Getting Greener, Getting Better: Sustainable Tourism in the European Policies

The article aims at shedding light on the affirmation of the concept of “sustainable tourism” in the EEC and the EU, a topic that gathered little attention from European integration historians as of yet. After having retraced the first references to the role of tourism in environmental issues in the 1960s, the spread of criticism of mass tourism and the commitment of the European institutions to the cause of green tourism in the 1970s are investiga⁠ted; then, the tourism policies implemented during the environmental turn affecting the European institutions between the 1980s and the 1990s are examined. After having drafted an overall appraise of recent dynamics in the field of sustainable tourism, the article provides a broader assessment of the path followed by the European bodies to establish the principle of sustainability in the tourism policy and outlines the role played by the most relevant institutional actors in this process.