Catchy slogans about tourism’s peace-promoting qualities abound – ‘passport to peace’, ‘a vital force for peace’ and ‘the peace industry’, to name but a few. Yet, despite the critical scrutiny of the peace–tourism nexus in recent decades, its historical roots remain unexplored. This article traces the origins of the idea that tourism can help advance peace and international understanding. It examines the aspirations of the various international tourist organisations founded during the interwar and early post-war period. While these organisations sought to foster peaceful relations across national and cultural borders, their discourse of tourism as a force for peace also gave legitimacy to a transnational tourist industry and government attempts to secure hard currency in the Cold War.
Millions of Westerners went on holiday behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. This article considers the place of Eastern Europe in the international travel industry through the prism of Folkturist, a travel agency owned by the Communist Party of Sweden. By analysing Folkturist's business strategies and interactions with the East European tourist industries, the article shows the competing interests at stake when the market for eastbound leisure tourism expanded. Balancing the quest for profit with political goals was a constant challenge for Folkturist, as it was for the various organisations and institutions engaged in the tourist industry in the socialist states. By analysing Folkturist's advertisement strategies and package tour organisation and those of its commercial competitors in Sweden, the article argues that traditional concepts of political tourism fail to capture the pragmatism of political entrepreneurs and the impact they had on the market for leisure tourism to Cold War Eastern Europe.
This article analyses the transnational production processes of foreign correspondence in the Cold War. It examines the double role of foreign correspondents as reporters and Cold War political agents. Recent scholarship has explored the activities of Western correspondents reporting from the Communist world. Little is known, however, about Eastern bloc correspondents in the West. Drawing on the rarely studied files on East German foreign correspondents held by the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, the article problematizes the image of GDR journalists as obedient intelligence officers and highlights the dilemmas of journalists deployed to defend national interests. Focusing on the Nordic countries in the mid1970s, the article provides detailed insights into the politics and practices of East German foreign correspondence before the digital revolution. The article thus shows the benefits of going beyond the traditional focus on media content to analyse the daily practices as well as the political and symbolic significance of journalism. It contributes to the growing historical research on foreign correspondents and the media in East Germany and beyond. KEYWORDS Journalism; GDR; foreign correspondents; television; Nordic countries; Cold War This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
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