Globalisation, the buzzword of the late twentieth century, calls for the attention of historians. As others have already suggested, one way to contribute to the historicisation of the phenomena encapsulated in this idiom is to pay attention to connections over long periods. Connections between municipal governments and exchanges about the subject have both been neglected by historical scholarship for various reasons, but they can contribute to the history of the ‘construction of the universal’. Indeed, the information systems of municipal connections – their vectors, actors and structures – have defined, intersected with, nourished or undergone a series of would-be universalist ‘transboundary formations’. These formations are shifting combinations of values, collective actions, practices, rules, organisations and individuals, all of which are advanced as possible futures for mankind. By examining some of these discourses of ‘social order’ and ‘world order’ and the way in which they combine with municipal connections, this article attempts to produce the ‘municipal contribution’ announced in its title.

Attempts to develop a ‘municipal science’ bear witness to the challenges posed by the city to methods of government in the first decades of the twentieth century, particularly in France. Both in France and on the international scene, reformers sought new ways of thinking ‘scientifically’ about towns and their government. This article takes a serious look at ‘municipal science’, a fragile development which was never fully accepted in academic circles. It studies the endeavours to provide a scientific clothing for the reforming discourse developed by associations of town councillors and disseminated by teaching institutions or journals devoted to municipal administration. It also examines the contribution made by this crusade – at once political and scientific – to the renewal of public action through local authorities.

The new Polish state was founded more than 100 years after Poland's partition by Prussia, Russia and Austria. The partitioned Polish lands had been included one way or another in the administrative structure of the ocupying powers, and the individuals who became active in urban issues in the new state were socialised by associations established by the partitioners. Poland became not only a arena for a meeting of Prussian, Russian and Austrian imaginations about local government but also a place with a great variety of municipal praxises as well. The author analyses different meanings of local government with special attention to those employed by municipal officers from Warsaw and Cracow within the Union of Polish Cities. There were strong regional cleavages in the Union, but the political development of the Polish state strengthened centralisation and the Union itself remained united.

This article analyses the contribution of European socialism to the building of a variegated network of reformers in municipal politics from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s. Unsuccessful as a network inside the Second International, a broader international federation of cities, the Union Internationale des Villes/International Union of Local Authorities (UIV/IULA), was proposed in 1913. Belgian, French, Dutch and English socialist leaders remained strongly influential in this federation between the two world wars, working in connection with co-operative movements and the International Labour Office based in Geneva. The fifty years of debates and projects animated by the international journal Les Annales de la Régie Directe founded by the French socialist Edgard Milhaud allows us to follow the development of a generation of local reformers from the beginnings of municipalist thought and praxis up to the idea of building a decentralised European Community of cities and regional authorities.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the growth of towns was accompanied by the birth of a European and international municipal movement. In 1913 the Union Internationale des Villes/International Union of Local Authorities (UIV/IULA) was founded in Ghent. This combined two approaches, one political and utopian, the other technical and professional. The former focused on turning cities into promoters of a project for co-operation at European and worldwide level; the latter on solving the problems caused by urbanisation. They shared a determination to pursue their objectives regardless of the barriers of culture and national boundaries, and of the administrative hierarchy between local and national government. Between the two world wars the UIV/IULA gradually lost its original utopian inspiration, which was taken up by the Conseil des Communes d'Europe/Council of European Municipalities, founded in Geneva in 1951 with the aim of using the municipalities as a starting point to promote a federation of European states.

Town twinning can be seen as the first activity to involve municipal institutions as such in wide-ranging and long-term international action. Twinning fits Eric Hobsbawm's definition of an ‘invented tradition’. The French federalists played a decisive part in this process of invention, bringing European municipalities together in order to ensure an eventual European political union. Before long, however, the so-called bilingualist movement also turned to twinning as a way to further a universal mutual understanding that transcended the East–West divide. This resulted in a big clash between the French twinning organisations. Thus, the invention of town twinning needs to be studied alongside the dynamic political tensions that emerged on the French political scene during the Cold War

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