Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Coastal Tourism

Abstract

This chapter provides the historical framework for understanding the specifics of fishing tourism in one of Slovenia's foremost coastal towns, Izola. Although the dominant characteristics of contemporary Mediterranean coastal tourism (the discrepancy between material and symbolic aspects, consumerism, capitalist relations of production on the coast, etc.) are more or less applicable to any number of different coastal regions around the world, the East and North-Eastern Adriatic shores have historical peculiarities that merged with this general contemporary development and need to be considered if we are to understand more fully the present-day coastal dynamics in this area. Yugoslav tourism has an important place in this story as it reflects on the meaning of consumption and on the relationship between individual experience and ideology, be it Western, Yugoslav or post-Yugoslav one. The peculiarity of the cohabitation of domestic and international tourism in SFR Yugoslavia reveals both the specificity of socialist past as well as the introduction of capitalist relations of production for the coastal region. Tourism development within the NE Adriatic grew out of different political experiments and personal experiences that should be taken into account when trying to understand the present situation.