Backpack Ambassadors: Youth, Travel, and European Integration

FAIN: FT-58970-11

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

"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 will detail the institutional and governmental programs various countries utilized in the decades following the Second World War to promote fraternity among their populations via the travel and interaction of the young. Yet it will also consider the proliferation of independent "drifter" youth travel in the 1970s and 1980s and show how this often complicated the official process of integration while still contributing to it via these communities of young travelers. This investigation aims to emphasize European integration as a fundamentally cultural process in addition to a political or economic one by studying the practice of travel by the young and the emergence of European youth as a transnational social body.