Playing the tourism card: Yugoslavia, advertising, and the Euro-Atlantic tourism network in the early cold war

This chapter examines Yugoslavia’s participation in European Travel Commission (ETC) publicity campaigns in the United States from 1952 to 1963, as well as the country’s collaboration with the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) Committee for Tourism in the second half of the 1950s. Based on the largely unexplored archives of the ETC and the OEEC, as well as other print and archival documents, the chapter analyses how these organisations contributed not only to shaping a specific and positive image of the country in the American tourism market, but also to channelling a greater number of American tourists to Yugoslavia and Europe more broadly. Yugoslavia’s association with the ETC in 1951 provides an early example of the country’s attempts, after its split with Moscow in 1948, to collaborate with Western institutions and to insert itself into the Euro-Atlantic tourism network. Although these multilevel collaborations were at times inconsistent, they nonetheless benefited both Yugoslavia and its Western partners, revealing that international cooperation was essential to the construction of Yugoslavia’s tourist identity abroad.