental flats to the historic city of Sozopol—producing a summer flood of guests nearly 30 times larger than the year-round population (Republic of Bulgaria: National Statistical Institute 2018). The speed of development sometimes threatened to wipe out older wood structures from the town’s maritime past that stood in the way of construction. This potential destruction was exacerbated by a lack of urban planning law throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as a general animosity toward regulation of the construction industry. Yet, more than just the razing of actual structures, many long-term residents were put off by the aesthetics of the leisure economy and the behavior of tourists: often conflating the buildings themselves with the changed social milieu. In both examples, the prominence of the leisure economy was experienced as a collective relinquishment of control of local spaces and, to some extent, community control. In Bulgaria, this sense of alienation from spaces previously perceived as local was, for the most part, seasonal. Yet, in Spain, where the tourism city was more evolved due to many more years of development, the influx of residential tourists year-round changed the dynamic of coastal communities in ways that seemed both more permanent and less intrusive given the advanced age of many residents and their sequestration within gated and suburban communities. While the swelling number of foreign tourists was a model case of openness through travel and receding importance of borders in a more interconnected Europe, it also was a reminder of a new economy that gave outright mobility to some while only promising it to others. Leisure spaces—with their bright lights, unending music, and ambience of carefree enjoyment—were often inspirational to those in the poorer peripheries of the European Union. While many in the Costa Blanca and Black Sea did indeed see their economic fortunes ascend, and were able to afford vacations themselves, they often felt a sense of reserve about coastal boom towns. Vacation hubs seemed to signal a permanent dedication to the leisure economy and continued employment in hotels and support industries. Some were uncomfortable with this long-term plan and did not identify it as a solid path to creating a European Union less socioeconomically divided along regional lines. In both Spain and Bulgaria, people reported that the transformation of coastal regions into spaces for foreign

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tourists gave them a sense of having given over a piece of their home and, after having done so, they were no longer welcome—something akin to renting a house only to have the tenants change the locks. Vanina, a 35-year-old tech worker from Stara Zagora, told me that she no longer likes to visit the Black Sea, although she went every summer for 20 years: “It seems like there are no Bulgarians left … I mean I know there are … but it’s just all Danish and German and British people.” This sentiment reflected the fraught coexistence of multinational Europe in tourism spaces: an accepted arrangement but, even after many years, an uneasy one.

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Molnár, Virág. 2013. Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Post-War Central Europe. London: Routledge. Oliver, C., and K. O’Reilly. 2010. A Bourdieusian Analysis of Class and Migration: Habitus and the Individualizing Process. Sociology 44 (1): 49–66. Pemble, John. 1987. The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South. New York: Faber and Faber. Rabinow, Paul. 1995. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Republic of Bulgaria: National Statistical Institute. 2018. Geographical Representation of Data on Accommodation Establishments by Statistical Zones, Statistical Regions and by Districts in 2018. Bulgaria: Republic of Bulgaria. http://www.nsi.bg/en/content/7067/annual-data. Rojek, Chris. 1995. Decentring Leisure Rethinking Leisure Theory. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Salazar, Noel B., and Nelson H.H.  Graburn, eds. 2016. Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Berghahn Books. Salvati, Luca, and Alberto Sabbi. 2011. Exploring Long-Term Land Cover Changes in an Urban Region of Southern Europe. International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology 18 (4): 273–282. Sklair, Leslie. 2005. The Transnational Capitalist Class and Contemporary Architecture in Globalizing Cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (3): 485–500. Spanish National Statistics Institute. 2007. “Licitación Oficial En Construcción”. Datos Por Comunidade Autónomad. Spanish National Statistics Institute. http://www.fomento.gob.es/NR/rdonlyres/D6BC2EDD-55DA-4DCB9F11-125E9326E6B6/36535/2007parte_III.pdf. Stanilov, Kiril. 2007. The Post-Socialist City Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Verlag. Swyngedouw, E. 2004. Social Power and the Urbanization of Water Flows of Power. New York: Oxford University Press. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Urbain, Jean-Didier. 2003. At the Beach. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Urry, John. 2002. Global Complexity. Malden, MA: Polity. Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. West, Rebecca. 2007. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. New York: Penguin Classics. Yepes, V., and J.R. Medina. 2005. Land Use Tourism Models in Spanish Coastal Areas. A Case Study of the Valencia Region. Journal of Coastal Research: 83–88. Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Returning to Peripherality: The Social Experience of Urban Crisis

Abstract  This chapter examines how in Bulgaria and Spain, vast amounts of new and unfinished tourist housing and hotels became a point of European Union (EU) criticism after the 2008 financial crisis. It shows the reevaluation of coastal spaces amidst the crisis and considers how this relationship is indicative of a new sense of core and periphery, sometimes provoked by the tourism economy and its apparent failings after the economic crisis of 2008. Ecologically damaged coastal areas became public metaphors of dissatisfaction with the EU and painful reminders of a return to a peripheral or a hyphenated sense of European citizenship. This final section will connect failed urban spaces with the EU project as a whole and will consider if anti-corruption movements seek to activate stronger EU regulatory enforcement or to erode the EU’s fiscal and regulatory power. Keywords  Nationalism • European Union • 2008 financial crisis • Austerity

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Holleran, Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0218-7_5

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5.1   The EU Torn Asunder Tourism feeds off of peripherality as a marketing tool that makes use of exoticism and regional difference but the industry does not always bring the hoped-for development anticipated by politicians and business people. In fact, it can help solidify social and economic hierarchies, failing to deliver the progression from service jobs to knowledge jobs while simultaneously taking a large environmental and social toll on areas that aggressively encourage the industry. The goals of the European Community quickly became a political economic hybrid of promotion of democracy within the region through liberal economic development policies. For a period, this dual strategy worked well due to the growth of tourism as a major portion of the European economy, often supported through strong welfare state vacation policies and middle-class demand. The political events of 1989 brought democracy to the entire Continent as well as a push for increased political integration. Yet, as the European Union (EU) project slows down, earlier conceptions of European regionalism have reemerged—often creating uncomfortable dynamics of national antagonism reminiscent of the late nineteenth century but mediated through the complex institutional architecture of the twenty-first-century EU. Within the development of the European Union, tourism economies were expected to make use of regional economic disparities as a selling point while marketing poorer Southern and Eastern European destinations as the ‘genuine Europe’ that was less urban and more tied to tradition. While visitors were enticed with the prospect of experiencing the ‘Europe of yesterday,’ politicians in developing and democratizing countries were convinced that mass leisure was the economic tool which would help their countries arrive at the ‘Europe of tomorrow’ on a more equal footing with the prosperous European core. In this sense, the industry represented an economic attempt at addressing the political project of stable government and democracy promotion in two regions, during two successive time periods. Yet, like many development schemes, tourism development was a widely used economic stimulus plan with a cultural subtext: places that received visitors would be more prepared for the coming era of intra-European mobility. More than simply creating low-level social interactions between hosts and visitors, investors and regional hoteliers, and EU funders and local government officials, the tourism economy was a cultural project that emphasized inter-connectivity and a borderless

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Europe of the future. However, it was also a modernization project built on deficits: the lack of democratic institutions in Southern, later Eastern, Europe; the prevalence of corruption; and the widespread belief of developmental hierarchies within Europe in which Mediterranean and post-­ socialist Europe would not only be assisted by the European core but also learn from it: how to democratize, how to build successful economies, and even how to be ‘properly’ European. Leisure cities and the quick development that they went through at a time of intensified EU cohesion were symbolic of aspirations to open European boundaries and spread prosperity. Informants in both case studies saw the proliferation of coastal growth as a positive sign of modernization and economic improvement during moments of social and political transition that involved opening up to the rest of Europe. Since the 2008 crisis, these spaces are often used as examples of under-regulation and corruption at Europe’s Southern and Eastern peripheries. This has added to the sentiment that much of Europe’s edges were unable to regulate themselves in public finance and this has ‘trickled down’ to areas like home construction and coastal management. Some policymakers have used peripheral economic and political problems, such as Greek sovereign debt and Bulgarian mismanagement of infrastructure funds and border security, as examples of the hubris of the EU political class for expanding too quickly and displaying an overconfident attitude toward ameliorating regional political and economic disparities (Parsons 2006; Caldwell 2010). Those in peripheral countries feel that a double standard is constantly evoked in EU institutions. Emilio, an unemployed construction worker in a town near Alicante, told me: “[E]verything must be done perfectly here in Spain … in building homes, one nail cannot be out of place … one deadline missed … or else we are thieves … in Berlin their airport was supposed to be done five years ago.” For Emilio, urban problems—particularly around troubled housing markets after the 2008 crisis—were flashpoints of protest (for groups fighting eviction) and signs of governmental incompetence to properly regulate the economy. However, he also maintained that urban problems are entirely normal. In his opinion, overbuilding was most certainly a problem but a problem that was drastically twisted out of proportion by those from European core countries who were indignant over past money spent on regional development and searching for a way to cut off poorer peripheral countries. He framed this opinion in terms that drew on the tourism industry as well: “People from

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Norway and Luxembourg and Holland … they all were fine with Spain being in the EU when they wanted to come sit on our beaches or buy a home … now they are tired of this place and fed up with us … they will not be our friends in bad times … and that is really the test of friendship.” The recent delineation between Europe’s core and its peripheries has been marked by new political movements that cast doubt on the power of the European Union to enact solidaristic policies that lessen regional inequality (Anderson 2009). Indeed, both anti-austerity movements in Southern Europe and nationalist movements in Eastern Europe have accused EU institutions of exacerbating regional polarization and keeping the peripheries in check in order to maintain the centrality of political and economic priorities of core countries. This argument has taken on a new ferocity as peripheral countries continue to struggle over debt but also to question the basic tenet of freedom of movement after the mass migration of refugees began in 2014–2015. Many have wondered if new controls on mobility will also begin to affect more elite Europeans due to worsened labor markets, threats of terrorism, or a British exit from the EU.  All these forces could prove problematic for the tourism industry, which previously lauded its symbolic role in ‘bringing Europe together’ through leisure travel. The urbanization that occurred in the lead-up to the 2008 crisis was fueled by favorable circumstances for investment in home construction and budget tourism. Many of these projects were quickly built with little consideration for future market trends or environmental consequences of sprawling coastal urbanization. For many people living in coastal communities at the ‘edges of Europe’, where intensive construction took place, the frenzied drive to build between 2000 and 2008 has become a symbol of the European Union’s overly hasty cohesion plans that now seem badly calibrated to deal with financial downturns and intra-EU regulatory harmonization. Indeed, there has been a new outburst of populist protests that use the environmental impact of tourism as a means to show that EU integration has not helped to strengthen financial or urban regulation but has incentivized development for home construction and ecologically intensive tourism beyond what Southern or Eastern European municipal planning departments could handle. For many observers, this growth imperative (Logan and Molotch 2007) created a perfect storm in which local planning authorities lacked the tools to stop overly aggressive urbanization because of the promised financial

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benefits, weak institutional knowledge, and the market pressures of low borrowing costs and deep-­pocketed tourism developers with previous international experience. The social experience of leisure development has also turned contentious with residents seeing tourism economies as a ‘selling off’ of naturally beautiful sites to foreign visitors and homebuyers rather than a symbiotic existence of the two groups in the same spaces (O’Reilly 2007). In Bulgaria, the more recent periphery of Europe, this effect is regarded as slightly less grave because privatization is still well regarded by the public (Holleran 2014) due to distrust of state management stemming from the socialist past. Spain’s experience is more contentious because the tourism market has matured and large portions of the housing stock are now owned by non-nationals. This is particularly true for the Spanish middle classes, who see their financial security under extreme threat when compared to counterparts from the European core countries.

5.2   Post Post-Nationalism The expansion of the European Union quickly evolved from a trading block that embraced unified economic policy (and eventually a single currency) to a political configuration with the goal of creating a confederation of states that would operate together on a range of economic, political, and social issues. Kicking the European Union into ‘Second Gear’ in the early 1990s involved setting out a series of social goals that would aid the member countries in cementing political and economic bonds (Parsons 2006). One of these key goals was to develop a post-national understanding of European identity in which common values were located on a continental rather than nation state level, and in which people identified as European citizens as much as they claimed allegiance to a specific European country. Programs to address post-nationalism thrived with economic support from Brussels (Beck and Grande 2007) and strong buy-in from individual countries where acceptance of a European identity seemed both less parochial than previous nationalism and more suited to creating citizens who could thrive economically in a more interconnected multilingual Europe. Of course, the programs also often implicitly set European identity against other world regions, particularly as a pro-regulatory antidote to North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)-era laissez-faire globalization and as a pro-human rights antidote to Russia and China.

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Countries that failed to adequately reform their political institutions to protect minority rights or to prevent corruption were not just seen as in violation of the European cohesion benchmarks but also as being ­insufficiently European and this critique became especially potent to new post-­socialist EU members. Tourism, amongst other more institutionalized programs such as European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (ERASMUS), was a popular tool to foster post-nationalism and well liked because it tracked onto an existing and growing industry. Unlike non-­profit programs that had educational goals, tourism seemed to be an industry that naturally helped create post-national citizens within a market logic that attracted investment and participation with little assistance or administration required from the EU. On this ground, the industry seemed to represent an organic business-oriented outgrowth of the EU’s policies for open borders to investment and travel and a good example of how well thought out new EU economic laws could spark positive social outcomes. Tourism came to have an almost totemic significance both economically and politically: it represented the opening up of countries to the rest of Europe and the world, which carried particular significance for new democracies, and it was a novel and alluring avenue of development at a time in which traditional paths involving industrialization were being rethought. In the European context, cities of visitors became powerful cosmopolitan symbols and increasingly fit into a global idea of open spaces for trade and cultural exchange (Judd 2002). Yet, tourism hubs were never actually spaces of innovation or centers of immigrant culture. They often had few additional industries beyond mass tourism and the international dynamic, rather than taking on the complex dimensions of multiethnic cities like London or New  York, quickly solidified into a dichotomy of locals and visitors (or long-term residential tourists) that carried distinct class dimensions (Urbain 2003). In the 1990s, as the Fordist model of mass tourism in large resorts waned (Rojek 1995), and long-term settlements of residential tourists and retirement communities took advantage of EU mobility, new conflicts over space came to dominate many coastal regions in the European Union, including the two sites focused on in this book. Within the communities studied on the Black Sea and the Costa Blanca, the specific international dynamics of tourism city development often added a new layer to the urban problem of eviction, displacement, and struggles over the “right to the city” (García 2010). Fights over land use, taxes, and environmental impact were often restrained and confined to professional environmentalists

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before the 2008 crisis but, since the start of the sovereign debt crisis, the critique of the development policies of the EU’s peripheral regions have expanded, especially as it has become clear that EU structural funds helped subsidize private development and municipal loans (that are still unpaid) were also used to bolster the tourism economy. Within this dynamic, public frustration with both municipal leaders and overall EU policy has grown in tandem with debt, unemployment, and the increasingly negative media coverage of the ‘cultural and moral deficiencies’ of peripheral Europe. This growing sense of ‘living on Europe’s edges’ is also related to the idea that the social solidarity of a previous era of integration (exhibited in the large-scale funds given to Mediterranean Europe and Ireland) has been replaced by a more punitive and less forgiving economic policy, particularly in the form of austerity. This fight, while mainly abstract and confined to media accounts of the 2008 crisis, can be seen in rising tensions within tourism cities (both beachfront villages and large gentrifying cities like Barcelona) between local residents from Europe’s peripheries and visitors from Europe’s wealthier center (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1  Mural in the city of Zaragoza reading ‘24% unemployed.’ (Photo by the author 2014)

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5.3   Lessons from the Tourist City This book has attempted to show how tourism-based development increases expectations of those living in countries going through political and economic change and how it also raises new urban challenges related to the social structure of cities and, perhaps more importantly, urban environmental sustainability. While much of the book has attempted to explain how tourism first became a positive symbol of EU cohesion and, after the 2008 crisis, a more problematic way to understand the growing regional divisions within Europe, the European Union is not alone in its experiences of this form of urbanization and the social dynamics it brings. Far from it. Rather, tourism is increasingly a major economic engine for cities around the world and urban planners, municipal politicians, and developers are hoping to harness the growing power of the industry while mitigating some of its more pernicious social and environmental effects. Some cities have made commendable progress in fitting tourism into new urban planning guidelines and plans for a diverse housing stock that allows for ample homes for locals while creating a secondary market for investors. Singapore has created two parallel housing markets—with one of the world’s largest supplies of quality public housing—while investing in tourism. However, cities like Miami and Vancouver represent less thought out models in which second homes for wealthy international investors have been promoted as an economic growth strategy without adequate planning for low-income housing or for preventing overdevelopment that threatens both environmentally sensitive areas and climate preparedness. In cities where tourism has helped to exacerbate a ‘housing crunch’ social conflicts have taken hold, often based on a combination of national and class conflicts such as those discussed in the two European case studies. In the fields of Urban Studies and Urban Sociology, the conundrum of how to create equitable leisure cities will be a major theme in regions transferring away from industrial growth as well as places that are building large-scale tourism ventures ex nihilo. This book shows, in the European context, how tourism provided a useful avenue for nation branding (Aronczyk 2013) as well as a means to focus funds that were earmarked for projects that brought infrastructural and economic modernization. Yet, like in many other regions, in both Spain and Bulgaria the allocation of funding often went to support projects that were meant to draw in visitors and subsequent investment and not necessarily to serve people already living in the community on a permanent basis. The prevalence of ­mega-­events,

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costly cultural projects, and roads to serve new subdivisions raises important questions of how tourism economies can promote holidaymaking while also providing benefits for existing residents who may have a different set of funding priorities. In other regions, some of these battles over space and funding have played out in anti-growth activism, fair housing movements, and even xenophobic incidents against tourists and second homeowners. As cities become increasingly diverse and homeownership and travel in foreign countries become more common, lessons from the previous examples of tourism cities will be needed for urban policymakers hoping to embrace best practices that keep the leisure industry socially just and as a point of civic pride rather than contention. The most important lesson from the tourist city is in the realm of environmental impact and sustainability. As cities and regions have embraced mass tourism, particularly budget mass beachfront tourism, as a growth strategy they have been burdened with dramatic environmental consequences. These consequences included erosion, endangerment of wetlands and aquatic species, pollution of coastal waters, problems with drainage due to extensive asphalt coverage, securing an adequate water supply, maintaining a comprehensive sewage system during times of high growth and sprawl, and preventing contamination of important natural aquifers in semi-desert regions (Pilkey et  al. 2011). As explained in the book, places like the Costa Blanca attempted to phase out environmentally intensive coastal development in favor of lower-impact cultural tourism which brings fewer visitors for equal or greater profits. Yet, these attempts proved to be largely chimerical due to the municipal competition between cities and regions for any kind of tourism (even the lowest-profit, highest-­ impact budget beachfront variety). The Black Sea in Bulgaria fared even worse consequences because of the post-socialist regulatory gap that did little to implement or enforce new environmental and urban planning laws. Also, like developing country tourism patterns, many in Bulgaria felt that their economy was in such dire shape during the adjustment period of the mid-1990s that they would have to accept any development plans proffered, even tourism urbanization in sensitive coastal areas. In some ways, the presence of mass tourism in these areas represents one of the many ways in which environmentally damaging activities that benefit those from wealthy countries are offloaded onto poorer countries. The difference is that, unlike industrial manufacturing processes, those from wealthy countries must observe the consequences when they visit (until they find

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the problems of growth and destruction of natural habitat too unpleasant and they decamp to other, more virgin, locations). Last, the greatest peril of creating tourism cities, left largely unaddressed by this book, is the susceptibility of coastal tourism to climate change. The largest segment of the global tourism industry continues to be beachfront leisure (Urbain 2003) and this market share has encouraged the sprawling development of hotels and homes in coastal areas from Thailand to Albania. These communities are at high risk from rising sea levels as well as the increased ferocity of storms and hurricanes. In some communities, the ad hoc nature of tourism settlement (to realize quick profit) makes these destinations even more dangerous when storms do make impact. In other places, where development has been under way longer and more stable structures exist, landowners and local governments must come to terms with the fact that they are building on ground that may not exist in twenty years. Worse yet, they are depriving coastal communities of natural sources of storm mitigation, such as dunes and wetlands, and sinking precious resources into assets that are temporary. For coastal tourism to continue to exist as a favored means of economic development, it must conquer the economic inequality embedded in the host-­ visitor model of mass leisure, while looking toward a problematic future in which climate change will put coastal regions in flux.

References Anderson, Perry. 2009. The New Old World. New York: Verso. Aronczyk, Melissa. 2013. Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Beck, Ulrich, and Edgar Grande. 2007. Cosmopolitan Europe. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Caldwell, Christopher. 2010. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. New York: Anchor. García, Marisol. 2010. The Breakdown of the Spanish Urban Growth Model: Social and Territorial Effects of the Global Crisis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34 (4): 967–980. Holleran, Max. 2014. ‘Mafia Baroque’: Post-Socialist Architecture and Urban Planning in Bulgaria. The British Journal of Sociology 65 (1): 21–42. Judd, Dennis R. 2002. The Infrastructure of Play: Building the Tourist City. New York: Routledge. Logan, John R., and Harvey L.  Molotch. 2007. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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O’Reilly, Karen. 2007. Intra-European Migration and the Mobility—Enclosure Dialectic. Sociology 41 (2): 277–293. Parsons, Craig. 2006. A Certain Idea of Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pilkey, Orrin H., William J.  Neal, James Andrew Graham Cooper, and Joseph T.  Kelley. 2011. The World’s Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rojek, Chris. 1995. Decentring Leisure Rethinking Leisure Theory. London: Sage Publications. Urbain, Jean-Didier. 2003. At the Beach. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Index

A Aesthetic, 84 Airports, 23 Altea, 100 Americanization, 99 American style suburbs, 99 Anti-growth activism, 117 Austerity, 38, 115 Authenticity, 86 Aznar, José Maria, 64, 99 B Balkan mentality, 96 Balkantourist, 30, 33, 69, 88 Benidorm, 20, 22, 56–61 Berlin Wall, 17 Bikini, 58 Bilbao effect, 63 Block housing, 28 Borderless Europe, 110–111 Budget tourism, 76, 112 Bulgarian Communist Party, 69, 87 Buying on plan, 65

C Calatrava, Santiago, 36 Calpe, 102 Center-periphery, 7 Climate change, 118 Climate preparedness, 116 Coastal management, 111 Cohesion, 112 Command economy, 27 Community control, 105 Core, 2, 83, 112 Corruption, 35 Cosmopolitan, 114 Costa Blanca, 99–104 Cultural tourism, 62, 63, 117 D Debt, 1, 38, 115 Delors, Jacques, 17 Democratic constitution, 19 Democratization, 3, 15 Disneyfication, 97 Disruption of the tourism industry, 95

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Holleran, Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0218-7

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INDEX

E Eastern Bloc, 33 Eastern periphery, 32 Economic hierarchies, 110 Economic modernization, 116 EEC development grants, 21 Elderly, 100 Enclaves, 24, 38 Environmental enforcement, 35 Environmental harm, 3 Environmental sustainability, 116 Erosion, 89 Ethnographic fieldwork, 10 EU development policy, 2 European cohesion, 114 European cosmopolitanism, 66 European integration, 14, 85 Europeanization, 39 Europeanness, 3, 11, 51 European otherness, 51 European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), 23 European regionalism, 46, 110 European Union, 112, 113 EU structural funds, 115 Exoticism, 54 F Financial crisis, 1 Fly and flop tourism, 61 Fraga, Manuel, 22, 56, 88 Franco, Francisco, 14, 19, 22, 52, 54, 58 Franquista legacy, 89 Friedman, Milton, 28 G Gated communities, 100 Glavproekt, 70 Globalization, 20, 27 Golden Sands, 34, 70, 93

Golpe de estado, 24 González, Felipe, 21 Grand Tours, 45 Guggenheim Museum, 26 H Heritage sites, 34 Highways, 23 Homeownership, 25, 33 Housing markets, 116 Housing stock, 100 I Industrial production, 28 Infrastructure, 2, 6, 9, 36, 116 Integrate, 2 K Khrushchev, Nikita, 84 Kitchen debate, 84 Kitsch, 104 Kitsch aesthetic, 89 L Leisure for economic benefit, 49 Leisure industry, 8 Leisure spaces, 105 Leisure time, 46 Liberalization of the Spanish economy, 54 Local businesses, 100 M Maastricht, 28 Maastricht Agreement, 16 Maastricht Treaty, 18, 27 Mafia, 38 Mafia culture, 73

 INDEX 

Market niches, 91–92 Mass leisure, 110 Mass tourism, 20, 21, 46, 93 Medical tourism, 93 Mediterranean Europe, 19 Mediterranean South, 2 Mega-events, 116 Mezzogiorno, 18, 33 Mobility, 105, 112 Modernization, 15, 86, 87, 111 Modernization project, 111 Mortgage default, 1 Multilingual Europe, 113 Multilingual friendships, 102 N Nation branding, 116 Nationalism, 6, 113 National re-branding, 21 National Tourism Council, 88 Nested orientalism, 46 Niche tourism, 76, 94 1992 Summer Olympic Games, 25, 62 Nixon, Richard, 84 North-South hierarchy, 47 O Opus Dei, 58 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 54 Organized labor, 20 Overbuilding, 111 Ownership society, 24 P Pedestrian culture, 102 Peripherality, 2, 3, 6–9, 11, 17, 77, 110–118 Peripheral urbanisms, 87

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Peripheries, 2, 7, 37, 38, 83, 112 Place-making, 93 Pleasure periphery, 76 Political cohesion, 14 Political integration, 110 Political transition, 15 Post-authoritarian societies, 37 Post-dictatorial, 7 Post-national citizens, 114 Post-nationalism, 113 Post-socialist, 38 Post-socialist East, 2 Post-socialist urbanization, 85 Post-socialist urban planning, 95 Private ownership, 21 Private property, 29, 33 Privatization, 25, 27, 99, 113 Professionalization and modernization of the tourism industry, 56 Public frustration, 115 Public-private investment, 20 Public spaces, 102 R Real estate markets, 102 Regional cohesion, 16 Regional development, 111 Regional development grants, 2 Regional economic disparities, 110 Regional polarization, 112 Residential tourism, 62, 64, 66, 93, 99 Restituted property, 87 Retirees, 99 Retirement, 100 Retirement abroad, 64 Retirement colonies, 47 Rural economies, 99 S Sea levels, 118 Second home market, 64

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Second homes, 103, 105 Semi-periphery, 5, 8, 51, 54, 76 Service economy, 102 Service jobs, 36 Sewage, 89 Single-family home, 99 Social goals, 113 Socialism, 2 Socialist tourism, 69 Socialist tourists, 30 Socialist urbanism, 87 Social milieu, 105 Sozopol, 84, 94–99 Spanish Civil War, 53 Spatial divide, 101 State management, 113 State-run hotels, 31 State socialism, 87 Stoyanov, Petar, 33 Strandja National Park, 35 Subdivisions, 117 Suburban communities, 105 Suburban developments, 104 Suburbanization, 105 Suburbs/subdivisions, 99, 103, 104 Sunny Beach, 34, 70, 72–75 Sustainability, 3, 117 Sustainable tourism, 62 Symbols of socialism, 89 T Thatcher, Margaret, 25 Thomas Cook, 53 Time norms, 46 Tourism-as-journey, 51 Tourism economy, 84 Tourists year-round, 105 Travelers, 8

Trente glorieuses, 19 2008 crisis, 111 U Underdevelopment, 48 Unemployment, 115 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 26 United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), 59, 60 Urban centers, 85 Urbanization, 2, 3, 14 Urban planning laws, 117 Urban regulation, 112 V Vacant, 1 Varna, 35 W Welfare state, 18, 27, 46, 51, 110 Werner Plan, 16 WikiLeaks, 35 Working-class holiday, 61 World Bank, 22 Y Yugoslavia, 17 Z Zaragoza, Pedro, 58 Zhivkov, Todor, 14, 31