In 1452, Bizkaians assembled at the Oak of Gernika and approved the Fuero Viejo de Bizkaia (the Old Law of Bizkaia) one of Europe's most important yet little known medieval legal codes. Its laws encompassed an extraordinary range of individual and collective liberties, anticipating the 18th-century Declarations of Rights contained in the constitutions of the U.S. and France. It was extraordinarily modern in both spirit and letter and attracted the attention and admiration of John Adams and William Wordsworth. Its influence survives to the present day, underpinning Bizkaian and Basque claims to their own political identity within the Spanish state. Distributed for the Center for Basque Studies.
In 1452, Bizkaians assembled at the Oak of Gernika and approved the Fuero Viejo de Bizkaia (the Old Law of Bizkaia) one of Europe's most important yet little known medieval legal codes. Its laws encompassed an extraordinary range of individual and collective liberties, anticipating the 18th-century Declarations of Rights contained in the constitutions of the U.S. and France. It was extraordinarily modern in both spirit and letter and attracted the attention and admiration of John Adams and William Wordsworth. Its influence survives to the present day, underpinning Bizkaian and Basque claims to their own political identity within the Spanish state. Distributed for the Center for Basque Studies.
“Constitution” is a rich term in Western political culture, encompassing political and juridical doctrine as well as government practices through the ages. This volume examines “constitutional moments” in history, those occasions or episodes when significant steps were taken in the definition or redefinition of polities. Their actors were writers or politicians, rulers or ruled, who found inspiration in a distant past or instead looked towards a future to be drawn anew. This book sheds light on such moments from Ancient Greece to the present day, mostly in Europe but also in the Ottoman world and the Americas, thereby uncovering a revealing variety of constitutional thinking and action throughout history. Contributors are: Jon Arrieta, Niall Bond, Luc Brisson, Peter Cholakov, Nora Chonowski, Angela De Benedictis, F. Sinem Eryilmaz, Hakon Evju, Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, Javier Fernández Sebastián, Merieke Gebhardt, Xavier Gil, Mark J. Hill, Ferenc Hörcher, Jaska Kainulainen, Thomas Lorman, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, Ere Nokkala, Brian Kjaer Olesen, András Pap, Nikola Regent, Alberto Mariano Rodríguez Martínez, Pablo Sánchez León, José Reis Santos, and Ersin Yildiz.
This book explores the new debates on Basque sovereignty and statehood that have emerged in the post-violence Basque political scenario. It deciphers how sovereignty is understood or imagined by a revitalized civil society after the unilateral cessation of operations by ETA (Basque Homeland and Freedom). The contributors to this book investigate the new political field developing in the nexus between conventional party politics, established socio-cultural and linguistic organizations, creative civil society initiatives, and innovative activism. This book is for graduate students, scholars and professionals in political science, social anthropology, European studies, political philosophy, transnational studies, sociology, political geography, and global studies. It will also be of interest to academic specialists in Basque studies, specialists working on sovereignty, nationalism and globalization, and professionals in governance, international relations, foreign affairs, European politics and diplomacy.
On April 26, 1937, a massive aerial attack by German and Italian forces reduced the Basque city of Gernika to rubble and left more than sixteen hundred people dead. Although the assault was initiated as part of a terror bombing campaign by Francoists against Basque Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War, its main intent was to test the effectiveness of the rising German Luftwaffe’s new equipment and strategies. To produce this detailed analysis of the political and military background of the attack and its subsequent international impact, Xabier Irujo examined archives and official government documents in several countries and conducted numerous interviews with Basques who survived. His account of the assault itself, based on eyewitness reports from both victims and attackers, vividly recalls the horror of that first example of the blitz bombing that served the Germans during the first years of World War II. He reveals the US and British governments’ reaction to the bombing and also discusses efforts to prosecute the perpetrators for war crimes. Irujo relates the ways in which the massacre has been remembered and commemorated in Gernika and throughout the worldwide Basque diaspora. Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre is an important contribution to the history of the Spanish Civil War and to our understanding of the military strategies and decisions that shaped this war and would later be employed by the Nazis during World War II.
The aim of this book is to document the experiences of institutions and states that are implementing bilingual higher education policies in the legal context, to identify the different approaches and to suggest some of the likely areas for future theoretical development. It examines the role of higher education language policies (medium-of-instruction policies in higher education) in mediating the tension between on the one hand the centralizing forces of stated-mandated policies and globalisation and demands for language rights by ethnic and linguistic minorities on the other.
Before Babel: A History of Basque Literatures is the first book written originally in English and directed towards a global audience. It is also a new departure from traditional literary histories, as it is not a philological tedious classification of centuries, authors, genres, and books published in Basque. This book addresses the historical conflict and violence that define Basque history and culture, and so it defines Basque literary history as that of at least two literatures: one expressed by Basque subaltern (oppressed) classes in their language, euskara, which mainly constitutes an oral tradition, and the other written by Basque elites in Spanish, Latin, French, etc. The book emphasizes that this double literature remains at the core of the Basque Country’s history and culture to our days. Even today Basque literature in euskara (Basque language) plays a symbolic role: to represent a Basque Country where the majority speaks and writes in other state languages. Euskara, used by a minority, remains subordinate. In this respect, this book is a departure from previous Basque literary histories; it redefines Spanish and French literatures, advances a new theory of what a minority literature is, and pays attention to texts, disciplines, and practices that traditional histories neglect: political discourse, anthropology, tourism, economics. This history also represents a review of most literary historical discourses (new historicism, postcolonial theory, multiculturalism, subaltern studies) and presents a new methodological and theoretical proposal. Finally, this history allows to revisit under a new light political and historical movements such as nationalism, feminism, modernity, and globalization. As a result, different authors such as Sabino Arana, Judah Halevi, Maddalen Lujambio, Axular, Hugo, Unamuno, Itxaro Borda or Oteiza are brought together.
This book offers a novel interdisciplinary approach to interpret the emergence of the Basque-Spanish nationalist conflict. It incorporates into sociological analysis the understanding of law put forward by legal realism and legal pluralism to answer some of the most pressing problems encountered in historical research on this topic. It does so by carrying out a comparative historical analysis which focuses on the puzzle produced by the political trajectories of two traditionally considered Basque territories between 1841 and 1936: Navarre and Vascongadas – the precursor of today’s Euskadi. Urasstabaso Ruiz argues that the historical and ideological trajectories of these territories need to be understood in relation to their local legal praxis and interpretations of law, which played a key role in how the authorities of these territories responded to the advent of modernisation. Overall, a fresh theoretical alternative is articulated, and the meaning of jurisdictional action is interpreted. Modern Societies and National Identities will appeal to academics interested in nationalism, the state and modernisation, particularly to those concerned with the Basque Country and the state of Spain.
This book explains how and why the Basque separatist armed group ETA decided to end its armed campaign against the Spanish state. The ETA’s armed campaign for Basque independence lasted fifty years and led to more than 800 casualties. This book analyzes the factors that led to ETA ending its campaign of violence in 2011, despite having yet to achieve its political objectives. It explains how the Basque pro-independence movement’s political leadership won an internal battle and brought ETA to a position in which abandoning violence was the only feasible choice. The work argues that the key factor leading to the cessation of violence was the loss of support for armed struggle within the pro-independence social base, and it examines why and how that support decreased so decisively. Written by a former journalist, the narrative is based on more than 30 interviews, including former members of ETA, Spanish judges, former ministers of the Spanish government, political leaders of all Basque political parties—from the Nationalist Left to the Partido Popular (PP)—and international mediators. As such, it is the first book to recount in detail the inside story of the internal struggle within the Nationalist Left movement, and particularly between the political party Batasuna and ETA. This book will be of much interest to students of political violence, ethnic conflict, nationalism, Spanish politics, security studies, and IR.
