The Twinning of the World: Sister Cities in Geographic and Historical Perspective

Abstract

Absstract Although there are unmistakable signals of the advent of a truly planetary society in the late Twentieth Century, the subject has received nothing like the scholarly attention devoted to the development of a world economy or various problems in the global ecosystem. The intent of this paper is to begin redressing the imbalance by exploring the evolution and geography of an especially symptomatic people-to-people movement. The findings generally confirm the widely accepted core-periphery model of our contemporary world-system. Since 1950, more than 11,000 pairs of sister cities in some 159 countries have entered into twinning agreements. This form of long-distance social interaction is novel by virtue of its mode of origin through local initiative and of the potential involvement of the entire non-infant population in a great variety of shared activities and exchange visits. This exploratory account traces the beginnings and diffusion of this rapidly growing phenomenon over space and time from an initial zone in Western Europe (still the region of most intense activity) to other advanced countries and eventually to the former Eastern Bloc nations and most Third World countries. The choice of country and specific community within it is not a random process; historical connections, shared economic, cultural, recreational, and ideological concerns, similar or identical placenames, and, to a certain extent, the friction of distance, all play meaningful roles. The methodology is descriptive, i.e., the plotting of events by date and location and drawing certain inferences from the resulting patterns. Although twinning for the most part reinforces and humanizes the political and economic interests of the participating nation-states, a significant minority of these relationships promote ideological and humanitarian programs that may be at odds with official policy. Measuring the direct and indirect contribution of twinning to the creation of transnational commonalities of thought and social behavior in an increasingly interdependent late twentieth-century world remains a task for future investigation.

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