Aesthetic and Cultural Idioms of Difference in Town Twinning

Abstract

This penultimate chapter takes up another implication of The Civic Culture as it moves on to a more detailed elaboration of the diverse notions of ‘difference’ that are implied in the political culture of town twinning activities, that the present book is investigating (cf. Chapter 6). The political embeddedness of town twinning, which has referred historically both to ‘classical’ international relations and intra-European relations among nation-states, revolves around changing understandings of differences within Europe that town twinning is intended to address. In particular, two sets of differences, those which obtain between European societies, and those prevailing between the societies and ‘their’ minorities, will be introduced in order to undertake a reconstruction of the political implications of town twinning as rooted in social practices that respond to the European Union’s ‘variable geography’ (Díez Medrano, 2003, p. 1).