The historical place-making of East Belgium through borderlands tourism

It is widely recognized that tourism plays a role in border-making and place-making. As territorialization and bordering of places are inherently processual, tourism’s role in border-making and place-making obviously fluctuates over time. This paper explores these fluctuations in the historical place-making of East Belgium through borderlands tourism. East Belgium, bordering Germany and Luxembourg, is a symbolic area with a history intimately related to changing European relations in the last centuries. Drawing on historical publications, mostly from the Touring Club de Belgique, and semi-structured interviews with policymakers, destination agencies, and civil society, we compare tourism’s place and border-making role during the interwar period (i.e., the 1920s and 1930s) with contemporary-historical times. Results demonstrate the changing scales of political and identitarian reference of tourism’s place and border-making in East Belgium. The trope of ‘redeemed cantons’ illustrates the tourism nationalism of the interwar period. This trope, which disregarded residents’ sense of place, was supported by suggestive maps, propaganda in the national tourism bulletin, excursions, and truncated trail development at the border. Contemporary tourism policy contributed to the area’s de-bordering, leading to cross-border regionalization, but paradoxically also to re-territorialization within the nation state. Tourism became a conduit for strategic deliberations concerning the relationship between German and Belgian territories, cultures, destinations, and past and future. In conclusion, our analysis of tourism, territorialization and bordering in East Belgium shows that understanding tourism’s relation to bordering and territorialization processes requires nuanced, relational and temporal perspectives on the material and imaginary construction of place, territory and border.