The
result of the recent referendum in Greece over its – depending on whom you ask
– future in the Eurozone has shaken most natives, confused diasporic Greeks who
could not vote from abroad and angered those less sympathetic to the Greek
cause. I think that there is enough to-ing and fro-ing in the cybersphere on
the so-called ‘Grexit’
these days, so I will not add further comments. My observations relate to a
lateral issue: it concerns what glocal responses (as in Robertson 1995) to
troika policies did to alter the country’s image as a tourist destination (for
critics of such market policies, it helps to remember that as is the case with
other island states, the Greek economy depends on tourist flows to the date).
Connected to this question is how foreigners came to view the country as a
‘host’ more generally over the last two years or so.
Like
most, I too remain confused. One of my latest Facebook travels revealed a link
to a video in which Greek students from Birmingham dance in the rhythms of
Zorba the Greek on campus – a rather bizarre reaction to the definitive ‘No’ that
the ‘Greek people’ had delivered to its ‘EU oppressors’ only a few hours ago
(the actual video dated from 2012 and was posted on You Tube on the Greek
Independence Day– see Mack, 25 March 2012).
I compared this to the dancing and celebration scenes at Exarchia when the
first referendum voting results were announced (No Comment TV, 06 July),
and wondered how the coupling of such desperate defiance with performances of
the most touristified Greek music would appear to a visitor’s eyes. The
surrealist gusto Greeks display has various, unseen at this point,
consequences, possibly exacerbating stereotypical conceptions of Greek habitus
and streamlining those back into a rejuvenated, if not radically redefined tourist market.
Let
me backtrack a bit to explain this potentially surreal effect: I am sure most
of us remember the political background of 2008 (see Wikipedia,
undated on ‘Ta Dekemvriana’, including Greek anti-government
protests after Nea
Dimokratia’s failure to restructure the country’s
labour markets (Papadimitriou 2009: 51-2; Tzanelli 2011: chapter 6) – further
challenged from 2010, when the Greek economy experienced another dip that would
push the country to borrow more, accumulate a debt impossible to repay and, finally,
under a left-wing government, respond to its debtors’ threats with proposals to
exit the common EU currency and the EU itself. There is so much media talk
about the proliferation of disorder and fostering of all sorts of terrorism in
the country; booking your package holiday to a Greek island is a de facto bad idea. To mobilities
academics like myself this might suggest that we have eventually reached the
‘end of tourism’ as a political reality. Public frustration has proceeded to
remove the glossy veneer from the country’s cosmetic cosmopolitanism (Nederveen
Pieterse 2006) – a veneer in earnest also necessary for engaging with other
cultures, including the alleged ‘superficiality’ of touring and media arts –
leaving its ‘skin’ blemished by centuries of foreign interference, ‘bare’, like
the lives of its disposed citizenry. So, the neoliberal cage seems to have been
exchanged with one of sheer terror.
If
not cautiously unpacked, such statements merely reverse Fukuyama’s (1992)
reflections in the End of History,
the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government that shunts radical alternatives in a conservative deadlock: either
our history terminates in evolutionary terms, or extremism terminates its
industrial human capital. There are
other voices that argue that tourism has ended in new global environments of
mobilities in the sense that we cannot separate it from other forms of
spatio-temporal and functionally differentiated movements, such as migration,
business travel, technological services, skills and the like – that we live in
the age of nomadology (Hannam 2008; Hannam et.al. 2006). Unfortunately,
observations that tourism ends where terrorism and other forms of social
conflict thrive (Korstanje and Clayton 2012) are very close to contemporary
Greek realities.
From
the start of the global recession the end of Greek tourism manifested itself in
bundles of endogenous (strikes and protests against cuts, welfare retrenchment
and poverty-induced troika policies as well as rising levels of xenophobia
against both tourists and migrants) but also exogenous (terrorism allegedly
exclusively of alien origins) mobilities. All of them retain the nomadological
attributes of strangeness – referring to both privileged and disenfranchised
aliens. Gone were the peace of some island beaches, upon which tourists would
now increasingly find migrants (alive or dead) washed ashore (usually from
Greece’s archenemy-state, Turkey) (Bearden,
29 May 2015); Acropolis tours for cultural tourists,
who would be blocked by labour strikers and protesters against heritage
privatisation (see Smith, 27
January 2011 and 16
March 2014); and luxury urban tourisms that hordes of homeless beggars
and emergency food provision stalls would disrupt with invocations of
consumerist guilt. Contemporary Greek social landscapes tend to be at odds with
otherwise persistent tourism trends in the country (beach and heritage
holidays), when one thing is sure: the clash is here to stay. The (justified)
fear is that Greece might enjoy short tourism renaissances (Lowen, 25 June
2014),
but its slide into a ‘Third World’ purgatory will eventually coerce it to
redefine its global market presence. And given constant invocations of Second
World War ‘debts’ (that Germany refuses to discharge) by both the country’s
leadership and common folk, it seems that recession promoted a resentful
retrenchment into past suffering that matches so well its contemporary
landscapes of homelessness and poverty.
Let
me be clear: I have no interest in contributing in post-neoliberal
redefinitions of Greek tourism, but plenty in providing glimpses at alarming
prognostics. The aforementioned performative protests already sit comfortably
at a crossroads between dark (of war, famine and suffering) and slum (poverty
and normally urban) tourisms in that they have become the country’s enduring
representational core in global media platforms (Gopal,
31 March 2015). In many ways, global audiences have
already become ‘trained’ to gaze on Greek poverty, with all the ethical issues this
may provoke (Baptista 2012; Tzanelli 2015). It feels as if global reporting on
the crisis portrays a society at its final gasp, ready to be sacralised in
marketable images of begging, death and ‘endemic’ terrorism. But do global
audiences really care? Bauman’s (2007) argument that any attempt to sacralise
dying as a spectacle is the prelude to the represented tragedy’s neglect,
should prompt a response from the Greek governing centre. But what sort of
response – and can this escape capitalist exploitation? There could be
coordinated efforts to connect such spectacles of poverty (the ‘staple’ of
global press reporting) to progressive trends of social tourism – to employ the
poor to engage with visitors. But currently, there is no such thing in Greece. What
would also be absent from such an ‘exercise’ would be globally coordinated volunteer
tourist education - or, more correctly, ethical political consumption, given
that volunteerism is as problematic as its slum tourism counterpart. Of course,
the post-neoliberal frame in which Greece is asked to operate in market
networks does not necessarily accommodate ethical terms on consumption of such
‘spectacles’ – in any case, a controversial move. The very premise that the poor can benefit
from work in tourism is so tightly associated with experiences of (neo-)
liberal rhetoric and capitalist exploitation that radical movements such as
those promoted by Syriza
would shy away from it. Others may rightly point out that any sort of
‘touristification’ would not support dewesternising, decolonising projects,
only strengthen the EU bondage (Mignolo 2000). And what about alternative
voices? It is additionally questionable
if the current budding of urban and rural cooperatives (Nasioulas 2012) as well
as a promising solidarity movement in Greece (Henley,
23 January 2015) can find profitable and fair introduction
in local tourism, or support nation-wide policies of self-government in the
Zapatistas model of development.
Self-governance is a scarce resource that has
to be earned – in the Zapatistas’ case, with revolution that is not always
peaceful or contextually advisable. But social tourism has to be for the poor
and not poor in cultural resources - otherwise those in poverty join racist value
hierarchies from the back door. In addition, tourism is often consigned to
inessential policy prerogatives in (non)developing economies and ‘Third World’
experimentation focuses on hard industries and policies instead. But is this
restructuring of local markets perhaps a partial solution - or have social and
geographical inequalities in Greece deepened, irrevocably tying the mobility of
its social landscapes to nodes of business and governance managed only from
afar?
References
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Rodanthi is currently co-authoring an article with Maximiliano Korstanje on the effects of troika policies on Greek epistemologies of well-being.
