my review of Reclaiming Travel (Stavans and Ellison) on Spiked

http://www.spiked-online.com/review_of_books/article/reclaiming-travel...-from-the-snobs/17521#.VhZ62svltFo

Travelling for a change: the new ethical tourism

I will be debating the above with Harold Goodwin (Professor of Responsible Tourism, Manchester Metropolitan University and founder of responsibletourism.com) and Anna Mdee (Research Fellow, Overseas Development Institute) at the Battle of Ideas, on Saturday 17th October.


All details, including ticketing, are at: http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/2015/session_detail/9908


The whole weekend, over 17th and 18th, is a fantastic event - a  no holds barred interrogation of the defining issues of our time.

Some reflections on package holidays and the ethical tourism lobby

mass tourism and ethical etiquette

One of my first tasks at the university was to accompany sixty students to the Mediterranean island of Malta on fieldwork. A colleague, taking the role of tour guide on the bus, microphone in hand, proclaimed to the students as we passed the crowded resort of Bugibba that ’this is a rather ugly example of unsustainable tourism’ . On a grey February afternoon, even in Malta, it is hard to make a tourism resort look pretty. Certainly Bugibba has had its problems, stalled hotel projects being the most visible.

But Bugibba also accounted for twenty to thirty per cent of Malta’s bed spaces in the 1970s and 1980s. It brought people, who brought money, and that money fuelled the mini economic miracle that Malta has undergone in the age of international tourism. Tourist revenue has helped pay for better facilities and opportunities for tourists and locals alike. Bugibba and the whole Qawra peninsula now has a lovely paved promenade, better sanitation and fewer unfinished hotels than sixteen years ago.

For those in the know, what is good in Bugibba is not to be found in architecture, museums or galleries (although you can hop on a bus and be standing in front of Caravaggio’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist at St.John’s Co Cathedral[i], gazing into the sublime Blue Grotto[ii] or perusing one of the most important archaeological sites in the world at Hagar Qim[iii], all within forty minutes). It is to be found in the people, lots of them, tourists and locals, drinking, relaxing, swimming and enjoying each other’s company. That is its purpose, one it serves pretty well and, if you like, pretty ‘sustainably’ over the years.

Bugibba is cheap, but not ‘cheap’. People who go there in the main work hard, save up and enjoy the conviviality and light hearted atmosphere of the resort. Likewise Benidorm, Magaluf and Torremolinos,  part of the role call of unsustainable tourism in the eyes of the ethical lobby. Without the Bugibbas, Benidorms and Torremolinos of the world, many would find a foreign holiday beyond their means. Cheap is good, unless of course you believe, as some do, that staycationing is the best way to preserve the planet. In my experience many who argue that rack up the air miles to get to international conferences to do so.

Mass tourism, especially of the package variety, has few fans in the broadsheets and the academy. In the universities there is a deference to the etiquette of ‘ethical tourism’. This dictates that a place’s ethical credentials are in inverse proportion to the net amount of fun being had. Also, in the main, it involves little benefit to the communities involved.

There have been a couple of notable exceptions in the UK press recently, both with reference to Benidorm. The Telegraph’s Anthony Peregrine describes his experience: ‘I swam and sunbathed on the two vast, magnificent beaches. I hired a car to go up the mountains directly behind. And, by night, I oscillated between tapas and meat pies, wine and beer, Flamenco and the birdie dance’. He is right to add that ‘[w]hen cultured people sneer at Benidorm, they are not sneering so much at the resort as their fellow Britains’. [iv]

Julie Burchill provides a great account of what is worthy about Benidorm.  Her family graduated from Butlins to Benidorm in the 1980s, as did many others. Her article is about her aspirant family, friendships and alcohol induced conviviality, and is free of the irony and condescension that often accompanies reference to iconic holiday resorts built for the mass market (in academic commentaries as well as in the media).

Aspiration for better things was also what prompted the local council of the then small fishing village of Benidorm to petition General Franco in the 1960s to allow them to build along the lengthy sandy beach in the first place. Franco’s relationship to tourism was pragmatic. Foreign currency was needed to develop, buy compliance with and time for his regime. Yet conservative regime allies frowned on the liberal culture associated with tourism. The demand for sun, sea and sand – not just from foreign tourists but from the Spanish too – led to concentrated pleasure zones for the masses. Benidorm’s high rises facilitated the mass package tourism that brought a little bit of Spain within the reach of many. Space and light survive – buildings can only take up thirty per cent of any given plot. Conviviality and fun thrive.

Benidorm is Europe’s biggest resort, with over four million arrivals per year, but has retained its clientele. The adage that tourism kills the goose that lays the golden egg – that resorts become crowded, unfashionable and then decline – is largely a myth here, as it is on the Costa del Sol, Bugibba and many other apparently ‘unsustainable’ crowded resorts.

As if to put one over on travel snobs, city officials for Benidorm have recently applied for UNESCO World Heritage Status for their town. If it achieves that it will be up there with the pyramids and the Great Wall of China, and my local Canterbury Cathedral.

The statement from the Visit Benidorm tourist board claims that the resort fulfils six of the ten conditions necessary for UNESCO eligibility (only one is required). Benidorm, they claim, represents a ‘masterpiece of creative genius’, ‘provides a unique or exceptional  testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilisation alive or missing’ and ‘represents natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and scenic importance’. The application has the support of Mario Gaviria, sociologist at  the Universidad Publica de Navarra: ‘It is a symbol of harmonious coexistence that happily brings together people of all nationalities and languages. It’s a materialisation of the welfare state in action’ [v].

I can’t see any reason to give Benidorm World Heritage Status. It is sought in part as a badge to help sell heritage to tourists, not something Benidorm needs. However, the expansion of what constitutes world heritage over the years suggests the application should be taken seriously.  World heritage designation has been around since 1972. For twenty years predominantly European castles and Roman remains dominated. From 1994 new rules meant sites associated with human co-existence with the land and those associated with particular traditions were brought in. The broadening out of the designation coincides with a relativisation and greening of what is taken as important world heritage in wider society. It is all a bit hit and miss, as Peregrine points out. Why Durham cathedral and not York? Why the West Devon mining landscape but not the Rhondda valley? Why not Benidorm?

in defence of the masses (on holiday)

As anthropologist Hazel Andrews recently noted, academic analysts of tourism often ignore mass tourism, preferring to focus on the merits of niches such as ecotourism and volunteer tourism[vi].  When they do address it, package tourism comes out badly.

Andrews herself described her time immersed in the culture of young Brits abroad in Magaluf as ‘one of the most troubling episodes of my life’[vii].One undergraduate text books asserts that the building of high rise hotels on beach frontages (characteristic of sun seas and sand tourism) constitutes ‘obvious environmental rape’.[viii] Another asserts that there is a ‘crisis of mass tourism that has brought social, cultural economic and environmental havoc in its wake, and it is mass tourism practices that must be radically changed to bring in the new’.[ix] The same author sees mass tourism as being ‘consumed en masse in a similar, robot like and routine manner, with a lack of consideration for the norms, culture and environment of the host country visited’[x]. Contemporary cultural analyses echo this, viewing the holiday habits of tourists as determined by neoliberal culture rather than their own desires.

Of course there are exceptions. The excellent Europe at the Seaside,[xi] reviewed on this blog, looks like a dry economic history of mass tourism, but proves to be (for an academic book) a rip roaring read about places, people, social trends and the cultural benefits of affluence and mobility. It is a far cry from the fetishisation of Culture with a capital ‘C’ in some academic and popular commentaries – the notion of people inhabiting cultures that define them now and for the future, cultures deemed to be at grave risk from the march of modernity.

Another exception is Flight to the Sun, the Story of the Package Holiday Revolution[xii], by Roger Bray and founder of  post-war holiday pioneers Horizon Holidays, Vladimir Raitz. They tell the story of the package holiday entrepreneurs, with the insiders eye of Raitz: hiring ex World War Two aircraft, pushing for government licences to fly them, negotiating with Spanish hoteliers for whom back to back charters (the staple of the industry) was originally alien and confusing.

For other books unashamedly upbeat about mass travel you have to look back at accounts of the growth of holidays in Victorian England. Thomas Cook faced down Victorian moralists in arguing the merits of holidays for ‘the million’ who could ‘o’erleap the bounds of their down narrow circle, rub off rust and prejudice by contact with others, and expand their sails and invigorate their bodies by an exploration of some of nature’s finest scenes’.[xiii] Piers Brendon’s Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism[xiv] and Lynn Withey’s Grand Tours and Cooks Tours: a History of Leisure Travel[xv] are excellent books that capture the optimism of the time.

The Victorian critics of tourists back then were unguarded in their condemnation of the masses on holiday. For eminent Victorian gentleman  Sir Lesley Stephen Londoners on holiday meant ‘Cockney ridden’ resorts  that at least had the merit of confining the ‘swarm of intrusive insects’ to one place.[xvi] Today criticism is mediated through a discussion of the need to conserve environments and cultural diversity in the face of a deleterious  modernity in the form of mass tourism.  Whilst Cook had optimistic and progressive sentiment on his side, today those who see themselves as radical are often the most circumspect  about mass tourism and the tourists who partake.

bad behaviour abroad

Bucking the trend, two sociologists have turned their attentions from the eco resort to the bad behaviour of young hedonistic holiday makers.  Hazel Andrews sees the excesses of lads abroad holidays as part of the construction of an exclusive and aggressive British identity[xvii].  Daniel Briggs in his study of hedonistic ravers on Ibiza sees neoliberalism and economic insecurity as to blame for a culture of excessive drink, drugs and criminality amongst some [xviii].

Closest to the mark on this, however, is Spiked commentator Neil Davenport who argues that the excesses of British youth (exaggerated in my view, although personal experience is now very dated) are more to do with the demise of strong social and political identities rather than the strength of aggressive British or neoliberal ones [xix].

Davenport agrees with Briggs that some have become ‘decoupled’ from established and traditional social values grounded in work, family and community. But whilst Briggs blames neoliberalism  and economic uncertainty for eroding such strong pillars of society, Davenport sees a subtle and pernicious erosion of the traditional script of adulthood that once helped socialise young people. A disoriented society unable to champion transcendental values of any kind, without future oriented ideologies, means that ‘young people are not furnished with an historical imagination that can conceptualise change and transformation’. Without this they ‘only see themselves ‘in the present’ and therefore have no understanding of themselves and the society they are meant to be part of.’ This is compounded by the tyranny of relevance in schools (Davenport is a school teacher in a sixth form college). If education and society generally does not champion knowledge beyond what is relevant to ‘me’ and to ‘now’, why should young people aspire to more than this? For Davenport, the  ‘lack of a sense of historical change excludes the possibility of personal transformation’  encouraging the examples of  ‘negative fatalism’ well described in Briggs’s book [xx].

Responsibletourism.com

Responsible tourism.com have just announced their ‘long list’ for their annual responsible tourism awards. This long list is never long enough to accommodate the package tourism destinations that so many enjoy. It is generally a combination of small scale, green niches, often in developing destinations, along with larger operators looking for an ethical kitemark to place alongside their mission statements. Ryanair have never made the long list.

South East Archive of Seaside Photography (SEAS)

For a visual feast of times when tourism was leisure, leisure was not politics, and it was OK to ‘leave your cares behind’, have a look at my colleague Karen Shepherdson’s SEAS repository of old holiday photographs from the East Kent coastal resorts [xxi].

These days Margate in particular appears to be on the up. The revival of its Dreamland theme park is a very welcome, if inevitably a little nostalgic, addition to Margate’s charms.  I can personally recommend cycling the coastal path from Whitstable,  through Herne Bay, round Margate and Broadstairs,  and then down to Ramsgate – truly stunning views, happy  crowded beaches, secluded bays, ice cream and history.

 

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[i] http://www.stjohnscocathedral.com/caravaggio/the-beheading-of-saint-john-the-baptist.html

[ii] http://www.bluegrottomalta.com.mt/

[iii] http://heritagemalta.org/museums-sites/hagar-qim-temples/

[iv] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/spain/11576042/Benidorm-to-apply-for-World-Heritage-status.html

[v] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/spain/11576042/Benidorm-to-apply-for-World-Heritage-status.html

[vi] https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/fear-and-loathing-in-shagaluf-the-brit-scholar-abroad/2020106.article

[vii] https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/fear-and-loathing-in-shagaluf-the-brit-scholar-abroad/2020106.article

[viii] C. Cooper. et al, 1993. Tourism: Principles and Practice. 1st edition. London, Pitman. p.103

[ix] A. Poon. 1993. Tourism, Technology and Competitive Strategy. Wallingford, CABI. p.3

[x] A. Poon. 1993. Tourism, Technology and Competitive Strategy. Wallingford, CABI. p.4

[xi] L. Segreto, C. Manera,  and M. Pohl  (eds) Europe at the Seaside. The Economic History of Mass Tourism in the Mediterranean. Oxford, Berghahn.

[xii] Bray, R and Raitz, V. 2002. Flight to the Sun: The Story of the Holiday Revolution. Continuum, London

[xiii] L. Withey. 1997. Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915. Michigan, Morrow. p.145

[xiv] P. Brendon. 1991.Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism . London, Secker and Warburg.

[xv] L. Withey. 1997. Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915. Michigan, Morrow.

[xvi] Cited in M.Fieffer. 1985. Going Places: the ways of the Tourist from Imperial Rome to the Present Day. London, McMillan, p. 179

[xvii] https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/fear-and-loathing-in-shagaluf-the-brit-scholar-abroad/2020106.article

[xviii] D. Briggs. 2013. Deviance and Risk on Holiday: An Ethnography of British Tourists in Ibiza. London, Palgrave McMillan.

[xix] http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/sun_sea_and_working_class_hedonism/14162#.VXDOBXl0x-s

[xx] http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/sun_sea_and_working_class_hedonism/14162#.VXDOBXl0x-s

[xxi] http://www.seasphotography.org.uk/

American Association of Geographers, annual conference, Chicago, April 2015

Last week over 7000 people gathered for the annual American Association of Geographers conference, this year held in Chicago. It is a tremendous event – a chance to present and develop ideas, network, debate and make a few friends.
 
Below are some thoughts, whilst still fresh in my mind.

our session


The session I organised, Ethical Tourism, Care and Global Citizenship,  featured  Michael Clancy, Pete Smith, Heather Hindman, Cori Jacubiak and myself. Between us we have backgrounds in sociology, politics, geography, anthropology and education, and that made for a wide ranging and open discussion. We were all, in different ways, concerned with how modern notions of global or cosmopolitan citizenship are formed through travel and articulated through care and responsibility. We also broached the worth of these reworkings of the notion of citizenship, away from the membership of the political community of the nation state towards a citizenship expressed through consumption and a global civil society of NGOs. An edited book featuring these and other papers is proposed.

downtown Chicago from Lake Michigan

Ethical travel is associated with having the potential to extend bonds of care across boundaries to distant lands. It is also associated with the making of global citizens, able to think and act on contemporary issues of poverty and climate change that are global in nature. My new book, co-authored with Pete Smith, looks at volunteer tourism as an expression of ethical lifestyles, and as exemplary of ‘lifestyle politics’. The topic has proved to be a good way to look critically at the relationship between lifestyle and politics. In an age of disillusionment with politics (and indeed democracy – one or two contributions at the AAG were quite sanguine about ‘post-democracy’), lifestyle is now often theorised in human geography as terrain on which new ethical and political subjects can emerge.

performativity

The frame of reference for looking at this in a few of the sessions I attended was that of performativity. Performativity is something of an orthodoxy in some human geographical circles, following the ‘performative turn’ of the 1990s. Performativity holds that gestures, speech and bodily actions constitute identity, i.e. they are not only representations of it. Judith Butler is often a principal point of reference, especially her 1990 book Gender Trouble.[i]  Many of the presentations also drew on Michel Foucault to argue that power is transmitted and people’s lives effectively disciplined through gaze, communication and gesture.

In the sessions organised by Bryan Grimwood and Kellee Caton titled Tourism Moralities and Mobilities some papers took the line, to varying degrees, that lifestyles were performed identities with potential beyond lifestyle in the realm of moral and even political agency, very much in the spirit of Butler.  An excellent paper on communities of rock climbers by Jillian Rickly of the University of  Nottingham painted an interesting picture of these communities as expressing solidarities and also as performing a certain resistance to the rhythms of mainstream society through their chosen lifestyle. In other papers it was argued that aspects of lifestyle such as ‘couchsurfing’ (Michael O’Regan) had the potential to rupture the pervasive neoliberal encounters and rhythms of life that turn out neoliberal citizens for a neoliberal society.  The choice, as one participant put it, is between ‘lifestyle conformity and lifestyle radicalism’, the latter with the potential to forge new thinking and new subjectivities.

I am, and was, highly critical of the performative paradigm thus applied. I tend to agree with Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Judith Butler’s performative perspective on feminism in the former’s essay The Professor of Parody. Here she argues that:

“Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy?”[ii]  (my italics)

Performativity seems to propose that the performance of alternative identities has potential where political demands for rights and material betterment or equality do not. In this respect there are plenty of parallels with today’s campus politics, where Butler's outlook seems so influential. Nussbaum’s essay, written in 1990, was prescient. An inward oriented and ultimately narcissistic process of ‘ethical selving’[iii] as one recent study refers to it has trumped an outward, socially oriented impulse.

Yet Butler’s outlook is certainly reflected in the interpersonal, performed subjectivities of the lifestyle oriented politics of our time. This was clear in the interesting papers from a session convened by Mark Griffiths on Hybrid Knowledges and Embodied Experiences in the Spaces of Development. Ruth Judge’s (UCL) paper on 'gratitude, anger and fun’ in international volunteering was especially interesting. We intend to pursue debate around and between the different perspectives on the political and the affective, the public and the private.

neoliberalism

As is commonplace in human geography, ‘neoliberalism’ was once again in evidence as the mode of society and thought that, it is assumed, we should all be opposing. Neoliberalism is most often not simply the extension of the market into more areas of life, but is also viewed as a profound influence on personality and subjectivity. People are seen as being shaped profoundly by lived neoliberal reality. Hence the lifestyles that appear to ‘rupture’ this process are imbued with transgressive and progressive potential. They can challenge the ‘neoliberal subject’ and forge new subjects.

Neoliberalism has largely replaced capitalism as the enemy for many radical geographers. Whereas capitalism referred to a form of social organisation that restricts freedom and holds back material liberation, neoliberalism tends to refer more to a culture of greed and narrow self-interested  individualism engendered by the market. For neoliberalism’s opponents progress comes through challenging neoliberal consumption with ‘alternative’ or ‘ethical’ consumption or lifestyle.

Yet opposition to neoliberalism is not only opposed to the liberal free market, but is also hostile to liberal values generally. The rational subject, able to act in its best interests, is regarded as a naive myth. The impulse is to morally regulate choice through, for example, ‘behaviour change’ to lead to more 'sustainable' outcomes. In the advocacy of ethical consumption, these outcomes are almost invariably  localism, anti-modernity, pro-organic …. This was the tenor of a session titled ‘Consuming the Anthropocene’ which amongst other things looked at the potential for digital prompts to change behaviour in the direction of more ‘ethical’ consumption of food. University of West Virginia scholar Bradley Wilson’s excellent paper, subtitled Peasant Politics in an Age of Uncertainty, took a different line, asking  the question ‘who curates the museum of ethical consumption?’ and arguing for an authentic voice from the rural producer rather than those claiming to speak on their behalf from business and civil society (in this case the Rainforest Alliance).

Wilson is right. We are often presented with a moralisation of consumption (as in moralising rather than morality)  which has undercut politics by presenting a particular ethical outlook as a gold standard for all ethical people to follow. Perhaps, as we briefly discussed in the session, it is time to exit the museum of ethical consumption.

The claim, implicit and explicit in a number of the sessions, that societies’ ills, however conceived, can be challenged through the performance of neoliberal-critical lifestyles and consumption is misplaced. The moralisation of consumption and the politicisation of behaviour and affect tend to limit the political debate necessary for any revival of a healthy public sphere of political reckoning.

author meets critics?

A gripe: I attended a couple of ‘author meets critics’ sessions: David Harvey on his latest book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism [iv]  and also  Glen Sean Coultard discussing his work Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition.[v] The main limit of these session is that the ‘critics’ almost invariably turn out to be substantially in agreement with the authors  - the sessions feature levels of agreement rather than substantial questioning of assumptions. This is surprising. Outside of radical geography there is little sign of the end of capitalism. In the latter case the author’s laudable argument that struggles of minority nations in Canada should eschew the politics of recognition went on to also reject the concepts of sovereignty and citizenship as, effectively, impositions from the oppressors. Again, any debate that happened was not prompted by the critics. 

Chicago highlights

'the El'

A highlight of the week was the field trip to the University of Chicago, a truly inspirational place. From what I gleaned, President Obama’s alma mater manages to retain a respect for the pursuit of knowledge in the face of so much instrumental thinking in education. All undergraduates follow a broad liberal syllabus featuring humanities, science and philosophy. All professors research and also teach undergraduates, most often in small groups. You really do join a community of scholars when you attend UoC. The university has many proud achievements to its name: the first sustained nuclear reaction took place here, the Chicago Schools of economics and sociology respectively were conceived here and the institution has a tradition of producing thinkers, leaders and scientists. 

The other highlight was the architectural boat tour up the Chicago river which runs from Lake Michigan and forks through downtown Chicago. Chicago is famous for its architecture, and is full of inspiring symbols of human ingenuity and achievement.  Of course like any big city, it is not hard to find evidence that humanity has a long way still to go. The city is pretty divided, socially and racially. Some of the infrastructure, especially the ‘El’ elevated rail in the city, is in need of investment.

Finally a thank you for the people who made the week an enjoyable occasion, too many to mention of course, but including: Pete Smith, Heather Hindman, Cori Jacubiak, Harng Lui Sin, Mary Conran, Michael O'Regan, Mark Brouder, Jarkko Saarinen and of course the bar tender in Hanrahan’s.

 

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[i] Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.

[ii] Nussbaum, M. (1999). "The Professor of Parody". The New Republic", 22 February 1999

[iii] Barnett C, Cloke P, Clarke N, Malpass A (2011). Globalizing Responsibility: the Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell.

[iv] Harvey, D. (2014) Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. New York, OUP

[v] Coulthard, G.S. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press

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A note on Malta’s referendum on the Spring bird hunt

On the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta hunting birds is a big issue. The islanders have just voted in a referendum by a margin of just 1% to allow the continuation of the Spring hunting season. The season is 19.5 days long, over which period hunters are allowed to shoot up to 11,000 turtle doves and 5,000 quail. Although Spring hunting is outlawed by the EU Birds Directive, Malta applies each year for a short period of exemption, an arrangement dating back to their admission negotiations a decade ago.

I wrote about the issue last year when it hit the UK news following naturalist Chris Packham’s high profile campaign against the practice.(1) I chose to defend the hunters against the chorus of criticism and vilification from UK based commentators, celebrities and campaigns.

In anticipation (I hope I am wrong) of yet more castigation of Maltese hunters as the rednecks of Europe, a few points of principle are important.

Many of the campaigns, such as that by the UK’s League Against Cruel Sports,  look to the EU to do something about the hunters. The EU is a relatively undemocratic and distant institution. It is far better if this Maltese mini culture war is played out in the confines of Maltese society. Here Maltese people can decide, democratically, on what is and is not allowed on their soil. That is what the referendum represents, and therefore holding it was positive. Given the scale of the issue on the island and that it is not a clearly party political one, the referendum, forced by a petition from the anti-hunting lobby, shows the strength of Maltese democracy. 

After all, this has long been a hot issue on Malta. The vote in favour of allowing hunting was very close. It shows that almost half of the Maltese people want an end to the Spring hunt. They have good reason for doing so. A beautiful Spring walk through the countryside is fraught in hunting season. A weekend camping trip or a barbeque may be spoiled or more likely simply be a non-starter. Bear in mind that Malta is the most densely populated country in Europe. There isn’t a great deal of accessible land for leisure, and a considerable amount comprises hunting grounds.  Some see hunting as a hangover from the past, something that modern Malta should move on from as soon as possible.

Against this many Maltese enjoy hunting, and see it as a tradition they want to hold on to. There are some 9,000 registered hunters on the archipelago, out of a population of 450,000.  Hunting is far more controlled than in the past, and it is not a growing pastime. (2)

I wonder whether the high profile intervention from British and other European campaigners helped or hindered the anti-hunting cause? Most Maltese people are proud of their country and its customs. I have recently spoken to some who are against hunting and others certainly not advocates of it who were also highly critical of the arrogance of campaigners, many of whom condemned hunters as barbaric and even floated the idea of boycotting Malta’s staple tourism industry. Quite a few critics followed the lead of Queen guitarist Brian May who described the practice as ‘another manifestation of the vestiges of savagery in humans’. (3) Mark Mifsud Bonnici, runs a hunting association in Malta and understandably feels: ‘We’re being depicted as a breed that is separate from everyone else, that we are not human anymore, that we are public enemy number one.' (4)

The referendum is a victory for Maltese democracy. It was accompanied by a high turn out (75%) and a follows a vigorous debate. The result has been gracefully acknowledged and respected by Maltese anti-hunt campaigners even though they were narrowly defeated. That defeat may be relatively short lived. There is evidence that younger Maltese are significantly more anti-hunting than others. The referendum can be repeated after two years. Perhaps during that period commentators and campaigners outside of Malta could refrain from portraying hunters as barbarians and show some respect for the democratically expressed wishes of the Maltese islanders.