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Introduction. The article is devoted to the instruments used by the Spanish Kingdom in administrative and legal spheres to counter nationalist and separatist aspirations of the Basque Country throughout different historic periods. Special attention is paid to the confrontation with the Basque terrorist organization ETA. In addition, the research analyzes what caused ETA to emerge, underscores the major stages of its evolution, and discusses cross-border aspects of bilateral cooperation between Spain and France under the aegis of the supra-national specialized organization of Europol. The administrative and legal instruments used by Spain are distinguished in context of the analysis of the prospects for the applying of modern political and legal toolkit in the regional policy that is often contrary to the interests of the modern centralized state. The research pays attention to the administrative measures that led to ETA crisis and its further collapse.Material and methods. The paper uses the methodology of a retrospective analysis and content-analysis to characterize the shifts in the principles of Spanish administrative and territorial tools and their influence on the nature of the Basque nationalism. The Constitution of 1977 and the Statute of autonomy of the Basque Country are considered.Results. The paper sums up all the major shifts in the Spanish practice in the usage of administrative and political measures to combat the Basque separatist aspirations, evaluates their efficiency and outlines current obstacles towards the way of the establishment of a new bilateral dialogue with Madrid.Conclusion. The first part of this article points out the growth of nationalist and separatist aspirations in the Basque Country and shows how political systems (absolute monarchy, republic, authoritarian governance, constitutional monarchy) lead to the application of new administrative and legal instruments that affect the Basque nationalist aspirations. The second part focuses on the current state of relations between the region and the central government.

In the framework of mixed Higgs-Starobinsky inflation, we consider the generation of Abelian gauge fields due to their nonminimal coupling to gravity (in two different formulations of gravity -- metric and Palatini). We couple the gauge-field invariants $F_{\mu\nu}F^{\mu\nu}$ and $F_{\mu\nu}\tilde{F}^{\mu\nu}$ to an integer power of the scalar curvature $R^n$ in Jordan frame and, treating these interactions perturbatively, switch to the Einstein frame where they lead to effective kinetic and axial couplings between gauge fields and inflaton. We determine the power spectra, energy densities, correlation length, and helicality of the generated gauge fields for different values of the nonminimal coupling constants and parameter $n$. We analytically estimate the spectral index $n_{B}$ of the magnetic power spectrum and show that for $n>1$ it is possible to get the scale-invariant or even red-tilted spectrum for a wide range of modes that implies larger correlation length of the generated fields. On the other hand, the magnitude of these fields typically decreases in time becoming very small in the end of inflation. Thus, it is difficult to obtain both large magnitude and correlation length of the gauge field in the frame of this model., Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures