The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  The expansion of tourism was led by three agents: within the Mediterranean, there were governments – national, regional or municipal – that saw in tourism a way to attract foreign currency and to promote local industry. In Israel, for example, three master-plans were produced in the hope of encouraging tourism, in 1976, 1987 and 1996; this country had the advantage of four tourist constituencies: Jewish visitors, Christian pilgrims, domestic tourists and foreign holidaymakers attracted by the country’s beaches and monuments. By 2000 the Tel Aviv littoral from the edge of Jaffa northwards was lined with massive new hotels offering four- or five-star service, but little in the way of beautiful architecture.9 Outside the Mediterranean there were giant travel companies such as Thomson and Hapag Lloyd that aggressively marketed the Mediterranean, sending their representatives along the shores of Spain, Italy, Greece and Tunisia, in a search for hotels that would appeal to visitors from England, Germany and elsewhere. Finally, just as importantly, there were the clients, who saw in two weeks on the shores of the Mediterranean a release from the greyness of northern Europe in the 1950s and 60s – many wanted little more than a sunlounger on the beach or by the hotel pool, and some were unsure whether they even wanted to eat the food the locals laid before them. In Greek Cyprus British holidaymakers can easily find Cadbury’s chocolate and British sliced bread.10 Dutch holidaymakers are known to take bags of native potatoes with them. The French, with their own Mediterranean coastline, have been much more creative than their north European neighbours. Club Méditerranée pioneered inclusive holidays from 1950 onwards, starting with beach huts in Majorca which were intended to conjure up romantic images of desert islands. Its Mediterranean destinations included many places little visited by mass tourism, such as the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. Innovative methods included an emphasis on direct sales to customers, but its peak lay in the years before 1990; economic conditions and management problems subsequently weakened the organization.11

  At first the northern invasion was gentle. Rimini possessed an airport as early as 1938. At this period, though, Rimini attracted wealthy clients, air travel was still very costly, and war soon interrupted the trickle of foreign tourists. After the war, Rimini adopted a populist approach.12 There and elsewhere business blossomed, as travel by air, rail and road became ever cheaper and easier. Trainloads of Germans and Britons began to descend on Rimini in the 1950s; satellite towns swelled in size, so that Riccione and Milano Marittima began to compete with Rimini itself. Their trademark has long been the serried ranks of sunbeds and umbrellas marking out the domain of each concrete hotel. Similar developments occurred near Pisa, where Viareggio became a major centre for the Tuscan tourist traffic, satisfying a clientèle apparently less interested in the artistic wonders of Florence and other Tuscan cities than in a seaside holiday (allowing for the odd day-trip to Pisa to gawp at the Leaning Tower). Mass tourism, with new hotels and other infrastructure, became a significant route to economic recovery in Italy, Spain and Greece.

  But the real transformation occurred with the arrival of the aeroplane.13 Cheap, safe, rapid air travel took time to arrive. Here, England was a pioneer, because of the sheer inconvenience of having no direct rail link to the Mediterranean. Britain was a major centre of the aeronautical industry, capitalizing on new aircraft technology developed during the war to construct the efficient, smooth airliners of the late 1950s and early 60s such as the Vickers Viscount and the Britannia. So the British, and later the Germans and Scandinavians, took to the air. In the 1950s Thomson Holidays inaugurated regular flights to Majorca, which was to become the first target of intensive air tourism. Otherwise a journey to Majorca was tediously slow, by train, ship, train, another train (on wider Spanish gauge) and finally ship again.14 By the late 1960s, with the introduction of faster, smoother jet aircraft such as the BAC 1-11, traffic was burgeoning; and the airport at Palma remains, at least in summertime, one of the busiest in Europe. Between 1960 and 1973 the number of annual visitors to Majorca rose precipitously from 600,000 to 3,600,000.15 By the start of the twenty-first century, tourism accounted for 84 per cent of the Majorcan economy. Whole concrete towns such as Palma Nova were created for the tourist industry. But the roots of this success went back to Franco’s time. Majorca and Spain (excluding the Canaries) accounted for 25 per cent of British foreign holidaymaking in 1967, and 36 per cent in 1972, while holidays to Italy fell from 16 per cent to 11 per cent.16 No country could compete with Spain, which was exactly what Franco’s regime wanted: in 1959 a new ‘Stabilization Plan’ for the Spanish economy envisaged not so much the stabilization as the expansion of tourism in Mediterranean Spain, the Balearics and the Canaries.17 Along the coast of Spain vast swathes of concrete brought a degree of prosperity, but also showed little consideration for the natural beauty of the Costa Brava and the rest of Mediterranean Spain. For the moment, the astonishing cultural assets of Spain – Toledo, Segovia, Córdoba, Granada – took second place to the coastline, which benefited from new access roads, proper lighting and other vital improvements, even if the railways long remained painfully slow.

  Travel became democratized as well as globalized. The idea of travelling from Britain to Spain began to appeal to a wide range of people of all backgrounds, aided by the creation of the package holiday. The tourist ceased being an adventurer who navigated a way across the towns and countryside of Mediterranean lands, since it was now possible to choose flights, hotels, meals, even daytrips, from a catalogue in the secure comfort of a sitting room in England or Germany, knowing that representatives who spoke one’s own language would be there to confront any difficulties with the natives. What people wanted was a ‘holiday from the assembly line’.18 And in case the idea of being abroad seemed too threatening, there was comfort in numbers, and there was the willingness of the natives themselves to accommodate the eccentric needs of foreign visitors: fish and chips for the English, Bratwurst for the Germans.

  Those who took Mediterranean holidays were keen to display the fact conspicuously, returning from Spain or Italy with a suitably deep tan. By 1947 French brochures advertising the Côte d’Azur were laying stress on the joys of the beach.19 Tanned skin became a badge indicating both prosperity and health, since more was known about the advantages of Vitamin D than about the disadvantages of UVA and UVB rays. Pallor was now associated with consumptives and office clerks. The great arbiter of taste, Coco Chanel, decided to make a fashion accessory of her suntan after cruising the Mediterranean in the 1920s, setting a standard for generations of women. However, this interest in bronzed flesh was also associated with changing moral standards.20 Even before the Second World War parts of the body could be displayed on the beach that remained carefully hidden in other public places. The display of the female (and male) body became gradually more extensive. Named after a Pacific atoll used for nuclear testing, the bikini was shown at a fashion show in Paris in 1946, though it took a couple of decades for it to be widely adopted – even its designers expected something like a nuclear reaction among those opposed to it. Over time, it became increasingly daring, so that the navel, originally covered, was invariably exposed.21 The supposed immorality of the bikini led both the Italians and the Spaniards to ban them in 1948 (with vocal support from the Vatican), but this could simply not be sustained as foreign tourists flooded into the country. Part of its appeal could be found in the material used to make it by the 1960s, Spandex or Lycra, a blend of synthetic and natural materials that does not retain water. Even when used for one-piece swimsuits, the tight, clinging quality of Lycra revealed more of the female body than conservatives would have wished. Display is an important part of how people make use of swimwear, and the pool is often a place where there is plenty of silent watching and little swimming.22 Thus the aeroplane and the bikini, two inventions as far apart in technology as could be imagined, transformed the relationship between the Mediterranean and the north of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.23

  Naturally, the arrival of tourist
s in search of a suntan puzzled inhabitants of the Mediterranean for whom the sun was something to be avoided at midday. Puzzlement was compounded by the behaviour of tourists: physical contact between men and women, especially when they were not wearing very much, could shock Greeks, Tunisians and others. In Communist Albania the behaviour of tourists was seen as a sign of western decadence: Enver Hoxha complained about the antics of tourists in neighbouring countries ‘with pants or no pants at all’. Whatever he meant (probably it was an attack on Yugoslav liberalism) he ensured that very few western tourists were allowed to enter, apart from members of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties. The hedonism and permissiveness of north Europeans, especially from the 1960s onwards, affected the attitude of those they encountered, beginning with local young men who were fascinated by what they saw.24 The clash of cultures became even more obvious in the 1980s as it became more common for women to bare their breasts on the beach. The cult of physical beauty in France, with its large cosmetics industry, made it inevitable that Saint-Tropez should be the pioneer in this; Italian and Spanish resorts followed suit. Liberalization for some meant a dilemma for others, and responses varied. A nun charged with turning away vistors to St Mark’s Basilica in Venice who were improperly dressed found the job so stressful that she had a nervous breakdown. In Spain, Ibiza has become well known as a centre for gay tourism, a sign of how far the country has moved since Franco’s time. One country that seized the opportunity to profit from tourism with marked success was Yugoslavia, which determinedly built a reputation for cheap, well-organized hotel-based holidays, particularly favoured by Germans, one speciality being naturist resorts, which the Tito regime had quite cleverly encouraged, knowing that this would appeal specially to the eager adherents of German and Scandinavian Frei-Korps-Kultur seeking an all-over tan.

  Cheap flights and cheap alcohol can also ruin tourism: Mallia in Crete and Ayia Napa in Greek Cyprus have acquired horrific reputations, and young British tourists have done most to damage their standing. They are not interested in local culture but want to seize ‘the opportunity to have more fun in a short space of time than might be possible at home’. ‘Fun’ is mainly concerned with sex and alcohol, and in 2003 the British press claimed that both had been actively promoted by representatives of the tour company Club 18–30.25 It is no surprise that in Majorca there have been attempts to move upmarket; for, even if this means the number of tourists will fall, more prosperous visitors will spend more per head. Some areas, such as Apulia and parts of Sardinia, have been consciously marketed as ‘quality’ destinations, and boutique hotels have started to take business away from giant complexes. Tourism has brought prosperity to areas that were previously impoverished and unproductive. Yet the environmental price has been very high. The strain on water resources, the contribution to carbon emissions from air-conditioning units, let alone aeroplanes, and pollution of the sea close to hotel complexes have all contributed to the deterioration of the Mediterranean environment. Local traditions have also suffered, as festivals have become commercialized: the long moribund Venetian carnival was reinvented and marketed as the high point of the Venetian calendar – it is no coincidence that it falls in a lean season when the city used to be empty of tourists. The impact of the media on demand can be detected in Kephalonia, promoted after the publication of Louis de Bernières’s bestseller Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, or in the Greek islands after the runaway success of the film Mamma Mia in 2008.26

  For long the Mediterranean was almost the exclusive beneficiary of this expansion of mass summer tourism, along with Portugal and the Canary Islands; only in the 1990s did long-haul holidays to Cuba, Florida or the Dominican Republic become significant competitors in the mass market. The late 1990s also saw a very substantial expansion of short holidays, ‘city breaks’, as price wars among airlines resulted in the creation of budget airlines, led by British and Irish entrepreneurs. Irish-owned Ryanair developed hubs in Britain, Belgium, Germany and Italy, becoming Europe’s largest airline. These airlines appealed not just to the price-conscious but to those with holiday homes in southern France, Tuscany or Spain. Alongside air travel, sea travel has been boosted, sometimes cynically, by shipping companies arguing that a cruise is more environmentally friendly than a flight. Dubrovnik is so overwhelmed by cruise ships that traffic police are employed in high season to control the flow of tour groups through the old city.

  Tourism in the Mediterranean is not, of course, just for Europeans. Two ‘invasions’ from further afield have been particularly significant: the American and the Japanese. Americans were far from unknown in the watering-holes of the Mediterranean before the Second World War (D. H. Lawrence visited the Etruscan tombs with an American friend), but the inclusion of historical monuments in Italy, Greece, southern France and Egypt on the tourist circuit once again reflects ease of movement as cheap fares and elaborate communications networks made the Mediterranean easily accessible by air from the other side of the Atlantic. The Japanese have sought the explanation for the economic successes of western Europe in European culture and history; in addition, these contacts have accelerated the already rapid westernization of Japan. Japanese visitors have waxed and waned as the economy of Japan has expanded and contracted. Another constraint on tourism has been political turmoil: the once flourishing resorts of the beautiful Dalmatian coast have recovered slowly from the disintegration of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. However, as with the trade routes of the medieval Mediterranean, so also with the holiday trails of the modern tourist: if Croatia or Israel is unsafe, then other places gain a comparative advantage – Cyprus, Malta, Turkey, and so on.

  III

  The fall of Communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union eased some tensions, because Moscow was no longer trying to create a vigorously anti-American faction based in Syria, Libya and other allies, even if these countries remained generally hostile to Israel, which, for its part, seemed half-hearted in its offers of peace and reluctant to let go of its settlements in the West Bank, despite the evacuation of Gaza in 2005 (after which the territory fell under the rule of the Islamist Hamas movement). Strong military and economic ties binding Turkey and Israel together disintegrated in 2010, nominally over an Israeli attack on ships bringing aid to Gaza while it was under a strict Israeli blockade; but it was also clear that Turkey was seeking a new mission, which some defined as ‘new Ottomanism’, within the Middle East, and that this was partly the consequence of rebuffs from the European Union, some of whose most powerful members opposed Turkish entry, and none of whom could offer a solution to the Cyprus question that would satisfy the Turks.

  The search for greater stability within the Mediterranean has increasingly turned away from political rivalries towards ecological issues that can be addressed only if all the nations of the Mediterranean agree to transcend political differences and work together. Whether the series of initiatives launched at the start of the twenty-first century will have any effect depends on a willingness to limit economic growth so as to preserve the Mediterranean environment for future generations. Beginning with the ‘Barcelona Process’ in 1995, the European Union has attempted to steer all the Mediterranean countries towards common political, economic and cultural objectives. Out of the agreements of 1995 there evolved in 2008 a Union pour la Méditerranée in which the entire EU and every state in the Mediterranean participates. Although the first objective, political stability, seems to be blocked by continuing tensions, notably between Israel and its neighbours, the inclusion of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Lebanon in the Mediterranean Union is intended to provide a framework within which they can begin tentatively to recognize common interests rather than differences. Among economic objectives, the idea of a pan-Mediterranean free trade area conjures up images of the great days of Roman or early Islamic trade across the Mediterranean. Its principal drawback is that it is seen by Mediterranean states outside the EU, especially Turkey, as a weak substitute for membership of the EU itself, and some E
uropean politicians who have opposed Turkish entry into Europe, such as President Sarkozy of France, have been noticeably enthusiastic about the Mediterranean Union. Others have looked forward to the day when the EU will become a Euro-Mediterranean Union offering membership to all the Mediterranean lands, but there are quite enough problems to resolve concerning political rivalries and economic disparities within the Mediterranean, not to mention the future of Europe, to make this sound a Utopian dream – a severe warning against over-hasty integration was provided early in 2010 by the dramatic collapse of government finances in Greece, a member of the Eurozone that irresponsibly spent far beyond its means. And a consequence of the Greek crisis was that the Chinese government was able to purchase one of the docks at Peiraieus later that year, giving the People’s Republic easier access within the Mediterranean for its industrial goods – a sign of how much China has changed since it dreamed of naval bases in Hoxha’s Albania. Other very worthy objectives include a solar energy plan and the cleaning of the seas, where pollution and over-exploitation have wreaked havoc with (for instance) the tunny-fishing industry – three-quarters of tuna fished in the Mediterranean go to Japan. Yet in March 2010 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species meeting in Doha refused to act when it was clear that over-fishing, in and beyond the Mediterranean, threatens the bluefin tuna with extinction.