As the United States sends stockpiles of weapons to Ukraine, another transatlantic mobilization is underway. Freed from two years of COVID restrictions and testing requirements, Americans are once again traveling in large numbers. Market observers have predicted a six-fold increase in American tourism to Europe compared to summer 2021.

If you’re wondering what shipments of weapons and planeloads of tourists have in common, the answer is: quite a bit. Tourism has long had a way of getting mixed up in international politics.

It is easy to overlook tourism’s political importance. After all, most Americans journey abroad seeking fun or exposure to a country’s history, food, and art. The goal is usually to escape news headlines, not study them in detail.

Tourism is also easy to dismiss as a superficial activity involving pre-packaged, staged encounters. The word “tourist” began in the 18th century as a neutral synonym for “traveler,” but, as the literary historian James Buzard has shown, cultural sophisticates soon turned the word into an insult. Starting in the mid-19th century, self-declared travelers sought to bolster their own cultural status by ridiculing tourists as thoughtless sheep. The most famous American version of this anti-tourist position came from popular historian Daniel J. Boorstin. In his 1962 book, The Image, Boorstin lamented how the rise of convenient transportation across the oceans rendered travel experiences “diluted, contrived, prefabricated.” According to Boorstin, a genuine traveler takes risks and interacts with locals, while tourists merely follow someone else’s script.

The U.S. Information Agency (USIA) saturated travel agencies and airlines with this booklet. Photo taken by author. Courtesy of U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

It’s a mistake to stereotype tourists in this way. The historical record shows that tourists are pretty good at thinking for themselves. My research uncovered many examples. Here is one: Exactly 70 years ago, as the Korean War raged and the Iron Curtain divided Europe, the U.S. government decided to coach American tourists on how to prepare for encounters with communists and their supporters. It was the height of McCarthyism in the United States, but grassroots communist movements thrived in Western Europe. In fact, many of the waiters and chambermaids serving Americans in France’s luxury restaurants and hotels belonged to communist labor unions. So, in 1952, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), working with civic organizations, saturated travel agencies and airlines with a booklet, “What Should I Know When I Travel Abroad?” If Americans met a Western European who wanted to negotiate with Moscow, the booklet suggested that Americans respond politely but firmly: “It seems to us that in the fight between what is right and what is wrong there just isn’t room for neutralism.”

Actual tourists, however, didn’t follow the script. The USIA interviewed several hundred Americans in their homes after their 1952 trips. Most appreciated the booklet, and a surprising share—71 percent—claimed they read it cover to cover. Still, the government’s diplomatic experts found troubling signs. When it came to explaining something as basic as “America’s concern with Communism,” the report found Americans “ill-equipped.” Alarmingly, the USIA learned that Americans took “a less-determined stand” on European neutralism than their government’s recommendation. Fully one-third said that their travels helped them understand European desires for negotiating with the Soviets. One tourist admitted to the USIA, “I couldn’t say anything. I could only sympathize.”

Indeed, international travel can help build solidarity with other countries. As the USIA learned, tourists aren’t so good at following specific political talking points, but tourism has, historically, instilled a sense of which foreign places matter to the United States. Why is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) so popular in the United States today? One reason is that Americans have for so long visited Europe in search of cultural treasures—making those nations feel like part of a shared community. When World War I erupted, wealthy Americans who had traveled to Europe before the war became the most vocal advocates for U.S. entry into the conflict, citing their tourist memories, especially of embattled France. One influential magazine in 1917 offered a lavish 16-page photograph spread showcasing French tourist sites “to help perpetuate … the bond of romantic affection” linking America to France. During the next war, while Adolf Hitler posed for snapshots by the Eiffel Tower, best-selling books like The Last Time I Saw Paris built U.S. commitment for fighting Germany with travel writing that described France as part of Americans’ own heritage.

What does the political nature of tourism mean for today? For starters, Americans with the ability to travel abroad should think more deliberately about combining politics with pleasure when choosing their destinations. NATO’s self-defense clause obliges the United States to risk World War III for the safety of countries like Estonia. My guess is that few Americans could locate Estonia on a map. Next summer, why not skip Paris or Rome and visit Estonia’s charming capital of Tallinn? Learning about newer NATO members will help Americans develop more informed opinions on the risks and rewards of their nation’s foreign commitments.

Government officials themselves should give more attention to tourism’s ability to sustain those bonds of affection. The American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan has called on Taiwan’s government to welcome more foreign tourists as a matter of “national security.” The U.S. government would be wise to give tourism similar attention. When it comes to popular culture, politicians usually fixate on what’s novel. That’s why, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden White House organized a briefing for TikTok influencers. As far as I can tell, the Biden White House has not reached out to the travel industry or the millions of tourists heading abroad this summer. The president cannot make tourists support his policies, but he can encourage them to listen to and learn from our allies while abroad.

Washington can also help make foreign travel accessible for more Americans. In an age of polarization, international travel remains refreshingly bipartisan. According to a 2021 survey, 41 percent of Democrats and 38 percent of Republicans reported having a valid passport. But that percentage drops to 21 percent of Americans with annual incomes under $50,000. In 1949, the widely respected journalist Norman Cousins called for government subsidies to help poorer Americans travel abroad. Washington could follow that advice today by waiving passport fees and bolstering exchange programs for low-income Americans—not as a form of charity but as way to broaden Americans’ engagement with foreign policy.

Overseas vacations have always involved politics alongside leisure and escapism. Your next vacation by itself will not change the world, but it will become part of the next chapter in international history.

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Before the 19th century, most peoples, in most parts of the world, did not live in nations, but in those larger conglomerations of peoples we call loosely “empires”—or as they were often known, “universal monarchies.” Most of today’s nations are the creatures of imperial collapse: Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Norway, Albania, Finland, Ireland, Sweden—not to mention the former settler populations in North and South America and the former colonies in Africa and Asia—all were once part of larger imperial groupings.

Before they became independent, few of the inhabitants of these places had any real sense of themselves as belonging to nations. They took their identity, instead, from what was known in many European languages as “small homelands:” families, tribes, villages, parishes, ethnic and religious communities, etc. Italy, for instance, only came into existence in 1871 after a prolonged series of wars, mostly against its former Austrian rulers and their allies. All that had previously existed had been a collection of duchies, principalities, and city-states sharing a common religion, a more or less common language, and a more or less imaginary common history in imperial Rome.

So when these places became nations, they were compelled to invent for themselves a collective identity, a past, and a role for the future. They also had to lay claim to political legitimacy. This they did through the principle now known as “indivisible sovereignty.” If the nation was, henceforth, to be the only legitimate unit of human association, then the nation’s power to make decisions concerning the fate of its citizens had to be, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, “immortal…incommunicable and inseparable.”

A nation might be prepared to open its borders, share its resources with other nations, make and abide by international treaties, etc. But the decision to do these things had to rest with the nation alone. This is essentially what “self-determination” means; and “self-determination,” which Woodrow Wilson in 1918 called “the imperative principle for action” in the modern world order, has become the defining feature of the modern nation-state.

While this definition of nationalism seems inward-facing, in its earliest forms, it was also paradoxically cosmopolitan. These new nations—unlike the old empires—were liberal and democratic and did not look upon their demand for self-determination as a threat to, or threatening for, that of any other peoples. Giuseppe Mazzini—the theoretical architect of Italian nationalism and one of the most influential political writers (and activists) of the 19th century—forecast that the future would be made up of assemblies of nations, each sovereign and independent in its own right, but each living in harmony with all the others. The new “nationality” was, he insisted, no “bitter war on individualism,” nor was it intended “to foster a new sectarianism.” “Ours is not a national project,” he claimed, “but an international one.”

Not all, however, thought like this. In Germany, in particular, and under the influence of some followers of philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, an alternative vision emerged of the nation as the creation of a distinction between “friend and foe.” Nations, the neo-Hegelians insisted, were born out of conflict, and could only survive and prosper through conflict. Every nation, in order to become and to remain a nation, required an “other” against which to struggle.

To put it very crudely: If Mazzini’s nation was built upon some species of love, the neo-Hegelian one was built on hate. If the liberal, Mazzini nation aimed for international peace, the neo-Hegelian one could only flourish in war. And with this came most of the vices we currently associate with nationalism: xenophobia; bigotry; the contempt for other cultures, other religions, even other languages; and the belief that “we” are best and that “we” must always be first.

In Europe, the end of World War I, and the subsequent economic and political disorders, made versions of the neo-Hegelian brand of nationalism seem particularly attractive. As many—most notably Madeleine Albright—have pointed out, the similarities between the situation in the 1930s and the one we face today in many parts of the world can seem uncanny. The fault for every national malaise, from the economy to diminished political status, is laid on the international order—today we call it “globalization”—and on the remote indifferent “elites” who govern what the Italian Fascists sneeringly called “the individualistic liberal state.” The solution for every ill is believed to be to return power to the “people,” and not to the so-called “representatives” of the liberal state.

Inevitably, since the “people” are only ever a figment of the political imagination, restoring their power is believed to require a strongman who would not “represent” but—literally—“embody” them, just as he would also embody the nation: a Mussolini, or a Hitler; an Orbán, an Erdogan, or a Putin or a Trump. But strongmen, like the nation itself, can survive only so long as there exists the threat of an “other” for them to be strong with. And if this “other” does not exist, then, like the Jews in the 1930s or immigrants today, it has to be invented.

But history does not ever really repeat itself. The end of World War II led to the creation of a large number of international institutions ranging from the United Nations to NATO to the International Monetary Fund, from the Arab League to the Organization of American States. The most far-reaching and ambitious of them all began in 1952 as the European Coal and Steel Community, and is now the European Union. Although these institutions are very different from one another, they are all based upon international treaties; and they all attempt to solve the one problem that the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had also attempted, but so spectacularly failed to solve: how to put an end to war.

The international institutions still have not ended that great human scourge. The source of their weakness is that they are constituted of nation-states that are defined by their sovereignty. But international agreements require nations to be bound by international law, which means sharing sovereignty with other nations. This is a difficult juggling act.

Of course, the post-1945 order worked more or less effectively for a while. The long-awaited World War III never materialized. But the order worked only so long as the threat of war these international organizations had been created to avoid remained. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s removed the presence of what had been, even before 1945, the West’s single great “other.”

After 1990, as the threat of war receded, nations began to question the wisdom of having surrendered their sovereignty to bodies over which they have no unilateral control. The new nationalism which has arisen in the past three decades, therefore, found its neo-Hegelian “other” not in other nations, but in the international institutions themselves. People at the local and national levels saw the international order’s devotion to immigration, free trade, and open borders as, above all, a danger to their “indivisible sovereignty.”

This opposition to the concept of an “international community” is what unites all the new nationalist parties of the far right—and the far left—against the European Union. Hence Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s flouting of EU law; Britain’s suicidal attempt to “take back the country;” Turkish leader Recep Tayipp Erdogan’s rejection of any attempt on the part of the “international community” to limit his authority as an affront to his country’s sovereignty; and Donald Trump’s attacks on NATO, on the EU, and on virtually all international trade agreements. All, he argues, challenge the right of what he called recently “this Great Sovereign Nation” to act unilaterally. “Internationalism”—or, as it used to be called, “cosmopolitanism”—is the new enemy at the gates in all its forms, cultural, legal, racial, political, economic.

In a sense, this always has been so. Cosmopolitans have always despised nationalists, and nationalists have always hated cosmopolitans. But whereas liberal nationalism was an attempt by the world’s Mazzinis to replace cosmopolitanism with a new vibrant international order of nation-states, the new-old neo-Hegelian nationalism seeks simply to destroy it altogether. If the cosmopolitan world we unsteadily inhabit is to survive, Hegelian logic would seem to demand that it find itself a new “other”—something which the nations of the world can only face, as they once faced the threat of perpetual conflict, as a cosmopolitan community, in which the self-consuming monster of national sovereignty would, once again, be laid to rest.

Climate change, perhaps?

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Neutrality might be the answer.

I was born and raised in one neutral country, Switzerland. As an adult, I moved to and became a citizen of another neutral country, Sweden. I have experienced what it means to live in societies developed on peaceful and stable ground.

In 2017 my first home country, Switzerland, celebrated the 500th anniversary of its last military action abroad. In Sweden, more than 200 years have passed since the Swedish army was engaged in foreign war (at that time, an occupation of neighboring Norway).

In both my home countries, neutrality has thus stood the test of time and reinforced the democratic nature of the governments. Which is why neutrality deserves more attention, especially in small and vulnerable democracies around the world.

The planet is already moving in that direction. The primary international tactic for most countries is no longer archaic military violence, but engagement in smart public diplomacy based on international law.

A more diplomatic and law-based world fits the notion of neutrality, which means that a country does not join any military alliance or engage with other countries as a belligerent.

Historically there have been as many forms of neutrality as there have been countries to declare it. And yes, there have been some cases, as in Austria after World War II, when a country was obliged by foreign powers to become a neutral state.

In the Swiss case, the concept of neutrality goes back to the Second Peace Treaty of Paris in 1815, which allowed Switzerland to become a self-governing territory. But at that time, Switzerland was just a loose network of independent states. It took another 33 years—and, in fact, a civil war between the various states of the country—to establish the current federal, democratic state by referendum in 1848.

That state was explicitly neutral. And this direct engagement of Swiss citizens in state affairs—via votes in referendums and citizen’s initiatives— has served to enforce neutrality. When people get to make decisions, they often choose peace, stability—and neutrality.

The Swiss have, however, retained an army. Indeed, for many decades, it was said that Switzerland was an army. This reflected a triumphant megalomania in the country after it had kept itself out of two disastrous world wars that consumed its neighbors. But later in the 20th century, Switzerland reduced what had been one of the biggest and most expensive armies—a “protection force for neutrality”—in the world.

Neutrality is not static. It requires constant development and fine-tuning. The Swiss have long debated and changed exactly how their neutrality works. But the debate is always open; the Swiss consensus is that neutrality is a security issue, and security issues should not be left to a small circle within government or parliament, at least in a democracy.

One very long debate involved Swiss membership in the United Nations. Supporters of neutrality for decades argued that such a membership, which could imply participation in military operations abroad, would not be compatible with being a neutral country. In 1986, two-thirds of Swiss voters said no to UN membership. But voters narrowly approved the same measure in 2002, making Switzerland the first country to join the global organization by referendum.

My other home country has made a similar connection between democracy and neutrality. Sweden has debated whether to join NATO—as some politicians from national right-wing parties are demanding—but that would require a popular vote.

Sweden’s neutrality dates back to the Napoleonic wars, when the Nordic kingdom lost more than one-third of its territory. Since 1812, Sweden has not initiated any armed combats and has declared itself a non-aligned and neutral country. In contrast to Switzerland, this policy has never been enshrined in international treaties and Sweden has always understood its neutrality to be proactive, which has allowed it to be involved in peacekeeping efforts around the world. It also has joined the European Union and forged agreements (though not membership) with NATO.

The Swiss and Swedish examples show the different options and limits of neutrality. The stricter Swiss neutrality limits the international options of the country, but its stand is more credible than Sweden’s more pragmatic approach. At the same time, Sweden can react more flexibly to changing security challenges.

Taking these risks and benefits into consideration, when I think about the links between peace, stability, democracy and neutrality, I wonder about the power that neutrality might hold for a place under threat, like Taiwan.

Taiwan is a country of 23 million, adjacent to a larger nation of 1.3 billion, which maintains the right to invade its smaller neighbor whenever it chooses. What kind of protection does such a place need?

Taiwan has built up its military forces and weaponry, and it has made alliances with the United States and as many other countries as it can. The goal has been to counter the threat with defense.

But the Chinese threats continue—indeed, they have recently increased. So the more important piece of security might involve the example Taiwan presents to the world.

Taiwan democratized three decades ago, and it has sought to make its democracy more participatory over the years. I have visited some 15 times to observe elections and referendums, and work to enhance the country’s system of direct democracy, which is now considered a global model.

Using that democracy to embrace neutrality formally has been discussed, and the idea has a couple of virtues. First, it would reinforce Taiwan’s democracy by setting a policy in line with the views of its people, and making it clear that no government could simply go to war.

It also might provide real security, and broadcast to the world that Taiwan is devoted to peace. Again, Switzerland and Sweden are good illustrations of how such a proactive policy of democracy and non-aggression can deter invasion (Switzerland’s ability to stay out of the world wars being the prime example), while also creating a globally recognized brand for the country. If China invaded an officially neutral Taiwan, it would be threatening and attacking an open, democratic, and peaceful country—a difficult position for its autocratic government to defend.

Of course, there is no single or simple solution for the complicated security situation in East Asia. But a Taiwanese move to neutrality would project self-confidence, and a message that should impress the world. It also would allow Taiwan to focus more on its internal development, including making greater advances in its democracy. The country’s cities, in particular, are seeking more sovereignty and control from a national government that has long centralized power, in part by arguing that a strong national authority is needed for security reasons.

Neutrality, in combination with democracy, is not a guarantee of a country’s eternal life. But history suggests it is better insurance than the most sophisticated weapons systems.

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