Backpack Ambassadors

Richard Ivan Jobs has written an exciting book about an exciting topic: ‘How youth travel integrated Europe’, as the book’s subtitle puts it. Jobs presents a history of European integration that does not focus on political institutions and economic connections, but on how ordinary young Europeans (and travellers from other parts of the world, notably the United States) helped create a sense of European identity. What might seem to be a history of tourism (backpack travelling) has thus deep political implications, even though the protagonists of travelling might not have imagined it. As Jobs succinctly puts it in the introduction: ‘The young, through their travels, transgressed politically constituted territories in eye-widening patterns. In doing so, they developed a transnational travel culture vital to the broad ideological trajectory of postwar Europe’ (p. 3). The book is a powerful call for writing the history of European integration ‘from below’ with less of a focus on political decision-makers at the top

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