Commodification of contested borderscapes for tourism development: Viability, community representation and equity of relic Iron Curtain and Sudetenland heritage tourism landscapes

Tourism can symbolically underpin policies for economic and political cross-border cooperation but the resulting rhetoric may not be supported by all tourism-related stakeholders. Our research on the viability, community representation and ethical components of the Iron Curtain Trail and the European Green Belt in the German-Czech borderlands shows that these tourism projects commodify conflictive borderland histories to gain support for a European-wide cross-border cooperation discourse. Despite these efforts, both projects are contested on local levels. The contestations result from the selectivity of EU-inspired memory politics and lacking participative governance across the border. This combination undermines the capacity to deal with (i) different socio-spatial identities, creating challenging encounters between commodified borderland histories and locals with their memories; (ii) development and promotion challenges of the tourism projects, potentially undermining their viability as tourism products. In the light of these contestations, defining when EU-inspired borderland tourism projects are successful becomes a political issue with important moral questions regarding whose memory should be commodified, and for which purposes.