The tourist is, as people have mentioned, a pisstake of the fact that a lot of people from the US think that "European" (and "British", for that matter) is a nationality. There are many different countries, with many different customs and languages. The tourist, therefore is utterly confusing (not to mention confused himself) because he is a mixture of so many different ones. He also seems to have an endless enthusiasm despite the fact that he seems to run into bad luck throughout his entire appearance. I noticed Norwegian and Danish aspects to both his appearance and personality too (including use of the words "Nej" and "Fjord", and even though he's a reused TOMI model, he bears an incredible resemblance to Senior from the Danish band Junior Senior (the guy on top in the picture below) so I thought that was part of the idea.
