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(Richez, 1994) and the enforced dependence of North Cyprus on Turkey
since the partition of the island in 1974 (Scott, 1999).
To summarise, the neo-colonial dependency model tended to conflate a
generalised system of domination between metropolitan and peripheral
states with a specifically unequal capitalist mode of (tourism) production.
The inherent tension between theoretical generalisation and historical-geo-
graphical specificity has mediated an incomplete understanding of the
manner in which the local and regional experiences of tourism development
articulate with wider circuits of capital and decision-making. Insight into the
diverse articulations between tourism capital, national states and local enter-
prise has also been hindered by the conception of tourism development con-
ditioned predominantly by discrete national economies trading with each
other, thus obscuring the increasingly transnational social relations which
cut across national boundaries (cf. Hoogvelt, 1997; Sklair, 2001). Increasingly,
therefore, we need to examine the differentiated architecture of tourism
trade and inequality that has emerged as a result of global capitalist restruc-
turing over the past two decades, in which some regions do well out of tour-
ism and others do not, for reasons that are not entirely to do with geographic
location, or indeed, economic dependence on tourism.
Thus we need to ask ourselves to what extent and in what ways have the
social alignments of power and geographies of inequality in tourism been trans-
formed as a result of nearly three decades of economic globalisation. Indeed, as
the southern European and, in particular, Greek economies implode under
unsustainable mountains of debt, revealing the precarious foundations of the
property-tourism fuelled booms of the previous two decades, new patterns of
economic development and territorialisations of power will emerge that will
surely not leave the structure of the regional tourism economies unscathed. As
well as the concentration of financial muscle amongst an increasing number of
transnational tourism corporations with considerable global reach, one must
also consider the consequences of the shifting centre of gravity of the world's
economy (and indeed international tourism) towards 'newly industrialising'
countries and emerging economies of Brazil, India, China, Russia (BRIC), and
others, a process that is mediated, if not necessarily accelerated, by the financial
crisis centred on Europe and North America. Such questions are vital if we are
not to be led into the cul-de-sac of market fundamentalism and/or culturalist
analyses which either ignore or dismiss altogether, the structural bases of
globalisation and inequality.
Economic Globalisation and Transnational
Relations in Tourism
In 2010, travel and tourism were estimated to represent around 30% of
world exports of commercial services and around 6% of total exports of
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