ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the social dimension of the concept of national neighbourship as a potentially useful category by means of which to investigate bilateral relations. We understand this concept as a social relation based on knowledge, emotions or behaviour (three components of attitudes), directed at a neighbour whether constituted by a state, nation or individual. We develop our category by describing its various aspects (co-residence, recognisability and a relational one) and the levels at which it appears (in local communities, borderlands and among neighbouring cultures). Then, by crossing the three components of attitudes with their three addressees, we obtain nine domains in which national neighbourships manifest themselves. These domains, when filled with examples from the Polish–German reality, serve as a proposal for operationalising our underlying concept.
