THE DEVELOPMENT OF TOURISM INDUSTRIES

IN THE ARAB WORLD:

Trapped Between the Forces of Economic Globalization and

Cultural Commodification

By Waleed Hazbun[1]

Department of Political Science

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tourist Colonials

While the development of tourism industries is a major feature of the process of globalization these days, the Arab world has long been a destination for western pilgrims, travelers, and adventurers. It was, in fact, upon the images and tales brought back by these early tourists that Thomas Cook and Son’s in the 1860s was able to construct the first modern industry of international tourism by bringing British tourists on organized tours up the Nile and across the Holy Land.

In the years following, Western tourism was interwoven with Western colonialism. This took the direct form of Thomas Cook’s commission to transport the British Empire’s troops through Egypt and the French colonial efforts in North Africa to promote heritage preservation and tourism in the service of pacifying indigenous urban communities and drawing Europeans to settle the land. At the same time tourism also played a large indirect colonial role as travelogues became the dominant means for the transmission of representations of Arab peoples and places to the West.

In the time since, tourism has grown as an international industry now representing one of the largest employers and items of trade in the global economy. While the bulk of this traffic is between the affluent societies of the industrialized North Atlantic, the 3% or so of the global flows which encompass the Arab world have had disproportional impact in enveloping the region in the global processes of tourism development.

The new religion, the new pollution

In the Arab world today, while Western tourists still come in search of the region’s past, Arab governments are feverishly promoting tourism as a means to build their own economic futures. The argument posed by its boosters—such as state elites, private entrepreneurs and international bankers—is that the Arab world’s warm climates, sunny beaches, vast deserts, historical monuments, and native hospitality are some of the most valuable resources of the region and they should be exploited for the means of generating new sources of wealth. This industry has been touted as a means to help adjust their developing economies to the ever more competitive pressures of the global marketplace.

Tourism with its roots in religious pilgrimages around the Eastern Mediterranean has a claim to be considered one of the oldest trades in the region. But, we must ask, what kind of future will tourism development offer? The choice is not simply whether to open or keep closed the boarders. Tourism is a commodity that is produced, shaped and valued by policy makers, investors, and hotel operators as well as archeologists and the tourists themselves. The “tourism product” is not simply a reflection of the existing state of the natural geography or the remaining historical monuments and ruins, but most of all is a product of political and social constructions bounded by global economic processes.

The economic benefits of tourism require tradeoffs. Some of them are economic—such as foregoing investment in other sectors—while other tradeoffs concern environmental degradation, the social segregation and privatization of public space, and how tourism acts to commodify culture and heritage and then project these as the dominant representations of Arab society.

To understand these choices and dilemmas we need to look at both the economies of the industry as well as how it impacts the social lives, cultural heritage, and media representations of the Arab people.

Economic needs and tourist dreams

While images and myths of other cultures are often what drives tourists to travel, the development of tourism industries in host countries is shaped by economic factors and pressures of globalization have only exaggerated them.

Since independence Arab governments have been charged with promoting economic development to satisfy the needs of their people and maintain political legitimacy. Even after the years of the oil boom, for most states, these challenges are greater than ever.

Populations continue to expand requiring the importation of larger amounts of food. And with the majority of most populations somewhere below the age of 18 this means that larger numbers than ever are coming into the labor market seeking jobs. Most of these economies already have high unemployment.

In addition, greater amounts of imports from industrialized economies are going to be required to satisfy the demands of the upper class and the growing middle classes which have become hooked on Western consumer goods. Even efforts to promote local industries are going to require significant inputs from abroad. These combined with sizable debts drawn up will require more than ever increasing amounts of foreign exchange.

This greater demand for food, jobs, and hard currency has to be coped with along with the decreases in their supply from declines in oil revenues and remittance flows. On top of this are the pressures for economic reform, often instituted as part of IMF loan packages, requiring decreases in government social spending and subsides, currency devaluations, and the privatization of inefficient but job providing factories.

Tourism has been hoisted up as a way out of these problems with its potential for providing jobs and hard currency. The promotion of tourism is not new to the Arab world and other developing countries. In the 1950 and 1960s it was promoted for developing economies dependent on primary exports (such as minerals) as a means to diversify their economies and as a source of capital for industrial development.

Since the 1970s the logic has changed. Tourism is now even viewed by some as an outward-oriented growth strategy, that is similar to those promoted by the East Asian tigers. Such strategies seek to promote a sector that is competitive in the global marketplace and does not require tariff protection nor extensive government intervention as earlier strategies to create local industries to produce (often less efficiently) goods imported from industrial economies. Outward strategies are guided by a logic of microeconomic efficiency instead of national autonomy.

Like many other export sectors such as textiles, tourism is labor intensive. Additionally, for developing countries promoting tourism has been viewed as ripe to take advantage of shifting product cycle: Put simply this suggests that European tourists who had long gone to northern Mediterranean resorts, may now seek to go farther afield to try new destinations. Much resort tourism found elsewhere, though, is often mass produced along standardized models found everywhere else.

This promotion of tourism is viewed by its boosters as having great potential to provide jobs and hard currency thus promoting macroeconomic stability. It was also thought that through forward and backward linkages it could support other indigenous sectors such as food production and consumer goods. And as tourist zones could be set up in less urbanized areas this might also lead to more balanced regional development.

“Don’t you wish you could wake up one day and read that...”[2]

These arguments for tourism development also matched the economic situations of the local entrepreneurs and the state in the Arab World. International tourism was already a developed industry globally with airlines, tour operators, and tourists looking for new destinations. Arab states were able to join the industry by doing little more then building beach-side hotels and in some cases providing tours of archeological sites.

Hotel investments were viewed as being able to provide the quick, hassle and risk free returns most Arab investors wanted. In the 1950s and 1960s tourism sectors in places like Lebanon and Tunisia became refuge shelters for private capital escaping the socialist nationalization in places like Egypt and Tunisia.

With the oil boom and economic opening program of the mid 1970s, tourism in the Arab world expanded rapidly. Most of new Arab wealth that was invested regionally went into tourism and this was matched by loans and outlays from local governments. A key input for these projects was land, and that was generally already owned by the state or quickly acquired by it. On the state’s part it required much less capacity for regulation and promotion than other more technologically or capital intensive/sophisticated industries booming in Southeast Asia.

When the IMF started requiring privatization in exchange for bailing out Arab states from currency and debt crises, hotels were and continue to be the first to go. Looking forward, it is also understood that tourism will not face the same shock that say textiles will as Arab economies, such as those in North Africa lower their trade barriers to Europe.

More recently tourism has been viewed as linked to the “peace process” such that transnational tourism flows would be fostered by attaining peace, promoting peace would be a marker of stability and acceptability, and tourism development could provide economic stability for the regional economies.

The gifts of sun, sand, souks, and sites...

The results of these efforts are a complex mix of the tangible and intangible. In economic terms tourism is firmly established as a key economic sector is many states.

The shape and nature of tourism differs throughout the region, and thus I will have to make some very basic generalizations though this presentation to give and overall picture.

Tourism as an economic activity is most dominant in Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco. Tunisia has the longest history of the developed standardized package sea and sun resort tourism. Morocco and Egypt have developed such mass tourism sectors as well as tours which seek to take advantage of cultural and historical sites such as the souks of Marrakech and the temples of Luxor.

In these three countries tourism is big business and has been expanding rapidly. Between 1983 and the mid 1990s tourist arrivals in Tunisia and Egypt jumped past the crisis of the Gulf War to more than double from 1.5 million to about 4 million visits by non-residents to each country. Tourism receipts in Egypt amount to over 2 billion dollars or about 8% of GNP while Tunisia and Morocco each bring in about one billion dollars or representing 5-6% of their GNPs. These figures make tourism one of the top foreign exchange earners for these countries covering, for example, over 40% of Tunisia’s commercial trade deficit.

Most direct employment is in the hotel sector where; for example, over 50,000 are employed in Tunisia. Tourism likely employs indirectly about one out of every ten people in Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt.[3]

Several other countries have been seeking to develop more modest tourist sectors mostly concentrating on cultural and luxury resort tourism. These states include Jordan, Syria, Oman, as well as the Palestinian authority and rebuilding is under way in Lebanon. Some Gulf states, in particular in the UAE and Bahrain, are seeking to develop an even more restrictive narrow band of lucrative luxury tourism.

The Arab world also includes states with minimal tourism levels such as Algeria, Libya, and Iraq. While these countries would like to attempt to expand their tourism[4], Saudi Arabia is another case where tourism isn’t even a visa category, but at the same time has for centuries hosted the mass Hajj pilgrimage.

Tourism’s other myths

Tourism development has proven a relative success in advancing macroeconomic growth. I would argue, though, that is because other development options seemed less feasible or more risky. The hard currency tourism brings in has made it so key to national economies it ranks now with issues of national security. I don’t suggest ending the promotion of tourism, but argue we should take a hard look at its effects and how it might be controlled and reshaped.

As we noted above the need for job creation is a major pressure facing many Arab states. But tourism, as it is now structured, does not usually promote the jobs and skills these economies need to be creating. Tourism’s seasonality makes most jobs, in and out of hotels, temporary in nature. Nevertheless, the draw of this quick money has emptied large sections of agricultural land of its work force.

The full-time work is generally not high paying. As cause or effect of this the skill levels of the vast bulk of workers in the sector is very low as is their level of education (most workers have minimal education). In a places like Tunisia the numbers show that very few workers have any real training, the tourism trade schools can only put out a tiny fraction of the workers needed each year. (The situation is better in Morocco, though.)

The truth is that the number of directly employed is still not very large as a share of total employment and most of the rest supported by tourism are effectively in the informal sector. It would be a mistake, though, to assume that this sector should then be viewed as a match for the less educated sections of the populations. Instead we should view this along with one of the most common complaints from Western tourists which is that they feel constantly harassed by unofficial or false guides, who might offer an assortment of dubious services or simply tag on to you and seek to extract a commission from the shop owners on tourist purchases.

More than anything this situation exposes the high unemployment rates in areas such as Fez and Marrakech where there are little for the young men to, while at the same time being exposed to conspicuous consumption by Western tourists.

And the effects may go deeper. A Tunisian tourism consultant lamented to me the startling disparities in school attendance rates in the Hammamet area of Tunisia, a major tourism zone. It appears that boys were dropping out or not attending school in great numbers drawn by the lure of making money off tourists. Thus these boys are limiting their education and long term job opportunities. This consultant remarked further that he feared it may lead to exacerbating gender conflicts within the community.

Tourists drink first

Tourism development also eats up tremendous amount of land and resources. Such that large stretches of coastline have been turned into concrete, in effect privatizing what was once public space. Where locals once enjoyed the seaside, now only those who can afford the hotels come as tourists.

As the numbers that flock to the beaches grow, inevitably so does the pollution that they and the tourist facilities dump in the water. It must be noted that Tunisia has done more than any other Arab state to seek to strive for a best practice of environmental sustainability and awareness. But I wonder if this would be the case if it was not viewed as a threat to it projects of tourism development. Commenting on these development plans one analyst remarks “the government was seemingly more concerned with the environment’s impact on the tourism industry than the [impact of the tourism industry on the environment].” [Poirier 1997, p. 58]

As for those that don’t make it to the beach, the environmental effects of tourism development still harm the local population. In most areas water is a limited resource. It has become common-place to refer to the next Middle East conflict as one over water resource. Tourism only makes this situation worse as the tourist zones per person use up about 8 to 10 times per day the amount of water of the rest of the country.

The over exploitation of water draws it into conflict with agriculture which still employs more of the local population. Only the high priced luxury tourism of the Gulf is able to offset tourist water demand with costly desalinated water. As a Moroccan geographer notes “A dwindling underground water table often coincides with the installation of major hotels. Nevertheless, tourist hotels have always been the last to suffer from water interruptions imposed by drought.” [Berriane 1997, pp. 249-250]

A beach of their own

The cause for the most grievous imbalances of resource use and urbanization has been a lack of planning. Without regulation hotels were scattered in strings along coastlines with little coordination or organized supplemental development. Long stretches of roadside across from the water would be left desolate and barren.

In the mid 1970s Tunisia and elsewhere shifted from such a linear model to a nuclear model consisting of integrated stations. The logic of such super-complexes, is similar to that of a shopping mall or Disneyland. The idea is to pack a number of huge luxury hotels, with sometimes over 1000+ beds per hotel, into a small area together with a series of restaurants, night clubs and other facilities such as sports clubs and condos. This compactness with higher bed per area densities supposedly reduces the impact on beach erosion and the cost of developing the accompanying infrastructure.

Besides requiring much large amounts of financing and often controlled by transnational hotel and development corporations this type of development led to a whole new type of segregation or hermetically sealed tourist experiences. Often built in new zones away from other development like Port El Kantaoui north of Sousse in Tunisia, or along the Red Sea coast of Egypt, these complexes disconnected tourist zones from the scavenging of the informal sector and thus indirect employment.

Rock the casbah

The move to the isolated integrated station had political as well as economic motivations. In Egypt the tensions caused by the cultural flows of tourism have sparked open violent conflict over tourism and the future of an Arab society.

Hotel development has been one of the leading sectors since the infitah of the 1970 and expanded greatly in the 1980s. It was during this period that Islamists who opposed secular authoritarian rule were organizing against the state. In 1992 the Gama’a al-Islamiya began a campaign directed at foreign tourists with the goal of crippling the industry an thus the national economy. In the end hoping to destabilize the regime. This deadly campaign has included bombing tour buses, firing at cruise ships, hotels and most recently hit the Egyptian Museum in Cairo killing nine tourists.

These attacks peaking in 1993-4 have clearly focused on the very prominent role tourism plays in the economy. In particular, they decry the extravagant luxury of Western tourists and rich Arabs who not only consume alcohol and violate the Islamists’ sense of proper social conduct, but also clearly flaunt the existence of vast local and global economic inequalities.

The obvious vulnerability of tourist has led to calls for a further segregation of tourist in zones. These have taken off along the Red Sea coast. This segregation is well represented by a New York Times reporter, chief of the Cairo desk, who spouts on about the splendid isolation of a Sharm ash- Sheikh resort which he claims “may have less in common with the Egypt of the Pyramids and the Pharaohs than with the ends of the earth.” For him this is signaled by its clean airport and the best roads in Egypt, convivial pubs, and the relaxed dress of the German woman at the pool. [NYT Feb 11, 1996]

The shortsightedness of this strategy is that it fails to address the heart of the political struggle in Egypt.

An Egyptian sociologist Heba Aziz points out that in fact one of the first instances of attacks on tourists was carried out by a group of soldiers fulfilling their service duty in a camp near Giza, near the Pyramids and luxury five hotels..these men living in miserable conditions set fire to several tourist establishments in the area.

Aziz goes on to note that based on a statement by the Minister of Interior in mid 1994, in the previous 36 months only 12 tourist were killed while 125 members of the security forces were. Add to this that the Ibn Khaldoun center reports that in 1993 alone 111 members of Islamist groups were killed in clashes with the security forces we see the real scope of the conflict.

In other words, the tourist have become symbolic players is this struggle. On the one hand, in the eyes of the Islamists, they have come to represent the Western decadence and power, while on the other hand as victims they present the government with further need and justification for harsher crackdowns and large polices presence throughout the country.

I present this not to give credence to any claims that they represent a form of Hobsbawmian social banditry, but to note in fact the strategy of both sides is leading the country faster, and faster in the wrong direction. A war fought over tourism will lead to only a further segregation of tourists into enclave resorts (with little cultural contact with Egypt and its heritage) were the state can still gain hard currency and the same time increasing repression.

In addition to similar measures in Tunisia, that government has pursued a curious path to negotiating its encounter between poverty and the new invasions of Western culture. It has developed a very public social welfare program--which includes such things and donating to it profits from state sponsored Michael Jackson concerts and the premier showing of the American blockbuster movie Independence Day.

Shopping mall airport oasis

It should be no surprise then the area with some of the most rapid success with the model of enclave tourism has been in the gulf states such as Bahrain and the Emirates which have already built up their economies and societies as high income enclaves. This was made possible with oil wealth, though now they are seeking to diversify their economies.

One of the ironies of these cases is that luxury hotel facilities were first developed in the Emirates as a response to business needs. The various emirates were competing for business against each other and built up grand hotels to promote their own prestige with hotel luxury and architectural sophistication and top notch international management teams. [Ritter 1985, p. 174] This led to a process of tourism development in reverse where tourist accommodations were built up before their was much concern about building tourist attractions [p.175.]

Dubai now has a concerted effort to promote itself as a tourist zone, but note that as a senior tourism official stated: we seek “to give people what they want, but only attract who we want” [Laws 1995, p. 188].

The development in the UAE of mega-million dollar theme parks and tourist villages are far out pacing similar efforts elsewhere in the Arab. Situated and a trading cross roads Dubai has been able to attract shopper from the Gulf as well as a new pack of Russians who spend on average up to $1,000 per day. This is a totally different league than the Tunisians who struggle to squeeze out a mere $50 per day. The pinnacle of these development id the post-Ramadan “Shopping Festival” compete with daily prizes of luxury automobiles.

Dubai has thus proved itself to be years ahead of the latest post-modern refashioning on going at New York’s JFK airport with the idea of creating an airport cum-shopping mall to be built by a Dutch company. As a NYT reporter describes it “he basic idea is to move passengers from parking lot to check-in counter to airplane with such ease that they forget they are traveling and go on shopping binges instead” [IHT may 15, 1997].

Don't ever need to leave Las Vegas

This excess of consumption brings to life the future possible path of a number of trends... as tourism further seeks to segregate itself into enclaves, and as the Egyptians tombs continue to deteriorate from the humidity the tourists bring inside some are arguing that we need to create adjacent to them a theme park of replicas... the ultimate conclusion of this might look like the Luxor gambling casino in Las Vegas which is a grand hotel in the shape of a pyramid, with an obelisk and sphinx out front...inside it contains tacky recreations of Egyptian artifacts and bring to life much of Hollywood’s images of the country in a “sanitized version of Egypt” such that a tourist from Kansas interviewed on TV concluded that she does not need to travel to Egypt anymore now that she has seen the Luxor, USA” [Gottschalk 1995, pp. 216-7].

I might present this in jest, but the question is a very deep and sincere one. The concerns over the environmental and social impacts of tourism have even those debating the future of Israeli/Palestinian tourism speaking positively of the future “Disneyfication” of tourism there. Its cleans, its makes money, it works. [See discussion in Twite and Baskin 1994,The Conversion of Dreams]

No room at the inn

The original segregated tourism zone, in fact, is the Holy Land. As part of the autonomy arrangements the Palestinian authority has been able to develop its own Tourism council. I was recently given a copy of the official travel brochure which was put together with help from the Spanish government. It starts off with the greeting “Welcome to Palestine, The Holy Land” it then informs the reader ... (quote) “Do you know there are:” and goes on to list that there are such things as Palestinians Doctors, and Universities, and taxies, and artists. It states to the side that the #1 reason to visit the Holy Land is for its connections to the Bible etc... It just struck me that the writers of this document felt, with cause, that Palestinian society has been so invisible that we need to state it first.

The invisibility of Palestinian society should seem striking if we are to believe those who suggest tourism can bring greater understanding between cultures. The fact of the matter is that the tourism industry is often more a reflections of geographies of power than a reflection of the geography of cultures.

Holy Land tourism has for decades now been an Israeli product. Such that a reporter can size up the state of the Israeli economy by noting that“ there was plenty of elbow room Christmas week in Bethlehem’s Manger Square” [NYT Dec 29, 1996]. Not only is tourism key to the Israeli economy, but it is in fact tourist visiting Palestinian sites which support this sector. But not only do most Holy Land tourists stay mostly in Israeli accommodations (and this is true even for those visiting Jordan), Israel has long indirectly staged and managed the sites. As part of recent talks the Israeli army had to explain to the Palestinians how they managed the Christmas festivities in Bethlehem. A few years back when the Palestinians, in protest, called off Christmas celebrations, the Israeli government set about “bussing in Christian volunteers from kibbutzim to fill Manger Square and make Bethlehem appear as Christmas-like as possible” [Boston Globe, Dec 24, 1990].

The next question we must ask ourselves is if the post-Oslo era is going to bring any changes in this. A big NO came in the form of Netenyahu’s opening, under the cover of darkness, of the tunnel along the western retaining wall which forms the platform for the Al-Aqsa mosque. This fight is not only over the Israelis being able to circulate more tourism through Jewish controlled Jerusalem so they can gain more revenues. Anthropologist Joel Bauman reports than as part of the underground tour of these tunnels the visitor is shown a model of the Temple Mount which peals successive historical layers of development to show a reconstruction of the Second Temple. One guide explained to him “To get a sense of the real magnitude and grandeur of the Western Wall, we would have to get rid of the Muslims. But, for now, we can only tunnel under them.” [Middle East Report, 1995, p. 23]

Remapping tourism, the state, and globalization

One of the many strange ironies we are facing as a consequence of the post-Oslo peace process concerns what it is doing to our maps. Modern Middle East boundaries (and nation-states) have often been considered a hindrance for Arab peoples who fondly recalled being able to travel easily between Beirut, Jerusalem, and Damascus. Such flows were essential to the inter-weavings which formed Arab culture and society.

But one new sight has been the reappearance on political maps of spaces..or maybe call them specs or bantustans as many critical of the peace process do..but nevertheless they are labeled Palestine. At the same time, go to any travel agent who organizes trips to the Holy Land, and there you will see the reappearance as well of tourist maps without boards or labels between Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and whatever Palestine is.

In the last decade many Arab destinations have even removed themselves from the Middle East, leaving the Arab world even further behind. They do this by claiming their location as in the heart of the Mediterranean (Tunisia) or in the Eastern Mediterranean (Egypt). I have also read newspaper reports that sometimes tourist think the Sinai think it is its own “country” and others who have never heard of Tunisia or think it no longer exists as a country.

Globalization then is not only about crossing boarders, it is often forgetting them. But are they really gone?

The international tourist is one of the defining icons of the many facets of globalization. Through this figure we can observe the new mobility of people, information, commodities, and cultural trends constantly crossing national boarders and reaching previously remote locations on all parts of the globe. The expanded conveniences the international tourist enjoys is a reflection of our globalized economy where a common tourist purchase often relies on a complex web of capital flows, currency exchanges and automated tellers. The tourist also can be thought of as embodying the realization of a “global culture” where particular national identities and diverse cultures give way to peaceful pluralistic personal interactions and cooperation between international organizations. [Waters 1995]

These images may provoke us to suggest that the experiences of the international tourist—through which one can view the dissolving of the limits of the nation-state and national economy—is an essential vantage-point from which we can gain insights for study the processes of globalization.

I suggest that the tourist vantage point is critical to the study of globalization, but not for the reasons suggested above. Such an image is restricted to the perspective of the consumption of tourism, while it ignores, or better yet, it is willingly deceived about the dynamics of the production of tourism. It is in the contrast between the perspective of the globalist tourist and that of the administrative and economic system of tourism the allows her to jetset, that the real political nature of tourism is revealed.

This argument is suggested by considering such a contrast in the context of Walter Russell Mead observation that while “the international airport is both an agent and a symbol of the new global economy that is eclipsing the nation-state,” at the same time, “from passport and custom control to air traffic control and international aviation agreements, the airport is one of the places in our society where the nation-states’s power is [or better, makes itself] most keenly felt” [Mead 1995/6, p. 13]. Put another way, while the consumption of tourism may breed globalist tourists, the production of tourism helps promote the regulatory powers of nation-states (and transnational corporations), and to some degree may foster a form of liberalization “staged” for particular consumers while shutting or segregating out the “natives” as they might be called.

In conclusion, I would just like to suggest that tourism more often than not reflects and reproduces political and economic disparities, instead of being able to help reduce them. The only that this process could be reversed it seems is by including more community participation in the planning, building, and enjoyment of tourism development projects. This of course requires more popular participation in the economy and politics, first. Thank you.

Works cited and bibliography

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Aziz, Heba. 1995. “Understanding attacks on tourists in Egypt.” Tourism Management 16, 2 :91-95.

Bauman, Joel. 1995. “Designer Heritage: Israeli National parks and the Politics of Historical Representation.” Middle East Report No. 196 :20-23.

Berriane, Mohamed. 1997. “Environmental Impacts of Tourism along the Moroccan Coast.” in Swearingen + ?, ed. The North African Environment at Risk. Boulder: Westview. 241-253.

Britton, S. 1991. “Tourism, capital, and place: towards a critical geography of tourism.” Environment and Planning D: Space and Society 9 :451-478.

Britton, Stephen G. 1982. “The Political Economy of Tourism in the Third World.” Annals of Tourism Research 9 :331-358.

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Chaudhry, Kiren Aziz. 1993. “The Myths of the Market and the Common History of Late Developers.” Politics & Society 21, 3 (September):245-274.

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Field notes, various newspapers (IHT=International Herald Tribune), and the and following magazines were consulted:

The Middle East (London)

Tourisme Info (Tunis)

Geographical Magazine (London)

Data from World Tourism Organization and ONTT (Tunisia)

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[1] Correspondences: 366 Arborway, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130; (617) 524-0759; wahazbun@mit.edu. This paper is an expanded version of a paper presented at 30th Annual Convention of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) on the theme of “Arabs, Arab Americans & the Global Community” November 1, 1997 in Washington, DC. This paper is a part of a Ph.D. dissertation in progress: “Staging Liberalization: The politics of tourism, the state, and the global economy in the Arab world.” Funding for this project has been provided by the American Institute for Maghribi Studies.

[2] A quote from Edward Said made at an AAUG forum over 20 years ago. The rest goes... “plans are afoot to build a great Arab library instead of a new hotel?” [ reprinted Said 1995, p. 229]

[3] I have come across articles that suggest this for Egypt and Morocco. I figure the calculation is based on 1 direct job creates up to 4 indirectly and every one employed person supports 4 or 5 people on average. In Tunisia this means 50,000 x 4 x 4.5= 900,000; while the population is almost 9 million.

[4] At the Mediterranean Tourism Convention in Tunis 1997, the Libyan exhibit was by far the largest, and they passed out pamphlets with the statement from their leader: “Relations are between peoples, not governments”.