The Politics of Travel
Why it’s best to pretend you’re Australian when abroad.
Picture the classic scene: a sweaty mass of beer soaked, L-plate sporting, sunburnt and beer gutted bodies swarming a vomit soaked post-football match street asking other equally inebriated wanderers to get their tits out. An average evening in an indistinguishable exotic destination. An average gathering of distinctly British tourists.
What does it mean, quoting the venerable Sting, to be an Englishman in New York or any other destination for that matter? And why do modern British stereotypes call upon the invention of binge drinking, football hooliganism and the ladette rather than the Queen, fox hunting and incessant apologising? Admitting your English heritage, however tenuously it may exist, will often strike fear into the heart of a foreign patron. Sadly, this fear doesn’t derive from a resonant respect of British colonialism but the dread of becoming embroiled in some kind of international quarrel. Psychoanalysis deems the liberation of repressive values at home and/or the desire to commit incest as a sufficient explanation of unruly behaviour abroad, yet any Wetherspoons at closing time doesn’t exactly suggest a militant adherence to curfews and compulsory bridge club in Britain.
Not long ago a British couple were arrested for having sex on a beach in Dubai, a country which, despite purporting to be the Western Capitalist’s El Dorado, is part of the United Arab Emirates. Sex is illegal outside of marriage in Dubai, a fact which is perhaps not pertinently obvious to the average tourist, and so is sex in public, which is actually also illegal in the UK. The whys and wherefores aren’t important (we all know how to do it) but the troubling question is; would the couple have acted this way on Margate beach?
While this example is fairly recent, the phenomenon can be observed back in the 70s with the boom in the package holiday industry and the conception of Club 18-24. The brilliant if difficult to watch parody Kevin and Perry Go Large demonstrates the mass exodus of British youth to Spain and Greece and the music and fashion trends that arose with it – Fatboy Slim never seems to be out of his Hawaiian shirt. In a peculiarly omniscient scene at the end of the film, both Kevin and Perry have at last fulfilled their holiday wish and end up having sex on a beach surrounded by thirty other couples.
Seemingly then, the psychoanalytics may be on to something. Being abroad provides the antithesis to being at home: work becomes play, obligations are replaced by desires, politeness by rudeness, eating in by eating out, familiarity with newness and so on. There is something terribly liberating about being away from home, what Freud equated with the uncanny, that makes the traveller take on an abnormal identity. Inside us all is a Mr Kurtz longing to return to the ‘savage nature’ that civilised living has stolen us away from. Once again however, we fall into the common colonial trap treating what is foreign with haughty disdain when, from the simplest view, we are the foreigners in a familiar land, pissing on a doorstep.
In fact, Freud (in the usual manner) inverts his original argument to say that what is unhomely and unfamiliar is found at the very heart of the home, that is, the experience of the individual. In this sense the problem of British behaviour abroad is much more to do with British behaviour at home, and ultimately the problem of defining what is and isn’t British without placing it in a kind of global hierarchy. Tourists are, in a sense, global ambassadors for their country, and they represent their nationality most resonantly when away from it. For now at least, it is safer to be a-national, or perhaps Australian.
What does it mean, quoting the venerable Sting, to be an Englishman in New York or any other destination for that matter? And why do modern British stereotypes call upon the invention of binge drinking, football hooliganism and the ladette rather than the Queen, fox hunting and incessant apologising? Admitting your English heritage, however tenuously it may exist, will often strike fear into the heart of a foreign patron. Sadly, this fear doesn’t derive from a resonant respect of British colonialism but the dread of becoming embroiled in some kind of international quarrel. Psychoanalysis deems the liberation of repressive values at home and/or the desire to commit incest as a sufficient explanation of unruly behaviour abroad, yet any Wetherspoons at closing time doesn’t exactly suggest a militant adherence to curfews and compulsory bridge club in Britain.
Not long ago a British couple were arrested for having sex on a beach in Dubai, a country which, despite purporting to be the Western Capitalist’s El Dorado, is part of the United Arab Emirates. Sex is illegal outside of marriage in Dubai, a fact which is perhaps not pertinently obvious to the average tourist, and so is sex in public, which is actually also illegal in the UK. The whys and wherefores aren’t important (we all know how to do it) but the troubling question is; would the couple have acted this way on Margate beach?
While this example is fairly recent, the phenomenon can be observed back in the 70s with the boom in the package holiday industry and the conception of Club 18-24. The brilliant if difficult to watch parody Kevin and Perry Go Large demonstrates the mass exodus of British youth to Spain and Greece and the music and fashion trends that arose with it – Fatboy Slim never seems to be out of his Hawaiian shirt. In a peculiarly omniscient scene at the end of the film, both Kevin and Perry have at last fulfilled their holiday wish and end up having sex on a beach surrounded by thirty other couples.
Seemingly then, the psychoanalytics may be on to something. Being abroad provides the antithesis to being at home: work becomes play, obligations are replaced by desires, politeness by rudeness, eating in by eating out, familiarity with newness and so on. There is something terribly liberating about being away from home, what Freud equated with the uncanny, that makes the traveller take on an abnormal identity. Inside us all is a Mr Kurtz longing to return to the ‘savage nature’ that civilised living has stolen us away from. Once again however, we fall into the common colonial trap treating what is foreign with haughty disdain when, from the simplest view, we are the foreigners in a familiar land, pissing on a doorstep.
In fact, Freud (in the usual manner) inverts his original argument to say that what is unhomely and unfamiliar is found at the very heart of the home, that is, the experience of the individual. In this sense the problem of British behaviour abroad is much more to do with British behaviour at home, and ultimately the problem of defining what is and isn’t British without placing it in a kind of global hierarchy. Tourists are, in a sense, global ambassadors for their country, and they represent their nationality most resonantly when away from it. For now at least, it is safer to be a-national, or perhaps Australian.