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The Basque Country and the Use of Violence: Cross-Border Cooperation in View of the European Union

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The Basque Country and the Use of Violence: Cross-Border Cooperation in View of the European Union Francisco Letamend�a* THE BASQUE COUNTRY AND THE USE OF VIOLENCE: CROSS-BORDER COOPERATION IN VIEW OF THE EUROPEAN UNION 1 BASQUE NATIONALISM IN THE SOUTH AND IN THE NORTH The state-building process of the Spanish and the French nation states has provoked very different reactions within the same ethnic group: the Basques'. Mobilisation around the identity of minorities therefore takes the form of countermobilisation in opposition to the mobilisation of the population by the state itself to create a national identity. This explains the peculiar wave-rhythm of its occurrence. The first identity reaction against the nation state's mobilisation was the "reactionary legitimist" * Mr. Francisco Letamendia, born in 1944, is a Professor in the Department of Political Sciences, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris 8. His specialist fields are comparative nationalism, political violence and the construction of Europe. He has written a muti-volume work on the history of Basque nationalism, a comparative work on the conflicts center-periphery across the world, and has co-edited a study of cross-border cooperation between Euskadi and Aquitaine. ' The historic Basque Country, Euskadi, is divided nowadays in three administrative parts: two of them are in Spain: the Basque Autonomous Commu- nity and Navarre, the third is in France consisting of the three historic basque territories of the Departement of Pyrenees Atlantiques. The Basque Autonomous Community covers 7,261 square kilometres; its total population was in 1991: 2,159,000 of which 1,184,000 in Bizkaia (Vizcaya) with its capital Bilbo (Bilbao), 697,000 in Gipuzcoa (Guipuzcoa), with its capital Donostia (San Sebastian), and 278,000 in Araba (Alava), with its capital Gasteiz (Vitoria). The population of Navarra (Nafarroa) is 523,000. It covers 10,9421 square kilome- tres. The population of the three northeren historic territories in France is 250,000. The territories are named Lapurdi (Lapourd), Nafarroa Beherea (Basse Navarre) and Zuberoa (Soule), they cover an area of 2,962 square kilometres. one, as Seiler says (1989); the second adopted the forms of populist nationalism whereby peripheral nationalism employs state-nationalist ideological tools in the fight against the centre. These two mobilisations are noticeable in the southern Basque Country. The first example was the Carlists' armed rising at the middle of the 19th century against the weak liberalism of the Spanish nation-state. Then the Basque nationalism developed by Sabino Arana's at the turn of the century used clerical and Carlist ideological tools against the two new classes which were emerging in the industrialised Biscay: the owners of the steel works on the one hand, and the immigrant proletariat from the other parts of Spain on the other. At the end of the 19th century, as the demand for labour was creating important concentrations of working class Spanish immigrants (from 1880 to 1890 the mining zone of Vizcaya became the main bastion of Spanish socialism), Sabino Arana, who was born in Bilbao in 1865, formulated the first Basque ideology. In his works, the Basque past, the past of rural Vizcaya, is rendered into myth, being described as classless. He argued that industrial society was corrupting Basque traditions, and that socialists (socialism is described as a foreign invention) were as guilty as the large Basque iron-steel industrialists and mine owners who introduced them. In 1894 Arana founded the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). This new Party, which combined the charismatic communitarian- ism of Arana with the moderate autonomism, experienced, above all in Vizcaya, rapid electoral progress after Sabino Arana's death in 1903. The Second Spanish Republic (1931-1936) was sensitive to the peripheral nationalist movements, and aspired to find a solution for them, especially in Catalonia. Basque nationalism accepted the procedure for setting up autonomist governments laid down by the Constitution, although this was not federal. But the procedure when applied to the Basque Country was paralysed in the Spanish Congress; leaders of the right claimed that they preferred a "red" Spain to a "broken" Spain. The civil war was to be essentially a bloody destruction of the "anti-Spain", which included "separatists" movements in general, and Basque separat- ism in particular. It was the complete opposition of the Spanish right, already fascist, which was to place the PNV, when the military rebellion began in July 1936, on the republican side. After the Francoist conquest of Bilbao, in June 1937, victor's law ruled in Euskadi. A relentless persecution was carried out against the symbols of the Basque collective identity, starting with its language, which led to indiscriminate repression in what Franco regarded as the Back "traitor" provinces. Basque society restructured itself under Franco as a "World of Silence". The EKIN (it means to act in Basque) group .
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