Knights in Defense of “the West”: Travel Dollars and Cold War Enchantment in Western Europe

In 1951, the Revue de Tourisme (the Tourist Review) included an article titled “The Tourist Trade and the Cold War” by L. J. Lickorish, the research officer of The British Travel and Holidays Association in London. The article highlights the importance of tourism for the economic recovery of Western Europe, and how the U.S. traveler to Europe is a “knight in defense of his Western ideal of freedom, a pilgrim to the shrines of his civilization, and a crusader against insidious evil creed.” The article is illustrative for how after the Second World War, U.S. tourism to Western Europe was integral to saving and promoting the capitalist system of “the West” as opposed to the communist “East.” Transatlantic tourism would not only bring dollars to Europe to close the “dollar-gap,” the imbalance of imports and exports between the United States and Europe, it was also the perfect tool to legitimize U.S. global political and economic policies by utilizing the past of “Western civilization,” and to advance ideals for the future. This paper explores how the visual economy of tourism shaped the idea of “the West” through the lens of anticommunism. With a focus on the notion of circulation in tourism advertising (magazines, pamphlets, brochures, photography), it reveals the ways in which tourism conveyed specific notions on freedom, liberal democracy, modernization, and capitalist internationalism. In so doing, the paper underscores the development of the postwar tourism industry in Western Europe as an anticommunist practice by explaining how it produced “the West” as a cultural, economic, and political transatlantic community to fight the Cold War.