Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 294

(Husbands, 1983). In this respect, it is argued that tourism serves to inculcate
a sense of psychological inferiority to metropolitan tourists amongst locals,
a situation that is materially reinforced through the proliferation of servile
employment and a clearly demarcated ethnic division of labour (Samy, 1980;
Pattullo, 1996: 63-65). Erisman (1983), however, warns that these perspec-
tives tend to underplay the ability of Caribbean populations to negotiate and
adapt to the penetration of metropolitan cultural forms through tourism.
Moreover, international tourism is one amongst numerous mediums through
which consumerist values are communicated. It is certainly arguable that the
consolidation of a small number of overwhelmingly North American and
Western European global media-telecommunications-entertainment corpo-
rations enhances their ability to exercise a far greater degree of influence over
local cultural practices and patterns of consumption than tourism does (see
Held et al. , 1999: 341-360). 2 Nevertheless, the historical class and ethnic
dimensions of inequality in dependent island economies cannot be ignored,
particularly where the symbolism and ideological content of colonial history
is refracted through tourism, serving to undermine the emergence of a strong,
indigenous, post-colonial identity (cf. Palmer, 1994).
What many of these earlier political economy analyses of international
tourism had in common was their overly generalised view of macro-structural
processes which, some argue, can be attributed to a disproportionate empha-
sis on international mass tourism (Oppermann, 1993). Whilst crucial aspects
of local/regional economic development were certainly overlooked and under-
theorised, the neo-colonial model did nevertheless highlight some of the
major structural inequalities between markets and destinations in the inter-
national tourism political economy. Before moving onto a more detailed cri-
tique of the neo-colonial dependency model in tourism, the next section will
briefly consider some of the key transformations in the world economy, with
an emphasis on the past three decades, and the implications for the interna-
tional political economy tourism.
Tourism and the global dynamics of unequal development
In the absence of widespread capitalist industrialisation in the so-called
'Third World', international mass tourism emerged as one of the principal
instruments for the diffusion of capitalist modernity into non-industrialised,
'developing', or more commonly known, 'less developed countries' (LDCs),
particularly in those parts of the world that have seen a difficult transition
from colonial rule to independence, for example, sub-Saharan Africa. From
1989 to 1997, the proportion of tourist activity accounted for by LDCs rose
from 21% to 30.5%, whilst aggregate tourist receipts increased from 26% to
30% (Harrison, 2001a: 11). In terms of its contribution to developing country
exports, the importance of international tourism as an export sector never-
theless varies considerably from one region to another, as well as between