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.

The book will be useful for scholars and students particularly searching for an overview of town-twinning practices, but also for readers interested in how social processes are intertwined with the political, economic and cultural project of European integration. It is an empirically rich and theoretically dense read, reaching across different disciplinary fields of sociology, anthropology and political science. (Ines Wagner, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 54 (4), 2016)

Autorentext

Andreas Langenohl is Professor of Sociology at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. His research and teaching interests encompass modernization theory and it critique, notions of the public sphere, transnationalism, social studies of finance and the epistemology of the social sciences.

Inhalt

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