History and Culture
In France, the expression "en province" still tends to mean "outside the Paris region." Equivalent expressions are used in Peru ("en provincias," "outside the city of Lima"), Mexico ("la provincia," "lands outside Mexico City"), Romania ("în provincie," "outside the Bucharest region"), Poland ("prowincjonalny," "provincial"), Bulgaria ("в провинцията," "v provintsiyata," "in the provinces"; "провинциален," "provintsialen," "provincial") and the Philippines (taga-probinsiya, "from outside Metro Manila", sa probinsiya, "in the provinces"). Similarly, in Australia "provincial" refers to parts of a state outside of the state capital.
Before the French Revolution, France comprised a variety of jurisdictions (e.g., Île-de-France, built around the early Capetian royal demesne), some being considered "provinces," though the term was also used colloquially for territories as small as a manor (châtellenie). Most commonly referred to as "provinces," however, were the Grands Gouvernements, generally former medieval feudal principalities, or agglomerations of such. Today the expression "province" is sometimes replaced by "en région," " région" now being the term officially used for the secondary level of government.
In Italy, "in provincia" generally means "outside the biggest regional capitals" (like Rome, Milan, Naples, etc.).
The historic European provinces—built up of many small regions, called "pays" by the French and "cantons" by the Swiss, each with a local cultural identity and focused upon a market town—have been depicted by Fernand Braudel as the optimum-size political unit in pre-industrial Early Modern Europe. He asks, "Was the province not its inhabitants' true 'fatherland'?" Even centrally-organized France, an early nation-state, could collapse into autonomous provincial worlds under pressure, as during the sustained crisis of the French Wars of Religion (1562—98).
To 19th- and 20th-century historians, in Europe, centralized government was a sign of modernity and political maturity. In the late 20th century, as the European Union drew nation-states closer together, centripetal forces seemed simultaneously to move countries toward more flexible systems of more localized, provincial governing entities under the overall European Union umbrella. Spain after Francisco Franco has been a "State of Autonomies," formally unitary but in fact functioning as a federation of Autonomous Communities, each exercising different powers. (See Politics of Spain.)
While Serbia, the rump of former Yugoslavia, fought the separatists in the province of Kosovo, the United Kingdom, under the political principle of "devolution," produced (1998) local parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Strong local nationalisms have surfaced or developed in Britain's Cornwall, France's Brittany, Languedoc and Corsica, Spain's Catalonia and the Basque Country, Italy's Lombardy, Belgium's Flanders; and, east of Europe, in Abkhazia, Chechnya and Kurdistan.
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