Le jumelage des villes comme facteur d’impulsion à des flux internationaux de biens et de personnes. L’exemple de la Pologne

Abstract

Town-twinning is a form of Municipal International Cooperation (MIC). It enables local communities to share experience and innovation in the field of town and municipality management techniques and encourages people to follow the tendency to remove political barriers. It generates flows of goods and people as a part of an exchange initiated by local governments and organised with their assistance. In the past decade, the international cooperation of local governments in Poland generated mainly the exchange of information, goods and people with Western Europe and Scandinavian countries (64% of all links in 2001), mainly with Germany, France, Holland and Denmark. The main directions of goods and information flows were from highly developed countries to Poland. Only human (cultural) exchange was really bilateral. If we do not take into account the border cooperation with neighbouring countries, the institutional connection links with Eastern, Southern and Central Europe were very weak. This shows and confirms the dominance of parallel connections in this part of Europe, whose strength decreases going eastwards. These flows contributed to the integration of Poland with Western Europe. The most common barrier was lack of financial resources, and the most frequently chosen partners were richer ones. Private contacts with local leaders had the highest importance in linking the partners. This shows that the directions of twinned municipality exchanges are above all the result, and not the source, of existing social and economic relationships.