Spain
Ethnic strife in Spain has meant, for the most part, the long insurgency mounted against the Madrid government by the Basque group ETA. Since 1959, ETA has been the main armed group fighting for Basque independence. It has been responsible for more than 800 deaths during its fifty year history, but has been largely rejected by the Basque population in recent years.
The Basques, a unique people with a pre-Indo-European heritage, inhabit an area along the Bay of Biscay and on both sides of the Pyrenees Mountains. The French Basque areas have been essentially incorporated into France since the French Revolution, but the Spanish Basque areas retained a good deal of independence into the 1800s, but then were gradually brought under the control of the central government. Resistance to outside control intensified as a result of the influx of workers coming to work in the new industrial plants that sprang up in the Bilbao area after about 1850. Basques themselves were responsible for this burst of industrialization. Urban Basques demonstrated an entrepreneurial ability found in Spain only in the Catalan area around Barcelona. But the rural Basques resented the influx of newcomers and sought to reassert their Basque-ness by essentially reinventing themselves, especially their endangered language. The leader in this nationalistic rebirth movement was Sabino Arana (1865-1903) who founded the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) which is still the leading Basque party.
Arana’s xenophobia and actual racism have made him a controversial figure in Basque history, but the PNV continues to honor his memory as the founder of the movement to reclaim Basque heritage and defend it against encroachment from outsiders.
Franco Years
Just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Spanish Republic had granted the Basque Country and Catalonia special autonomy statutes which fulfilled many of their longstanding demands for home rule (but not complete independence, as demanded by the most radical separatists). Although the Basques in general did not support the socialist (and secular, if not atheist) policies of the Republic, they saw that the Rebels, led by right-wing army officers and Spanish nationalists, would be far less friendly to autonomy. As a result, they fought against the Franco-led forces and against their German and Italian allies. The Basques had no modern weapons and could not hope to defeat these brutal fascist forces, but they did succeed in delaying the Rebel advance and frustrating Franco’s plans for a rapid victory. German commanders convinced Franco that he should approve an all-out war against the Basque civilian population as a way of breaking the morale of the guerrilla fighters. Thus, on April 26, 1937, German and Italian warplanes devastated the heart of the Basque market town of Guernica, killing some 2,000 civilians and leveling much of the historic center of the city. Similar terror bombings were directed against a number of other Basque towns, but not Bilbao, which the regime wanted to keep intact due to its economic importance.
In addition to blackening Franco’s name and the cause for which he fought, the atrocity at Guernica cemented an irreconcilable hatred between the Basques and the Franco regime. For the next forty years, Franco’s security forces, especially the Guardia Civil, oppressed the Basque country and, in a way, insured that Basque nationalism would deepen in response to an unremitting persecution. By the time of Franco’s death in 1975 and the advent of the new parliamentary monarchy of King Juan Carlos, the Basque separatist movement, which had been operating underground for decades, had ceased to have any interest in reestablishing a modus Vivendi with the national government.
The Basque Nationalist Party of Arana and Jose Aguirre, who led the party from the Popular Front era and then through World War II, lost much of its impetus after the war, disappointed that the Allies had not undertaken to overthrow the Franco dictatorship for its support of the Nazis. Outlawed by Franco and in exile, first in the U.S. and then in France, the PVN was losing touch with the post-war Basque population. Franco had made a concerted effort to populate the Basque cities with migrants from elsewhere in Spain and by 1975, forty per cent of the Basque country population had no Basque parentage. For his part, moving adroitly after the war, Franco found that his anti-communism made him a valued ally of the U.S. Under the circumstances, Basque nationalists saw no choice but to wait for the dictator to die and then to reassert Basque independence.
The formation of the ETA during the 1950s opened a new epoch in the history of Basque nationalism. Many of the ETA’s leaders were not entirely or even partially Basque. They had been born in the Basque country, but one or both of their parents were migrants to the area from elsewhere in Spain. For these new anti-Franco activists, the key to revival of the Basque movement was to learn the Basque language and create cells of likeminded revolutionaries. The ETA differed from the PVN in its adoption of a leftist revolutionary ideology (partly in response to Franco’s anti-communism) and its resort to terror tactics. Oddly, it retained a devout attachment to Catholicism, but of the “revolutionary” variety found in Latin America during the 1960s.
Over the course of the next twenty years, it carried on a clandestine guerrilla war against the Franco regime, culminating in its spectacular bombing of Franco’s hand-picked successor Carrero Blanco in 1972 as he pulled up in front of a Madrid church for his daily attendance at mass.
Post-Franco Efforts to Accommodate Basque Nationalism
With the transition from the Franco regime to a parliamentary democracy between 1975 and 1978, the Basque’s once again had a chance to achieve their goal of a separate existence within Spain. They wanted home rule based on there historical self-government bodies called fueros, which had been abolished after the Carlist Wars of the 19th century but had never been forgotten. They also wanted recognition of their language as an official language in the Basque Country. But, the 1978 constitution did not give them either of these concessions.
The new rulers of Spain, Adolfo Suarez on the center-right and Felipe Gonzalez for the Socialists, sought to make contact with ETA at its secret headquarters in the Basque area of southern France, but the ETA leadership suspected a trick and refused to come out of hiding. In fact the hard-line ETA leaders refused to give up their violent tactics and, in a way, they were encouraged in their violence by repressive measures instituted by Suarez and then expanded by Gonzalez. During the late 80s and into the 1990s, a bloody conflict between Basque “terrorists” and Guardia Civil and other police and paramilitary forces (sometimes operating undercover), meant the cycle of violence continued. The ETA affiliated Basque party never achieved more the 12 to 15 per cent of the vote in national elections and refused to take its seats in the parliament, but the pre-Franco Basque Nationalist Party (PVN) did participate and became the dominant political force in three of the four Basque majority provinces. The fourth province, Navarra, was run by an even more conservative political group. Under the Autonomy Statute granted in the 1978 constitution, the Basque area has its own popularly elected parliament, local administration and police and levies its own taxes, and runs its own schools – using the Basque language and Spanish – and enjoys many other forms of “home rule.” But this was not enough for the ETA, which seemed intent on pushing the Spanish government to violence.
Many of the old Franco-era police officials had stayed in place after the transition to democracy and were only to happy to accommodate the ETA terrorists. They kidnapped many of them from their safe havens in southern France Basque country, dragging them back to Spain for interrogation, usually using torture, and often executing them without any form of justice. The ETA replied in kind, with wanton killings. This vicious cycle continued until 1998, when the ETA finally announced that it was giving up violence altogether, leaving the forces of order on the other side facing the dilemma of whether to believe them or to continue the campaign of repression.
The 1998 cease fire, like another one in 2006 and now in 2011, have always ended with the ETA going back to violent tactics. Each time, however, their ability to carry out attacks has been further weakened. Arrest of many of the top people in the organization over the years has crippled its operations. Younger people have been recruited – almost all those arrested have been men and women in the 20s and 30s – but there are signs of fatigue. The ETA affiliated political parties in the Basque country have been regularly outlawed and newspapers that support the ETA line have been shut down. But the ETA supporters generally are able to muster enough support to launch a new political party and open a new newspaper. As long as the ETA is able to appeal to discontented young people, it still has a future.
Interestingly, when I search the New York Times since 1998 using the term “Basque” I find that most of the articles are about terrorism or cuisine. The Basque area is famous for its food and has been a favorite with foreign tourists for years. It is one of the most prosperous and sophisticated areas in Spain. The Basques treasure their language, food, music and culture in general and want to preserve them. But doing so without violence seems to be more difficult than elsewhere.
Catalan Separatist Tendencies
Historically, Catalan ethnic feeling has been another form of separatism in Spain. Catalonia had a long history as an independent state before its incorporation into a unified Spanish nation in the 1400s. With its own distinct language and literature and a more enterprising and prosperous population than found elsewhere in Spain, the Catalans have long pressed Madrid for greater autonomy.
Ironically, native-born Catalans find themselves faced with the dilemma of how to deal with thousands of new arrivals to their area, from elsewhere in Spain, but especially from North Africa and the Middle East. The influx of these newcomers, largely Muslim and poor, has posed an identity problem for Catalans similar to that already faced by the Basques. Can people "become" Catalan (or Basque)? Or can one only claim this identity based on one's family heritage?
Such centrifugal forces are found in many countries – Scottish and Welsh nationalism, Lombard separatism in Italy, Quebecois sentiment in Francophone Canada. Separatist or regionalist movements usually include various groups, some more extreme than others. In the case of Spain, language and culture have been key elements of the push to achieve greater autonomy; but in the case of Catalonia there is also frequently a sense that “we would be more successful” economically if we were on our own rather than part of a less developed country. Basque separatists, on the other hand, are usually from the radical Marxist tradition and reject capitalism as well as control of their region’s destiny by the politicians in Madrid.