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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2017

MAX HOLLERAN
MAX HOLLERAN*
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne, School of Social and Political Sciences, 420 John Medley Building, Parkville VIC 3010, Australia; [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines how Spain's tourism industry was developed using European Union (EU) grants in the 1980s and 1990s, and how this strategy was later deployed to post-socialist Europe (illustrated using the case of Bulgaria). The article shows that peripheral modernisation was an important mission in the evolution of the EU and urban development for tourism played a major role in two successive post-dictatorial societies. Tourism was considered a key economic sector that addressed the reality of deindustrialisation and also served as a useful metaphor for intra-European mobility and the symbolic power of the leisure economy.

Type
Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 26 , Special Issue 4: Entangled Transitions , November 2017 , pp. 691 - 715
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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