ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the ideological aspects behind the boom of rural tourism. It discusses data, which was collected mainly from Lithuania and Finland, with some complementary data from Estonia and Latvia as well. Relation to nature, relation to localism and urban-rural relations seem to be undergoing a remarkable change. The chapter discusses how remarkable this change will be in the Northern European Countries located by the Russian border. In rural culture, localism is often combined with cuisine, as well as with art and craft. There are structural and cultural factors behind localism. The Finnish peasant agriculture left its land-owning structure to subsequent generations. Romanticism was composed of fundamentally different ideas from the rationalism presented by proponents of the enlightenment and the consequent movement of modernism. The tones of rural neo-romanticism and acceptance of the weaknesses of agriculture were somehow turned into a belief about the agrarian way to solve development problems in the countryside.
