Resumen de People, state forms and representative assemblies: The making of the ‘Basque’ political institutions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries

Joseba Agirreazkuenaga Zigorraga

• In this paper Joseba Agirrcazkucnaga argues that the growth of nationalism in the Basque provinces of Spain was assisted, rather than hindered by forms of representative institution which had developed in the early-modern period. Each of the Basque provinces had come to possess executive agencies chosen and supcrvized by a General Assembly of the province. The paper then describes how the Assemblies developed a system of Conferences, in which delegates of each Assembly met together to coordinate policies on matters of general interest to all of them and when needed to organize a common opposition to threats of encroachment by the central government, and in the process became one of the sources from which a sense of Basque identity could grow. The article reviews the historiography of the subject and the various forms of common activity which the Conference system generated in the early-modem period and the often considerable degree of autonomy that they were able to practice, despire the centralizing tendencies of government in Madrid.