Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe

FAIN: FT-228954-15

Richard Ivan Jobs
Pacific University (Forest Grove, OR 97116-1797)

Summer research and writing on Cultural and European History, and International Relations.

"Backpack Ambassadors" brings together two exceptional phenomena of the postwar period in western European history examined through the cultural practice of travel: the emergence of a transnational youth culture and the process of European integration. This project details the institutional and governmental programs various countries utilized at the end of the Second World War to promote fraternity among their populations via the travel and interaction of the young. Yet it also considers the proliferation of independent 'drifter' youth travel and how this often complicated the official process of integration while still contributing to it via these communities of young travelers. By studying the practice of travel by the young, this investigation emphasizes European integration as a fundamentally social and cultural process in addition to being a political and economic one.

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