Tourism's relationship to political boundaries has caught the attention of researchers only recently, even though on a more general level the academic study of borders attracts considerable interest. A topic that has been explored only superficially concerns the obstacles inhibiting tourism's development in a cross-border setting and, particularly, the tensions arising when the respective national interests of the two neighbouring countries do not coincide with the mutual benefits to be derived through close transfrontier collaboration at the regional level. An emerging key question is what forces dominate within the region straddling the border between two countries -those dictated by the respective national interests of each country, or those benefiting the transboundary region itself? These issues are explored through an examination of the Bothnian Arc Project, a cross-border collaborative effort between Sweden and Finland. A detailed investigation of the planning process that has been put into effect for developing and marketing this coastal region's tourist product is provided. Among the issues discussed are the attempts on the part of all stakeholders to establish a unifying identity for the region, which will set it aside from other destinations in northern Scandinavia (e.g. Lapland). The focus is on some of the most important challenges lying ahead in terms of developing and marketing this cross-border region as a single destination. Additionally, the investigation shows that even if the border in this region has effectively disappeared, obstacles remain to achieving mutual regional benefits.

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In the UNESCO crisis the industrialized countries were confronted with the Third World's claim for a New World Information and Communication Order. To this challenge they reacted in many ways, ranging from support of Third World demands to withdrawal from UNESCO. In order to explain this variety, the policies of the United States, the Soviet Union, France and West Germany at the height of the crisis in 1983/84 are compared. Three competing approaches of foreign policy analysis are tested: foreign policy as `interest-oriented behaviour', `behavioural style', or `emergent behaviour'. On the whole, `interest-oriented behaviour' proves to be the most adequate model because the conflict behaviours of the four countries can be systematically related to their different interests. Only US and West German behaviours differed to a much greater extent than their interests. In a basic first cut the variety of UNESCO policies is therefore explained by variables assumed to influence foreign policy interests: the media systems, and the societal values they represent, as well as the positions in the overall international power structure. In a second cut this explanation is refined by looking at factors which might account for differences in US and West German foreign policy styles. In this respect, the differences in behaviours seemed above all to reflect differences in the belief systems of the German and American foreign policy elites.

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