Touring between war and peace : imagining the 'transcontinental motorway', 1930-1950

In 1930 the Alliance internationale de tourisme, a confederation of national cycle and motor touring clubs, set out plans for a motor road from London to Istanbul. This article explores the reasons for the road plan's relative success as a transnational project in the tense inter-war years by looking at the way in which visions of the road crossed national boundaries. By creating both a physical and a symbolic framework that fitted easily into national modernisation projects and identity visions of elite groups of motor tourists, it is argued, the road plan created an effective international fiction that allowed it to circumvent many of the inherent tensions of its construction.