Richard Ivan Jobs. Backpack Ambassadors

Some, if not many, of the readers of Richard Ivan Jobs’s revealing book Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe might carry fond recollections of their own youthful travel in Europe, with its familiar repertoire of Eurail Passes, youth hostel stays, and passport stamps. Fewer will likely suppose that what they were doing was part of a transnational movement of genuine and enduring historical significance. Yet Jobs advances precisely this argument in his history of the “cultural phenomenon” (192) of youth travel across continental Europe from the very end of World War II through 1992. In their travel, he claims, European (and to a lesser extent non-European) youth played a “vanguard” (84) role in germinating the idea of a common European community and future within popular consciousness. More broadly still, youth travel helped normalize mobility as a defining condition of social and international being—in Europe and now worldwide. The book’s argument touches three main areas of historical concern and debate. The first is the history of European integration, which, as Jobs asserts early on in the book, has been conventionally treated as a top-down initiative propelled by European political elites. Backpack Ambassadors brings non-state actors more to the fore, by showing how youth travel effected a kind of European integration “from below,” promoting transnational sensibilities and linkages that helped actualize “Europe” as an idea and political project. In the book’s first two chapters, Jobs reveals how youth were considered in many European governmental quarters to be vital assets of national and European recovery, leading to the prioritization of international youth travel from the early reconstruction period onward. Germany, especially the Federal Republic, was a primary focus for these efforts, as Allied occupation authorities believed that international travel and transcultural contact might assist in “Europeanizing” Germany and reorienting its civic culture in more liberal directions.

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