Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 328

approaches to the political economy of tourism, epitomised by the neo-
colonial dependency model. Central to these changes have been the increasing
dominance of transnational tourism corporations and the growing structural
power of market forces at a global and regional level. Thus, an increasingly
complex and differentiated geography of tourism production, distribution and
exchange has emerged, underwritten by the forces of economic globalisation
and market liberalisation which challenge the straightforward North-South
geometries of power articulated in the neo-colonial/dependency model of
international tourism.
Such transformations in the complex geographies of tourism are manifest
in terms of the simultaneous globalisation and regionalisation of tourism, as
cross-border FDI and transnational corporate investment in key tourism sub-
industries take place alongside growing participation of regions and regional
growth triangles as relatively autonomous actors competing for a share
of mobile tourism capital (see Chapter 5). Furthermore, the dominant power
and influence of TTCs over particular tourism sub-sectors and, in particular,
distribution chains must be seen in the context of the diverse arrangements
of enterprise and capital/labour relations within regional and local destina-
tion economies. Among other things, what the 2011-2012 Eurozone crisis
has demonstrated is the degree of economic and social differentiation that
exists between the southern European 'tourism' economies and the northern
core in which the majority of creditors and indeed tour operators, when
thinking specifically in relation to this industry, are based.
In addition, it is clear that the role of the state, both at regional and
national levels, remains significant. Many proponents of globalisation have
argued that nearly three decades of deregulation and privatisation have red-
uced the role of the state to that of a mere conduit for geographically mobile
transnational investment capital. The autonomous role of the state has
indeed given way to overlapping structures of decision-making authority as
well as been challenged by the power of TTCs. However, as the interplay of
the EU, national states and regional governments in the remaking of Spanish
destinations over the past 20 years had demonstrated, state actors have
played a central role in the restructuring of places in accordance with the
interests of tourism capital. The efforts of regional and national cliques to
direct and influence the flow and intervention of capital into tourism desti-
nations have been given further impetus by a cluster of global institutions,
including the EU, UNWTO, WTTC and World Trade Organisation.
Whilst many parts of the world, including the considerable swathes of
household enterprise in southern Europe which paradoxically has enabled
many people to endure the ferocity of the Eurozone crisis, remain only par-
tially integrated into, or indeed, may be entirely marginal to, the orbits of
transnational tourism capital, examples of alternative economic paths and
models of power-sharing which challenge the commodified spheres of
marketised economic production and exchange are still few and far between,