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British Mensa Travel Special Interest Group |
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Is
ethical tourism possible? by David Gourley In recent years my wife and I have had the good fortune to be able to travel fairly widely, having chalked up a tally of over 50 countries. By and large, this has not presented us with ethical dilemmas. We have not had a bad conscience about going to any of these countries, though they did include Suharto's Indonesia and, only a few months ago, Mugabe's Zimbabwe. The regime in virtually every country, our own included, is in some respects morally deficient. One could, of course, set criteria that were so exacting that one would end up going nowhere other than, perhaps, Scandinavia. I am for example against the death penalty, but that has not stopped me visiting the United States. Not that we lack ethical criteria when selecting holiday destinations. We would not have visited South Africa during the Apartheid era. Nor, in Soviet times, would we have gone to what we regarded as the captive nations of East and Central Europe. A fellow Mensan once suggested to me that this was "inconsistent". I fail to see how. Admittedly, the one might appear at first sight a "left-wing", the other a "right-wing", stance. But disapproval of apartheid hardly connotes approval of Soviet-style communism, or vice-versa. The fact is that I am extreme in my moderation. I cordially detest extremism, be it of the left or right. When we started serious travelling, a dozen years ago, I would have considered it a pipe dream that we would one day go to a South Africa whose president was Nelson Mandela, or to a Prague that was once again the capital of a free country. We have recently enjoyed a trip which took us all the way by rail, starting with Eurostar, to Vienna, Prague and Budapest. When we booked it last year we hardly imagined that this would present us with any ethical dilemmas. We would be visiting or passing through seven countries in all. New NATO members the Czech Republic and Hungary have successfully made the transition from communism to liberal democracy. Slovakia under former Prime Minister Meciar was rather more 'iffy' but there is now a different government. France, Belgium and Germany hardly give cause for massive pangs of conscience. Nor, it seemed at the time, did Austria. But then there was an election in Austria. The so-called Freedom Party (FP) garnered over a quarter of the votes. Its leader, Jorg Haider, who had gained notoriety for past utterances about Nazi employment practices and so on, was widely regarded as a rabid nationalist and definitely beyond the Pale. Prior to the election, Austria had been ruled, as indeed it had been for much of the post-war period, by a grand coalition between the two largest parties, the conservative Peoples Party and the Socialists. But the former has since chosen instead to form a coalition with the FP, though Haider himself has decided, almost certainly for tactical reasons, to stay outside the government. First published, in edited form, in VISA issue 38 (autumn 2000) |