Elsevier

Tourism Management

Volume 52, February 2016, Pages 230-241
Tourism Management

European tourism policy: Its evolution and structure

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2015.06.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • EC tourism policy-making responds to the creation of the Internal Market.

  • The current European strategy endows the strategy conceived in the 80's–90's.

  • Tourism is a “tool” for sustainable growth and competitiveness, not a full policy.

  • The sustainable development principle in the Treaties lays the policy foundations.

  • EC competence and EU legislature have eroded Member States' sovereignty.

Abstract

This article reviews the procedural complexity of tourism policy-making by the European Commission leading up to the 2010 Communication. Initially, the European Commission had to present interventions affecting tourism as a community action or measure; intended to assist in the implementation of the Internal Market. Later, integration of the sustainable development principle into European Treaties established a framework for governance and a foundation for tourism policy, and the Lisbon Treaty in 2007 established a European policy that explicitly related to tourism, albeit a complementary competence in character. This article highlights a lack of leadership from the Member States throughout the process and contrasts this with the self-serving, driving force of the Commission in making tourism policy that focuses primarily on promotional actions. Consequently, the Commission has not created a robust, dynamic, flexible European model for tourism, designed in a way to best serve the needs of the Member States.

Introduction

Since the end of the Second World War, tourism has been a stable and continuous driver of economic growth in Europe. It has not, however, always been openly welcomed by European Institutions. Only since 2007, when the treaties which reformed the European Union were finally implemented, has there been clearly formulated tourism policy, promoted by the European Commission (EC). That it should have taken so long was partly because Member States were reluctant to relinquish part of their domestic powers to the EU and partly because of the nature of tourism. This article narrates the increasing recognition given to tourism within the EU framework until the creation of the European Tourism Policy.

To understand how this policy was formed requires a comprehensive review of the successes and failures of relevant EC initiatives. The pattern is one of policy created and enacted following EC initiatives by means of internal actions such as Communications. In rare cases, the regulatory initiatives gave birth to Directives, Decisions, Resolutions and Recommendations. The roles of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of the European Union (COUNCIL) are relevant to the discussion as they are both institutions involved in the legislation process. In addition, the European Economic Social Committee (EESC) and the Committee of the Regions (CoR) were involved as consultative bodies of the European Union, although their acts were not legally binding. EU decision making is complex and the full institutional arrangements are not described within this paper; Lodge (1996) identified at least eight legislative procedures impacting tourism, Manente, Minghetti, and Montaguti (2013) show how multiple EU policies affect tourism, while Wallace, Pollack, and Young (2010) provided a more current and detailed account of the European policy institutional map and instruments. For quick reference, a list of key institutions mentioned in this paper is given in Table 1.

Section snippets

Tourism policy provided by the internal market

We shall first review how tourism was used as a soft target to incentivise Member States to embrace the Internal Market (Robinson, 1993). The internal market, also known as the single market, was an ambitious, and often controversial, project that would remove sovereignty from the states (Garrett, 1992). The integration process led to a gradual transformation from state to shared sovereignty between Member States and European institutions. Raising awareness of the importance of the tourism

Sustainable development and governance: key elements for the recognition of tourism policy in the treaties

Despite explicitly mentioning tourism as a sphere of action for European integration, the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) left some matters unresolved, which were subsequently dealt with in the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997). Disappointingly, the latter did not formally recognise tourism policy but did introduce resolutions that recognised the sustainable development principle from the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. These resolutions, alongside the introduction of a new

Towards a European tourism model?

Most actions under the 2006 Communication were achieved, thus raising awareness within the public and private sectors about the opportunity to recognise tourism policy in the next reform of the Treaties. Decisions from different angles, from Community Strategic Directives for rural development (COUNCIL, 2006a:20) to “Community action for the European Capital of Culture event for the years 2007–2019” (COUNCIL, 2006b) included specific references to tourism. The EC had legitimised their role in

Conclusions

The establishment of a European tourism policy has not followed the traditional path of other European policies where typically the Authority, according to its general political goals, makes decisions and reorganises the Institutions (Wallace et al., 2010). Tourism policy was never given the importance of other industries such as agriculture, despite generating much more wealth (Robinson, 1996). Its policy making has largely been opportunistic and patchy as a way of coordinating national

Miss Judith Estol is PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Barcelona. She previously worked as National Expert, Tourism Unit, DG Enterprise and Industry, European Commission.

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    Miss Judith Estol is PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Barcelona. She previously worked as National Expert, Tourism Unit, DG Enterprise and Industry, European Commission.

    Dr Xavier Font is Reader at the International Centre for Research in Events, Tourism and Hospitality at Leeds Beckett University. His research focuses on understanding reasons for pro-sustainability behaviour and market based mechanisms to encourage sustainable production and consumption.

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