Twinning for solidarity: building affective communities in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan Revolution

Abstract

In the British popular imagination, ‘twinning’ is perhaps most commonly associated with mayoral delegations, civic ceremonies and the post-war peacebuilding project in Europe. However, the model and practice of twinning has also been utilised to develop an impressive array of political, economic and cultural relationships that connect geographically remote communities and institutions all across the globe. Among these relationships are a number of twinnings that have emerged as a part of wider movements to extend political solidarity to peoples and communities facing forms of tyranny and persecution. Despite the renewed interest in the politics and practice of solidarity, ‘twinning for solidarity’ has been scarcely addressed in academic research to date. This paper seeks to redirect the scholarly gaze towards this phenomenon by taking a closer look at transnational relationships that were forged across British and Nicaraguan localities in the aftermath of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution. Building on an empirical base of research undertaken over 3 years, it promises to (a) trace why and how ‘twinning’ emerged within the broader repertoire of solidarity initiatives at this time; and (b) explore just what twinning has and might yet achieve in the particular context of political solidarity.

Introduction

The concept of ‘twinning’ aims to capture a range of different practices involving the establishment of sustained links between communities usually, though not exclusively, located in different nation-states. As a social practice forged on the basis of cooperation and mutual assistance, twinning has early antecedents in the writings of 19th century anarchists, internationalists and social reformers from Zamenhof to Kropotkin. ¹ Notwithstanding its mixed and somewhat radical lineage, the practice of twinning has been most readily associated with post-war peacebuilding project in Europe. The origins of the European post-war twinning movement lie, in part, with a special meeting of French and German mayors at Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, in 1948. ² This conference led to the formation of the International Union of Mayors for Franco-German Understanding in 1950, and September of that year witnessed the signing of a twinning agreement between Ludwigsburg, Germany, and Montbeliard, France. The 1950s and 1960s saw the establishment of numerous twinning links between localities in Western Europe, alongside a number of broader regional integrationist projects beginning with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950. The twinnings of the post-war period reflected an impetus to promote peace and goodwill among communities torn apart by recent conflict. ³ They emerged from a period of relative political consensus, characterised by a high degree of cooperation and unity between local and national governments, an elevated role for mayors and a willing engagement from citizens at the local level, many of whom opened their homes and communities to guests from the continent.

There has been much interesting and engaged scholarship on the post-war twinning project. Within this, twinning has been conceptualised in terms of peacebuilding, ⁴ municipal internationalism ⁵ and even neo-imperialism. ⁶ However, an excessive focus on the intra-European experience of twinning can obscure the other directions and trajectories that the practice has taken. In the United States for instance, the model of twinning was emulated but with a new lexicon and character. Thus, ‘sister city’ partnerships emerged, initially promoted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and premised on the notion of ‘citizen diplomacy’. ⁷ In Japan meanwhile, the shimai toshi tradition became entrenched in both sub-national diplomacy and peacebuilding initiatives. ⁸ More to the point, careful observation reveals the ways that the model and practice of twinning has broadened, deepened and transformed from the post-war period. It has broadened in the sense that it has extended far beyond Europe. In 1991, a study by Wilbur Zelinsky estimated that there were around 11,000 pairs of twin towns/sister cities across 159 countries that had entered into formal partnerships of some kind. ⁹ This figure easily doubled in the following two decades. These formal links, normally established by ‘pacts’ or ‘memoranda of understanding’ between municipal or local governments, have been complemented by a range of more informal partnerships, friendship links and project-based activities involving a wide web of local institutions. The practice has therefore deepened in the sense that it is no longer just towns or cities that form relationships under the banner of ‘twinning’ but within them schools, hospitals, churches, trade unions and businesses. Beyond this, it is also possible to observe that twinning has transformed in various ways. In the first instance, it has graduated from a project of state-led cultural diplomacy to a much more diffuse set of practices whereby community and grass-roots associations of various stripes determine the character of the partnership. As such, twinning has gradually opened to a range of different agendas beyond those of peace and diplomacy. It has undergone a process of gradual democratisation as more and more civil society groups have successfully sought to meld and mould the twinning model to meet their own aspirations, agendas and passions. ¹⁰

Beginning with the proliferation of UK-Nicaragua links in the 1980s, there has been a gradual uptick in the number of twinnings that have emerged in order to assist overseas communities facing – inter alia – foreign intervention, dictatorship and land incursions by hostile powers. These twinnings are usually couched in the language of ‘solidarity’ and form part of a wider repertoire of what social movement scholars call ‘claim-making actions’ or ‘contentious performances’. ¹¹ In the 1990s, for example, the practice of linking with communities under siege was taken up by British anti-apartheid activists alongside some of their more well-known strategies like boycotts and divestment campaigns. More recently, the practice of twinning has emerged in the context of solidarity actions with Cuba ¹² as well as Palestinian struggles against annexation and everyday militarism in the Occupied West Bank. ¹³ In spite of the burgeoning examples, the political work of twinning and its particular manifestations as a mode of solidarity have been scarcely examined by academic writers.

This paper goes some way towards filling that gap. It seeks to redirect the scholarly gaze towards the phenomenon of ‘solidarity twinning’ by taking a closer look at transnational relationships that were forged across British and Nicaraguan localities in the aftermath of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution. The paper makes novel empirical and conceptual advances. Empirically, it traces why and how the practice of twinning emerged within the broader repertoire of solidarity initiatives at this time. Conceptually, the paper connects somewhat disparate debates from geography, philosophy and the sociology of emotions to discuss just what twinning can, has and might still achieve in the context of political solidarity. More specifically, through the UK-Nicaragua example, it seeks to demonstrate how the normative obligations of reciprocity and ‘we-thinking’ embodied in solidarity twinning depend upon the successful production of affective intensities and emotional discourses that unite communities in solidum. In this way, the paper advances existing conceptual work by highlighting not just the normative and descriptive properties of solidarity but also its affective and emotional dimension.

The paper draws upon on 3 years of detailed desk-based and archival research into the evolution of British twinning practice; as well as transcripts from a dozen semi-structured interviews with individuals that have been closely involved with setting up and sustaining UK-Nicaragua twinning and friendship links, in particular. These interviews included both British and Nicaraguan participants. As such, some of the quotations have been translated from the original Spanish into English. Participants have been anonymised and all identifying biographical data has been removed as a precaution in light of the increasingly volatile political environment that has assailed Nicaragua since 2018.

Twinning for solidarity: towards a framework for understanding

The word ‘solidarity’ derives from the Latin solidum. Laitinen and Pessi ¹⁴ explain that in Roman Law, obligatio in solidum described the joint and unlimited liability of each member of a family or other community to pay common debts. Since the end of the 18th century, the principle of solidarity, denoting a mutual responsibility between the individual and society has been broadened beyond the law of obligations, and been applied in the fields of morality, society and politics. ¹⁵ Since this time, solidarity has been described in both a descriptive and a normative sense. ¹⁶ In its normative sense, solidarity usually consists of mutual obligations that bind two parties into the promise of coming to one another’s aid. The normative thrust of solidarity thus extends beyond a focus on the well-being of the other and is instead centred on the idea of mutual care and reciprocity between all parties. In this respect, solidarity differs fundamentally from charity or altruism. The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano articulates the difference well, claiming, ‘I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it’s humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the other’. ¹⁷

When used descriptively, the term often draws attention to the shared characteristics or common ground that exists between members of a group. Historically, solidarities forged on the basis of proximity and homophily – attraction based upon cultural, political and social likeness – have been the basis of a wide variety of political movements from working class rebellions and struggles for national self-determination to white supremacist and fascist organisations. However, proximity and homophily are not pre-requisites for solidarity and a growing number of scholarly texts attest to the ways that solidarities have also been forged across geographic, linguistic, material, gendered and racialised difference. ¹⁸ Forging solidarity across radical difference is no mean feat. Developing such relationships is extremely challenging because it generally demands a willingness to listen, learn and engage openly with alternative ways of knowing and being in the world. It requires all parties to look inward and to ask themselves difficult questions about the ways that existing structures produce inequalities of wealth, prestige and voice. It is through such practices of open listening, collective diagnosis and critical reflection that solidarities can become productive and creative. ¹⁹ Implicit in this, but still relatively underacknowledged in the existing literature on solidarity is the different registers at which and through which solidaristic connections are forged. Open or apophatic listening, for example, requires the suspension of pre-existing social categories and closer attunement to the corporeal manifestations of ideas, aspirations or experiences. Yet, such listening practices have received much closer attention among scholars of deliberative democracy and performance studies ²⁰ than those working on solidarity.

Moreover, within the existing work on solidarity, ‘it has repeatedly been supposed that factual common ground is sufficient justification for normative obligations’. ²¹ However, deductions of this nature miss a crucial step. There are plenty of groups that do share factual common ground – a nationality, place of work, socio-economic class, religion – but do not feel compelled to enter into a bond or promise of mutual aid. The questions that we ought to ask then, are perhaps as follows: What lies beneath? What are the quintessentially human, emotive responses that lead to empathy between disparate collectives and individuals? Just how is common ground established and transformed into something with normative force? It is here that feelings of love, care, empathy and amity often play a key part in driving the commitments between parties and in constituting a disposition of togetherness. Put in this way, solidarity is best understood not just as a descriptive term and normative obligation: it also comprises an affective orientation.

The concept of affect offers an approach to history, culture and politics that places analytical focus on extra-linguistic forces such as feelings, moods and intensities. In pointing to the forces that can act below, beyond or upon individual cognition, affect gives a name to the sometimes slippery ‘infra-empirical’ factors ²² that drive our aversions and attachments, with corresponding political effects. Numerous scholarly works have sought to elucidate the relevance of affect for global politics. ²³ Among these, recent scholarship on ‘affective communities’ offers the most promising insights for deepening our understanding of solidarity twinning and particularly the ways in which these transnational constellations of individuals may be drawn together to think, feel and act in concert on common concerns. The idea of affective communities aims to highlight the ways in which social clusters or collectivities can be produced and sustained by shared emotional bonds. ²⁴ Such clusters can be mobilised at any and all levels of politics and society. They may emerge in a relatively fleeting fashion, embodied in outpourings of rage, jubilation or shock in response to a political event such as a terror attack, police killing, economic crisis or election result. However, these clusters can also take more staid and enduring forms such as those of national communities whose feelings of unity are renewed periodically through commemorative rituals and events. As Emma Hutchison ²⁵ and Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa ²⁶ both emphasise, the making and unmaking of affective communities is intimately bound up with matrices of power and practices of representation. In other words, these communities of feeling do not emerge from nowhere: they are fashioned, tempered and targeted by particular activating discourses, visualities or frames that work over mind and body, body and mind, to impel, induce and oblige. In this way, affective and emotional responses emerge from the social context that they are a part of. However, they also produce or (re)constitute that social environment, by helping ‘to inform where, how and with whom individuals belong’. ²⁷

When we conceive of solidarity twinnings in light of the discussion above, several key observations come to the fore. Firstly, solidarity is a distinct type of social relation founded on reciprocity, mutuality and ‘we-thinking’. The latter implies a break with altruistic or charitable actions which reify ‘otherness’ and instead emphasises apophatic listening and collective practice. Twinnings that stake a basis in solidarity should thus seek to embody these normative ideals. Secondly, forging solidarity between members of radically different local constituencies is a challenging and interminable process. We should therefore expect twinnings that are founded with aspirations of solidarity to be particularly attendant to questions of power, privilege and positionality as a matter of course. Thirdly, the recognition that solidarity is not merely a descriptive and normative concept but that it also has an affective quality is an important qualifier; one that helps us understand how everyday, micro-level interactions and responses connect to broader movements, ideologies and campaigns. Closer attention to the interplay between affect and discourse/representation can provide clues as to just how solidarity twinnings come to be. In other words, how affective entanglements of – for example – love, respect and care can be mobilised to underwrite and fuel the normative obligations that bind remote communities together in solidum.

These conceptual cues help to inform the empirical analysis that follows. In Part 3 below, the paper turns to examine the emergence of twinning within the broader repertoire of solidarity initiatives in the wake of The Sandinista Revolution. The analysis pays careful attention to the importance of the affective and emotional connections that were forged in the wake of the Revolution and which ultimately underpinned commitments to ‘twin’. Far from purporting to articulate a unified theory of political solidarity in the tradition of scholars such as Kurt Bayertz ²⁸ and Sally Scholz, ²⁹ the analysis presented below instead calls for sensitivity to some of the inevitable disjunctures between the high ideals of solidarity work ‘in theory’ and the messy, imperfect and often improvised nature of solidarity work ‘in practice’.

Twinning for solidarity with Nicaragua

As Dan La Botz eloquently writes, Nicaragua is a place that has long felt the burden of being a small country in a strategic location. ³⁰ Occupying a triangular expanse of land between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, Nicaragua has served as a significant sea and land route for international commercial interests since at least the era of the California Gold Rush. ³¹ For the most-part of the 20th century, the country was ruled by the Somoza family dynasty, which was in turn backed by US interests. From 1936, Anastasio Somoza García exercised power either directly as president or indirectly through carefully chosen puppet rulers. After his death he was succeeded by one of his sons, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who served both as President and Director of the National Guard, giving him absolute political and military control over Nicaragua. Somoza Debayle concentrated wealth and prestige in the hands of his family and he took extremely repressive measures against the political opposition and protestors. When a huge earthquake shook the country and destroyed large parts of the capital city of Managua in 1972, Somoza appropriated millions in international relief funding to shore up his own personal fortune. Years of despotism, corruption and dispossession were among the precipitating factors for the 1979 popular uprising which brought the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front or FSLN) to power. Invoking the legacy of the martyred peasant hero Sandino, the FSLN formed a Council (or Junta) of National Reconstruction and initiated a sweeping process of economic reform, including investments in healthcare, infrastructure and a mass literacy programme. The FSLN’s transformative policy agenda was widely welcomed by large parts of the international community. The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), for example, offered public praise for the new literacy programme and Oxfam published a short book entitled, Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example which sought to underline the positive social gains of the revolution. ³² Emerging against a regional panorama of brutal right-wing military regimes, vast social inequality and restricted political participation, Nicaragua’s agenda of reform was all the more striking.

However, through the prism of Cold War foreign policy, the FSLN was constituted as a ‘Communist threat’ materialising alarmingly close to US borders. Whilst the Carter administration’s approach to new Nicaraguan government was one of moderate accommodation through aid and dialogue, from 1981 onwards Republican President Ronald Reagan took a more hardline approach, instituting an economic blockade and authorising the Central Intelligence Agency to begin financing and training irregular forces of contrarrevolucionarios (counter-revolutionaries or contras) with the aim of destabilising and ultimately overthrowing the Sandinistas. ³³ Contra tactics included disrupting trade and economic supply lines across the country, attacks on public services – including health centres and schools – as well as acts of violence and intimidation directed towards civilian populations. The civil war waged on in Nicaragua for over a decade. Between 1979 and 1990 there were some 30,000 deaths, with 250,000 left internally displaced and at least twice as many forced to leave the country as refugees. ³⁴

The escalating situation in Nicaragua was followed closely by international audiences. As Christian Helm describes, the FSLN’s ‘image campaign’ was a key ingredient for mobilising transnational audiences to its favour. ³⁵ From 1981, the Government of National Reconstruction issued a new weekly edition of their flagship daily newspaper, Barricada. Barricada Internacional was published in Spanish and English to facilitate international circulation. ³⁶ It emphasised the sweeping nature of the Sandinista’s policy reforms, their promotion of a mixed economy at home, as well as the government’s position of non-alignment in international affairs. In this way, the FSLN managed to offset propaganda issued by the Reagan administration and US allies, which had been picked up and replicated via mainstream Western media. They offered seemingly authentic voices and information ‘from the ground’ and a discourse that, to some extent, transcended Cold War bipolarity. As a result, an incredibly broad coalition of supporters rallied to their cause and a transnational solidarity network was born, with the participation of many national and local activist groups in Europe, North America and the wider Latin American region. Many novel acts of witnessing, claim-making and awareness-raising were creatively trialled and repurposed by these actors, including the international solidarity brigades, ‘protective accompaniment’ and solidarity twinning. While the two former strategies have received quite extensive scholarly discussion, ³⁷ the latter remains conspicuous in its absence from the existing historiography of the Revolution. By 1994, 17 twinning relationships had been established between localities in the UK and Nicaragua, with hundreds of similar examples across mainland Europe and the United States. ³⁸ The sections that follow map the emergence of UK-Nicaragua twinning, taking into account its affective underpinnings, and provide a tentative analysis of its promise and pitfalls as a mode of solidarity.

Affective entanglements in the wake of the revolution

The vast majority of those involved in the initial establishment of UK-Nicaragua solidarity twinnings first travelled to the Central American state as international volunteers (‘internacionalistas’) in the early 1980s. While some were independent travellers, many visited the country as a part of international brigades organised by solidarity collectives such as Witness for Peace, Peace Brigades International (PBI), TecNica and the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign (NSC). These visits often involved a combination of construction work, coffee-picking and assisting in schools or healthcare facilities. For many of these individuals the experience would prove powerfully emotive and even life-changing. One former internacionalista described their experience in the following way:

It was the time of the contra war and you could hear shooting at night. My host used to say “don’t worry, it’s just the campesinos shooting at a cow in the distance” but I’m sure he was just trying to reassure us because there were always fresh graves in the graveyard that we walked past each day. So, it was a very moving experience for me. I’d never seen citizens armed like that, citizens who I felt that I could actually support somehow; and, I’d never heard such eloquence and from people who were stood - barefoot and wearing perhaps what was their only item of clothing - talking so knowledgeably about what had happened to them, about politics. . . ³⁹

For this individual and many others that were interviewed, participation in the brigades forced them to reckon with uncomfortable questions of power, privilege and positionality. Work in the fields, schools and health centres exposed them to the extreme deprivation that characterised everyday life for the majority of Nicaraguans. Meanwhile, the country’s fertile volcanic terrains and stunning natural vistas were haunted by the persistent undulation of violence, loss and death. Exposure to these acute material conditions elicited corporeal responses of shock, discomfiture and shame, an experience that can be better understood with reference to Linda Åhäll and Sianne Ngai’s work on ‘ugly feelings’. ⁴⁰ As these scholars argue, ugly feelings or negative affective intensities can be richly generative, prompting reflexivity and action. Indeed, the deep-seated unease felt by the internacionalistas when confronted with the realities of their own relative wealth and dispensation spurred them to find ways of ‘making sense’ of the conditions and the challenges that surrounded them. They began to read keenly about Nicaragua’s history and accelerated efforts to perfect their Spanish so that they could access speeches, manifestos and other materials published by the FSLN. This burgeoning literature helped them to frame and situate Nicaragua’s story within larger revolutionary narratives of violence, dispossession and colonisation at the hands of foreign powers: from the encomiendas of the Spanish and the racialised stratification, division and conquest of the Atlantic Coast by the British to the neo-imperial ventures of the United States.

The internacionalistas were fed and sheltered in home-stays with local Nicaraguan families and this was important as many of them got to know their hosts on a very personal level. Camaraderies, friendships and even romances blossomed; and, in the words of one British participant, this growing sense of tenderness and familiarity ‘dissolved all the abstractions of “war,” “ideology” and “the developing world”’ ⁴¹ which had initially piqued their interest in the country. Dinner table conversations, pillow talk and impassioned political dialogues at local bars, churches, repurposed theatres and alcaldias (town halls) breathed life into the political axioms of Sandinismo and revealed to the internacionalistas a resilient and ambitious people that they came to regard as ‘fundamentally very much the same as us’. ⁴²

For the Nicaraguan hosts, interactions with outsiders who were broadly sympathetic to their armed struggle similarly helped to challenge preconceptions of the ‘West’ as a monolith and enemy. That their struggle had galvanised popular support internationally was both energising and emboldening, especially for those who had lost land, work and loved ones over years of conflict and displacement. Whilst the Nicaraguans frequently complained that the manual skills of the internationalistas left much to be desired, the presence of these foreign observers was nonetheless regarded as useful in withstanding the crippling economic effects of the US blockade. On the one hand, the scores of volunteers arriving in need of food and accommodation brought a much-needed cash injection to the conflict-beleaguered economy. On the other, their presence had symbolic purchase and helped to boost morale. As one Nicaraguan participant recalled,

[When they arrived, we realised that] Nicaragua had become a point of reference for the whole world . . . On the one hand [the internacionalistas] looked at us as a heroic people for having overthrown a fifty-year long dictatorship; on the other hand they looked at us in a spirit of solidarity since we were being violated, yet again, by US imperialism. Our country had been left in ruins after a bloody war, but the North American blockade really plunged us into misery. People of all ages and from all professions arrived to contribute and to help us rebuild the nation. It was remarkable. ⁴³

The presence of the foreign guests did not go unnoticed by the higher echelons of the Sandinista leadership, who, alongside their international ‘image work’, ⁴⁴ organised a series of solidarity conferences at home in the Nicaraguan capital city of Managua. Beginning in 1981, these conferences featured impassioned talks by high profile members of the Government of National Reconstruction who beseeched the visiting internacionalistas to spread word of what they had seen and experienced on their travels. ⁴⁵ And so they did. Some compiled (now emblematic) books or memoirs based on time spent with Sandinista militants. Key examples included Margaret Randall’s Sandino’s Daughters (1981), Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile (1987), David Kunzle’s Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua (1995) and Peter Wright’s Peasant Poets of Solentiname (1991). Others collaborated to produce and distribute new international translations of literary and auto-biographical works by Nicaraguan public intellectuals, theologians and militants, from Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli to the brothers, Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal. Altogether, these texts helped constitute a popular imaginary of the Revolution as an earnest quest for sovereignty and popular democratic social justice and signalled the emergence of a transnational affective community bound by a shared sense of hope, unity and purpose in the Nicaraguan struggle.

The presence of the internacionalistas in Nicaragua and the candour and hospitality of their Nicaraguan hosts enabled the formation of new relationships, affections, intensities and lines of connection that cut across stark socio-economic divides, eroded stereotypes and challenged expectations vis-a-vis the Other. As one commentator has put it, these face-to-face encounters offered a new beginning that retrieved the precious humanity of the Other and gave back to the struggling Nicaraguan people ‘a race. . . a sex. . .an age’. ⁴⁶ In this way, they laid the groundwork for future solidarity activities. Thus, when the international volunteers eventually returned home many of them remained committed to the revolutionary cause. Some established reading groups, where many of the aforementioned texts were circulated and avidly consumed. Others wrote newspaper articles, organised talks and participated in local fundraisers to help generate public awareness about the complicity of Western governments in the Contra War. The latter generated cash that could be donated to humanitarian organisations like the International Committee of the Red Cross which had maintained a presence in the country. Nonetheless, having been immersed in such a vibrant atmosphere of change and possibility in Nicaragua, many of the former internacionalistas remained underwhelmed by the short-term, unidirectional and somewhat fragmentary nature of the ‘solidarity’ actions they encountered back at home. As one of the British participants recollected, ‘it was clear that at the time that we were all kind of singing from the same hymn sheet – you would go to the events and see familiar faces from the other local solidarity groups: Chile, El Salvador etc. And that was fine but it wasn’t really taking it anywhere. . .’. ⁴⁷ The internacionalistas’ strong affective investment in the Nicaraguan communities that had housed and so-inspired them with their ‘Do-It-Yourself’ mode of politics unleashed an exigent desire to reframe and deepen the existing templates and deeds of solidarity. It was in precisely this context that initiatives to ‘twin’ with Nicaraguan communities emerged.

Twinning as solidarity: its promise and its pitfalls

The idea to twin as an act of solidarity with Nicaragua evolved, in part, from the idea of ‘town adoption’ which had been previously trialled with limited success in the context of Chile solidarity work. ⁴⁸ Town adoption had been conceived as an altruistic or other-regarding practice in which UK activists would focus their sights on a particular Chilean town or community and seek to safeguard them by monitoring and publicising human rights abuses. The logic of this was not dissimilar to the ‘boomerang effect’, a now-popular concept which has been used to describe the ways that transnational activism helps to restrict the brutality of oppressive regimes by channelling external scrutiny and pressure towards them. ⁴⁹ Despite the fact that the practices of town adoption and twinning both sought to connect communities transnationally, they were not equivalent in emphasis or scope. Where town adoption was premised on a vertical mode of social relation that charged one side with protecting the other, a decade or more later solidarity twinning instead sought to capture and engage with the anticolonial thinking that was emerging from Nicaragua and echoed globally in the discourse of the Non-Aligned Movement. ⁵⁰ As such, twinning was envisaged as a more horizontal relationship that would facilitate sustained forms of exchange and mutual assistance between paired communities. In ways that were directly reminiscent of works on apophatic listening, participants expressed a keen desire to ‘break with or suspend existing social categories’, ⁵¹ namely those that reified distance and difference between publics in the former imperial powers of the Global North and those in former colonies of the South. In this way, it was hoped that twinning would play its own subtle role in eroding established patterns of global hegemony. As one participant outlined:

We didn’t want to have a message of “look at the poor starving people over there”; we wanted it to be a mutual, supportive thing. At the time, for me, and for a lot of people, what was going on in Nicaragua was a very positive thing that’s hard to generalize about. I could see that change was possible and that was great, but you always risk - in a situation where you have one very poor country and one very wealthy country - a rather paternalistic approach. And we really wanted to avoid that. The idea of twinning helped with that in a way, because through twinning you can help to make the international links with communities more explicit, and you can actually see what’s going on out there. You don’t end up just giving money to an abstract or faraway place. Instead, through twinning you try to expose the realities of what other peoples’ lives are like. ⁵²

With these aspirations in mind, many former internacionalistas led the charge in reorganising their local reading groups and solidarity committees into long-lasting friendship and community linking associations.

Enlisting assistance from the Nicaraguan Consulate in London, the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign and the various friends they had left behind in Nicaragua, British solidarity activists made contact with receptive alcaldias and petitioned their own local councils to establish formal twinning ‘pacts’ that would enshrine the relationships at the level of subnational government for years to come. The very first UK-Nicaragua twinning to be signed into force by subnational governments was the link between the London Borough of Lambeth and the Caribbean coastal community of Bluefields. Established in 1984, the Lambeth-Bluefields link was followed within the year by new formal twinnings between Sheffield and Estelí, Bristol and Puerto Morazán, Liverpool and Corinto. More formal and informal twinnings followed in subsequent years, reaching a peak of 17 by the early 1990s.

Although the variable political composition of local authorities meant that it could not be achieved everywhere, there was strategic value to institutionalising the twinning links. The pacts between subnational levels of government lent greater international credibility and recognition to the Sandinistas who had been presented as an illegitimate ‘puppet’ regime by the Reagan administration. Successful overseas cooperation via municipal links contributed to the FSLN’s international image campaign through the process of ‘counter-framing’ ⁵³ in which the existing ‘schemata of interpretation’ ⁵⁴ that painted the FSLN as hard-line agents of Soviet-style Communism was successfully challenged and supplanted by day-to-day interactions that ‘normalised’ relations between British and Nicaraguan officials. It also did the work of ‘frame bridging’ ⁵⁵ by merging aspects of solidarity activism with similar twinning-related activities – namely exchanges, fundraising events and cultural celebrations. As such the solidarity activists were able to tap into new sentiment pools, thereby widening the group of international onlookers willing to stand up and challenge US military and economic aggression against Nicaragua. As one of the British twinning participants summarised,

[Twinning] got the kind of support that a solidarity group could really only dream of. . .Political solidarity is something we are not really used to seeing. But twinning on the other hand – for example supporting children in a nursery far away - is a part of our cultural stock in one way or another and we were able to reach and involve many more people through the twinning than we did in any other way. ⁵⁶

Taken together, the burgeoning constellation of UK local authorities and communities willing to take an interest and political stand in favour of Nicaragua signalled a growing divergence between the aspirations and values of local and national government, a phenomenon that some scholars have identified with ‘paradiplomacy’. Paradiplomacy is a convenient label for the international activities and foreign policy capacities of subnational political units. ⁵⁷ Under some circumstances, such activities can augment the position and power of the nation state. ⁵⁸ However, where subnational governments choose to bypass national directives or take an overtly contrarian stance towards them, it complicates the performance of national unity that is necessary for state claims to sovereignty. ⁵⁹ Viewed through this lens, the institutionalisation of solidarity twinnings between the UK and Nicaragua arguably sits among a number of examples of alternative diplomatic practices that transcend traditional state-centric modalities, open up the ‘black box’ of the nation state, and problematise claims about its ‘unitary’ nature. Most notably, their presence signalled variance and nonconformity with the Thatcher government’s approach to foreign policy. The British premier Margaret Thatcher had been a staunch ally and supporter of the Reagan administration and had roundly refused to condemn US activities in Nicaragua, even after the Iran-Contra scandal came to light in 1986.

Amid these gestures of political promise, the experiments with solidarity twinning also gave rise to several pitfalls and challenges. Unbroken communication between British and Nicaraguan localities proved extremely challenging. Handwritten letters, often imprecisely translated between English and Spanish sometimes took months to arrive by post, if they arrived at all. The cost of telecommunications was prohibitive for almost all of the Nicaraguan communities; and, for some of the more remote regions like Bluefields, the only way to communicate directly was via shortwave radio. Not only did this make it hard to respond quickly and effectively to new challenges, it also underlined the unevenness of the relationship between the localities. Emerging against the backdrop of the Contra war and the beginnings of the US blockade, many of the earliest activities to take place under the banner of ‘twinning’ were focussed on the immediate and acute material needs of the Nicaraguan communities. UK partners mobilised resources and machinery to donate to schools, hospitals and public utilities. Examples included glues, tacks and textiles for shoe-making which were purchased by the Leicester-Masaya Link Group and two large refuse trucks from Lambeth which were filled with household items and shipped to Bluefields. ⁶⁰ However, several twins soon ran into obstacles with donated household, agricultural and industrial equipment. Replacement parts were hard to get hold of in Nicaragua due to the economic blockade and often, the local communities there often did not have the technical know-how or available materials to improvise.

Moreover, the decision to focus on the more immediate material needs of the Nicaraguans soon gave rise to trepidation. There was growing concern, particularly among British participants, that some twinning activities had unwittingly come to resemble aid-giving or charity. And yet, at the same time, these participants also found it impossible to ignore the severe material deprivation that they encountered in their partner communities: a fact that was conveyed regularly through letters from friends and loved ones appealing for assistance with medication, basic goods and local infrastructure. Keen to resist the paternalist and colonial structures of ‘aid’, but unsure of just how to work across such stark socio-economic divides in a spirit of true equality, twinning associations called upon the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign to pool critical reflections and ‘best practice’. The NSC responded with the publication of several guidance documents for twinning. In one of them, a section subtitled ‘The pitfalls of twinning and linking - points to watch out for’ underlined with some force that, ‘[l]inking with Nicaragua is not a form of charity . . . any linking should be seen as being of mutual benefit and reciprocal in all but material assistance’. ⁶¹ The statement clarified that the new and emerging twinning arrangements should be premised on meaningful two-way exchange. However, the NSC’s wording was also carefully primed to acknowledge that the profound material inequalities between the twinned communities would inevitably shape what could be exchanged. Embodied in their normative formula then, was a kind of tacit compromise: UK communities should continue to provide material and technical assistance where possible, whilst Nicaraguan communities would contribute to the partnership in other ways: namely through the provision of political and cultural resources.

The NSC’s tacit compromise was not a difficult sell for the Nicaraguan partners, who could continue to appeal for the material assistance they desperately needed to help keep the Revolution – with its promises of social reform and improved living standards – on track. Moreover, as they keenly reminded their UK counterparts, when taken in a more holistic historical perspective, Nicaragua had ‘already contributed materially to the development of Europe through the linked processes of colonisation, forced labour, extractivism and industrialisation’. ⁶² In this sense, material assistance was figured not as ‘aid’ but in terms of an unsettled debt between core and periphery.

Neither was the NSC’s compromise a difficult sell for the UK partners who continued to vest an abundance of hope and optimism in the revolutionary process. With the Nicaraguan political transformation unfolding in parallel to Thatcherite reforms that were taking place across the UK, many of the British participants found themselves able to draw stark parallels between the commitments made to education, healthcare, social justice and community made by the Sandinistas, whose motto of ‘La solucion somos todos’ (the solution is all of us) jarred against Thatcher’s now infamous refrain, ‘There’s no such thing as society’. For these individuals, the Nicaraguan example gave life and possibility to an alternative vision of socio-political practice: one that was foregrounded not in individualism or nationalism qua Thatcherism, but rather in the power of collective endeavour and a solidaristic global spirit. As one UK participant summarised: ‘Obviously there was a massive imbalance in financial resources and ability to travel and things like that but we still thought it was a good idea [to twin] because we felt that there was just so much for us to learn as a society. . .’. ⁶³ In this respect, the relationships forged through twinning practice centred Nicaraguan communities not as ‘victims’ or ‘beneficiaries’ or but rather as partners capable of imparting moral, social and political wisdom.

Solidarity twinning in a shifting political landscape

The 40 years that have passed since the 1979 Revolution have seen remarkable political change at the local, national and global scales. The changes that have taken place include the electoral defeat of the Sandinista government in 1990 and the splintering of the revolutionary movement, the cessation of Cold War hostilities, the rise of the internet and social media, as well as the authoritarian capture of Sandinismo and the global coronavirus pandemic. Of the UK-Nicaragua twinnings established in the 1980s, around half lost momentum and ultimately found themselves unable to navigate the changing political situation that materialised with the FSLN’s electoral defeat in 1990. Hence, links between Lambeth and Bluefields, Manchester and Bilwi, Liverpool and Corinto, Brighton and Corn Island were inactive by the early 1990s, leaving their only traces in local archives and collective memories. Retrospectively it has become clear that, among the UK-Nicaragua twinnings established in the wake of the revolution, those that have been best able to weather the political and social transformations of these past four decades are those which have not just ‘leaned in’ to cement their existing friendships, framings and forms of exchange but also ‘looked out’ for new forms of connection within their communities. ⁶⁴ That is to say, the links which have thrived are those which have displayed flexibility in the face of change and have managed to successfully inculcate new members with a sense of pride and purpose in twinning. Preserving opportunities for face-to-face encounters via delegations and cultural celebrations has been key to achieving this.

Within most of the twinning relationships, the tradition of in-person visits that started with the international brigades was restored in the form of annual or biennial delegations. As with the brigades, those who participated in the delegations were usually accommodated at home-stays where feelings of familiarity, empathy and care could (continue to) be generated anew through interactions with a host family. However, unlike the brigades, the twinning delegations were premised on the basis of two-way travel between Nicaragua and the UK. They often placed an onus on identifying professionals – teachers, nurses, engineers, artists, performers and planners – for upskilling, capacity-building and peer-to-peer learning opportunities with the hope that new knowledge gained during the trip would be put to future use benefitting the home or host community. For example, some of the nurses and teachers that participated in early delegations to Swindon’s twin town of Ocotal went on to establish direct links between hospitals and schools which led to the upgrading of medical equipment, provision of school packs and improvements in maternal health outcomes. Meanwhile, artists and performers from Estelì and Leon have used the knowledge and networks developed during visits to their twin towns of Sheffield and Oxford to help scale-up the work of scantly resourced arts organisations at home. As I have argued elsewhere, this aspect of twinning practice ‘recalls what geographers define as “hub” or “network” effects: where links initially formed by a core group (in this case, the twinning association) accelerate the formation of other connections between the two communities’. ⁶⁵ Although the specifics of individual experiences have varied quite widely, the delegations can be thought of as a kind of ‘solidarity tourism’ which has worked by generating and leveraging affect to fuel onward normative commitments and, by extension, achieve positive social outcomes.

During the intervening years, cultural and arts-based encounters have also played an important role in renewing old affective connections and generating new ones. For the most-part these encounters have been figured as opportunities for British audiences to appreciate and explore Nicaraguan cultural expressions, with a particular emphasis on forms of poetry, art, dance and song infused with the idioms of the revolution. Each year, for example, The Oxford Leon Twinning Association (OLAT) has welcomed Nicaraguan musicians and singers to Oxford, where they spend weeks working with residents to prepare for a performance of the misa campesina (peasant mass). The misa is a liturgical score originally composed by Carlos Mejía Godoy, a Nicaraguan musician and songwriter whose uplifting, folkloric canciones (songs) effectively narrated the revolutionary struggle. Initially banned under Somoza, the misa was later promulgated as a democratisation of the liturgy under the Sandinista government. During preparations for the recital, Nicaraguan guests spend time living among the local Oxonian community, rehearsing with local choirs and learning about the customs and practices of British Catholics from the presiding priest and congregation members. In turn, the Nicaraguan guests speak to Oxonians about the historical and political context leading to the composition of the misa. For those Oxonian residents with a historical connection to Leon, the uplifting singsong provides an opportunity to be transported back to the halcyon days of the revolution and relive memories of the time. Meanwhile, for those encountering the misa for the first time, the experience is primed to engage and entertain, thereby (hopefully) bringing new participants/members on board to help maintain the twinning into the future. Examples like this remind us that the making and unmaking of ‘affective communities’ – in this case communities of solidarity – is always intimately connected to practices of representation and the ways in which and through which such cultural practices work to construct imaginaries that elicit, refresh and orient emotional responses over time.

Recognition that solidarity twinnings are, at least in part, constructed on the basis of an imaginary is important for understanding their trajectories and politics in recent years. With the changing orientation of Sandinista policies under Daniel Ortega’s post-2006 ‘pacted’ regime, some UK partners gradually shifted away from official collaborations with party officials and/or alcaldias, focussing instead on developing more unmediated links with civil society actors working on a range of socio-political projects – women’s reproductive rights, environmental protection and LGBTQ visibility – often in opposition to the government’s position. Others ignored (or at best, missed) Ortega’s slide towards social conservatism and continued to align their messages and activities closely with that of the FSLN as part of a continued agenda of political solidarity. The violent repression of student protesters which spurred national unrest in 2018 and the Ortega-Murrillo government’s press censorship and continued refusal to release political prisoners has since sharpened the divisions among and within twinning links. Whilst ‘looking out’ has enabled some of the UK twinning partners to develop meaningful relationships beyond the FSLN and recognise the ways that Ortegismo has moved the party away from its progressive early ideals, others remain guided by a romantic fixation on Sandinismo forged during the revolutionary moment and have failed to interpret it as anything but the most progressive force in Nicaraguan politics. In other words, they have continued to cement existing connections and interpretive frames at the expense of other ways of seeing, doing and being in solidarity. As they move forward, the most pressing question to confront UK-Nicaragua links is as follows: With whom exactly should our solidarity now lie? Or, as one anonymous reviewer eloquently put it: How do we find ways to love a revolution gone sour?

Conclusion

In recent decades, the practice of twinning has been creatively appropriated and transformed by social movements and civil society actors in order to counter the threat of – inter alia – foreign intervention, dictatorship and political violence. Despite the renewed interest in collective action and the practice of solidarity, these ‘solidarity twinnings’ have been scarcely addressed in academic research to date. This paper makes a concerted move in this direction by redirecting empirical and analytical focus towards transnational relationships forged with Nicaraguan localities in the aftermath of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution.

The paper first traced why and how ‘twinning’ emerged within the broader landscape of solidarity initiatives in the wake of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Drawing on a rich selection of interview and archival data collated between 2017 and 2019, it sought to illustrate how the affective scaffolding for solidarity twinning was laid during encounters between Nicaraguans and international volunteers. Although the internacionalistas were maligned in some quarters as feckless idealists, their presence in Nicaragua was useful for at least two reasons. Firstly, they provided a source of foreign currency that helped to grease the wheels of a struggling economy. Secondly, their presence gave rise to new affections, intensities and lines of connection that served to usurp many of the crude stereotypes that had structured relations between Nicaraguans and external observers or publics. These manifold individual encounters, it was argued, gave rise to a burgeoning affective community and paved the way for the ongoing transnational contact, care and expression of solidarity that was later embodied in the act of twinning. In this way, the example of the UK-Nicaragua twinnings clearly supports the theoretical case made in Part 2, that solidarity should be understood not just as a descriptive and normative phenomenon, but also, crucially, as an affective one. Whilst this observation might seem intuitive or even obvious to some, there remains much scope to extend the existing body of scholarship on solidarity such that it gives more room to fully explore the relationship between the affective drivers and normative discourses that bind individuals into relationships of collective and mutual obligation.

The evidence presented in the main body of this paper above suggests that the UK-Nicaragua twinnings had important practical, symbolic and performative virtues. By building upon existing friendships and bonds of care, the twinning model allowed solidarity activists to push beyond short-term, abstract and one-way gestures of goodwill to create more sustained avenues of communication, feedback and support between particular British and Nicaraguan localities. In this way, Nicaraguan partners could communicate the particular needs and concerns of their communities and British partners could feel more closely involved with the revolutionary effort, in spite of the geographical distance between them. Moreover, as models of collective action, they pre-figured many of the struggles of the contemporary globalised and networked era that are not limited to the established spheres of sovereignty but are rather translocal and transversal in form. It is for these reasons that solidarity twinning warrants much closer consideration from researchers working in the areas of international relations, social movements and political practice.

That these relationships were often founded on the basis of existing affective connections helped them to attain levels of commitment and longevity rarely seen elsewhere in the solidarity movement: as of 2019 – a full 40 years after the Revolution – there remained some 12 UK-Nicaragua twin links and related projects active in the UK. Many of the individuals that were active in the founding of these links continue to play a part in their work today. Some have even permanently relocated to their twin locality to join friends and loved ones there. This is a testament to the power of twinning as a device capable of generating and maintaining intimate connections across vast spatial and temporal distances. However, with this power comes a caveat. To make the most of solidarity twinning and ensure its success as a political strategy, it is important to remain reflexive and, in particular, to be sensitive to the blind spots (sic) that can be created when we ‘lean in’ to cement these friendships.