Tito as a Tourist

Abstract

Yugoslavia's foreign policy orientation and the country's role in the nonaligned movement made it possible for Josip Broz Tito to behave like a tourist. This paper aims to show what kind of tourist Tito was and what elements of tourism are to be found in his travels. Tito’s travels were to be contextualized into an aristocratic tourism and the creation of his personality cult within the Yugoslav political system. The paper will also highlight the contradictions between the official communist ideology and the undisputed leader’s actions which have the characteristics of a capitalist tourist. Within this contradiction, the vindicating mediating factors, "the policy of peace" and the nonaligned movement as the rationale for most of Tito’s travels as a tourist, were also backed up by the absolute impossibility of publicly drawing attention to the travels of aristocratic luxury unbecoming to the leader of a proletarian movement and of the working class struggle for power.