Basque Identity Research Articles

Using Strategic Communication for Nation-Building in Contemporary Spain: The Basque Case

This article analyzes the use of strategic communication for nation-building purposes in the case of regions, or the so-called “stateless nations” of contemporary Spain. It describes the case of the Basque Country region where successive nationalist governments over the last 30 years have used soft and hard power methods for this purpose. The soft power methods have consisted fundamentally of the use of mass media campaigns and funded institutional publicity to generate a climate of opinion that opposes Basque identity and Spanish identity. Other soft power methods have involved the promotion of Basque culture, beliefs, and values through mostly public diplomacy efforts (which also had an impact among internal audiences). Soft power approaches have resulted in a positive climate of opinion concerning an inclusive (not ethnic) Basque identity without political connotations. Nevertheless, this positive outcome has been contradicted by other hard power approaches such as the implementation of coercive linguistic laws and a level of passivity towards terrorism. Far from reinforcing each other, the intensive use of one-way communication and hard power methods seems to have created a dissonance between Basque identity and Basque nationalism.

Subversive Pleasures, Losing Games: Basque Soccer Madness

ABSTRACT The following article addresses the socio-cultural significance of a unique recruiting philosophy in the first division Spanish soccer Liga: the Basque-only policy of Athletic Bilbao. The Basque club is one of three clubs (besides Real Madrid FC and Barcelona FC) in Spain that have never been relegated to the second division throughout their centenarian history. Athletic contributed to Spanish soccer history in three ways: by importing the game from England through Bilbao's commercial relations; through the numerous records, victories and world-class players it has produced; and by maintaining a unique recruiting philosophy. The article discusses the various characteristics, consequences and impasses of ethnicised recruitment in a globalised competition that thrives on athlete migration. First, it situates the Basque club within the socio-political matrix of 20th-century Spain, Basque Country and Bilbao. Second, it describes the Basque-only philosophy of the club, and how conceptions of Basque identity have changed over time. The article pays attention to the 2010 World Cup victory of the Spanish selection, as it confronted Basques with a decision of identification: whether to cheer or not to cheer the Spanish selection, seen by many as the symbol of an impostor state. Third, the article addresses the impasses of the self-limiting recruiting philosophy: the necessity to suffer mediocre sports performance, and the symbolic obligation to carry on despite that suffering. Finally, the article discusses the community-making effect of a philosophy that renders Athletic's losing game a source of transgressive self-enjoyment – one that becomes part of a historical discourse of auto-exoticisation.

Social identification and acculturation in the Basque Autonomous Community

Abstract Basque origin undergraduates in four universities of the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) completed the Host Community Acculturation Scale (HCAS) in three life domains: marriage, culture, and work. Undergraduates with a strong Basque identity ( N = 308) and those with a strong dual Basque-Spanish identity ( N = 219) completed the HCAS towards the co-national Spanish minority and “devalued” Moroccan immigrants residing in the BAC. Results indicate that (1) undergraduates have a preference for individualism and integrationism towards Spanish co-nationals and Moroccans; (2) Strong Dual identifiers endorse individualism and integrationism more than Strong Basque identifiers towards Spanish co-nationals; (3) Strong Dual identifiers favored Spanish co-nationals over Moroccan immigrants in their acculturation orientations, whereas Strong Basque identifiers endorsed more welcoming acculturation orientations towards Moroccans than towards Spanish co-nationals; and (4) undergraduates endorsed more individualism, integrationism, and assimilationism in the work domain, while they endorsed more segregationism and exclusionism in the culture domain. Results are discussed using the Interactive Acculturation Model.

The reign of Christ over the nation: The Basque question in the Spanish Republic, 1931–1936

The debate on the Basque Statute during the Spanish Republic (1931–39) became an exceptional political myth in contemporary Basque politics. According to current political narratives of Basque identity, the traditional will to self-government of the Basque people was expressed during those years in a broad demand for autonomy and collective identity. This article outlines the social complexity of the autonomy project, more related to religion than to ethnic conflict. This approach suggests that present concerns with Basque identity narratives undermine the historical parameters operative in the past, disabling our understanding of the history of the Basques.

Euskal identitatearen garapena online sare sozialen bidez: gazteen praktika sozialak Facebooken

The transformation that Basque society has suffered and the emergence of the new technologies of communication have transformed the logic, the way, the spaces, the tools and the cultural references to analyze, understand and develop the national identity. The objective of this article is to identify and analyze those elements and for this aim it is going to be exposed a research made in 2011 to answer how youth build Basque identity by Facebook. During this research in addition to answer the influence that online social networks have in social practices and in the construction of the national identity, the sense of community and the question required for the sociological analysis of the Basque identity will be questioned.

The coding of aesthetic and thematic discourse in a cinematic mnemonic: The case of Ama Lur (1968)

The deployment of film for purposes of propaganda is well documented, but the makers of the Basque documentary Ama Lur ( Motherland) (1968) committed themselves to far greater experimentation with film language and aesthetics when they attempted to construct Ama Lur as a collage of Basque identity that would impact upon its audience as a mnemonic, a device to aid memory that relies on visual, kinesthetic or auditory associations between more easily remembered constructs. This article contextualizes the making of Ama Lur (the first full-length feature made in the Basque Country since the Spanish Civil War) in the turbulent and increasingly violent decade of the 1960s as it was lived in the Basque Country during the dictatorship of General Franco. Against a backdrop of the emergence of ETA, the makers of Ama Lur sought to both document and make newly relevant a notion of extant and vibrant Basque nationhood. With reference to the theories of time put forward by Henri Bergson, this analysis of Ama Lur seeks to explain its functioning in the service of an oppressed but nevertheless evolving Basque culture and identity.

The historical dynamics of ethnic conflicts: confrontational nationalisms, democracy and the Basques in contemporary Spain

. All the historical moments in which the Basque debate reached political protagonism in contemporary Spain coincided with political contexts of institutional democratisation. The debate on patriotism in the Basque Country is connected with a uniform narrative regarding the Basques and their moral distance from the Spanish nation: the ‘Basque problem’. This narrative has fostered a confrontational discourse between Spanish and Basque nationalism. It has also promoted recourse to specific stereotypical images of the Basques, which bind ethnicity to collective identity. Such representations reveal that the invention of the Basque country as a uniform ethnic collective had much more to do with the internal contradictions of Spanish national identity – and later of Basque identity – than with the existence of a secular conflict between Basques and Spaniards. The Basque case shows that every ‘ethnic conflict’ requires adequate contextualisation in order to avoid simplifying its origins and past pathways to make it conform to present uses.

For whom does language death toll? Cautionary notes from the Basque case

In this article, I show that despite a seemingly inclusive, language-based identity promoted in schools and pedagogical materials, Basque identity and language are embedded with social histories that exclude large swaths of the would-be Basque nation: women and second language learners of Basque. To the extent that these processes continue to operate in society and are ignored in the curriculum-in-use, it bodes ill for the future of Euskera as a language of everyday use. Specifically, I examine elements of Basque identity, culture and language featured in classrooms or pedagogical materials used to teach Basque language and culture in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) of Spain and the diaspora, and show how they are socially constructed to position some kinds of Basques as “more Basque” than others. These social constructions are problematic, in that efforts to revitalize threatened languages like Euskera need to welcome speakers rather than marginalize them.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ethnographic approaches to race, genetics and genealogy

Teaching and Learning Guide for: <i>Ethnographic approaches to race, genetics and genealogy</i>

Basque-Atlantic shores: ethnicity, the nation-state and the diaspora in Europe and America (1808–98)

Classical approaches to nationalism and ethnicity have traditionally understood ethnic groups as ethno-nationalist groups that were irrevocably predisposed to constitute political entities in order to preserve and promote their assumed unique socio-historical and cultural markers. However, we argue that the Basque case illustrates much the opposite. Basque ethnic identity was not only utilized by the Basque nationalist movement, but it helped to form diverse processes of national identifications such as the Spanish, French, or Venezuelan for that matter throughout the nineteenth century. In this sense, the debate on Basque ethnicity is not a marginal issue in the re-elaboration of Spanishness and identity politics on both sides of the Atlantic but a central and main one in the Spanish and Latin American national and state-building discourses.

Loyalties, commodity and fandom: Real Madrid, Barça and Athletic fans versus ‘La Furia Roja’ during the World Cup

This essay is about contemporary identity construction in Spain, using football as one of the most representative aspects of mass and popular culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It seeks to explore the multiple contemporary identities in Spain through football, those within Spain, especially Basque and Catalan, and that of Spain as a national entity. After 25 years of established democracy and with a new territorial arrangement introduced in the new Constitution, what is the role of the main football teams in Spain? What relevance do they have for their cities' politics? Do they still play the same role? For example, does Real Madrid still symbolize the Spanish state and government? Is Barça still the main Catalan stronghold? What is the relation between Athletic and its hiring policy and Basque nationalism and identity? If national identity in Spain is weak because of its strong regional identities, is this reflected in its national selection when participating at the World Cup? tant se val d'on venim, si del sud o del nord, ara estem d'acord estem d'acord, una bandera ens agermana, blaugrana al vent un crit valent, tenim un nom que el sap tothom Barça, Barça, Barça!1 De las glorias deportivas, que campean por España, va el Madrid con su bandera, limpia y blanca que no empaña. Club castizo y generoso, todo nervio y corazón.2 Bilbo ta Bizkai guztia goratu bedi munduan Aupa mutillak! Gora beti euskalerria! Athletic gorri-zuria geuria. Bilbo ta Bizkaiko gaztiak gora! Euskaldun zintzoak aurrera!3 Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol; hemos venido a emborracharnos, el resultado nos da igual.4

Basque Diaspora in the USA and Language Maintenance

The Basques first immigrated on a large scale to the USA during the Gold Rush of 1848. After immigrating to the USA, they settled in pockets throughout the West, especially in California, Nevada and Idaho, and it is currently estimated that more than 35,000 Basque–Americans live in these three states. This represents one of the largest concentrations of Basques outside the Basque Country. Although Basque identity and culture have been preserved thanks to Basque Clubs scattered throughout these states, little is known about their language proficiency and language attitudes. This paper looks into this question. The participants in the study were 80 Basque–Americans who completed a questionnaire aimed at examining their language attitudes towards Basque, Spanish, French and English, as well as their command of these languages. Thirty of the participants were also interviewed in order to research the issues in greater depth. The results show that, although the attitudes held towards the different languages are in general very positive, the attitudes towards Basque warrant particular attention, even though language attitudes and language competence are far from comparable.

Performative Identities and the Representation of ETA in Basque Film and Novel

The novels Gizona Bere Bakardadean and Zeru Horiek, by Bernardo Atxaga, and the film Días contados (1994), by Imanol Uribe, constitute renowned examples of the representation of ETA activists in literature and film. All three also represent performative constructions of melancholic, gendered identity in postmodern life, constructions which supersede their representation of Basque identity. Instead of offering specific insight into the political constitution of national identities, ETA members and ex-members in these works express first and foremost the human condition in modernity. Consequently, this essay, inspired by Judith Butler's theories about the performative construction of identity and the psychological constitutive processes of the psyche in subjection to normativity, focuses on how Atxaga and Uribe construct the modern subject's identity in these three works.

The Role of (ETA) Violence in the Construction of Nationalism in Spain and the Basque Country

AbstractUsing the theoretical concepts of the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, the author discusses the different ways in which three political parties in Spain ‐ PP, PSOE and PNV ‐ construct their discourse in relation to the nation and violence. It is claimed that the PP has developed a discourse based on chains of equivalence, one of which has the nation as a nodal point and the other ‐ the (ETA) violence. These chains are not just political but also ethical constructions. The PSOE bases its discourse on the logic of difference, which attempts to expand the political field to include more and more elements, but sometimes fails to renegotiate some important concepts. The PNV is in a constant fluctuation between the sovereignist position of a permanent struggle to preserve the Basque identity and to liberate the Basque Country and the autonomist position where the logic of difference is employed and only violence is left aside.

Viviendo en lo global: una identidad vasca en Bernardo Atxaga

In The Son of the Accordion Player, novelist Bernardo Atxaga proposes a new model of Basque identity for the 21st century, a model that distances itself from Romantic notions of identification linked to language, land, and ethnicity. David, the protagonist of the novel, is immersed in a long process of self and collective discovery, one that puts him at first on the road to political violence in the name of Basque identity if only to “survive” this terror and discover through the power of writing a more subdued and tranquil cultural identity that he then learns to pass on. This new model he discovers wrestles with the violences of the Spanish Civil War and of the Franco dictatorship in order to put them to rest. Writing, the writing of The Son of the Accordion Player, becomes a site for a version of memory free from melancholia and of impossible redemption.

Excluir para ser: Procesos identitarios y fronteras sociales en la América hispánica (XVII–XVIII)

Excluir para ser: Procesos identitarios y fronteras sociales en la América hispánica (XVII–XVIII)

From Herria to Hirria : Locating Dialogue in Julio Medem's La pelota vasca

Nathan Richardson is Asso ciate Professor of Spanish at Bowling Green State University. His book Post modern Paletos explores the representation and production of rural/urban relationships in contempo rary Spanish culture. He has published numerous articles on peninsular nar rative and film. His book, Different Spains: Imagin ing Place and Space in Spanish Fiction and Film, is forthcoming. Spanish Basque director Julio Mederns first feature-length work, 1992 s Vacas, explicitly addressed questions of Basque identity. Vacas traced the interactions of two Basque families from the trenches of the third Carlist uprising to the forest skirmishes of the Spanish Civil War. In 2003, Mederns sixth film and first documentary, La pelota vasca, brought the director back to Basque issues and Basque lands, where he interviewed hundreds of politicians, academics, and victims on the subject of the current Basque conflict. Mederns explicit return to Basque issues in La pelota vasca invites audiences to return to the films that La pelota and Vacas bookend?encouraging them to see La ardilla roja, Tierra, and Los amantes del ctrculo polar as part of an ongoing five-film dialogue on Basque identity.1 The regular references to Basque places, events, and people; the repetition of actors in similar roles both within and among the films; and other common motifs to the five suggest that Mederns interest in the Basque question is constant. Vacas and La pelota vasca are only the most explicit works in a Basque-focused whole; the palindrome vacaslvasca works itself out, so to speak, over the course of the five features.

Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez : Spanish Dictatorship, Basque Identity, and the Political Tug-of-War over a Popular Heroine

The history of literary criticism concerning Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez, the autobiography of the 17th-century novice Catalina de Erauso, illustrates the power of intellectuals and academics to place, misplace or even ignore a text within literary canons. This article explores the period between 1939 and 1975 when Vida was politically appropriated under the Franco Regime. Erauso was claimed as a cultural icon by both those who wanted to define a Basque identity as well as those who wished to reassert patriotic sentiments in Spain. Literary critics have throughout the ages utilized the Vida text for their own purposes, but during the Franco years critics often engaged in particularly twisted machinations to make the text fit their needs. The history of literary criticism concerning Vida has in fact failed to locate the text within literary parameters, and the text has therefore remained lost in terms of its significance in the history of Spanish literature and autobiography.La historia de la crítica literaria en relación a Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez, la autobiografía de Catalina de Erauso, novicia del siglo XVII, revela el poder que intelectuales y académicos poseen para situar, descuidar, o incluso ignorar un texto dentro de cánones literarios. Este artículo explora el período entre 1939 y 1975, cuando Vida fue apropiado políticamente bajo el Régimen Franquista. Erauso se convirtió en un símbolo cultural, tanto para aquéllos quienes querían definir una identidad vasca, como para los que querían reafirmar ciertos sentimientos patrióticos en España. Durante el Régimen, críticos literarios crearon maquinaciones especialmente retorcidas en torno al texto para satisfacer sus propias necesidades. La historia de la crítica literaria referente a Vida ha fracasado en la tarea de localizar el libro dentro de específicos parámetros literarios, y por tanto el texto ha permanecido perdido en cuanto a su significado en la historia de la literatura y de la autobiografía española.

Language Attitudes in San Sebastian: The Basque Vernacular as Challenge to Spanish Language Hegemony

This paper examines the effects of Basque- versus Spanish-language schooling on the language attitudes of secondary school students in San Sebastian, in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) of Spain. By mandating the teaching of Basque (‘euskera’) in schools, and by requiring Basque proficiency of civil servants, the Basque government is attempting to increase the utility and use of Basque. By teaching people Basque, the Basque Government is also trying to create a link between Basque language and identity. I will show that schooling has no independent effect on language attitudes; rather, positive attitudes towards Basque are correlated with exposure to Basque in both the home and school domains. Further, whether they attend Basque- or Spanish-medium schools, students who speak only Spanish at home exhibit identical language attitudes. Finally, regardless of the language(s) they use at home and school, all students favour vernacular Basque, which is not used for instruction. This suggests that, in developing their policies and educational programmes, language planners should take into greater account how vernacular forms are used in domains outside the school, and the values students ascribe them, and how these compare with the language varieties promoted in schools.

Social Identity and Leadership in the Basque Region: A Study of Leadership Development Programmes

The purpose of the study was to explore how social identity influences the construction of leadership development programmes in the Basque Region. The Basque region is recognised as having a strong social and national identity (Kaufmann and Tödtling, 2000; McNeill, 2000). Historically leadership development has been focused on practising leaders and managers and delivered by universities, consultants and other intermediaries. A recent study reported in the paper has shown managerial dissatisfaction with current provision in the region and has illustrated a need for provision to focus on `skills' for 'leadership'. What is meant by 'skills' and 'leadership' is, however, embedded within the Spanish language and Basque identity (Kasmir, 1996; Whyte, 1999). The paper introduces theories of social identity as they are applied to the study of leadership and it explores how these theories can help explain perceptions of leadership.