Youth organizations, citizenship, and guidelines for tourism in the wake of mass tourism in Finland

Abstract

This paper will study tourism as a site of citizenship formation with a particular focus on the arrangements and lived practices of citizenship in the Finnish Youth Organization and in a sub-section of Northern Ostrobothnian Travel Club between 1965 and 1985. From the perspective of the model of citizenship in Finland, modern mass tourism was not unproblematic and it was uniquely incorporated in the program and activities of the Finnish Youth Organization, underlining the wider social and civic utility of tourism. In this paper, the examination of archive materials from this particular historical period will provide a nuanced understanding of the mutual formation of citizenship and tourism at multiple geographical scales and insight into how the model of citizenship has been of great importance for mobile people in many ways.

Keywords:

• Citizenship formation
• lived citizenship
• tourism
• youth organizations
• Finland
• archives

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Academy of Finland’s RELATE CoE project for financial support. Thanks are due to the editors, anonymous reviewers, and Dr. Mark Griffiths for his valuable comments and support.