Basque attitude towards political violence: Its correlation with personality variables, other sociopolitical attitudes, and political party vote

Abstract

The Basque are a strongly nationalistic European people in northern Spain and southern France with an ancient ethnic tradition and a language unrelated to any other known. Their recent history has been overshadowed by a terrorist organization perpetrating political violence within the boundaries of the Basque Country and often beyond its borders within the Spanish state. Research on the Basque, with an emphasis on the comparison of psychological characteristics (studied by the use of an instrument developed for that purpose by the author of this article and another colleague, Jesus Guerra, of the University of the Basque Country), has provided an opportunity to review attitudes towards violence within the general population, analyze different groups constituted according to differences in attitude as well as political party vote, and to compare them with regards to differences in personality. The distribution of these attitudes within the sample population, as well as some hypotheses as to their origins, are presented, discussing their possible relationship to social and psychological variables at work within Basque society. Psychopathological indicators permit an estimation of the degree of abnormality associated with the attitude towards political violence. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.