Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe by Richard Ivan Jobs (review)

When Great Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, youth were at the forefront of protests against the outcome of the Brexit referendum. Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe, Richard Ivan Jobs's deeply researched and elegantly written book, offers a historical perspective as to why. Young people's travels throughout Western Europe during the decades following World War II, Jobs argues, formed a social and cultural backdrop that facilitated European political and economic integration. Moreover, through their continental perambulations, young people developed shared cultural practices and formed a transnational social cohort that asserted mobility as a fundamental right. Travel had rendered generational divides more important than national boundaries.

A flurry of young tourists—mostly Western Europeans but joined by large numbers of peers from North and South America and Australia—set off across Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. Hoping to harness the mobility of youth as a means of postwar reconciliation, and in an effort to build a cohesive Cold War counterweight, Western government officials devoted resources to encouraging youth travel. Growing numbers of mobile young people led to the development of infrastructure—rail passes, youth hostels—that would facilitate international youth travel for decades to come. Young explorers' sojourns in the Mediterranean peripheries of Western Europe, Jobs demonstrates, would help bring countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece into the European fold.

By the late 1960s, however, the mobile youngsters once eagerly cultivated by European governments were increasingly seen as menacing. From the young activists of 1968 to hippies camped out in city squares, young people often challenged, rather than reinforced, official domestic and foreign policy imperatives. This was true in the East as well as in the West. In a chapter on the unifying potential of youth culture, Jobs documents how the circulation of Western popular music behind the Iron Curtain fueled young people's demands for freedom of movement and contributed to the unraveling of the Cold War international order.

Backpack Ambassadors is most fascinating when chronicling the meanings of travel and the development of shared cultural practices among young tourists. While young people understood travel as a route to personal freedom, backpacking soon assumed its own expectations of conformity to new social rituals (often involving drug use). Likewise, Jobs notes, youth travel's promise of liberation was delimited by race, gender, and sexuality. Nonetheless, by the end of the twentieth century, backpacking in Europe had become a veritable rite of passage for affluent youth the world over.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the political import of leisure travel, as tourism intersects with issues of national identity, historical and environmental preservation, and the construction of empire. With the exception of study abroad and other formal exchange programs, however, young tourists have been largely absent from the narrative. In giving voice to youthful itinerants, Backpack Ambassadors both reconstructs a largely neglected subculture and adds to our understanding of the larger process of European integration. Jobs's book opens fruitful avenues for future research. In particular, there is much more to be said about the ways in which touristic travel and the less voluntary movements of refugees and migrant workers are intertwined—and the ways in which age, nationality, and race converge to shape understandings of which mobile individuals are welcomed by nation-states and which are not. In a world defined by the reassertion of national borders, Backpack Ambassadors is an insightful and timely study.