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Reviews
From Spain:
León and the Rise of Parliaments
Parliamentary democracy was not born in England, as many have mistakenly thought for so long, but in the Iberian kingdom of León, during the heat of the Reconquista, according to the Australian historian John Keane, in his book The Life and Death of Democracy (Simon and Schuster).
“This is a timely recognition, as León is preparing to celebrate next year the 1,100th anniversary of the founding of the Kingdom”, the writer Juan Pedro Aparicio told the leading Spanish-language news agency EFE. Aparicio will soon be co-ordinating these celebrations when he leaves his current role as director of the Cervantes Institute in London.
Read full articles (in Spanish) from Diario de León (here) and from Radio y televisión de Castilla y León (here)
INFORMACION.ES quotes a newspaper of the Province of Alicante: 'The Cortes of Leon represented "a qualitative jump", states John Keane in his book The Life and Death of Democracy, which was written to challenge a series of entrenched ideas about democracy.'
Link to the article from INFORMACION.ES, here and from Web-Islam (Centro de Documentación y Publicaciones (CDPI) de Junta Islámica de España) here
ADN.es writes instead: 'Democracy has entered a new stage, according to historian John Keane, a stage characterised by the robust emergence of extra-parliamentary mechanisms, which constantly check and balance the established powers.' (read full article in spanish here)
