The Nationalism Project: Competing National Ideologies Title Page Competing National Ideologies, Cyclical Responses: The Mobilisation of the Irish, Basque and Croat National Movements to Rebellion Against the State By Peter Anthony Ercegovac A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy. Department of Government and Public Administration, University of Sydney, March 1998. Emended edition, March 1999. ABSTRACT: The 1960s was to herald a significant change in the political environment of modern Europe. Established means of seeking political redress through traditions of parliamentary enfranchisement and elite consolidation was to be met by a new challenger from the peripheries of established nation-states. At the core of these changes was the re-emergence of national movements and nationalism, as an ideology, as a means of addressing the perceived state engendered marginalisation of peripheral communities. The failure of ‘Social Movement’ theory to deal with movements that would proffer an ideological alternative was to leave a gap in the discipline vis-à-vis state centralisation and peripheral oppositional mobilisation. ‘Social Movement’ theory’s two predominant paradigms of ‘Resource Mobilisation’ and ‘New Social Movement’ theory would fail to adequately expplain the emergence of movements that were not mono-generational in nature. The former’s negation of ideational movement mobilisation, and the latter’s downplaying of the state, was to ignore two factors in the mobilisation of peripheries to rebellion. That is http://nationalismproject.org/articles/Pero/title.html (1 of 3) [11/30/2001 7:22:33 PM] The Nationalism Project: Competing National Ideologies Title Page the state and the political opportunity structures formed in the processes of state transition in creating on going cycles of reform-protest-reform that are necessary to continued heightened levels of peripheral mobilisation. In this thesis I will explore the role of the state as a catalyst for movement mobilisation, through the dynamic process of state centralisation and reciprocal peripheral actvism against the centre. What emerges is a parallel, yet interdependent, development of centre-periphery mobilisation. The state, hence provides the frame in which the challenge from the periphery occurs and also the ideological preconditions for peripheral counter movement mobilisation. Nationalism, as such, provides a social movement with an ideological and strategic link with past conflicts that allow protest communities to attain a level of historicity and continuity that more traditional forms of social movements would find difficult to achieve. It is within the cyclical formation and re-formation of state that political opportunity structures emerge between expanding and consolidating state centres and reactionary peripheries. What develops is a reciprocal shaping and reshaping of centre-periphery identities, as movements tend to expand their own repertoire and demands according to those employed by the elites they oppose. A ‘mimicking’ of the ‘other’ that allows for the state to re-place itself at the cetre of any future resolution of the conflict. This thesis proposes to demonstrate national movements are but children of this process of continuous state ideological development, which formulates contentious repertoires as alternatives to state organisational options. In studying the Rpeublican Irish, Basque separatist and Croatian national movements since the 1960s to the present, I wish to show how all these mobilisations are by-products of the very state identities they refute. It is the inability of the Northern Irish, Spanish and Yugoslav state centres to provide a more inclusive doctrine of state that led to the initial mobilisation against the centre. Yet it is this failure to incorporate newly polarised peripheries that feeds the cycle of reciprocal centre periphery development. With each new encroachment of the centre upon the periphery, the periphery ‘mimics’ the centre until one of two events occur, ie, the startifaction of the crisis, and a perpetuation of conflict that has little chance of resolution; or the successful attainment of statehood. The nation is henceforth to be interpreted as a vehicle to sociteal liberation as long as it has a target in the state to justify its existence. Thus, the mobilisation of the national movement to rebellion cannot emerge without the dynamic and reciprocal development of the state centre and periphery. http://nationalismproject.org/articles/Pero/title.html (2 of 3) [11/30/2001 7:22:33 PM] The Nationalism Project: Competing National Ideologies Title Page GO TO INTRODUCTION Title Page | Introduction | Chapter I | Chapter II | Chapter III | Chapter IV | Chapter V | Chapter VI | Chapter VII | Chapter VIII | Chapter IX | Chapter X | Chapter XI | Chapter XII | Conclusion | Footnotes | Bibliography RETURN TO THE NATIONALISM PROJECT Copyright © Peter Ercegovac Published with Permission of author by The Nationalism Project, Madison, WI. 1999. Webmaster: Eric G.E. Zuelow http://nationalismproject.org/articles/Pero/title.html (3 of 3) [11/30/2001 7:22:33 PM] The Nationalism Project: Competing National Ideologies Introduction INTRODUCTION It was in February 1996, whilst taking a break from my doctoral field work in Seville, that I was to have an experience that would change the nature of my research. This was the period of Carnevale and the ascension to Lent. The allure of Carnevale’s expectant festivities played a large part in my decision to head south to Andalusia; as well as the fact that it was in the opposite direction from where, until then, all my attention had been focused. Seville that morning was glorious in its promise of sun, festivity and Moorish culture. A far cry from the bleak European winter that had awaited me in Belfast, Coleraine, Zagreb and Bilbao. Whilst admiring the Sephardic architecture and tree lined streets of the old city, with a group of Jamaican and Quebecois students, our early morning jaunt was halted by the sounds of discontent coming from nearby the old colonial Cathedral. Before us was a group of some eighty Romani protesting about the levels of poverty experienced in government funded housing projects, and the inadequacy of social welfare policies in dealing with ethnic specific cultural needs. However, neither the fact that the Romani were protesting, nor the looks of distaste that the Romani were receiving from the average Andalusian, angered by the disruptive nature of the protest, caught my attention. It was one sign. A powerful image of protest, which for me at that time seemed to be irrelevant to the Romani cause, much less the issue of public housing. This sign neatly sewn on the sleeve of a green army parker was the flag of the Basque Country. Worn by a Romani in his early forties, this brazen act of defiance towards Castilian ethnic rule was to question my intent to study the relevance of nationalism purely outside its role as a tool to social mobilisation for the initiation of collective action. This move was brazen on behalf of the Romani, due to the fact that a week prior to the occurrence of this small public rally, some two million people marched through Madrid demanding an end to the Euzkadi ’ta Askatasuna’ (ETA)1 movement’s ‘terror’, and a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Yet here in Seville, one week after the show of two million protesters moving towards a populist solution, there stood one Romani, a member of perhaps the most persecuted ethnic community of contemporary Europe, defiantly standing in the face of mass opinion, wearing the symbol of the people considered by many Spaniards as the cause of comtemporary violent dissidence. This was reminiscent of Charles Tilly’s experience in writing The http://nationalismproject.org/articles/Pero/intro.html (1 of 15) [11/30/2001 7:23:10 PM] The Nationalism Project: Competing National Ideologies Introduction Contentious French and how he had, whilst researching the rise of popular rebellion amongst the French nation in the dusty library of Versailles, been similarly interrupted by the voices of a few hundred protesters who today still felt, nearly two hundred years after similar activism had successfully removed the monarchy, the necessity to take to the streets when more official avenues of access were denied them. For Tilly the nature of the protest and the cause were of little significance in comparison to the epiphany he felt when recognising that in many ways, such a movement of people was cyclical and would remain an integral part of peripheral expression of discontent as long as the state existed. In my opinion, the power of this Romani evoking the symbol of the Basque was a throw back to the Francoist period whereby for most on the periphery the now vilified Basque radical movement ETA was once the symbol of open resistance to an overtly centralist Falangist regime. For this Romani, it was a symbol, a reminder of another time, when social movement activism was a means to political revolution as much as it was a manifestation of the cyclical nature of movement activism and state response. For me it was a reminder that the movement that I was studying was as relevant today as it was in the past, according to the nature of the state’s efforts to deal with it. Progressively my research changed. Initially I desired to study the contemporary relevance of nationalism in the Irish, Basque and Croatian communities. Eventually though, I was to broaden my research to include the cyclical nature of social movement activism in challenging core ethnic elites at the centre of restructuring state entities. Sparked initially by the experience in Seville, after each interview undertaken with political activists from the movements researched throughout this thesis, it soon became clear that the problems these movements face today- in terms of responding to state policy changes and the mobilisation of the population in order to accrue popular legitimacy- were cyclical. What the Irish Republican Army (IRA) faced today in the Joint Frameworks Agreement, was played out ten years prior in the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and the Sunningdale Agreement a further ten years before that.