‘The Enchanted Dollar Bill’: The Environmental History of Socialist Tourism in Hungary and Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia and Hungary were two of the most market-orientated states in communist Eastern Europe. Yet, as socialist states striving to reach a new modernity, rapid industrialisation was traditionally seen by their leaders as paramount in transforming them to match the leaders’ visions of a better and brighter future. By the 1960s, however, the introduction of tourism in beautiful – and fragile – environments began to pose challenges to rapid industrialisation in both Yugoslavia and Hungary. The development of tourism, which was predicated upon perceived ‘pristine’ natural settings, presented socialist leaders with two major dilemmas: on the one hand, mass tourism had the potential to destroy the very natural resource base on which it depended: the environment itself. On the other hand, industry was seen as a major hindrance to the pursuit of tourism, and the two were bound to clash as tensions between them mounted. How then did the leaderships of these two countries seek to strike a balance between industry and tourism to avoid conflict, develop tourism without destroying their respective environments, and what were some of the major consequences of these processes? By looking at Lake Balaton in Hungary and the Kvarner Bay region in the Socialist Republic of Croatia (Yugoslavia), this article argues that, while industry and tourism continued to conflict throughout the state socialist projects, the authorities initiated some impressive, albeit flawed, measures towards sustainable development in order to ensure the success of increasingly tourism-based economies. We examine the role of leisure tourism in both environmental preservation and destruction to further study how Hungarian and Yugoslav leaders commodified their environments in order to attract visitors and secure revenue by creating tourist land and seascapes.