Tourism and Brexit

Travel, Borders and Identity

Hazel Andrews

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781845417932
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book is the first to explore the relationship between tourism and Brexit from a social science perspective. As the UK repositions itself in the uncharted waters of a post-Brexit world the book considers three interconnected themes all bound up in touristic practices: travel, borders and identity. The volume uses diverse examples, including UK-Polish tourism, royal events, Arthurian-based heritage in Cornwall, media representations of Brits abroad, ideas of freedom on holiday in Mallorca, the impacts of Brexit on migrant workers in Mallorca and on tourism for Commonwealth and Overseas Territories. Contributors to the book are based in the UK, EU, Southeast Asia, USA, Australia and New Zealand, giving the analysis a strongly international focus. It will be useful for students and researchers in tourism, migration, European studies, social anthropology, geography and sociology.

1 The Magic and Liminality of Tourism and Brexit

Hazel Andrews

Introduction

An emancipated society is one that achieves coexistence in difference.

Jackson, 2013: 9

Preamble

When I was invited to either write a monograph or compile an edited collection on the theme of tourism and Brexit I could not at first imagine what such a book would look like, given that Brexit (that is the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union [EU]) had not – and, at the time of writing has not – happened. How could the relationship between the activities that make tourism such an important sector of the global economy and the national economies of many countries and something that has yet to happen be understood? This edited collection is an exploration of the relationship by picking up on some of the key themes that are relevant to both the practice of tourism and the Brexit debate; that is travel, borders and identity.

Both tourism and Brexit invite reflection on travel whether that be in the actual travel of tourism, the association of the EU with travel through the freedom of movement and the associated perceived problem of immigration, or the metaphorical travel of the Brexit process moving the UK out of the EU; from one state to another. Tourism and Brexit both concern borders, crossing them on the one hand or re-erecting them on the other, and both are deeply concerned with questions of identity. Additionally, both tourism and Brexit belong to the social world, having arisen through it and, therefore, reflective of it.

Brexit whys and wherefores

This introduction and this book do not seek to explain why Vote Leave won the 2016 referendum. Others have started to do that and are too numerous to consider here.1 However, it is worth outlining some examples. For instance, archaeologist Andrew Gardner (2017: 3) argues that ‘Brexit can be seen as the culmination of the collapse of the British empire, and transformation of British identity, in the post-Second World War era’, and with heritage studies expert Rodney Harrison discusses the implications of Brexit for archaeology and heritage, noting the rise in ‘new nationalisms’ (Gardner & Harrison, 2017). As they point out, this is not the preserve of the UK, but a global phenomenon. Hugh Gusterson (2017), for example, links Donald Trump’s election as US president with Brexit in what he describes as ‘the upsurge in nationalist populism’.

Questions of national identity certainly played a role in encouraging the vote to leave the EU, as some sentiments expressed in its aftermath indicate. In the UK, there was a rise in racist abuse post-referendum (for examples, see Stein, 2016) which, according to Madeleine Reeves, can be laid at the door of Vote Leave. As she argues, their ‘“call to take back control” has given form and solidity to undercurrents of fear, disillusion and xenophobia’ (Reeves, 2016: 480). Although Reeves may have a point that Vote Leave capitalised and gave voice to latent sentiments concerning identity insecurities, part of the problem lies much deeper than that within neoliberal politics and the accelerated capitalism of the principles of the free market unleashed by the Thatcherite Conservative government of the 1980s and continued in the New Labour Project led by Tony Blair in the 1990s. As Gillian Evans (2017: 216) points out, there was ‘the complete failure of the New Labour government (1997–2010) to address and represent the interests of its traditional supporters’. Tom Selwyn illustrates the point in hand in relation to tourism and heritage. In a study that examines the relationship between self and other that is manifest in tourism through the many images that are used to attract tourists, Selwyn examines the post-industrial landscape of a UK once based on manufacturing and production industries such as coal mining, rather than a service economy. With specific reference to a former mine in Wales, now a heritage attraction, he asks, ‘Do they, the beaten but here heroic miners, belong to the same lineage as us? If they do… how did we keep faith with them when the combined forces of technological and economic change and a vindictive government were arraigned against them? Some might say that we abandoned them until it was safe to build them a World Heritage Site’ (Selwyn, 2010: 208). Certainly a valid point and one to keep considering as the post-referendum analysis rumbles on. However, we need to remember that those who voted leave were not just composed of a disaffected or left-behind working class. And, it should also be remembered that not all people identifying as working class or with working-class roots voted leave (see, for example, Knight, 2017).

We’re all Europeans now

Of course, the issue that fuelled the Brexit debate was related to the UK’s uneasy relationship with the EU2 which was argued by Vote Leave to be subsuming UK identity and sovereignty in place of the development of a European identity. Anthony Pagden (2002: 33) points out that, ‘The identity of “Europe” has always been uncertain and imprecise’, that ‘like all identities it is a construction, an elaborate palimpsest of stories, images, resonances, collective memories, invented and carefully nurtured traditions’.

In her discussion of the Italian city of Trieste, Luiza Bialasiewicz argues that the forging of European identity-making began at the end of the Second World War. She notes that as a city on the border with a communist country (the former Yugoslavia), like Berlin, which also directly adjoined a communist state, Western Europe rubbed directly with its non-Western others and that ‘“Europeanness” had to be daily re-inscribed’ (Bialasiewicz, 2009: 320). However, the idea of Europe has deeper roots than that of the mid-20th century. In one of his Reith Lectures for BBC Radio 4 in 2016, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah points to the creation of the notion of Europeans, and by corollary ‘Western’ civilisation, as it rubbed up against another ‘other’ in the form of Islam (for example the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and the Moorish rule in Spain from 711 to 1492). In this creation of opposition, religious figures, chroniclers and philosophers have shaped the idea of the European based on ancient Greece: ‘Hegel, the great German philosopher, told the students of the high school he ran in Nuremberg, that foundations of higher study must be and remain Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second’ (Appiah, 2016).

The invention of traditions that Pagden makes reference to, and the invention of a shared cultural lineage in the form of Greek and Roman ancestry to which Appiah alludes, speaks of the creation of a narrative of Europeanness also identified by Cris Shore (1993: 779) in his examination of the processes of European integration in which he highlighted ‘the European Commission’s attempts to forge a supranational “European Identity” through the development of symbolic measures’. Many will be familiar with such pan-European ventures as the European Song Contest, the European Capital of Culture, the adoption of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony Ode to Joy as the European anthem and, for scholars, research funding that seeks to build academic partnerships in consortiums working on pan-European issues. Some of these initiatives pre-date the European Commission’s attempts since 1977 to develop ‘a “cultural policy” which has helped to boost people’s awareness of a European cultural identity’ (Shore, 1993: 779). In terms of the idea of community building and developing common goals, such initiatives have their merits; however, as Shore (1993) argues, a

problem with the Commission’s attempts at defining a cultural policy lies in reconciling ‘spontaneity’ with ‘instrumentality’. However well intended, Article 128 of the Maastricht Treaty… nevertheless raises fears of excessive bureaucratic intervention. Institutional attempts to ‘foster’, ‘encourage’ or ‘promote’ the diversity of European cultures are bound to be seen as creeping centralization. (Shore, 1993: 794)

If the warning signs were there in 1993, it is easy to imagine how in the 23 years that elapsed until the UK referendum in 2016, the fears of losing national identity could become both more expressed and more entrenched.

Tourism and Brexit

Prior to the referendum, tourism industry lobby groups had forecast some drawbacks to being outside the EU, including, for example, a reduction in business travel and the ending of EU funding in support of tourism development (Tourism Alliance, 2016). However, tourism is not merely composed of business interests and practices. There are business functions that facilitate the practice of tourism; however, to leave argumentation solely in the hands of business interests would not only miss the point of tourism as a sociocultural phenomenon and all that goes with that (for example, ideas of cultural exchange or even peace building rightly or wrongly attributed to the merits of international tourism – see the World Tourism Organisation [WTO] Manila Declaration, 1980), but would also abandon tourism to the vagaries of advanced capitalism concerned as it is with audits, profits and market supremacy without considering the very humanness of the desire to travel, socialise within, experience, see and embody the wider world. It would deny the very livingness of being alive, for travel-tourism is the practice of life and life the practice of travel. We travel through life and life takes us forwards, or backwards, through our imaginations, hopes, desires and memories. Thus, the intermingling of tourism and Brexit is not just about balance sheets, employment and numbers of people travelling, but it is also about expressions of how we see, feel and inhabit the world, how the world sees and feels us.

It is noteworthy that one of the most immediately identified issues for tourism in the aftermath of the result of the referendum is that the UK is seen as a less welcoming, a less hospitable country to choose to visit than before June 2016 (Andrews, 2019). It is reasonable to suggest that any losses in business terms from inbound tourism could be balanced with the idea that people will choose to holiday at home thereby boosting local economies. Contrary to the idea that the UK will attract fewer visitors, the Daily Express tabloid newspaper ran the headline ‘Britain’s £26BN Brexit Tourism Boom’ on 3 January 2020 with a claim that 2020 would ‘break records’ (p. 4) and ‘[the] treasured isles [would] lure 39m guests’ (p. 5). However, this forecasting needs to be tempered with the understanding that how hospitable a place or peoples are perceived to be is of great importance to the contemporary manifestation of hospitality as a commercial enterprise (Lashley & Morrison, 2000) and an important ‘tool’ in customer relations in tourism (see Andrews, 2000). Further, economic business arguments are not enough for the sociality that is the bedrock of reciprocal forms of exchange – of which hospitality is one manifestation – and the very basis of society (Mauss, 1954).

Brexit does not simply mean leaving the EU, but rather it is a pregnant signifier that carries so many ideas, so many ideals. For many, i...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 The Magic and Liminality of Tourism and Brexit
• 2 ‘Travel broadens the mind and enriches the soul’: Exploring the Significance of Tourism and Brexit on the Spiritual Dimension of European Integration
• 3 The Order of Things: Brexit and the Challenge of Identity
• 4 Uses of the Past: Heritage, Tourism and the Challenges of (Re)Producing Contemporary National Identities in England
• 5 Royal Events and Tourism in the Post-Brexit Era
• 6 Brexit and Tourism in Central and Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland
• 7 From Duty Free to Benidorm: British Tourists in Spain in an Age of Brexit
• 8 Taking Back Control: The Freedom of the Holiday
• 9 Divisions and Schisms in the Party Space
• 10 Post-Brexit Tourism and the Commonwealth Reimagined
• 11 Brexit and the UK Overseas Territories: Tourism and the Reconstitution of Core–Periphery Identity
• 12 Associate EU Citizenship: A Panacea for Loss of Fundamental Rights, Mobility and European Identity Post-Brexit?
• 13 Brexit and Post-Globalisation Era: Walking into Unknown Geography
• Coda 2020: COVID-19 Masks but Fails to Flatten Brexit
• Index