Summer holidays have become an extension of geopolitics. Tourists booking their vacation nowadays have to weigh up not only the usual unpleasantries — the risk of typhoons and food poisoning, the pickpocket and the bedroom cockroach — but also the chances of being drawn into a terror attack.
Islamic State is recruiting in the Caribbean and at least 89 Trinidadians are now fighting in Syria. A Canadian has just been beheaded in the Philippines. A separatist insurgency in the Muslim south of Thailand has spread north, with a bomb at a shrine in Bangkok that killed 20 people last year, mostly tourists. In Turkey bombs have been exploding in public places at the rate of one a month. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office produces sensible but strangely menacing advice about any number of our favourite destinations, from Thailand to Egypt. Official guidance to avoid “all but essential travel” could prompt the response that a week in Bournemouth, or even in one’s back garden, represents the better part of valour.
Travel, though, is supposed to enlighten not intimidate. Until now that principle has served the British people well, as we jostle with Germans and other north Europeans running away from routine and a pallid sun. The psychological benefit of decamping to foreign shores out-trumps the fear that something might go dreadfully wrong. You are more likely, it is said, to die slipping in a bath tub than at the hands of a terrorist. Yet these calculations, this readiness to suppress bad news, can be misleading.
The terrorist attack on British holidaymakers in Sousse on the Tunisian coast in June last year was presented as a bolt out of the blue. It did, however, have a pre-history: three months earlier, Isis killers had attacked the Bardo museum in Tunis. And it had a sequel: a bloody gunfight on the Tunisian-Libyan border in March this year in which 60 people, terrorists, police and civilians, were killed. That in turn is likely to stir a new attack.
In the Age of Terror, lightning really does strike twice. The harder that security forces press terror groups and dry up their operational finances, the more likely they are to select targets that are soft. Scaring away tourists is one of the surest ways of damaging a government. Egypt, for example, is likely to attract barely 8.6 million tourists this year, down from 9.8 million in 2014. Small hotels are struggling. The government, in denial at first over the terrorism in Sharm-el-Sheikh, has brought in British specialists to make the airport safe.
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To abandon holidays to edgy destinations would, however, be a surrender to terrorism. The tourist sector in these countries not only contributes to national prosperity; it provides an answer, of sorts, to the forces of disgruntlement that generate terror. A vibrant tourist industry reflects pride in the nation state and its history. It is a natural extension of the reformist wing of even autocratic governments, disposed to be communicative towards the outside world. Jihadists turn inwards; tourist enterprises are open and at their best make the case for tolerance.
The best advice to those planning their holidays is surely to travel mindfully, factor in political risk, be sentient travellers rather than shepherded tourists, avoid cultural arrogance and seek to understand. These are values that can be applied even when the summer holiday has become a distant memory.