Doors on the Bridge: The Border as Contingent Closure⁽¹⁾

by József Böröcz⁽²⁾

© All Rights Reserved!

I have placed this paper on the net to elicit scholarly comments. It is work in progress: please treat it as such; do not quote, paraphrase, or use in any other way without my explicit consent! If you have questions / comments, please contact me by writing to jborocz (at) rutgers.edu

Version 1.1; on the net since September 2, 1997

a) A new sociology of borders ought to focus on contingent closure, i.e., on the way in which borders shift between, and combine various elements of, working as bridges and doors outlined in a classical essay by Georg Simmel.

b) Specific arrangements of contingent closure at borders are public goods appropriated, on an increasing scale, into various private practices, including large and small, formal and informal, economic, political, cultural, moral, and religious institutions.

In making those points I will try to offer some comparative examples from central Europe.

a. The next logical, and compelling, step in systematizing the material elaborated in the exceptionally strong traditions of migration and tourism research, international political economy, comparative macroeconomic sociology, world-systems analysis, and globalization studies is distilling them into a unified analysis of social flows-including capital, labor, leisure, commodities, cultural patterns, information, power, religion, and symbols. This would amount in effect to a new sociology of borders and flows. My interest in this paper is to think aloud about how such a sociology would look.

Simmel's classical essay entitled "Bridge and Door" (1994 [1909]) provides some theoretical contours for such a sociology of borders. For Simmel, the bridge expresses in a tangible, object-form "the zenith" of "one of the greatest human achievements," the "will to connection" (Simmel 1994 [1909]: 6). By overcoming the physical obstacle of the two banks of the river-which is only socially constructed as "not just apart but separate," (ibid.)-the "positive intention" or, "social volition," of surmounting separation "now prevails, reconciling and uniting" (ibid.). Abstracting away from the tangible notion to its social sense, the bridge is that which attracts, connects, unites. The bridge is what overcomes separation. Applied to the socially constructed, non-natural separation expressed in state sovereignty, here we have one of the two defining functions of the border.

Simmel intimates the second such function, the dialectical pair of the first, in the metaphor of the door. Read for borders, the duality of the door's possible states-closed/open, i.e., yes/no-provides the two modalities by which public power regulates flows both ways between the inside and the outside: "[t]hus the door becomes the image of the boundary point" (op.cit.:7) so that, "in the unity, the bounded and the boundaryless adjoin one another, not in the dead geometric form of a mere separating wall, but rather as the possibility of a permanent interchange" (op.cit. 7-8). From a global perspective, the border in its door-function either launches or rests the mechanisms of separation contained in state sovereignty.

For a global sociology, the border is the bridge that marks "how humankind unifies ( . . . ) separatedness" (op.cit.: 9) of the state-sovereignty kind. The border is also the door-or, rather, a set of parallel and sequential doors-as "it separates the uniform, continuous unity" (op.cit: 9) of humankind, by blocking as well as by permitting its flows, under the formal, "sovereignty"-logic of the state. The bridge and the door-the logics of bridging and separating-or-allowing-are the two mechanisms that jointly make up the border. The border is a bridge with a set of doors. Attraction and exclusion/inclusion through blocking/permitting are the principal forces of this process.

It follows from the above that, in mapping the social forces of flows for a sociology of borders, focus on closure (the multiple modalities of the closed door) ought to be coupled with attention to two additional objects: the equally manifold institutions of laisser-passer-i.e., varieties of the open door-and of the numerous institutions of explicit attraction-the bridge.

Rogers Brubaker's carefully crafted, influential neo-Weberian scheme, addressing citizenship as a form of social closure, focusses on the formal institutional structure of the closed door. In it, we find a basic social nexus of modernity contained in a one-to-one relationship between the largest, the most rigidly formal institution of collective power-the state-and the ultimate subject of modernity-the individual. It is under this ideal-type arrangement of modernity that citizenship can be meaningfully depicted in the streamlined formula of an institution that is "internally inclusive ( . . . ) [and] externally exclusive" (Brubaker 1990: 21). This way, the modern state is "not simply a territorial organization but a membership organization," (Brubaker, 1990: 21) and "territory and membership are closely related" (Brubaker, 1990: 22). In a proper Weberian fashion, this model is static and operates exclusively in the formal-legal dimension (the only dynamic element in the operation of citizenship is "enforcement"; the only instance of informality is in the "definition of citizenship") (Brubaker, 1990:30-1). Because of its very static-and exclusively formal-legal-nature, this elegant formula leaves much room for further specification.

If, in a proper Weberian fashion, we take states to be macro-social institutions possessing the monopoly of legitimate violence over a sharply defined territory, an empirical and theoretical focus on their geometrical perimeter-literally, the line that defines them in practice-is the logical point to begin any such analysis of flows. Hence my insistence on an explicit, global sociology of borders.

A less static and less formal-legal notion of closure would open two analytical dimensions: one for the intensity and type of attraction through the bridge; another for the inclusionary/exclusionary-i.e., opening/shutting-movement of the door, and would do so in a historical-comparative way. In a historical-comparative global sociology of borders, I propose to denote the simultaneous application of those two dimensions as contingent closure. To rephrase this in the simplest possible form-by stating the minimum of a thus-historicized portrait of closure-passage through the doors on the bridge is a contingent event.⁽³⁾

Citizenship is, of course, only one manifestation of the general principle of social closure (Parkin 1974, Murphy 1988)-that elementary form of social inequality which combines hierarchical and network-principles into effective practices of social exclusion and inclusion. A specification of the idea of contingent closure from a global perspective (which is of course not what Weber, Parkin, Murphy, or Brubaker, have been interested in), could include at least six separate types of flows. Those include flows of persons, commodities (including, quite prominently, money and capital investment), coercion, technology, cultural content (including "information" as well as high and low art, etc.) and ideas.⁽⁴⁾ Table 1 (below) presents an ad hoc list of the formal and informal institutions of the door and bridge mechanisms of borders with respect to those six types of flows.

Table 1 A Heuristic of Some Formal and Informal Institutions of Door and Bridge for the Six Main Types of Flows

For illustration's sake, let us glance at the first row. Formal processes of attracting persons include creating the basic structures (called 'attractions') for the world's largest industry (tourism)-something I have recently proposed (Böröcz 1996) to treat as leisure migration (and defined as travel for consumption rather than production), and recruitment for migrant labor. Institutions of informal "bridge" for flows of persons include extensive social network ties and positive stereotypes. Formal "door" involves passport, exit and entry visa, and other immigration regulations; informal "door" institutions include the presence/absence of negative ethnic, "racial," regional, etc. stereotypes as well as the absence of extensive social network ties.

Austria, where I have been doing some fieldwork, offers a convenient case in point. It is relevant because Austria is one of the world's prime tourist destinations and it is also a very intense destination for foreign migrant labor.⁽⁵⁾ Because of a fortunate political-economic niche position for much of its postwar history and a series of very conscious pro-tourism policies (Böröcz 1996), Austria presents a uniquely successful case of tourism-based economic growth. In spite of this high, long-term exposure to economically useful foreigners as both low-paid, menial labor migrants and high-paying leisure migrants, however, Austria is widely known for its sustained, strong support to extreme-right-wing political forces whose rhetoric centers on foreigners as objects of hatred and disdain. Does this make any sense? How is this possible?

In response to the triple condition of (1) the very pronounced presence of west and north European and north American tourists, the (2) mainly transit-exposure of Vienna to travellers of very varied levels of purchasing power from the former east bloc, mainly the Czech Lands, Hungary and Poland, and (3) an informal, mainly underclass labor market arising from a combination of guest worker arrangements and undocumented temporary work typically done by a Turkish, Serbian or Romanian labor force, Austrian culture has developed a rather discriminating typology of foreigners. This revolves around the distinction between "Touristen" and "Scheißausländer" (approx.: Shit Foreigners). Category one-tourists from the rest of the European Union and north America-falls clearly into the notion of the "Tourist"; category three is clearly tucked into the latter; Czech, Polish and Hungarian visitors would be classified into either depending on the circumstances. This sharp differentiation among Strangers according to their consumption potential was, incidentally, first observed for incoming international tourism in state socialist Hungary eight years ago (Böröcz 1996).

Moving 250 kilometers eastward for comparison, my native Hungary has lost much of its fellow-east-central-European tourist inflows (and thus the source of the most profitable portion of its predominantly informal-sector tourist trade and, with it, the objects of anti-tourist disdain from the state socialist period). In this process, Hungarian tourism has also lost much of its previous complexity, and is becoming ever more similar to other semiperipheral tourism destination areas.⁽⁶⁾ Meanwhile, undocumented labor has appeared with full force, especially with seasonal inflows of ethnic Magyars from Romania, coupled with the emergence of a thirty-thousand strong small Chinatown in Budapest and a surprisingly strong, very wealthy Ukrainian and Russian diaspora. Under the conditions of this confusion and speedy restructuration, Hungarian culture has managed to find undocumented labor migrants as a new object of contempt. The old terminology of "büdös cigány" or "büdös román" (stinking Gypsy or stinking Romanian) serve as convenient expressions thereof, even in the most frequent case when the referent is neither Gypsy nor Romanian but a co-ethnic Magyar citizen of Romania (see Bodnár 1996).

An even more interesting discursive phenomenon stems from the fact that many Turkish guest workers of Germany, Switzerland and Austria, forced to avoid the territory of former Yugoslavia due to the wars there, are making transit through Hungary, on their way "home," to Turkey, as tourists. This annual transit of the Muslim underclass of some of the wealthiest countries of the world causes sometimes major traffic jams on Hungarian roads, and launches some intense outbursts of negative ethnic stereotyping. Because of the extra processing time caused by the visa obligation of Turkish citizens to Hungary, waiting times of six to twelve hours are common at the Austro-Hungarian border. Making problems worse, Turkish homebound tourism follows closely the holiday rhythms of German schools and workplaces, a rhythm creating major tourist outflows of ethnic Germans at the same time. The Hungarian public and the press curiously ignore the ethnic German component as a cause of this problem, and refers to this recurrent peak-season problem as "the Turkish Invasion." This invokes two images. First, it recalls the heroic 16th-to-18th-century period of Hungarian history when the (however ineffectual) protection of late-medieval-renaissance Hungary against the Ottoman forces coincided with the protection of the West and of Christianity. Second, it also invokes the much more derisive imagery of locusts, used conveniently for citizens of soon-to-be fellow-NATO-member, hopeless fellow-European-Union-applicant Turkey, residents of some of the greatest economic powers of Europe.

I quote these two examples of informal discourse for three reasons. First, they not only indicate ways in which labor migrants and leisure migrants cross each other's path physically by passing through the same geographical landscapes, but also suggest the need for labor and leisure migration to be analyzed in the single conceptual framework of a cultural / political / economic sociology of borders and flows. Both of these types of human flows, along with refugee movements, create the presence of Strangers-persons "who come today and stay tomorrow" (Simmel, 1950[1908])-and, thus, thematize the conflict between physical closeness and moral remoteness for both formal and informal social institutions. Because of their shared Stranger-ness, public moral attitudes toward leisure and labor migrants are formed in a shared epistemic space by the public and officialdom as well. This way, not only specific professional considerations concerning the utility of addressing human flows of various kinds in a single conceptual space, but also the sociology of political knowledge urge us to consider leisure and labor migration in one analysis.

Second, the Austrian and Hungarian examples mutually contextualize a discussion on the sociologies of migration and tourism in the two countries. They suggest that it is insufficient to derive an analysis of the Austrian practices of border control from a consideration of the formal political-economic condition that Austria has recently joined the European Union and it has undertaken to implement the so-called Schengen Agreement, the EU's explicitly anti-outsider immigration policy. If we do so-say, using the formal-static framework of the west-European "multinational state" presented recently by M. Rainer Lepsius (1992) and nothing else-we encounter difficulties in understanding (1) the extended presence of the multitudes of "un-" and "semi-desirable" foreigners in Austria and (2) the predominance and salience of the "Ausländer"-topic for Austrian politics. Similarly, it is difficult to see how the distinction between the "multinational state" and the "nation-state"-the focus of mainstream of European scholarship about the subject-would help explain differences between Austrian and, say, Hungarian policies and practices regarding immigration. An exclusive focus on the formal and economic aspects of the presence of foreigners in the two countries would fail to predict the apparent asymmetries⁽⁷⁾ of the Hungarian-Austrian border: Austrian citizens can (and do in very impressive numbers) visit Hungary with a domestic ID card-the European equivalent of the Driver's Licence-while Hungarians are required passports for "entry into EU territory." This outcome represents a logical continuation of a history of easy access to Hungary from the "west"; meanwhile, it represents a step backward for Hungarians whose access to Austria was at its easiest in the last year of state socialism,⁽⁸⁾ and has been made slightly more difficult ever since.

Third, and for my argument most important, these examples speak in a critical tone to what cultural anthropologist-globalization scholar Arjun Appadurai (1996) outlines as the detached nature of the cultural representations of global flows. Appadurai's main point is that current global flows "occur in and through the growing disjunctures among ethnocscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes" (Appadurai, 1996:37). The above Austrian and Hungarian examples suggest to me that-while of course these "ethnoscapes" have no rational, one-to-one relationship to perceived economic interests or the process of state building, European or otherwise-they do in fact reveal an important underlying correspondence with the basic macro-structural stratification of the world. When Austrians map a simple and somewhat brutal moral distinction between desirable and undesirable aliens on the global master grid of wealth and poverty, they express something essential about the position of their society in the world and, this way, they also give moral backing to official policies and practices, ranging from guest labor policies to the widely different treatment of entering foreigners on the border by the official representatives of the state. Using Alejandro Portes's typology of the modes of migrant incorporation, Austrians provide a prejudiced societal reception for some-mainly menial labor migrants-while espousing a non-prejudiced societal reception for tourists (Portes, 1995: 23-27). This also allows a convenient way to see how societal contexts translate into government policy (ibid.).

Most well-intentioned persons find the distinction between desirable and undesirable aliens reprehensible, especially if tied to purchasing power differentials and nothing else, but that should not overshadow the fact that these representations are deeply anchored in the structural relations of the world in- and outside Austria. A similar point could be made for the Hungarian discourse of "the Turkish Invasion" (although the connection between the informal and formal aspects of the Hungarian "door" for leisure and labor migrants is not nearly as tight as in Austria). This global mapping also explains the designation of "stinking Romanians / Gypsies" attached in effect to fellow-Magyars from across Hungary's eastern borders.

b. The last point I will make is that specific, minutely detailed institutional arrangements and practices of contingent closure at state borders constitute a public good in the sense that they are widely appropriated for private purposes. Just as clean air is a natural phenomenon that is a public good while being widely appropriated for the private purpose of breathing, or as clean water and sandy beaches are similarly appropriated for, depending on the circumstances, bathing, doing laundry, recreation or holiday making, the specific arrangements of contingent closure are social conditions treated as a publicly available resource whose elements are drawn out and used for private purposes by an increasing number of individuals and institutions worldwide. At this point, the sociologies of labor and leisure migration and of all kinds of other flows naturally coalesce. In closing let me outline a few, to me non-trivial, examples, suggesting the potential utility of such an approach. Those include (1) multinational microenterprises, (2) cross-border strategies of family practices; (3) entirely-informal-sector cross-border trade; (4) informal border closures within one city, and (5) long-distance nationalism.

(1) The use of borders as a tool in the accumulation process for multinational corporations is widely documented. Transfer pricing and various specific, regional policies of resource extraction and transfer have been widely quoted as instruments of that process. There appears to exist some exciting evidence from central Europe that suggests the spread of this phenomenon to a much smaller scale. It was only two weeks ago that I visited a knitwear factory in the northeastern corner of Romania, about 4 miles from the Romanian-Hungarian-Ukrainian border triangle, which is owned by two Hungarian individuals from Budapest. The facility, set up in early May this year, has already secured orders to saturate its entire production capacity until the end of the year. What is conceptually very interesting about the arrangement is that the thirty-employee facility of used, computer-controlled German knitting machines in a rather confined space has a five-country, seven-company structure established for the single purpose of distributing its products. The network of companies set up for this purpose includes outlets in Ireland, France, Switzerland, Hungary, and Romania. All this at a productive capital investment of no more than $ 200 thousand and a projected maximum annual turnover of roughly the same amount. The sole purpose of this elaborate, and I imagine quite cumbersome, organizational structure is providing enough flexibility to avoid unreasonable customs and other transfer costs and to be prepared for the Byzantine arbitrariness with which those transfer regulations are implemented in Hungary, Romania, and the European Union. The main instrument of that struggle is what I would call complex, highly innovative practices of creative invoicing-a near-exact miniature replica of trans-border practices of multinational corporations of a very different-much smaller-scale.

I suggest calling this phenomenon the multinational microenterprise. In the logic of the distribution strategies that govern the construction of this structure, the current arrangement of west, central, and east European borders, with the enormous complexities of the transfer conditions they offer, play a determinant part. Based on a low-wage-high-quality, ethnic-Magyar labor force in northern Romania, this kind of enterprise exists only because the border arrangements that produce the labor cost and quality differentials exist.

(2) The second example does not require much description in a panel on international migration. Migration research has widely noted and documented exceedingly well the existence of family strategies that span one, but sometimes several, state borders. The proper way to understand these institutional forms is not that they exist "despite" the fact that state borders cross the ties among various family members but, to the contrary, by pointing out how families, often of the least educated and most poorly paid segments of "third-world" societies, incorporate the existence of particular arrangements of contingent closure at state borders. European policies of restricting legal immigration to family reunification for formerly recruited guest workers have recognized, and in some ways strengthened, this phenomenon. At the recent marriage ceremony of a telephone engineer from Iraq who lives in Budapest, relatives from four additional countries appeared, and their native Iraq was not among them. The educational, labor market, and entrepreneurial, and general life conduct strategies of a family of this type would be unthinkable without the specific arrangements of contingent closure that tie and separate them.

(3) A lasting feature of central Europe's informal economic integration is what is called ironically the "COMECON-markets." These unlicensed selling facilities sprang up all over the region during the last fifteen years of state socialism, featuring mid-to-low quality, extremely-low-priced consumer items ranging from towels to water pumps. The collapse of state socialism in 1989-90 failed to shake the resilience of these marketplaces based entirely on differentials of subsidies, local market conditions, and labor remuneration rates in the various countries of the region. Nearly all details of the phenomenon have since changed: e.g., it is not Poles anymore but mainly Romanians and PR Chinese who do most of the travelling; Romanian, Serbian, Ukrainian, PR Chinese and Vietnamese who do most of the selling; many products come from farther away, such as the PR China and Vietnam that had not been a feature before; the embargoes and the specific demand structures created by the Yugoslav war and its aftermath have led to entirely new operations such as fuel and arms smuggling, etc. What has remained is that the Hungarian Forint still plays a crucial role as a reliable, convertible currency and that approximately the same population groups-the bottom half-to-two-thirds of the respective income scales of the affected countries-participate in such economic activities on a daily basis that would not be taking place were it not for the specific conditions of contingent closure at the borders of the countries of central Europe.

(4) The city of Berlin thematizes the issue of borders in a unique, and theoretically compelling way, by presenting the picture of a giant process of path dependence even in the absence of the border that used to divide the two halves from each other. Eight years after the unification of the two halves, the borderline of the former Berlin Wall is still clearly perceptible. This can be observed in such simple distinctions as the state of (dis)repair of the buildings and public spaces that still mark the two halves from each other (this is because much of the new united Berlin's monetary resources is channeled into the construction of the mega-project of the Potsdamer Platz area that used to be mainly no man's land during the times of the division and the new federal government quarters). The two Berlins still display an official income differential of 50% and an unemployment rate differential of even greater magnitude. The political climate of the two halves is exact opposites. The two main universities on the two sides-Freie Universität in the west and Humboldt Universität in the east-cater for students from the "other side" to no more than 20% of their student bodies, in spite of the fact that the faculty inherited from the state socialist past at Humbodt's has been almost entirely removed. It appears as if the roughly north-south dividing line of the former Wall is still in effect, if not in any other form, in the minds of people. The border is an existing, social structural fact despite its momentous demolition eight years ago.

(5) I left as a last example of the institutionalization of specific arrangements of contingent closure Benedict Anderson's recent treatment (1994) of long-distance nationalism. In the constitution of this type of political consciousness, radical physical removal from the Heimat, or motherland, features centrally. The life condition that gives rise to this political phenomenon is well symbolized by the Turkish guest worker in the German city of Düsseldorf, who has never visited "his" country (Turkey); who nevertheless covers his wall with a giant poster of the Turkish Airlines, reads the Turkish newspapers, fights the internal political struggles of the Turkish society (of Düsseldorf), and votes in the Turkish elections, without ever moving out of Germany (where he, as well as his offspring, are categorically denied citizenship rights). As anyone that has done work with immigrant ethnic communities can testify, the physical distance between the location of the political discourse and the state whose political future the discussion is about has very severe consequences. Specifically, the element of collective responsibility plays out in a very different form if the contingent closure of the state borders separates actor and state from each other.

To conclude, much of our discipline absolutizes closure at the border and ignores the various social flows that do cross it. Meanwhile, sociological studies of cross-border flows appears to have been split by types of flows. Although some elective affinities do exist among them (say labor migration and capital/financial flow scholars do tend to read each other's work), still, there is little effort to bring together the exciting results of their scholarship; experts in labor flows rarely talk to experts in leisure migration, and often consider cultural flows epiphenomenal. The phenomena they study, meanhile, fail to respect such disciplinary borders.

Conventional sociology, just like political maps, presents a portrait of the world that emphasizes state-by-state separation. World-systems and globalization approaches, just like the maps of airlines, sea lines, railways and roads, paint a picture of the world that emphasizes connectedness and downplays separation at state borders. Meanwhile, the really-existing borders are fascinating, complex, semipermeable, bi-directional socio-historical mechanisms of attraction and filtering. I wonder if it is possible to notice something important about our world by paying close attention to how they work.

Anderson, Benedict. 1994. "Exodus. (Exile and Nationalism)." Critical Inquiry, 20,2(Winter):314-327.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bodnár, Judit. 1996. "Layers of Moscow Square: Social Transformation in Public Space and the Broken Mirage of the Second Economy." Chapter 5. in The Post-State-Socialist City: Urban Change in Budapest. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, The Johns Hopkins University.

Böröcz, József. 1996. Leisure Migration: A Sociological Comparison. Oxford (GB): Pergamon Press.

Böröcz, József. 1997. "Stand Reconstructed: Contingent Closure and Institutional Change." Sociological Theory. 15,3:215-48.

Brubaker, Rogers. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lepsius, M. Rainer. 1992. "Beyond the Nation-State: The Multinational State as the Model for the European Community." Telos, 91(Spring):57-76.

Murphy, Raymond. 1988. Social Closure. The Theory of Monopolization and Exclusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pp. 1-44.

Parkin, Frank. 1974. "Strategies of Social Closure in Class Formation." Pp. 1-18. in Frank Parkin (ed.) The Social Analysis of Class Structure. London: Tavistock.

Portes, Alejandro. 1995. "Economic Sociology and the Sociology of Immigration: A Conceptual Overview." Pp. 1-41. in Alejandro Portes (ed.) The Economic Sociology of Immigration. Essays on Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Simmel, Georg. 1950 (1908). "The Stranger." Pp. 402-408. in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press.

Simmel, Georg. 1994 [1909] "Bridge and Door." Translated by Mark Ritter. Theory, Culture & Society. 11:5-10. In German: "Brücke und Tür." Pp. 2-12. in Georg Simmel: Das Individuum und die Freiheit. Essais. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.

WTO. 1996. Yearbook of Tourism Statistics. Madrid: World Tourism Organization.

1. Paper presented in the session, organized by Alejandro Portes, on Migration Research and Sociological Theory at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, Toronto, August 12, 1997.

2. Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Hungarian Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903-5072. jborocz (at) rutgers.edu . http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jborocz

3. Böröcz (1997) provides a detailed discussion of contingent closure as an object of historical-comparative sociology.

4. This list adds coercion to Appadurai's (1996) list of such flows.

5. In 1994, Austria, a country of 7.5 million citizens, or, roughly .12% of the world's population, registered 17.9 million tourist arrivals (a share of cca. 3.3% of arrivals worldwide) and was the world's sixth largest tourism earner with an estimated $ 13.2 billion (or, 3.8% of tourism receipts worldwide) (WTO, 1996:11-2).

6. According to World Tourism Organization data, with its population of cca. 10 million (or roughly .15% of the world's population), Hungary registered an estimated 21.4 million foreign tourist arrivals (or, a 3.92% share of global tourist arrivals) in 1994. In striking contrast, Hungarian tourism receipts amounted to $1,428 million-a meager .41% of the worldwide tourism market share (WTO 1996: 11-2). Hungary thus shows the typical semiperipheral pattern of tourism: the country's world market share in the incoming international tourism business measured in the number of tourists is almost ten times greater than that measured in tourism revenues. This is a striking contrast to Austria (see previous footnote). The discrepancy is commonly attributed to extreme levels of revenue leakage due to the syphoning effect of tourism multinationals in the highest-profit segment and rampant informality in the moderate-quality lower-90% of the market (for a more detailed comparative-historical analysis, see Böröcz 1996).

7. Incidentally, one finds many such asymmetries in Hungary's current external relations. Although Hungary has served, for two years now, as the launching area for the entire U.S. military contingent in the Bosnian peace keeping operation, there is no symmetry in U.S.-Hungarian visa practices: U.S. civilians can enter, and stay in, Hungary for any purpose for three months without visas; Hungarians need entry visas to the U.S. even for tourist purposes. During the summer of 1997, the U.S. visa procedure in Budapest takes fourteen workdays even for no problem visas.

8. EU-member states are required to use a computerized register of all entrants from outside the EU, making entry much slower for outsiders than others. Most EU airports distinguish between EU-passport holders and outsiders, just like most U.S. international airports provide separate, in most cases much faster, entry to U.S. citizens than to "aliens."