Pedro Ibarra Guell - Basque Nationhood: Towards a Democratic Scenario

NATIONALISMS ACROSS THE GLOBE

VOL. 18

SERIES EDITORS

Dr Tomasz Kamusella
(University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK)

Dr Krzysztof Jaskuowski
(University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland)

EDITORIAL BOARD

Balzs Apor (Dublin)

Peter Burke (Cambridge)

Monika Bar (Groningen)

Andrea Graziosi (Naples)

Akihiro Iwashita (Sapporo)

Sawomir odziski (Warsaw)

Alexander Markarov (Yerevan)

Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov (Sofia)

Alexander Maxwell (Wellington)

Anastasia Mitrofanova (Moscow)

Michael Moser (Vienna)

Frank Lorenz Mller (St Andrews)

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (Pretoria)

Balzs Trencsnyi (Budapest)

Sergei Zhuk (Muncie, Indiana)

Pedro Ibarra Gell and shild Kols (eds)

Basque Nationhood

Towards a Democratic Scenario

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016932082

Cover image NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

ISSN 1662-9116
ISBN 978-3-0343-2256-0 (print)
ISBN 978-3-0353-0817-4 (eBook)

Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2016
Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland

All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the editors

Pedro Ibarra Gell is Professor of Political Science at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). During the transition to democracy in Spain, he worked as a labour lawyer and advocate for political prisoners. He later founded and directed Party Hartuz, a research group on participatory democracy based at the University of the Basque Country. His main areas of research are theories of collective action, political participation, social movements and nationalism.

shild Kols holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oslo and works as a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Her core research areas are ethnicity, identity politics and peacebuilding. She has carried out long-term fieldwork in Tibetan communities in India and China and has published widely on the politics and representation of identity.

About the book

Debates about Basque self-determination were curtailed for decades by political violence, involving both the actions of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) and the counter-terrorism activities of Spain and France. In 2011, ETA announced a permanent cessation of operations. Since then, stakeholders have become increasingly aware of the need to rethink Basque nationhood and democratic representation in light of the changing nature of nationhood and citizenship within the European Union. These issues are also topical in the French Basque country, which has witnessed a re-emergence of Basque identity politics in recent years.

This book describes the contemporary re-imagining of Basque nationhood in both Spain and France. Taking a fresh look at the history of Basque nationalist movements, it explores the new debates that have emerged since the demise of non-state militancy. Alongside analysis of local transformations, it also describes the impact of global changes on ideas about Basque self-determination.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

iv | v Contents

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viii | ix

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This book is an output of collaborative research for the project Imagined Sovereignties: Frontiers of Statehood and Globalization, based at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). While the project was centered in Norway, the book has emerged out of a highly interactive and grounded process. Contributors to this volume convened several times, not only for our own exchanges, but to share views and receive feedback from discussants and other participants in the workshops and conferences, and engaged civil society actors.

As one of the projects institutional partners, the International Catalan Institute for Peace (ICIP) hosted a workshop in Barcelona on Imagined Sovereignties under Construction: The Basque Country and Catalunya (28 April 2014), bringing together several of the contributors to this volume. Following this, the contributors and project team gathered at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao for a joint workshop with ICIP, PRIO, and the Department of Political Science, University of the Basque Country on Basque Nationhood in a Globalizing World (2829 May 2014). A special session of this event was organized to invite the views and perspectives of Basque civil society, under the title Imagining Basque Sovereignty: Voices from Civil Society (30 May 2014). Organizations present at this event were Lokarri (a citizens network for agreement and consultation), STEE/EILAS (a teachers union), Gure Esku Dago (a grassroots organization advocating the right to decide), Ekologistan Martxan (an association of socialist ecologists), Bilgune (a feminist organization), Asociacin Bertsolaris (a cultural association), Grupo Astra (a cultural organization from the city of Gernika), and Ner Group (Nuevo Estilo de Relaciones, a network of businesses committed to just and sustainable human development). We would like to express our gratitude to all of the speakers and participants at these events for sharing important insights with us.