Town Twinning, Transnational Connections, and Trans-local Citizenship Practices in Europe

A. Langenohl

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137021229
• eBook ISBN: 9781137021236
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

Many Europeans think that town twinning has greatly contributed to integration in Europe after the Second World War. This book, based on observations and interviews with twinning practitioners in small towns, reveals the social and cultural processes that inform twinning as a transnational practice, its perspectives and its limits.

1

Introduction: Local Transnationalism in a ‘Europe for Citizens’

The term ‘town twinning’ refers to a set of practices that have gained broad currency in Europe, in particular with a view to the process of European integration. It involves millions of citizens in Europe. For instance, according to data from the Council of European Regions and Municipalities, the total number of twinnings in Europe rose from 34,200 to 39,816 between 2006 and 2010.¹ It is therefore not surprising that the European Union has chosen town twinning as a strategic site on the part of its citizens for fostering their commitment to and identification with the supranational European polity, as becomes evident from reading the ‘Europe for Citizens’ program (Programme Guide, 2013).

At the same time town twinning is a practice in change. While the EU has placed town twinning at the center of its agenda for producing greater political–cultural affection and sympathy in European citizens toward Europe, popular interest in town twinning would seem to be on the decline, with cheap travel opportunities replacing the deep immersion in other cultures once envisioned by town twinning, a trend many practitioners complain about.

Ever since its inception, following the Second World War, town twinning has been related to political processes in Europe. However, its relations to politics proper have been uneasy at times. On the one hand twinning was supposed to reinstall the municipality as the seat of political inclusion and decision-making in Europe, and at the same time to contribute to achieving a better understanding among the populations of nation-states in Europe with a view to a truly cosmopolitan political culture. On the other hand the consequences drawn from this agenda sometimes shifted twinning onto a precarious terrain where its relation to ‘proper’ politics and international relations became a cause of conflict. This applied, for instance, to the claim made in the 1970s and 1980s that town twinning might engender a ‘municipal foreign policy’ that its proponents hoped would help alleviate the systems confrontation between the NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, yet it was one which found itself frequently contradicting the official foreign policies of the states involved. Very recently, town twinning has faced another genuinely political challenge centering on the question of whether municipalities ought to adopt positions in accordance with political developments in their partner towns. This relates, for instance, to recent debates in Germany about what municipalities ought to do with respect to those of their French twins which elected Front National politicians to the mayor’s office in March 2014.²

These debates, whatever their ramifications due to the political developments of the day, have been fostering an understanding that transnational ties between municipalities do have a resonance in those local settings. However, both theoretically and methodologically, the locality of transnational practice in town twinning has not enjoyed much attention. To be sure, many social-scientific studies as well as practitioners’ reports and twinning manuals focus on the ways in which town twinning might change the attitudes and perceptions of its participants and practitioners toward more transnational, especially more Europeanized, outlooks. However, the practices of localization that are at the core of the construction of transnational ties between municipalities have not been the subject of a theoretically and methodologically rigorous analysis.

This book will argue that transnational, or more generally, trans-local, ties between towns and municipalities, held in such high esteem by practitioners and the EU alike, depend on practices of localization. More specifically, it will be demonstrated that practices of localization and the establishment and maintenance of trans-local ties are involved in a process of mutual co-constitution. In the same way as the deepening of local social life increases the resources available for supporting trans-local connections, so the emergence of trans-local references in practices of localization provides them with more substantiality from the perspective of those involved. Towns acquire local social and cultural specificity by dint of trans-local references, and these in turn are nourished by that specificity which makes the locality of the social more decipherable and experienceable by town twinners. What are at stake, therefore, are the localized practices of sociality underlying transnational political cultures.

In order to flesh out this argument, a conceptual, methodological, and empirical architecture is required. On a theoretical and conceptual level, the book makes a case for praxeological, or practice– theoretical, approaches and methodologies in their full range: from micro-sociological and anthropological approaches to the works of Pierre Bourdieu, and to more recent theoretical connections of the notion of practice with that of the public as well as of implicit understandings of the political inherent in these practices. The main intention is to liberate the idea of practice from its narrow restriction to microprocesses alone without abandoning the focus on the localizations of practice. In fact, and though it may sound paradoxical, the concept of ‘localization’ will inform the entire book as it intends to explore the nature of transnational processes understood as trans-local practices, bringing into the discussion highly diverse bodies of conceptual literature on locality and trans-locality, sociability and friendship, political culture, different sorts of capital, and imagined communities and relations.

This strategy has, of course, consequences for the body of empirical data to be analyzed. Firstly, in order to bring out the genuinely local dimension of trans-locality and transnationalism in town twinning, the investigation addresses small towns, the assumption being that the nexus between localizing practices and trans-local references in them can best be observed in municipal settings where twinning has to rely mainly on civic activism. This is the case in small towns but not in bigger cities where twinning follows directions imposed by the political administration. Secondly, the methodology implicit in this aims at fleshing out the local circumscriptions of twinning, whence participant observation of twinning-related events feed into the investigation along with interviews with practitioners, and occasionally the analysis of texts and documents such as speeches, event schedules, and documentation and application materials.

The book is divided into nine chapters. After this introduction, the second chapter deals with the history and historiography of town twinning, arguing that the aim of European integration with which town twinning is mainly associated has to be historically differentiated, and its accounts historically contextualized in order to grasp the specifics of the contemporary moment when town twinning is explicitly addressed by the EU as a major site for European integration on the level of political culture. The next three chapters are devoted to unfolding the conceptual frame of the present book and to characterizing the basic structures and elements of town twinning as they emerge from a complex interplay of localizing practices and trans-local (including transnational) references in those practices. Finally, chapters 6 to 9 are concerned with the politicity of small-town twinning on three conceptual levels: political culture; understandings of Europe implicit in twinning practices; and idioms of cultural difference that inform twinning. The following two sections of this introductory chapter lay out the empirical, methodological, and epistemological foundations of the study and give a brief account of how the shape of the research project changed over time before crystallizing in the present book. In this way the book’s major themes and theorems will be introduced.

1 Empirical references and methodology

This section will explain the general methodological approach adopted, focusing especially on the interactions between different types of data such as documents, observation data, ethnographic interviews, and semi-structured interviews. The empirical basis of the book consists of ethnographies, interviews and document data stemming from research in a total of 12 small towns in Hesse. Apart from document analyses most of the data have thus been gathered through conversations with the people involved in transnational activities in these 12 towns, and through participation in and observations of those activities. Conversations with people from the partner towns have been somewhat more sporadic and were often framed by transnational events and personal encounters organized by the twin town networks in which I took part, although some interviews were also conducted with practitioners in the partner towns whose role was significant for the present research. Quite apart from practical considerations, namely that it would have required a far larger project scope in terms of time and funding to systematically interview practitioners in all the twinned towns involved (altogether around 70), there is a systematic rationale behind this apparently self-limiting project design.

I have been less interested in covering the socio-cultural and political implications of town twinning in their entirety, or conversely in viewing town twinning as merely exemplary of much larger processes of transnationalization, than in seizing on moments where transnational spaces materialize in what would appear to be strictly localized sites, like those of small ‘provincial’ towns in Hesse. The present book thus differs from studies that take the transnational promise of town twinning at face value, and fashion themselves accordingly as evaluations of the transnational ‘success’ of their activities (cf. Wagner, 1995, 1998; Lottermann, 2009, 2010). In contrast to these, I propose to step back from such political presuppositions, and try to understand how locality is imbricated with trans-locality, including transnationalism, but not restricted to it. At the same time, and in contrast to research that approaches town twinning from a historical point of view as one specific trans-local and transnational practice among others (Clarke, 2009, 2010), the book will attempt to flesh out what is particular about town twinning as a practice that localizes trans-locality and brings transnationalism into people’s homes. It thus aims to be an intricate description of the social situatedness of the practices involved in town twinning as they reach forth from, and thereby make use of, their local settings, resources, and networks.

The book follows a conceptually based methodological strategy. Although decisions about which concepts to foreground in order to present the data have only been materializing during the course of the investigation, the study does not resemble a ‘pure’ grounded theory approach, which classically presupposes the absence of explicit hypotheses at the beginning (cf. Glaser/Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1998). In contrast to such aconceptual rigor, the strategy embarked on here involves an understanding of methodology as being conceptually generated, stabilized, and tested. It derives conceptual theorems from the social-scientific discussions about active citizenship and transnationalism as these discussions have gained resonance in the course of the empirical investigation. By ‘conceptual theorems’ I mean presuppositions in regard to the relative significance of various social aspects of town twinning for evaluating how it becomes relevant for political culture in the EU as a transnational political structure and project. These presuppositions refer to the role of the embeddedness of town twinning practices in social and associational contexts, and more specifically to the relation between localization and the trans-locality of town twinning practices (Chapter 3); to the ways that town twinning organizes transnational sociality in varying (trans-)local contexts (Chapter 4); to particular modes of local and trans-local sociation and association in town twinning, like gift-giving, hospitality, and friendship (Chapter 5); to the different strategies and instruments that twinnings use in order to contribute to a democratic and European political culture (Chapter 6); to the ways that taken-for-granted twinning practices are linked to abstract understandings of Europe (Chapter 7); and to the role that the articulation and transformation of cultural difference has played in town twinning, as well as to the current challenges created by global cultures (Chapter 8). These six theorems will be discussed in the respective chapters in conceptual terms on the basis of the current state of research – which also implies that the latter will not be presented in a self-contained chapter of its own but introduced along with, and thus help generate, the conceptual theorems. These will then be projected as interpretive grids onto the data in order to help analyze and present them.

Moreover, the sample of altogether 12 towns allows for an analysis and presentation of the data and their interpretation through a structuring comparison. By ‘structuring comparison’ I refer to a method of comparing that does not treat the cases to be compared as total social entities but highlights different aspects, namely, the aforementioned conceptual theorems, of town twinning, which became apparent in the course of the investigation, by fleshing out their specificities vis-à-vis one another. That is to say, at issue here is not an inter-town comparison as such but a comparison of the different social logics of town twinning as they form varying, and sometimes contradictory, assemblages in the towns under study. Therefore, the comparative approach will involve different sets of comparisons as the book proceeds through its conceptual parcours.

In terms of methodology, I have mainly used interviewing and ethnography, or more specifically, ‘focused ethnography’ (Knoblauch, 2001). That is to say, a social field is not explored in order to delimit its cultural borders but to answer certain questions that have been generated by sociologically elaborated conceptual theorems. The main theorem, as discussed in the third chapter, concerns ‘localization.’ According to Knoblauch, focused ethnography thus presents itself as a genuinely sociological variation of ethnography that, unlike ethnography in ethnology, does not necessitate presupposing a cultural distance between the observer and the observed but rather a certain proximity and familiarity between them since it is only through such familiarity that focused questions can be articulated and processed.

In the course of the events that I was observing, I also had the opportunity to interview people. Methodologically speaking, these interview activities should be regarded as a kind of extended fieldwork or participant-observation method, as the point was not so much to conduct clean interviews in a clearly circumscribed and carefully sanitized interview situation but rather to do ‘participant listening.’ According to the anthropologist Martin Forsey (2010), ethnography, especially in western societies, should avoid applying the fieldwork methodology of classical ethnology to a situation which is not characterized by the materialization of culture in one site, but rather by a dispersal of cultural references to places and spaces that escape direct visual observability. This makes it necessary to complement, if not replace, participant observation by interview practices. Summarizing arguments propounded by Hockey (2002), Forsey himself contends that ‘the disembodied experience of the research interview can resemble a world in which relationships are often conducted in the bounded time slots of phone or email contact, or in and around cultural activities that transcend local and global spaces.’ (Forsey, 2010, p. 568) This renders fairly accurately the situation I found when ‘observing’ events organized by the twinning committees, events which were compressed into short time periods of just a few days while at the same time allowing complex social and cultural referentialities to emerge that clearly transcended the time and space of when and where they took place.³

This facet of the interviews, namely of them being aspects of the situations under investigation rather than strictly confined data-gathering instruments, surfaced also at certain points concerning their technical recording. Most of the interviews were recorded on MP3-files. However, during the ethnographies situational characteristics materialized that made it not only technically impossible, but also methodologically implausible, to use recording devices. Picture an interview situation such as the one that occurred at the Hessian Family Day which was hosted by the town of Lahnfels in June 2013. The Hessian Family Day is an exhibition of family-related political, civic, and commercial initiatives and services rotating between Hessian towns. The local twinning committee had invited representatives from Lahnfels’s partner towns to this event to enable them to present political initiatives and social arrangements in their communities, relating to the theme of the family, to a public gathering in Lahnfels and perceived as being ‘Hessian.’ This gave me the opportunity to talk to five delegates from the partner towns while they were representing their municipalities. One of those interviews with the representative of the Turkish partner town took place literally on the spot, that is, with him and me sitting on a bench behind the table where brochures from his town were on display. From time to time he interrupted the interview in order to talk to passers-by who were interested in the brochures, and to greet friends.

I am inclined to interpret these interruptions not as a breaking off from the so-called interview situation (in fact, he only turned away from me and to his friends or those interested in the brochures, with me still listening in) but rather as moments in which the genuine locality of that situation surfaced most, tangibly structuring our conversation and providing my interlocutor with in-vivo examples he then used in explaining his work to me. The interview before that, conducted with the mayor of the Italian partner town, had taken place in the public reception area of the Lahnfels mayor’s office in front of which the partner towns had arranged their booths, with the general public and individuals associated with the twinning committee (or with other bodies) streaming in and out. First, New Orleans jazz music, and then German-style brass tunes coming from bands moving around the town filled the air through the open front doors while the conversation was unfolding. Any audio recording, though technically progressive, was not only impossible but would have been at best a ridiculous attempt at isolating a situation whose major characteristic was its powerful, localized contextuality.

The last interview, with the mayor of the partner town in Luxemburg, took place in a nearby pub, where we came to sit in a spatial constellation (next to each other on a bench and with no table) that did not even allow any physical place for a recording device. In my view, these contextualizations of the so-called interview situation should not be interpreted as methodical deficiencies, but rather as the condition for the realization of the interviews. When doing on-spot interviewing, or in Forsey’s (2010) expression, ‘participant listening,’ one is well advised to adapt to, and reflect on, the situation instead of automatically rejecting it as a methodological shortcoming. In such situations, I took written notes and turned them into an interview report after returning to my (situation-wise neatly circumscribed) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Local Transnationalism in a ‘Europe for Citizens’
• 2. European Visions: On the Political Historiography of Town Twinning
• 3. Small-town Transnationals: The (Trans-)locality of Town Twinning
• 4. Making Towns Meet: The Social Logics of (Trans-)local Encounters
• 5. Trans-local Friendships: The Microstructures of Twinning Sociability
• 6. Organizing (Civic) Culture: The Making of Europeans
• 7. (Trans-)local Economies: Imaginary Understandings of Europe
• 8. Aesthetic and Cultural Idioms of Difference in Town Twinning
• 9. Conclusion: Town Twinning and the Ethics of Exchange
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index