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Town Twinning in Europe. Understanding Manifestations and Strategies

ABSTRACT This paper categorizes various schemes of cross-border collaboration of European border twin towns. It is methodologically based on field work and data collected during semi-structured interviews with local actors involved in twinning processes, and answers why towns integrate across borders, and how it happens. The article presents empirical developments of twinning in Europe, categorizes it, and finally generalizes the phenomenon. It claims that the grand theories of European integration are too general to understand this process. Also, discipline-based approaches often do not suffice to grasp its peculiarity. It comes to the conclusion that theorizing about European town twinning is a challenging task, due to its multidimensional and varied character, as twinning results from various conditions in various times and places in Europe. Forms and manifestations of twinning differ significantly, resulting from the environment created by the relations between neighboring states (intergovernmentally driven by the center’s policies) as well as the local response (usually following a neo-functional logic). Consequently, towns employ one of the three strategies of twinning: “integration founders,” “integration forerunners” or “good marriages.”