Current discussions of globalization that have burst into academic and
public discourse in the last few years have increasingly focused their
attention on an important side-effect of the phenomenon they examine: the
great rise in international tourism. Globalization is essentially a process by
which an ever tightening network of ties that cut across national political
boundaries connects communities in a single, interdependent whole, a
shrinking world where local differences are steadily eroded and subsumed
within a massive global social order (Mowforth and Munt, 1998: 12). If so
defined, tourism is both a cause and a consequence of globalization. It accelerates
the convergent tendencies in the world. Not only do people meet and
learn from each other, but goods and services also travel and are diffused
throughout the globe in order to cater to the needs and demands of the travellers.
At the same time, as is discussed in this article, tourism further
develops as a result of forces and needs unleashed by globalization. In the
words of Wood: ‘Perhaps even more than the ubiquitous McDonald’s, international
tourism symbolizes globalization not only in its massive movement
of people to virtually every corner of the world but also in its linkage of
economic, political and sociocultural elements’ (Wood, 1997: 2).
Two years ago Michael Elliott remarked in his Time column that ‘It is
tourism . . . that defines globalization, and yet you could go to a score of
conferences on the global economy without ever hearing it discussed’
(Elliott, 2001: 57). This observation, doubtful even when it was made, is even
less true today. The interrelationship between globalization and tourism is