Question: I have a couple of profiles defined in Tasker that I would only like to enable while traveling abroad. As Tasker cannot recognize the state "traveling abroad", I would like to set this state manually which should then disable all the profiles related to this meta profile "traveling abroad".

I envision this in Tasker:

* Category: Traveling abroad (switch off/on)

	+ Profile 1 (switch off/on)
	+ Profile 2 (switch off/on)
	+ Profile 3 (switch off/on)
	+ ...

Answer: 
Disabling a profile constitutes as an action so you need to do something in a task only. Tasker supports toggling the status of profiles from a task.

Create a new task and use this action: Tasker → Profile Status 

* Name: name of the profile to be toggled
* Set: On/Off/Toggle

When would you or how would you like to run this task is upon you to decide. You can setup a location profile, a time trigger or perhaps, bind the task into a widget (1x1) to toggle all those profiles from a single touch on a shortcut.
You can create a Profile that is always active when it turned on, then use the %pactive variable state in the other profiles so that they are only able to be active when the main profile is.