The open council: Its recovery in contemporary Spain

Abstract

This paper aims to approach the recovery of the open council of the Middle Ages in contemporary Spain after its crisis and silence, as a general form of municipal self-government. The open council as a form of local government had a limited existence. The emergence of absolute monarchies and the crisis of the medieval municipality led to the unifying process of the local structure under the model of the Castilian municipality until liberal constitutionalism which, in the face of the absolutist reaction, configured the political-administrative edifice of nineteenth-century Spain around the party ideology that would be positivized in the successive municipal laws. Although, in contrast to the doctrinairism in which the local regime derived, the municipality in the modern sense of representative generalization postulated the local personality of the municipality as a collective natural individualization, revaluing the open council both at the national level; recovered both during the Dictatorship by the statute of Calvo Sotelo, and by the Second Republic in the municipal law of 1935. As well as, at the regional level, by the Catalan municipal law of 1934.