Introduction: branding post-war Mediterranean Europe: tourism and national identity

In the post-war period, Mediterranean Europe became the world’s pre-eminent tourist destination. This introduction to the special issue argues that this transformation was not solely economic but also profoundly representational and political. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of the tourism imaginary, the tourist gaze, and nation branding, it examines how Greece, Spain, Italy, and the South of France constructed and projected tourist identities through a complex ecology of state and non-state actors – national tourism organisations, airlines, advertising agencies, filmmakers, cruise operators, and tourists themselves. Against the assumptions of coherence embedded in standard nation-branding scholarship, the introduction foregrounds messiness, competition, and contingency. It situates Mediterranean tourism promotion within Cold War geopolitics, the politics of modernisation, and the cultural hierarchies of European modernity, while making a methodological case for an interdisciplinary, archivally grounded, and comparative approach to Mediterranean tourism history.