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

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.