In 2008, with the onset of the global financial crisis, Spainâs real estate market fell apart. Millions of homes were left half-finished or vacant; in major cities low-income owners were evicted by the thousands for mortgage default, and âwhite elephantâ projects, such as airports and cultural centers, sat unused despite the millions of euros in public debt saddled on cities. Given the spectacular burst of the real estate bubble in Spain, it is hard to remember that the country was once a model of European economic development and property played a starring role in that success story. During the 1990s, from Barcelona to AlmerĂa, swaths of homes and hotels were created for tourism using foreign capital and infrastructure subsidized by European Union (EU) regional development grants. These new peri-urban coastal strips took advantage of European cohesion policies to attract visitors, homebuyers, and investors. By the mid-1990s, this method of urbanization was so successful that it was dubbed âthe Spanish Modelâ (LĂłpez and RodrĂguez 2011) and became a development strategy for other struggling European regions, most notably newly democratic Eastern Europe. I examine this diffusion, using the case of Bulgariaâs Black Sea, which rapidly became a low-cost destination in the late 1990s as the country attempted to discard the social, aesthetic, and economic effects of state socialism.
This book shows how coastal property development shifted the narrative of European identity, from the 1980s until the financial crisis of 2008, in the Costa Blanca in Spain and the Black Sea in Bulgaria. The book develops the concept of European peripherality, poorer countries new to the union that joined later in the cohesion process and often also suffered from previous undemocratic government, in an explanation of how urban growth for tourism was a strategy deployed by new democracies to integrate into Europe: first used by Southern economies emerging from dictatorship in the 1980s, and then recycled by post-communist Eastern European states a decade later. The project examines this growth model from two perspectives: the institutional level of EU development policy and then, with greater detail, the personal experiences of those living in radically urbanized coastal communities in Spain and Bulgaria. Emphasizing that the development of the EU has always been tied to a modernization project of the periphery, the book shows how the defining edge of the Continent was first conceived of as the Mediterranean South and later as the post-socialist East. In both of these configurations, knowing where Europe âendedâ was vital to understanding its position in the post-colonial world and comprehending the task of European integration as a new form of economic governance.
Emerging from very different kinds of dictatorshipâone anchored on the Left, the other on the RightâBulgaria and Spain aimed to become European in remarkably similar ways and with tragically analogous consequences of tourism overdevelopment. This book argues that real estate development for tourism was a defining feature of both the Mediterranean and post-socialist peripheries and residents experienced these new landscapes of leisure as a metaphor of induction into the European âcore.â It then traces the disintegration of this development model after 2008, when newly urbanized spaces became markers of stalled progress and a renewed delineation between Europeâs center and its âproblematic edges.â While other scholarly works have shown how the European Project is vulnerable at the Eastern and Southern edges for geopolitical and economic reasons, this project considers peripherality as a problem that can be located in actual urban spaces and that has been experienced socially. Using nearly three years of ethnographic participatory observation and 150 interviews, the book shows what the dream of European integration looked like on the ground. It analyzes how this dream was tied to a specific kind of urbanization that changed the social relationship with the built environment and provided a symbolic template by which to discuss Europeanness. Many of the infrastructure projects, supported by EU funds, attempted to revitalize rural areas through tourism development and, particularly, mass budget tourism to coastal areasâa strategy that became more popular as EU cohesion eliminated barriers to international travel.
Since the 2008 crisis, it has become clear that EU cohesion helped to speed overdevelopment and degradation of the seashore because of abundant and badly used loans, credit, capital, and grants. In Spain, swaths of coastal development, with thousands of empty homes, are increasingly derided as physical examples of the European Unionâs inability to incorporate the âedges.â In Bulgaria, blatant disregard for the environment was a major catalyst for a national anti-corruption movement in 2013 that toppled the government after months of demonstrations and multiple self-immolations in protest of mafia involvement in politics. In both cases, the spectacle of coastal regions left with the detritus of failed construction projects and constant revelations of corruption and graft sparked social movements that questioned the efficacy of European cohesion and the sustainability of the tourist economy.
Urban growth for tourism has been a constitutive experience of two separate peripheries and of the EU cohesion process as a whole. As Juan DĂez Medrano states in Framing Europe (2010), each country that undergoes the cohesion process has a paradigmatic way of discussing integration. The general public and political elites in both Spain and Bulgaria used their tourism economies and changing coastlines as a synecdoche of the entire process of democratization. Yet, this symbol started to fall apart with the problematic role that property markets played in the 2008 crisis and was exacerbated by graft and environmental harm, which were innate characteristics of the modelâs emphasis on fast urbanization with little oversight. In the years since the 2008 crisis, the overbuilt edges of Southern and Eastern Europe have become a moniker of defeated aspirations and the false hopes of a more integrated and prosperous Europe. This book will help scholars to understand how this symbolic shift occurred and why European cohesion has produced a distinct model of urbanization.
In both the Spanish and Bulgarian cases, beach culture and the property boom of development for tourists heralded a new era of Europeanization in which their flagging industrial economies were transformed by loans and foreign investment. The rapid change of coastal areas became symbolic of modernization and progress for local residents, who were eager to see promised economic change after recent political transformation. Formerly rural locales opened their doors to fast-paced construction and attempted to attract visitors from the increasingly competitive European budget holidays market. Residents interpreted the arrival of wealthy visitors as a harbinger of a new era. In both the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, people believed that building up their tourism economies would make them into prosperous members of the European core. But land use and development would also become metaphors of a divided Europe, moving at two speeds: one, home to people who took beach holidays and owned second homes and, the other, perpetual hosts, or as an indignant Bulgarian informant put it: âforever bartenders, busboys, and towel folders.â
This book examines the process of coastal urbanization to compare the integration of Southern and Eastern Europe into the EU economy, which privileged industrialization in core countries, like Germany, while urging the âedgesâ of Europe to find new solutions for de-industrialization. The analysis of the EU policies of cohesion lays the foundation for a detailed ethnographic study of what this mass urbanization looked like on the ground in two successive peripheral areas. The growth of sprawling tourist cities fostered new and very different relationships between those living at the edges of Europe and the landscapes they grew up with, particularly because these changes came during times of political transition. Using extensive interviews and participant observation with architects, urban planners, property developers, politicians, and anti-growth activists, the book shows how the style and pace of coastal development was seen as a means to distinguish the present from the past.
The pastel colors of leisure spaces and new beachfront cultural tropes of fun, sun, and sex were often regarded as important harbingers of abundance and economic betterment. In the case of 1980s Spain, these changes marked the end of Francoâs social order of militant Catholicism; in post-1989 Bulgaria, capitalist beach culture came to represent the banishment of âsecond worldâ leisure aesthetics from the coastline. In both cases, the construction of new, often brightly colored tourism strips was tied up with feelings of aspiration, political revolution, and European unity. The ethnographic sections of the book explore how this urban model was greeted by local residents and how it became a means to discuss changing notions of European identity. These chapters will also show how the very same spaces of ludic energy and promised prosperity slowly came to represent both inequality within the urbanizing coastsâwhere corruption and land grabbing were rifeâand the persistent lack of economic leveling between the European core (who came to vacation) and the Eastern and Southern peripheries (who served them).
1.1 Literature on World Systems, EU Studies, and Tourism
The question of what designates the âedgeâ of Europe has been a motivating question among World Systems scholars and historical sociologists for a generation. For many scholars involved in World Systems Theory, the limits of the European Continent in the South and the East form a semi-periphery that has historically interacted with the world periphery of non-European regions and, most importantly, former colonies. The question of the semi-periphery is particularly important because, unlike colonial peripheries where raw materials are accrued, these spaces have often occupied more complex economies and the aspirations of âmarcher statesâ (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). The semi-periphery is a place of mixed economies that not only combine the functions of the center (trade, manufacturing, and investment) and the periphery (agriculture and extraction of raw materials) but also mix social and political practices of center and periphery, sometimes acting as a mediator between the two zones.
In the European context, the semi-periphery builds off of foundational historical research from the Annales School that emphasizes accounts of the importance of the Mediterranean region to European development (Braudel 1996) and later theories of evolving systems proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) and Giovanni Arrighi (1994). This section will not attempt an exhaustive account of the European semi-periphery as an evolving concept but rather will focus on the European Union and how it navigated two previous spatial and political configurations: post-dictatorial Southern Europe (Spain, Greece, and Portugal), using the case of Spain, and post-socialist Eastern and Central Europe, using the case of Bulgaria. These two forms of peripherality, Mediterranean and post-socialist, were the two central core-periphery dynamics operating in Europe during the era of intensified European cohesion that began in the 1980s and ended with the 2008 financial crisis.
The European Unionâs chronology tracks onto two important periods of geopolitical rearrangement that dramatically affected the relationship between the core and the semi-peripheries. First, the EU was founded as a French-German steel and coal agreement but the primary goal was always to use economic integration as a means to prevent future wars. The specter of fascism and World War II loomed large for early EU architects, such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. Creating an economic federation was a strategy that addressed underlying problems of nationalism and scale within Europe. A large trading block would reduce incentives for military conquest by bringing countries together through treaties and governing their relationship using the interplay of the free market. The belief that economic ties could forge political and social bonds was a motivating factor based in the optimism of Bretton Woods-era globalization as well as a paucity of other options.
Second, correcting regional imbalances within the European Union and moving the peripheral economies closer to the living status of the European core became an issue starting in the 1950s and 1960s when attempts were made to improve infrastructure, water treatment, and sewage disposal in rural regions. The concept of distributive economic development between countries was seen as a means to creating macro-political stability but also a system to increase markets for products from the European core while helping to export the Northern European welfare state to Southern Europe, where it was regarded as immature or inchoate (Ferrera 2005). With the new concern for political stability came implicit goals of social and cultural modernization based on proper dwellings and hygiene for populations regarded as in need of tutelage from the European core of France, Germany, and the Benelux countries.
As the European Union expanded, so did its mandate to correct regional economic inequality, first in countries in the Mediterranean South of Europe, that completed the EU accession process in the 1980s, and later in post-socialist Europe, after 1989 a...