ETA and Basque Nationalism (RLE: Terrorism & Insurgency)

The Fight for Euskadi 1890-1986

John L. Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138900301
• eBook ISBN: 9781317479598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book traces the formation of ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) and the tensions created by its combination and aims: socialism and Basque nationalism. The Basque Nationalist movement emerged in the late nineteenth century as a response to the rapid transformation of Basque society by industrialisation. The influx of Spanish-speaking workers to Basque territories seemed to threaten the stability of basque society. Gradually the immigrants became absorbed into the radical struggle, with the creation of illegal trade unions and the need to resist the Franco regimne by whatever means.

Over the next half century Basque consicousness developed until the radical nationalist organisation ETA was formed in 1959.

1

Basque Nationalism from its Origins until the 1950s

Basque nationalism originated in the 1890s in Vizcaya as a response to the rapid transformation of Basque society by the industrialisation which brought massive immigration of workers from other parts of Spain. The immigrants, who came to seek work in the iron mines and steel works, transformed many areas which had once spoken the Basque language, Euskera, into Spanish-speaking districts. In their struggle against savage exploitation and harsh working conditions they formed branches of the Unión General de Trabajodores (UGT) and of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE).¹ Both the UGT and the PSOE were militantly anticlerical, and were seen as dangerous and immoral by many devout Basque Catholics. The immigrants, apart from their trade union and political activities, merely by speaking Spanish seemed to threaten the stability of traditional Basque society. In addition, many Basques saw the immigrants as morally licentious and consequently as a danger to the ethnically Basque population.² Indeed, later nationalist theoreticians argued that Spaniards were racially inferior to Basques.

Until the 1890s the social distinctiveness of the four Basque provinces had produced no nationalist consciousness. The founder of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, the son of a Carlist shipbuilder, had to invent a name, Euskadi, for the Basque country, design a flag for it, and construct an ideology which would justify the region’s claim to independence from Spain. Arana was able to draw on a potent myth which was to be tremendously effective in building a nationalist movement, first in Vizcaya, and later in the other three Basque provinces. The most distinctive feature of Basque society was the language (or group of languages), Euskera, which is not Indo-European and has no apparent connection with any other tongue. This fact was enormously helpful in emphasising the distinctiveness of the Basques and justifying their right to be independent of Spain and France. The singularity of Enskera encouraged the belief that the Basques were a race apart.³ Naive versions of Basque history suggested that Enskera might be the language of the Garden of Eden, and the tongue spoken by all mankind before the disaster of the tower of Babel. The Basques were thought to be the descendants of Tubal, son of Japhet and grandson of Noah. It was claimed that they had lived in an egalitarian, democratic society, where the laws were made by assemblies of all the citizens, while the rest of the world lived under tyranny. According to this account, the Basques had fought for centuries to preserve their independence from foreign conquerors. In 778, for example, they had defeated the army of Charlemagne at Roncesvalles. The ancient laws, the Fueros, which were held to be unique to the Basque country, had, it was claimed, provided a purer democracy than anything existing elsewhere in the world before modern times.⁴ The Basque country, as it had not, like most of Spain, been subjected to Roman or Moorish occupation, had escaped the corrupting effect of living under tyranny, and the contamination resulting from mingling with those of Moorish or Jewish race.⁵.

The Basques had, it was claimed, freely negotiated agreements which accepted the Spanish King as the lord of Vizcaya and of other Basque provinces. However, such treaties were not to be understood as subjection since the King had to rule according to the ancient laws embodied in the Fueros. The racial superiority of the Basques had been recognised, it was claimed, by a royal decree granting the citizens of Vizcaya universal nobility. The devout Catholicism of the Basques, shown by the life of such saints as Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, was also produced as evidence of their moral superiority over Spaniards. The idyllic harmony of traditional Basque society was allegedly broken by the anticlerical and centralising policies adopted by Spanish governments in the nineteenth century. The Basques had seized the opportunity provided by a dynastic quarrel in 1833 to ally with Don Carlos, the conservative claimant to the Spanish throne, supported by the most reactionary forces, in order to preserve their Fueros which were threatened by Liberal governments in Madrid. The defeat of Don Carlos had resulted in the Basques being punished by reductions in their rights, although the Fueros remained in modified form. Similarly, after the second Carlist War of 1873–74, the Basques, once more on the losing side, were deprived of their customary rights and submitted to the same centralising laws as the rest of Spain.

In reality the Fueros had been granted by the Spanish Crown and had equivalents throughout Spain before customary law was replaced by the centralising tendencies of later Spanish governments. Not only had the Basque provinces been an integral part of Spain, but they had taken a leading part in creating the Spanish state. It was often pointed out that Fueros varied widely in each province and that there had never been any attempt to create a unified Basque country.⁶ Similarly, the royal decree of 1525 which granted noble status to all the natives of Vizcaya has been interpreted as a measure to win the support of the population to the Spanish Crown rather than as a recognition of Basque social superiority. The Fueros did not reflect a primitive democratic Arcadia, as power remained in the hands of a property-owning elite, as the franchise was often more restricted than elsewhere in Spain.⁷ Furthermore, the most illustrious Basques had been servants of the Spanish Crown or the Church.

It was true that the social structure of the Basque country had been very different from regions such as Andalusia, where large landowners ruled over downtrodden peasants or landless labourers. The Basque custom of primogeniture prevented the extreme fragmentation of land holding which occurred in areas like Galicia, and encouraged younger sons to leave the land and serve the Crown as soldiers, sailors or bureaucrats. Good educational standards which produced a high level of written Spanish accounted for the importance of bureaucrats of Basque origin at the Madrid court.⁸ There seems to have been little conflict between Euskera and Spanish until the late nineteenth century. Euskera was the language of the home and the countryside, and it was of no consequence to the authorities that the majority of the population did not speak Spanish, the language of administration and public life. Euskera was not a written language until the sixteenth century when Protestant missionaries translated the Bible and the Catholic Church responded by producing a number of religious works in that language.

The existence of the Fueros was the main evidence produced by Basque nationalists that the Basques were once a sovereign people, although the Fueros of each province were distinct and the Spanish Crown had never treated the Basque country as a single political unit. Nevertheless, the Fueros conferred substantial privileges on the Basques and were popular among most of the population. They stipulated that the Basques were not to be conscripted into the Spanish army, although the local authorities had the duty of raising a militia force. Such an arrangement had obvious advantages for the Spanish Crown in facilitating the defence of a frontier region. The other main provision of the Feuros, the exemption from customs duty, was also popular among the mass of the population, and resentment at its abolition was one of the factors which encouraged the growth of nationalism in the late nineteenth century. Until 1837 the customs posts were on the Ebro rather than at the French border or the seaports, so imported goods could be bought cheaply. After the loss of Spain’s American empire in the nineteenth century, the rising class of merchants and industrialists, finding the existence of the interior customs barrier detrimental to their interests, petitioned for the customs posts to be placed at the Spanish border.⁹ This demand brought the developing bourgeoisie into conflict with both farmers and rural gentry, both of whom benefited from cheap imports.

At the outbreak of the first Carlist War in 1833 most rural areas of the Basque country rallied to the cause of Don Carlos, as the enemy of liberalism. The war was seen by later nationalists as the real beginning of Basque nationalism, and the awakening of the people to regain their ancient rights,¹⁰ although Don Carlos was attempting to conquer Spain for his conservative cause, not lead a separatist movement. The Carlist leadership stressed its conservative ideology, support for the Church and opposition to Liberalism. However, the enormous support for Don Carlos was largely due to the identification of Liberalism with attacks on the Fueros and the Church. Local Basque leaders stressed the issue of Foral rights, rather than that of Don Carlos’s dynastic claims. The cities of the Basque country supported the Liberal cause of the Queen Regent, María Cristina, and welcomed the defeat of Don Carlos in 1839. In the second Carlist War of 1873–74 the protagonists were the same as in the previous conflict, with the towns and the bourgeoisie backing the central government, while the Carlists retained support of the rural areas. Defeat this time resulted in the abolition of the Fueros, leaving the provincial authorities with a vestige of provincial rights, the Conciertos Económicos, which permitted them to levy taxes, in order to pay their share of the central government’s demands.¹¹

The abolition of the Fueros was unpopular, even with some liberals who had fought against Carlism because of its reactionary, clerical programme. There were movements urging Foral restorations but these did not evolve into nationalism, until the development of the Vizcayan iron mines brought an influx of immigrants from elsewhere in Spain and produced xenophobic currents in the native population. Sabino Arana drew heavily on nostalgia for the Fueros to develop the nationalist ideology, but he also introduced new features to create a modern movement. Arana, influenced by his elder brother, Luis, became a nationalist in 1882 at the age of seventeen and devoted himself to the study of Basque history, language and culture. He spent five years studying in Barcelona between 1883 and 1888 before returning to Vizcaya to begin his political mission.¹²

Although Arana, whose charismatic personality dominated the movement which he founded until his death in 1903, was heavily influenced by his Carlist background, he transformed the Carlist desire for the restoration of the Fueros into something quite new — the demand for complete separation of the Basque country from Spain. Arana wanted the restoration of the Fueros because he believed that they had once provided the mechanism by which the Basques had governed themselves and could in the future be the means to achieve Basque independence, a programme which had little in common with the Carlist demands for exemption from customs duty and military service. Arana’s overriding concern was his belief that the Basque race was in danger of extinction because of an invasion of foreigners whom he considered to be racially degenerate, immoral, non-Catholic and socialist. Basque independence would, Arana considered, make it possible to deny admittance to the Basque country to Spaniards, prohibit intermarriage between them and Basques, restore traditional morality and shut out liberal and socialist influences.

Arana’s belief that the Maketos (the abusive term he used to describe Spaniards) constituted a danger to the moral health and social purity of the Basques led him to call for measures which would make life uncomfortable for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Basque Nationalism from its Origins until the 1950s
• Chapter 2 ETA’s First Steps 1951–1967
• Chapter 3 The Beginnings of Armed Struggle: Spring 1967 to Autumn 1970
• Chapter 4 The Burgos Trial
• Chapter 5 The Return to Radical Nationalism
• Chapter 6 The Twilight of the Dictatorship, 1974–1977
• Chapter 7 From the Election to the Constitution: June 1977–December 1979
• Chapter 8 ETA in a Parliamentary Democracy
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Index