[Marxism] Spain's Basque Fault-Line

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[This is the draft of the first article of a two article series written 
for the Irish Red Banner journal on the Basque Country and the Spanish 
state. The second one will deal with more recent developments, including 
the recent Basque elections.]



SPAIN'S BASQUE FAULT-LINE


'One day two swindlers came to this city; they made people believe that 
they were weavers, and declared they could manufacture the finest cloth 
to be imagined. Their colours and patterns, they said, were not only 
exceptionally beautiful, but the clothes made of their material 
possessed the wonderful quality of being invisible to any man who was 
unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid.'

Hans Christian Andersen, 'The Emperor's New Suit'





At the end of 1975, the ailing octogenarian Francisco Franco Bahamonde, 
Caudillo de España por la gracia de Dios, finally went the way of all 
flesh, taking a dictatorship which had lasted over a third of a century 
along with him. [1] In what was to happen in the following years, a 
period ubiquitously called by Spaniards _la transición_, the Spain of 
Franco - una, grande, libre, as well from time to time extraordinarily 
brutal - was transformed into the modern and apparently thoroughly 
normal parliamentary democracy that it remains to this day.

In fact '_transición_' is quite the appropriate word to describe what 
happened. The police apparatus of dictatorship was not overthrown by a 
rebellion of the masses as it had just been in Spain's junior Iberian 
sibling Portugal. Neither was it decapitated by its own military command 
structure in the kind of internal coup d'état that had done for 
Papadopoulos two years previously in Greece. No:  in Spain, the 
apparatus of dictatorship, having accomplished its historical mission of 
modernising the social structure (a modernisation, once the spectre of 
social revolution had presented itself in the 1930s, impossible - if the 
rule of capital was to be maintained - _without_ recourse to 
dictatorship) effectively deemed itself to be now no longer necessary to 
maintain bourgeois stability, and it reformed itself out of existence.

But behind all the pretty talk of democracy the _transición_ has in 
reality proved to be something of a bitter fruit for the great bulk of 
Spanish working people, for it has bound them and their parties not only 
to a system of bourgeois constitutional monarchy but to everything else 
that goes with it - from high unemployment, chronically low wages and 
institutionalised extreme labour flexibility (the rate of temporary 
working in Spain, at over thirty per cent of the total workforce, stands 
at double the EU15 average) to an entrenched state-funded clericalism 
and the highest rate of domestic violence in western Europe. Yet no-one, 
but _no-one_, outside of the political fringe can - would even dare - 
question either the _transición_ itself or its legacies.

But why is this so? Why is it that no serious political party, and 
especially no party of the left, can even put into doubt the wisdom and 
legitimacy of the _transición_? To answer this it is necessary to look 
at what has taken place in that one single part of the Spanish state 
where the _transición_ itself has still yet to be fully and successfully 
carried out, where the threads that bind the Spanish state political 
structure still remain to be definitively tied together. Rather in the 
way that it used to be said that in order to know the politics of 
someone form Britain one needed to ask for her opinion on Ireland, to 
understand the configuration of the Spanish political structure one has 
first to grasp the history of the place that the Basques hold within it.

In order to do this we must first take note of an essential 
characteristic of Spanish national identity: its congenital _weakness_. 
For Spanish nationalism was born a sickly child, a runt among the litter 
of European nationalisms. Classically, the initial vehicle for modern 
European state-building nationalism was western Continental liberalism. 
But the agglomeration of dynastic polities that made up Pre-Napoleonic 
Spain was composed of such an extraordinarily complex system of medieval 
privilege that liberalism, the ideology of the urban petit-bourgeois and 
professional social layers, stood as dwarfed within a mesh of 
unremitting social and political backwardness as its spokesmen were 
suppressed under the dead hand of orthodox Catholic fundamentalism.

Given time, perhaps, the Spanish national liberal project would 
eventually have achieved a more decisive political threshold. But time 
was just what was not afforded it. For when the Napoleonic occupation of 
1808 provoked popular uprising, sparking the conflict that has 
misleadingly gone down in Spanish historiography as the 'War of Spanish 
Independence', revolutionary liberalism found itself thrust to political 
centre stage well before its time had come. The provisional power 
represented by the Cortes (Parliament) of Cádiz duly drew up a 
Constitution ( in 1812), the first effective Constitution in Spanish 
history, in which it put forward the principle of national sovereignty 
in place of royal authority and abolished noble legal privileges. But by 
showing its hand so early liberalism had pushed itself out on a limb: if 
this was the Spanish 'bourgeois revolution' it had happened one 
generation too early. For with the restoration of the Spanish crown in 
1814, liberals not only found themselves isolated, but persecuted, 
imprisoned and harried into exile, and their constitution publicly 
repudiated.

The failure of liberal nationalism to carry through its struggle against 
oligarchy and feudal and religious hierarchy had two consequences. It 
not only allowed the old order to re-establish itself but also permitted 
it the historical space to construct its _own_ national ideology: an 
ideological vision of Spain founded on Catholic traditionalism.

Thus were the battlelines drawn for the rest of the nineteenth century, 
as Spain was torn apart between two competing national political 
projects - the 'two Spains' of legend - each fighting it out (literally 
so in the three so-called Carlist Wars) for the predominance of its own 
conception of 'Spain' over that of the other. On the one side stood 
Catholic Traditionalism, vehicle of the arch-traditionalist land-holding 
(and therefore clerical) lobby, which set out its vision in the form of 
a monolithic Catholicism for a Spain dependent for its future survival 
on the maintenance of religious and oligarchic hierarchies. On the 
other, a project of enlightened anti-oligarchic - 'bourgeois' - liberal 
modernisation, which portrayed a millennial Spain as a restless struggle 
for freedom and liberty (and, in its twentieth-century incarnation, for 
democracy).

It is salient that the confection of these rival visions of the Spanish 
'national spirit' took place while Spain largely failed to participate 
in that very special arena in which the 'nationalisation of the masses' 
is tempered: inter-national military conflict. While the other European 
nations were tearing into each other with gay abandon, Spaniards fought 
each other. Spanish nationalism was not forged against a real _external_ 
enemy: while the peoples of the principal powers of western Europe could 
vent their jingoistic frustrations on their neighbours, Spaniards had to 
make do what they could find at home.

It is also notable that all this coincided with Spain's fall to the 
status of fourth-rate international power. For the nineteenth century 
opened with Spain losing the greater part of its Latin American empire; 
it closed in 1898 with the shock of defeat in the Spanish-American war 
and the loss of the rest of it.

And it is at precisely this point in historical time that the new, 
developing non-Spanish nationalisms, specifically in Catalunya and in 
the Basque Country, entered into the political calculus, converting 
themselves in the course, in the absence of any real national enemies 
without, as the sum total of Spain's national enemies within.

Despite obvious superficial similarities, however, we need to be aware 
of the danger of equating Catalan and Basque nationalism, for they are 
in fact very different beasts in both aim and nature, and it is 
instructive in understanding global Spanish politics and the position of 
the non-Spanish Spanish state nationalisms in it to understand what 
these differences are.

On the one hand, modern Catalan nationalism has always tended towards a 
more pragmatic and 'autonomist' - rather than separatist - nationalism, 
more content to safeguard its cultural, linguistic and economic place 
within a unified Spanish state than to press for state independence 
outside of it. In this sense 'Catalanism' is politically and socially an 
extremely broad phenomenon. To be a 'Catalanist' one does not 
necessarily have to be a nationalist as such: it is perfectly possible 
to be a Catalanist social-democrat, a Catalanist communist, a Catalanist 
christian democrat, and even, more recently, a Catalanist neoliberal. 
Differences within Catalanism around the status of Catalunya within the 
Spanish state tend to revolve less around for or against Catalan 
nationhood and independence than relative degrees of 'autonomy' for the 
Catalan political structure within the Spanish system, and, given their 
non-fundamental nature, they tend to lead to political debates which 
rarely intrude into Spanish state politics as a whole.

Basque nationalism on the other hand has always displayed a strong 
independentist coloration. In good part this tendency is rooted in the 
dramatically more rapid and violent pattern of industrialisation it 
experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century. As modern 
industry tore the heart out of rural culture, and as immigrants from 
elsewhere in Spain flooded in to meet the soaring demand for labour, the 
idea that the Basque Country, or at least a part of it, was a 
_different_ country, _oppressed_ by Spain, was fuelled.

This independentist tendency of Basque nationalism has at the same time 
been reinforced by - and has reinforced - a political polarisation 
within Basque politics between two _rival_ nationalisms - Basque, 
separatist and irredentist; and Spanish. Basque social democracy - and 
the industrial setting of the Basque Country, especially that of 
Vizcaya, was one of its principal cradles - is, as a consequence, 
congenitally and apparently irredeemably as virulently anti-Basque 
nationalist as it is Spanish centralist and chauvinist. In addition, 
this polarisation - for or against Basque nationalism - cuts right into 
mainstream Spanish state politics, for it is based on fundamental 
differences regarding the nature of the make-up of the Spanish state itself.

Leaving out some details, then, (such as Galician nationalism, for 
example, or the strong regionalist tendencies in certain other parts of 
the Spanish state), these are the essential features of the national 
physiognomy of present-day Spain. Twin Spanish nationalist traditions, 
that of nineteenth-century liberalism (which has been reincarnated in 
the twentieth-century in social-democratic form), and of Catholic 
Traditionalism (manifested most sharply in modern times in the form of 
dictatorship, but which also exercises a strong spiritual influence on 
the present-day neoliberal Spanish state right), confront a Basque 
nationalism, with sharply irredentist tendencies, and a generally 
gentler, more 'autonomist', Catalan one.

The differences between the two traditions of Spanish nationalism, as 
well as what they hold in common, are thrown into sharp relief if we 
look at how the Basque and Catalan nations have fared at their hands in 
recent times.

Twentieth-century Catalunya has in fact enjoyed extended periods of 
relative self-government, being accorded its own government with 
devolved powers under the administration of the Mancomunitat from 1914 
to 1925, an autonomy statute and autonomous government in the form of 
the Generalitat under the Second Republic, and, following the death of 
Franco, under what the 1978 Constitution with a truly dialectical 
flourish calls the 'state of autonomies', a restored Generalitat with 
qualitatively similar powers. (By 'relative' self-government, of course, 
I mean that the level of governmental power enjoyed in Catalunya is 
ultimately decided in Madrid, not in Catalunya: despite the official 
terminology, these governments have never been truly 'autonomous', but 
merely devolved.)

These periods of 'autonomous' Catalan government accord with those of 
'liberal' ascendance in Madrid, and indicate how the liberal tradition 
in Spanish nationalism tries to accommodate non-Spanish nationalisms 
within a Spanish-state constitutional framework, with the recognition of 
political, linguistic, cultural and even economic privileges, but all 
under Madrid veto. Naturally, in the supervening periods, under the 
dictatorial regimes of Primo de Rivera and then Franco, all concessions 
to Catalan self-government were abandoned, and under Franco measures 
were even taken to prohibit the use of the language, and other national 
paraphernalia, such as flags, anthems, and so on.

Thus for the Catalans, dictatorship, particularly the Franco 
dictatorship, represented a fundamental and deleterious shift in their 
relationship with the rest of Spain, a rupture with the previous 
constitutional quid pro quo with liberal Spain. And under Franco the 
dream of a return of a return to a halcyon status quo ante would in turn 
colour the Catalans' reception of the future transición, a fact which 
greatly smoothed the latter's path in Catalunya.

The Basque case is entirely different. Liberalism, be it in true liberal 
bourgeois or in social-democratic form, has always found much more 
difficulty constructing an autonomy package within the framework of a 
sacrosanct, centralist Spain acceptable to Basque nationalists than it 
has with respect to Catalans, simply because the very idea of a 
sacrosanct, centralist Spain runs counter to Basque nationalism's own 
irredentist tendencies. Under the Second Republic, the 'autonomy' 
statute offered by Madrid to the Basques was, unlike in Catalunya, not 
to be implemented until after the outbreak of the civil war, and this 
because what was on offer from Madrid was not seen by the Basque parties 
to go far enough in terms of devolved powers. The reluctance of the 
Spanish government to lengthen the Basques' leash seemed to be only 
matched by the reluctance of the Basques to have their leash lengthened 
for them on their behalf.

So in the Basque case popular perception, at least within the Basque 
nationalist community, of the difference between liberal (i.e. 
social-democratic) and Traditionalist (i.e. Francoist) Spanish 
nationalism would have been quite different to that held by Catalans. 
Here, there was no halcyon antebellum golden age on which to build the 
transición. The autonomous Basque government of 1936 was a short-lived 
affair, and in good part, it could be argued, it was so as a consequence 
of Madrid's reluctance to recognise the justice of the Basques' claims 
to determine their own level of self-government. One could even put its 
existence down to a cynical opportunism on the part of a besieged 
Republic desperate for allies against the fascists at any costs. For a 
significant layer of Basque nationalism, then, the passage from Second 
Republic to Francoist dictatorship represented not a _qualitative_ shift 
in the political configuration of the Spanish state and their position 
within it, but only a _quantitative_ turn in the level of repression the 
Spanish state was prepared to mete out to deal with a demand for 
self-government that was never going to be met anyway, whoever was 
pulling the strings in Madrid.

The reason that the liberal tradition on Spanish nationalism has had 
more success in striking up an accord with Catalan nationalism is 
therefore not to be explained by the fact that it is fundamentally more 
receptive to the existence of the non-Spanish. For, as the Basque case 
indicates, under no circumstances can _either_ of the Spanish national 
traditions countenance the recognition of fundamental national rights 
for the non-Spanish Spanish state nations. That the liberal tradition 
tries to tempt these nations to the heel of the Madrid veto, on the 
latter's terms, while Catholic Traditionalism uses the veto to try and 
smash them out of existence, is a merely tactical difference. In this 
sense the _degree_ of powers offered by Spanish liberalism to the 
non-Spanish nations is irrelevant, for what counts in the realm of 
national rights is not _what_ powers, but _who_ decides. The real reason 
for liberalism's relatively unproblematic accommodation to Catalan 
nationalism is that the latter has been willing to play the game 
according to Madrid's rules. And the fundamental reason why no current 
in Spanish nationalism has been able to cut a deal with the Basque 
question is that the Basques, or at least a sufficiently sizeable 
minority of them, quite simply won't.

Thus, as the _transición_ opened up, the by now familiar accommodation 
with Catalan nationalism was accomplished with a minimum of fuss. But, 
once again, no such simple solution was possible in the Basque case.

True it is that was certainly no shortage of more moderate Basque 
nationalists, happy enough to accept an autonomy statute along the same 
lines as the Catalan one, so long as they could remain in control in its 
negotiation and able to control the projected parliamentary institutions 
to emerge from it. But there also existed a much more radical political 
current, smaller, but still significantly large (if subsequent election 
results are to be believed, something around a consistent third of all 
Basque nationalist opinion), for whom nothing short of full state 
independence would be adequate. In addition, in the Basque Country a 
significant part of the population was not Basque nationalist at all: 
not only not interested in self-government but actively hostile to the 
idea. And on top of that the radical nationalist ETA, an organisation 
basing itself (or at least trying to) on the twin projects of Basque 
national independence and revolutionary socialism had been waging an 
'armed struggle' against the Spanish state since the late 1960s.

The negotiation of a suitably moderate autonomy statute was only able to 
be carried out in the Basque Country by by-passing the more radical 
political forces of Basque nationalism. That it had been impossible to 
reach consensus on the Basques' status within the Spanish state (unlike 
that quickly reached in Catalunya on the Catalans' one) was graphically 
illustrated when the new Constitution, which had already been drawn up 
and subjected to popular referendum, winning wide acceptance throughout 
the rest of the Spanish State, was symbolically rejected by the majority 
of Basques. Even though here it was approved by a majority of three to 
one, the turnout in the referendum in the Basque Country was only 45% of 
the electorate. And when the autonomy statute itself was finally put to 
the electorate it fared better, but not much better: although it was 
passed, with a 95% yes vote, nearly half of the electorate abstained.

Thus the resolution of the 'Basque problem' wrought by the _transición_ 
has really resolved nothing fundamental for anyone at all. For the 
_transición_ constitutionalists the failure to win a consensus across 
the political spectrum has introduced a level of instability in Basque 
politics that means that the definitive parliamentarisation of the 
Basque question remains pending. For true Spanish nationalists - and 
they come no truer than those Spanish nationalists from the Basque 
Country itself - an 'autonomous' Basque government is only the thin end 
of the wedge whose thick end is the separation of the Basque Country 
from Spain. And for the independentist wing of Basque nationalism, any 
'autonomy' statute set up in the framework of the 1978 Constitution 
automatically subjects itself to the Madrid veto, and as such is - quite 
correctly - automatically unacceptable.

And now perhaps we can see the siginificance of the Basque question 
within Spanish politics.

The principal parties of the Spanish working class - the Socialists and 
the Communists - cannot countenance a recognition of the demand for real 
Basque self-government because this runs against the idea of a unitary 
Spanish state set out in the Constitution of 1978, and this 
Constitution, and everything that goes with it, is the one thing that 
the left will simply not break from.

For all shades of Spanish political opinion, the legacy of the 
_transición_ is summed up in two phrases: '_la democracia_' - the 
constitutional-monarchic bourgeois-democratic system that issued from 
the _transición_ - and '_el estado de derecho_' (the 'state of law', 
although the English language is too historically influenced by an 
Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence to convey accurately the import of the 
expression) - the institutional framework in which this is inculcated. 
But this trinity of _la transición_, _la democracia_ and _el estado de 
derecho_, far more than concretely representing a sum total of 
institutional bourgeois democratic rights and freedoms, acts as a 
modernised hypostisation of nineteenth-century bourgeois Spanish 
liberalism, for which it is the very territorial integrity of Spain 
itself that stands as the fundamental, and only, guarantee of the 
survival of the virtues - democracy, freedom, constitutionality, 
rationalism, you name it - of Spaniards. Anything that jeopardises the 
integrity of the Spanish nation jeopardises too these millennial 
virtues; and for Spanish nationalism in all its shades what jeopardises 
the integrity of the Spanish nation most is precisely the threat posed 
by irredentist nationalism in general and Basque nationalism in 
particular. Catalanism, as we have seen, is tolerable for this 
viewpoint, at least in the latter's more liberal forms, for it is 
prepared to live within both the Madrid veto and the established 
territorial borders of the Spanish state. Basque nationalism, for its 
historical independentist tendencies, is not. Not for nothing is it that 
a favourite epithet used by the left in its denunciations of ETA is 'nazi'.

For the ideological glue that holds the whole contraption of the 
_transición_ together - and thus acts as the best safeguard for the 
stability of capitalist rule in Spain - is Spanish nationalism; Spanish 
nationalism of nineteenth-century liberal vintage, which is neither a 
flag-waving jingoistic nationalism like the British-English one, nor a 
blunt instrument of Francoist variety, but which is none the less 
pernicious for that. And the fact is that it is only through focusing on 
this Spanish nationalism in its current concrete form of the reification 
of the constitutional settlement of the late 1970s will the left ever 
move beyond the narrow bourgeois political labyrinth in which it is now 
ensnared. The distance that the Spanish state left still has to go to 
realise this strategic challenge is indicated by its unmitigated 
chauvinism in relation to the Basque question. In one sentence: until 
the Spanish state left comes round to see that irredentist Basque 
nationalism is not its enemy, but its strategic friend, it will achieve 
nothing.



Friday, 30 September 2005





[1] For reasons of space this article is deliberately light on 
footnotes. Its central arguments, however, have been developed 
elsewhere, in my 'Frankenstein and the Monster: The Spanish State Left 
After the May Elections' (June, 2003; 
<http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext26/Spain.html>), and 
'Through the Smoke of Atocha: A Reflection on Spanish Politics' (July, 
2004; <http://www.geocities.com/edgeorge2001es/mywritings/atocha.html>), 
where both more developed justifications of the positions put forward 
here, as well as supporting references and citations, may be found.

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