Internationalism and the Rise of Global Tourism During the Cold War

In 1946, at an international tourism congress in London, Arthur Haulot (1913-2005), a prominent Belgian tourism expert (as well as a socialist, poet, and Dachau survivor), stressed “the importance of promoting workers’ travel,” claiming that another world war could be avoided only if the “peoples of the world [got] to know each other better.” Peace was a fraught concept in the postwar years, tied at once to the official, Soviet-led peace movement and to concepts of peace championed by organizations such as the United Nations. Both concepts exemplified the forms of internationalism: socialist by nature, on the one hand, and liberal, on the other. Tourism professionals such as Haulot mobilized both of these concepts, alongside the idea of technocratic internationalism—the notion that their work was rational, and thus apolitical—in advocating for the freedom of movement, mutual understanding, and mobility. Against this background, this presentation will examine Eastern European states’ gradual involvement in global tourism over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, and Haulot’s role in this. Indeed, during these decades, Haulot emerged as a key mediator between the East, West, and Global South, helping build institutional capacity in the field of tourism. By tracing these histories, I will argue for the importance of internationalism as a force shaping the global system that emerged around tourism in the Cold War, while also making visible the asymmetries, conflicts, and competing priorities inherent in that system.