Basque Nationalism between Archaism and Modernity

Abstract

A small people centred in the northern corner of the Iberian peninsula, the Basques claim their language is the oldest in Europe,' and proudly assert that it took the overwhelming might of the Roman Empire more than two centuries to conquer them. Nor were the Muslims and Charlemagne, at the peak of their power, more successful in this respect.2 The geographic isolation of Euskadi, as the Basque country is commonly known, helped develop among its people a strong attachment to millenarian social and family structures as well as a xenophobic mind deeply suspicious of foreign cultural influences.3 But, in spite of the nationalists' fanatic emphasis on their homeland's historical, ethnic and linguistic distinctiveness, the link of the Basque country with the rest of Spain was never seriously questioned. Of the four Basque provinces, three Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa and Alava were integrated into the Castilian Kingdom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and that only after the Castilian kings had recognized their regionalfueros (the Spanish word for rights or laws) in matters ofjurisdiction, administration and financial management.4 Strongly conservative and fanatically Catholic, the agrarian-based Basque society was consistent with the overall physiognomy of the Spain of the old regime. However, the invasion of the country by the legacy of the French philosophes late in the eighteenth century and by European liberalism in the first half of the nineteenth century threatened to undermine the cohesion and homogeneity of Basque society. The Carlist rebellions, the power base and social support of which was centred in the Basque provinces, especially in highly devout and Catholic Navarre, were essentially the violent protest of primitive peasant communities against the sins of liberalism and the corruption of urban society. Consequently, unlike Catalonia, where nineteenth-century nationalism was a cause advocated in an