Ending ETA's Armed Campaign

How and Why the Basque Armed Group Abandoned Violence

Imanol Murua

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138658233
• eBook ISBN: 9781317213598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explains how and why the Basque separatist armed group ETA decided to end its armed campaign against the Spanish state.

The ETA's armed campaign for Basque independence lasted fifty years and led to more than 800 casualties. This book analyzes the factors that led to ETA ending its campaign of violence in 2011, despite having yet to achieve its political objectives. It explains how the Basque pro-independence movement's political leadership won an internal battle and brought ETA to a position in which abandoning violence was the only feasible choice. The work argues that the key factor leading to the cessation of violence was the loss of support for armed struggle within the pro-independence social base, and it examines why and how that support decreased so decisively. Written by a former journalist, the narrative is based on more than 30 interviews, including former members of ETA, Spanish judges, former ministers of the Spanish government, political leaders of all Basque political parties—from the Nationalist Left to the Partido Popular (PP)—and international mediators. As such, it is the first book to recount in detail the inside story of the internal struggle within the Nationalist Left movement, and particularly between the political party Batasuna and ETA.

This book will be of much interest to students of political violence, ethnic conflict, nationalism, Spanish politics, security studies, and IR.

PART I
Historical background

1 The making of Basque nationalism

Early political articulation

The territories that later would comprise what is now considered the Basque Country, Euskal Herria or Vasconia, experienced five centuries of Roman colonization, and lived under the constant influence of their diverse neighbors from then on. The Roman presence was very uneven territorially, and it allowed the configuration of what Koldo Larrañaga calls “authentic reservations,” which kept the language and the old customary law to a higher degree than areas under strong Roman influence.¹ Over the post-Roman centuries, these territories swung among their powerful neighbors, sometimes looking for alliances, sometimes being subdued either willingly or by military force.² Despite the diversity of the communities settled all over the territories known today as the Basque Country and the enormous dispersion of jurisdictional areas in that pre-state era, it seems certain that the Indo-European peoples who arrived at this land found “a certain Pyrenean cultural complex” already in place.³ During the Middle Ages, the diverse territories that would become the Basque Country gradually and slowly articulated within the monarchies of the Ancient Regime, not as a unitary entity, but each following its own way and rhythm. Despite this diversity, they did maintain a somehow common juridical personality, based on the old customary laws, which gave them a character that distinguished them from their surrounding territories.⁴

Jimeno Jurío links the foundation of the kingdom of Pamplona at the beginning of the tenth century to the self-defense needs of the local lords, who sought a unitary military commander to face the pressure coming both from the north, by the Carolingians, and from the south, by the Muslims. The emergence of the new kingdom, later known as the kingdom of Navarre, changed the geopolitics of the area. In the tenth century the kingdom achieved internal cohesion and expanded territorially. Under the rule of Sancho the Great in the eleventh century, the western lands of Vasconia became part of the kingdom of Navarre, although maintaining their own powers.⁵ This was the only time when most of what we know as the Basque Country combined as a unitary political entity under a single ruler.

Nonetheless, the influence of the kingdom of Navarre over the western Basque territories was not stable. The powerful kingdom south of the Basque land, Castile, was expanding its influence and territory and entered into competition with Navarre. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a period of alternation of both kingdoms’ influence over Araba, Gipuzkoa, and Bizkaia, which had fixed their territorial limits, as they are today, by the middle of the twelfth century.⁶ As for the territories’ names, the first mentions of Araba and Bizkaia date back to the end of the ninth century, and Gipuzkoa was first named at the beginning of the eleventh century.⁷

In 1200, most parts of Araba and Gipuzkoa were definitively integrated into Castile through a combination of military conquest and negotiation with local rulers by King Alfonso VIII. Bizkaia was already under the influence and protection of the Castilian king, and this link became definitive in 1376, when the Castilian king Juan I took the title of Lord of Bizkaia.⁸ While Castile was emerging as a dominant power, Navarre entered a process of instability, decline, and disintegration, which was completed in 1512 with its military conquest by Castile. In the context of internal conflict among Navarrese factions, the monarchs of Navarre, Juan I and Catalina, signed the Treaty of Bois (1512), which was promoted by the French king Louis XII, and engaged the kingdom of Navarre under his influence. Fernando, the king of Aragon and Castile, reacted with the support of some local factions by invading Navarre. In 1515, the Cortes of Castile confirmed the definitive annexation of Navarre.⁹ There is a never-ending controversy about the nature of the integration or annexation of Navarre into Castile. Authors such as Jaime Ignacio del Burgo contend that the integration was an agreed union,¹⁰ but it is widely accepted among historians that the annexation was carried out by force.¹¹

This annexation was just another step in the expansion of Castilian military domination. By that time, what would eventually become Spain had begun to take form. In 1469, the marriage of the future Catholic monarchs, Isabel and Fernando, initiated the unification of the powerful kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. The unification was confirmed when the two monarchs were named queen and king of their kingdoms in 1479. The end of Al-Andalus in 1492, the mandatory Christianization of the remaining Muslims, and the expulsion of the Jews were other milestones in the consolidation of the new kingdom.

Lower Navarre, north of the Pyrenees, also fell under Castilian control after the invasion of 1512. However, the Castilian crown failed to control this territory, and the kings of Navarre took it back with the support of the French crown. Following this, Lower Navarre was linked to the kingdom of France, although it enjoyed a particular status until the French Revolution. Labourd (Lapurdi, in Basque) and Soule (Zuberoa, in Basque) were once under the influence of the kingdom of Navarre, until the English-ruled Duchy of Aquitaine took control of them in the twelfth century. Old customary laws were formalized under English rule and were over time a source of conflict with the English crown. After three centuries of English rule, Labourd and Soule fell under the control of the French crown when the English forces were beaten in 1449–51.¹²

Once under what J.H. Elliot called composite monarchies,¹³ all Basque territories enjoyed their own financial, legal, and administrative structures for centuries, following their customary laws, the fueros or fors. Each territory’s laws had their particularities, but all had in common a high degree of self-rule, materialized in the power of taxation and management of the public patrimony. The self-governance system in the continental Basque territories was in force until its abolition in 1789 after the French Revolution. It was the end of any recognition of the peculiarity of the Basque land within the French state. The new state was structured in eighty-three administrative départements, and the three Basque territories were diluted into the Basses-Pyrénées along with Béarn, despite the eloquent opposition of the representatives of Labourd in the National Assembly.¹⁴

On the other side of the Pyrenees, the Basque legal system lasted almost another century, until it was abolished in 1877 after the last Carlist war.¹⁵ The abolition of the Basque assemblies was preceded by a long political public debate on the foral question, “a political, legal, and administrative issue of whether or not the Basque Country was entitled by law to self-government.”¹⁶ This debate emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and was invigorated after 1839, when the law of October 25 introduced the recognition of the foral law into the Spanish constitutional framework, after the end of the first Carlist war. This new law indicated that the foral system had to be amended to fit into the new Spanish constitutional framework. In 1841, Navarre lost its kingdom status through a law that substantially restricted its self-government.¹⁷ The assemblies of Araba, Bizkaia, and Gipuzkoa survived under a highly controversial political debate.

In the context of that debate, an influential liberal movement supporting Basque self-governance had developed in the Basque Country, which aimed to adapt the old customary law to the new liberal framework. However, by the time the liberal forces of King Alfonso XII defeated the traditionalist forces in the last Carlist war in 1876, the defense of the fueros had been portrayed as the cause of the traditionalists’ insurrection. In contrast to the view of the liberal foralists, Carlists regarded the fueros as a preservation of the old regime. After their military defeat, what they had defended had to be abolished.¹⁸ On July 21, 1876, the Spanish parliament ordered the abolition of the fueros of the Vascongadas.¹⁹ The already diminished fueros of Navarre were not abolished, but they were stripped of most their powers to fit into the new liberal regime.²⁰

Across Spain, the Carlist Wars were a conflict between traditionalists and liberals, but in the Basque Country, the defense of self-governance was a key factor in the dispute. In fact, the loss of self-governance and the representative assemblies in 1877 had a decisive impact on the subsequent emergence of Basque nationalism.

The emergence of Basque nationalism

Sabino Arana is widely considered as the father of Basque nationalism, being the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party, the PNV, in 1895. He was the first person to declare solemnly, in a political sense, that the fatherland of the Basques was Euzkadi,²¹ i.e., the Basque Country. According to Javier Corcuera, it was only after Arana that some Basques believed they constituted a nation. Nevertheless, Arana was not the first to speak of the Basque Country as a nation. In Corcuera’s view, the rapid spread of Arana’s ideas and the PNV can only be understood “in an environment ready to accept them, in an atmosphere in which Basque nationality and the possibility of independence were not taken as mad ideas but as a formulation of something deeply felt.”²²

The first documented mention of the Basque term for the Basque Country, Euskal Herria, dates back to the fifteenth century. It was coined by Joan Perez Lazarraga, a writer from Araba, around 1564.²³ The term was not limited to one person, as a few years later a cleric and translator from Labourd, Joanes Leizarraga, used it in the introduction of a translation of the New Testament.²⁴ Lazarraga wrote “eusquel erria,” and Leizarraga, “heuskal herria.” A century later, Pedro Axular, a writer and priest from Labourd, gave the term Euskal Herria the sense of the country where Basque is spoken, and he even listed the territories that are nowadays considered the Basque historical territories.²⁵

By the early nineteenth century, the term “Basque” was associated with the concept of “nation” in Juan Antonio Zamacola’s Historia de las naciones bascas (History of the Basque Nations), published in 1818, a book that served as a reference and inspiration for Sabino Arana.²⁶ Arou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Historical background
• Part II Facts
• Part III Analysis
• Conclusions
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index