Town twinning is increasingly being used to establish strategic international trade links. For example, when Nottingham City Council in Britain considered installing a tram network in the 1990s, it consulted experts in its twin city of Karlsruhe, which has one of the largest and most efficient tram networks in Germany. A better list was drawn up by the Association of Polish Cities, which in January 1998 and at the end of 2000 conducted studies on the level of development of international cooperation between cities and municipalities throughout Poland (Brzozowska, 1998); Hałas and Porawski, 2003). These and other data from some regional reports or publications were used to conduct a survey. Considerable differences in the lists of twin cities in Poland, based on different sources, show that we must consider the absolute value of the data with extreme caution and take into account only the general nature of international connections. 38The highest real cooperation effects are characteristic of partnerships with Western European countries. Their share in real trade is much higher than that of the total number of notified agreements. The best results of cooperation in the field of trade in goods and people have been achieved in the framework of partnerships with German, Dutch, French and Danish municipalities. Human exchanges are bilateral in nature, whereas the flow of goods has hitherto been dominated by the direction of highly developed countries towards Poland. It is typical of most twinning between partners from developing and developed countries (Laurent, 1991); Schep et al. 1995; Hewitt 2000). The Polish authorities` support to their foreign partners is limited to administrative units in Eastern Europe, inhabited by a Polish minority, and to individual rescue missions organised to help partners from neighbouring countries in the event of a natural disaster (e.g. B Czech communities after the floods of 2002).

Town twinning is sometimes carried out for political purposes. The Hungarian city of Gyöngyös was associated with the Azerbaijani city of Shusha in 2013 and signed the partnership agreement with representatives of the Azerbaijani government; Hungary de jure recognized Shusha as part of Azerbaijan, although it was controlled at the time and until 2020 by the Armenian armed forces and the unrectified Arzakh. [59] In 2003, city councillors in Preston, England, attempted to partner in the name of solidarity with the Palestinian city of Nablus. [60] 28 In trans-regional international twinnings, the obstacles to cooperation were ”long distances” and communication difficulties due to a lack of knowledge of the partner`s language. . . .