Roland Vazquez - Politics, Culture, and Sociability in the Basque Nationalist Party

The Basque Series
This book was funded in part by a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spains Ministry of Culture and United States Universities. University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA
Copyright 2010 by University of Nevada Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vazquez, Roland, 1964
Politics, culture, and sociability in the Basque nationalist party / Roland Vazquez.
p. cm. (The Basque series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87417-822-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Euzko-Alderdi Jeltzalea. 2. NationalismSpainPas Vasco. 3. Political partiesSpainPas Vasco. 4. Pas Vasco (Spain)Politics and government. I. Title.
JN8399.B373N328 2010
324.246'08309466dc22

2010004136

ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-823-4 (ebook)

FIGURES (following page )

This book, which is a party study of the Basque Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco, or PNV), had its origins in research done for a doctoral dissertation. A confluence of circumstances led to that research. My desire to study the Basques in particular, combined with my interest in politics and the anthropological methods in which I had immersed myself in graduate school, as well as my recognition of a gap in the literature about Basque politics, all led me to feel that my topic had been determined without my having had a say.

Various themes are interwoven throughout the book. Clearly, as a party study, it looks at Basque politics and, more generally, political realities in Spain. The book does not simply concern political ideas and ideology, but political organization as well. I believe that this has been a significant void in the research on Basque politics, and it is one that is even more pronounced in the study of politics from an institutional perspective, in the Basque case as well as more pervasively. Furthermore, my research swims against the current, as there is a dearth of studies of particular parties compared to the nearly exclusive attention paid to party systems in general. A lack of research on cases compared to systems and competition seems all the more striking for a party as prominent as the PNV. Although organizations such as parties represent what might be called important meso-level realities, political scientists and sociologists have tended to focus on party systems and voting data at the expense of studying the organizations themselves (Mair 1997:8990, 121; see Lawson and Merkl 1988 for a seminal volume of essays suggesting their growing lack of importance). On the other hand, anthropologists have often been far too quick to jump directly from the local to the global (Aronoff 2006:14). Parties and other political organizations do continue to mattera fact that makes their empirical study of ongoing importance and the relative lack of such studies perplexing. In this, the Basque case and the PNV are but examples (albeit, given my research interests, highly relevant ones) of importance to political research in general. The Basque case is highly representative of more general trends. When they do deal with culture, political scientists and sociologists, whether native or foreign, have tended to consistently focus on ideology from a distance, as opposed to looking at more finely grained realities up close (e.g., Lecours 2007; Llera 1999b; Mata 2005). Anthropologists, who focus on a wider understanding of the concept of culture and a more hands on perspective, tend not to deal directly with political institutions (e.g., MacClancy 2007; Zulaika 1988; but see Aretxaga 2005 and Zulaika 1997 as important, albeit partial, exceptions to this trend).

With respect to method, the importance of looking at political life in situ, rather than relying solely on ideas and ideology, is precisely what provides the opportunity to discuss it as a total phenomenon. This is not to claim that ideas do not matter. Rather, a real understanding of politics requires that ideas, especially those that are cemented into official discourse, should not be studied to the exclusion of organization, behavior, and the more sublime influences on how people see the world, make choices, and engage in collective action. On the most basic level, my study therefore involved spending a substantial amount of time with Basques active in politics, both institutional and otherwise, as well as with other citizens who, invariably, had opinions and understandings of political matters. To do this, I established my base in a single community, the town of Tolosa, which, in spite of my traveling to many other areas for interviews and events, is where I had the majority of my encounters and day-to-day experiences.

Although it does not seem to me that there should be anything truly novel about my point of view in terms of theory and method, such a perspective may have much to do with my socialization into the field of anthropology. As I will note, a survey of the general literature on politicsespecially, the study of institutional and official politics and from within the centers of the disciplines of political science and political sociologywould indeed suggest that this argument still needs to be made, and forcefully so. (For a summary of some of the recent developments in and reluctant acceptance of qualitative research within political science, see Renwick Monroe 2005.)

It is appropriate to state here my own position on nationalism. I do not see anything about nationalism that requires specific information or a decidedly different approach that separates it out as a unique object of study. Along these lines, one potential argument to make, as does Bruce Kapferer (1988), is that the very meaning of nationalism is distinct in Sri Lanka, Australia, the Basque Country, or anyplace else. If this is the case, it calls the utility of viewing it as a singular and totalizing phenomenon into question. A more immediate concern is that my ultimate focus lies in my own ethnographic present. Had I been looking at the origins of Basque nationalism, I might feel otherwise. History, however, is an explanans rather than an immediate focus. The many elements of Basque nationalism are a part, albeit a critical one, of configuring how politics is done and what type of politics is done in the Basque Country. But, most importantly, my conceptualization dovetails with John Breuillys (1994:19) argument that nationalism is a form of politics. As such, I argue, there is nothing unique to nationalism that delimits Although this book is meant to engage scholars of nationalism, theoretically and even topically, I do not see it as being about nationalism per se. In any event, the way to cast the widest theoretical net possible is to lay out a tool kit for the study of politics.

The pages that follow concern forces that are/were prominent in the Basque political panorama; they seek to explain in some way how and why such forces have attained their positions of relative prominence. Even within the three provinces that officially comprise an autonomous Basque region, tremendous differences in everything from sense of identity to voting patterns exist across provinces, districts, and even neighborhoods. The recognition of partiality need not send us running to our own political and epistemological camps, but should, rather, admonish us to continue amidstand despitethe necessarily Sisyphean nature of the task at hand. Caveats aside, I believe that what I have distilled here transcends the idiosyncrasy of immediate local experience and speaks to larger Basque political dynamics.