Except for two differences, the emergence of contemporary Basque nationalism was in many ways to follow similar lines of development to that of Northern Ireland. Firstly, while the Basques faced a similar predicament to the Irish in terms of the state being the bastion of a culturally definable elite unwilling to relinquish their ascendancy, they nevertheless possessed the decided advantage, in terms of polarisation, of living under a dictatorship lacking, until 1977, a democratic structure (Kelly et al. 1982; Taylor 1984). Secondly, the ability of the centralist elite to be independent of other structures of government enabled the Basque polity to have a clearly definable enemy that could be defined in terms of the state. The fact that the Irish could have democratic recourse after the fall of Stormont in the British electoral system would dilute the saliency of a national movement built on the need for secession as a guarantor of the continuation of civil rights (Aughey 1996). This meant that the Irish national movement would have great difficulty in redefining their goals at the completion of each protest-reform-protest cycle. As each attempt by London to enfranchise the minority Catholic community would question the need for continuous mobilisation. In addition it would legitimise the metropole’s role as ‘protector’ of the minority from the centralist push of the Protestant elite.

At the completion of each cycle, and with the expansion of repertoire, the monolith of state proved pliable enough to bend to specific demands of the Irish national movement, without necessarily dismantling the processes of British rule in the province. This meant that for polarisation to remain, the movement had to remain militant. The effect was to lead to the legitimation of VDA as the final recourse to national movement mobilisation, as without it, the occupation forces would have been well placed to absorb all cleavages and demands within the processes of democratic bargaining. The Basque situation was different, as I will show in the following two chapters.

The Preconditions for the Variance between the Basque and Northern Irish Examples.

When looking at the Basque scenario, one can readily see a political situation more conducive to social movement revolt and the eventual appeasement of the national movement’s demands due to the nature of the dictatorship from 1939 to 1977 (Kaplan 1980; Cazorla 1993). Faced with the monolith of state that was the Movimiento, Franco’s governmental movement, the preconditions for societal polarisation along ethnic lines were already there. A predominant Castilian elite, like the Ulstermen of Northren Ireland, ruled. Yet, unlike Ulster, Franco’s Spain had no democratic recourse to the overt centralist campaigns of integration and centralisation of the state (Preston 1976). This placed the Basque movement in the advantage, up until the attainment of autonomy in 1979, of not necessarily needing their movement strategy to fully polarise society, in order to attain the necessary cleavage that could manifest itself in communal discontent, and eventually, collective action. Lacking the necessary opportunities for democratic participation that the Irish could claim in Westminster, the Basques could afford to engage the state from the beginning with the knowledge that under the Falangist option, the unitarist fascist state could provide no answer for the Basque question, as long as it saw integration as the ultimate goals of the Spanish state entity.

It is from this angle that I will attempt to expand on my argument that for national movements to successfully utilise the expansion of protest repertoire in order to shape the cycle of protest-reform-protest, the national movement needs to ‘mimic’ the conditions of rule as dictated by the centralist elite. The Basque argument will be used to show how the core of peripheral mobilisation against the state is dependent on the nature of the state’s governance over these marginalised communities, and the ability of these movements to utilise cycles of protest to attain their ultimate goal of independence. Thus, it will be shown how the ability of a national movement to attain independence is dependent on strengthening pre-existing cleavages between centre and periphery, without necessarily forcing the state’s hand to create all inclusive political opportunity structures that could satiate the demands of the movement within the overall structure of state democracy. If this could not be achieved, whilst the state reforms, then what occurs is the consolidation of the cycle, as opposed to the attainment and consolidation of the goals of the movement as has occurred in Northern Ireland.

The first period that will be studied will be from the emergence of ETA1 in 1959 through to the death of Franco in 1975. This will entail a look at the development of strategy of the movement in its initial stages, and the development of a revolutionary ideology that would become the lynchpin of the future direction of all Basque movements. I will attempt to demonstrate how the move to more radical forms of collective action was a direct result of the state’s inability to fully enfranchise the minority community, and how within this radicalisation, the Basques were able to create a space within Spanish political society so as to force their agenda on the state. Like the Irish, this reactionism would expand the ability of the minority community to claim vital space within the state. Unlike the Irish, the continued intransigence of the centre to reform on specifically nationalist issues, would provide the opportunities for the radical nationalist movement to continue in periods where otherwise its saliency would be questioned, as in the case of the democratisation process.

Thus, the perpetual dynamic relation of the ever developing state and peripheral movement will assist in showing the necessity of the two competing identities in continuing the development of not only the state, but, the periphery as well. This will lead to the second period to be researched in the next two chapters that will deal with the waking of the state centre and the realisation that the legitimacy of the national movement is secure, in so much as the state is willing to react to the provocation from the periphery. The longer clientelism, corruption, and ethnic ascendancy continue, the more justified become the peripheral movement’s struggle. If, however, the cycle of protest can be broken, then the issues will no longer be the same, and social discontent would have to emerge in a different form than the national one that lies at the core of the struggle between state centre and periphery.

The Rise of Peripheral Nationalism as a Counter to the Movement of State.

Realising the strength of regional movement development, in 1937 Franco formed his own movement that could socialise the populace towards a deeper centralised national state consciousness (Carr & Fusi 1993: 25). The Movimiento, by May 17 1958 and the formation of Franco’s Sixth Government, would become the sole official state party, and as such an integral aspect of Greater Spanish state identification that was determined to alleviate all political, regional and social cleavages through an extensive campaign of culturo-political homogenisation (Arbos & Puigsec 1980; Giner 1984). A process that I will call a ‘Castilianisation’ of Spanish ideological state development.2 Unitarist in origin, by the time of the Sixth Government’s end, it had established an extensive repressive system of state that had courted the churches and quietened the Leftist opposition (Pérez-Agote 1986; Lanson 1987; Carr & Fusi 1993: 28-31). Unitarism at all costs was to be the motto of state (Gregory & Fry 1983: 22). This led to a social stratification based on the three main tensions within Spanish society: church versus state, centre versus periphery, and owner versus labourer (Lipset & Rokkan 1967).

In Spain we find a cross cutting cleavage whereby a group of people amassed along one line- the region- may also be grouped together under another- class (Gunther 1980). This produces a potentially explosive environment when at the cross section one group may be hermetically sealed from another; as in the case of the Basques, as well as the Catalans and Galicians. This has led to the formation of distinctly regional institutions and polities that can be ruled independent from the centre, such as in the Basque Country where compact political units are formed amongst a homogeneic core community (Gregory & Fry 1983: 27). Due to the nature of Franco’s Movimiento, however, these political communities could only organise outside of the competitive multiparty context, leading to the importance of social movements to establish control over oppositional politics (Watson 1996: 31). This would lead to the marginalisation of regional national identities onto the periphery of Spanish political society, in direct opposition to the fledgling state national identity being forged within the parameters of the state monolith (Eisenwein & Shubert 1985: 266).

Gregory and Fry (1983: 27) noted this was why the Basque National Party (PNV)3 chose to organise along social movement lines, as well as re-adapt the nationalist doctrine as the centre of all future mobilisation. This notion of augmenting movement activism with more formalised avenues of oppositional activity, was similar to the way the NICRA, in the wake of Bloody Sunday (McCann 1992), realised the only way to justify the maintenance of a movement was to provide a mobilisational doctrine that could challenge the established order.

The Madrid Government considered peripheral nationalism to be a direct threat to their legitimacy. The Falangist state was all-encompassing, hence any other form of political mobilisation would be viewed as sedition (Laqueur 1993: 386). Yet, the continued activism of the PNV from a cultural and linguistic aspect had convinced many Basques that no civil and humanitarian issues could be fully addressed without first addressing the national question (Clark 1981). The subsequent promulgation of the Organic Law of 1966, which was to divide the executive powers of state between the head of state and Parliament (of whom one sixth were to be elected by the people), was to push the state in the direction of reform that would have democratisation of the state as an inevitability (Laqueur 1993: 386) For the oppositional Left, the Organic Laws and the Labour Charter resolved many issues, yet, for ETA and the PNV democratisation was a long way off resolving issues that were at the heart of their repression, ie, their autonomous national development (Cazorla 1993: 74; Padró-Solanet 1996).

The position of the PNV as being the sole claimant of the title of Basque Government in the shade, as it held since 1939, was slowly dissipating throughout the late 1950s (Farrel 1976: 34). By 1959 a generational split was to emerge with the rise of younger elites coming through the PNV youth wing (Euzko Gaztedi).4 EGI, formed in 1952 in Bilbao, questioning the validity of having an over-arching governmental structure of the National Assembly dictating policy from France when the fundamental socio-political failings were being felt under Francoist rule in Spain (Farrel 1976: 35; Clark 1979: 110). EGI, originally designed to teach literacy, soon established underground political colleges as new strategies were sought to engage the state monolith that favoured a redefinition of power relations through movement activism (Giner 1976: 190-191). Eventually, they would be responsible for training many future activists of ETA, the Maoist ORT, and the Trotskyist LKI 5 (Zirakzedah 1991: 42).

The advantage that the Basque nationalists had over the Irish lay in that in the early stages, civil rights were to be linked to national sovereignty, hence, making the issue of national autonomy non-negotiable. A position that the NICRA failed to get across to a centre that believed all would be resolved with the fall of Stormont. What was developing was the placing of the nation as a movement construct at the centre of opposition to the state. As a PNV councillor, Jose Maria Etxebarria, told me in retrospect:

We had to construct our nation to persuade our people, our culture, our economy to strengthen our consciousness, of belonging to one collectivity in one country. 6

The Francoist state elite, however, would view this as a direct threat to their own ideological construct of state and acted accordingly. Madrid would instigate waves of repression instigated from Madrid upon the region which saw Franco declare, from 1956 to 1975, ten states of emergency in the Basque Country, compared to once throughout the rest of Spain (Conversi 1997: 258). The outlawing of the teaching and speaking of the Basque language was to lead to a criminalisation of any form of cultural participation (Carr 1980: 170). This would place great emphasis on the ritualisation of cultural expression, as each act of expression was viewed as an act of defiance to the centralist state’s right to dictate the nature of state ideological development (Clark 1986a: 287; Urla 1988; Watson 1996: 17). What had emerged was a codification of alternate peripheral expression that Melucci (1992a, 1996) would consider important in providing the necessary cultural stratification needed to supply the polarisation for separate, yet parallel, state and peripheral movement development. One that could exploit the existing cleavages to expand the movement’s challenge on the state.

For the PNV this meant a redefinition of their internal organisation so as to incorporate strategies of passive resistance which was found in a base of 5000 core activists (Clark 1979: 113). The PNV’s organisation was hierarchical, leaving little room for an expansion of protest repertoire away from more formalised modes of collective action (Conversi 1997: 160). The state as a movement itself would engross all aspects of the state security and information apparatus, and as such would perceive itself as the monolithic symbol of populist rule (Cazorla 1993; Eisenwein 1995). This gave the Basques a clearly definable singular state target that the Irish could not enjoy when attempting, up until 1972, to work out if London and Stormont should be seen as one or not. As the HB political activist ‘Patxi’ told me:

It was clear to us, always, that it was the Spanish state, not the people, the state, that was our enemy, and we had to destroy it.

Cazorla (1993: 72) felt the one enduring legacy the nationalist opposition had was this residue of authoritarian franquismo7; Francoism that had sedimented into the national mentality of Spain. This legacy would become the centre piece of the national apathy to political mobilisation that would pervade contemporary Basque and Spanish oppositional participation, as well as affect the modes of action through which movement participation would occur (Carr 1982: 718). The notion of forming the national polity along specific lines of a movement was to grant the state greater flexibility in dealing with unofficial opposition outside more traditional realms of parliamentary resolution. At the core of this was the placing of the security and policing apparatus at the centre of the resolution of political disputation (Jáuregui 1981: 205). This was to ensure that, through the implementation of the 1958 Law of the Principles of the Movement and the 1966 Organic Law, the state could achieve the necessary economic liberalisation without diminishing the government’s authoritarian nature (Carr 1982: 726). A circumstance that the Basque national movement had to combat through increased engagement with the state.

This unsatisfied discontent manifested into general apathy which was to force a change of strategy, so as to polarise the community into action, through exploiting the opening of opportunity structures that emerged in periods of state reform (Zirakzedah 1991: 43). Union halls, church groups, neighbourhood organisations and football were to provide meeting places for clandestine education centres that recruited future activists, training them tactically in the methodology of social movement protest (Ramírez Goicoechea 1991: 289-297). The PNV realised that the way to combat Franco’s policy of politics of evasion’, that pervaded the general apathy of Basque, as well as Spanish, society, was through direct confrontation and forming alternative social networks (Morán 1982: 268; Carr & Fusi 1993: 118-123).

What was emerging was an ‘ethno-gensis’ of peripheral identity whereby through the perceived need of acting against the state, a new competing movement was being formed through the ritualisation of protest (Conversi 1997: 231). This identification through action would become intrinsic to the corresponding development of Basque and Greater Spanish identity (Reinares 1987: 122). The cyclical reproduction of the nation in movement would become dependent upon the action of the state, in its ability to incorporate or exclude peripheral demands through the extension of political opportunity structures. With each extension of the state upon the periphery, there was a corresponding ‘mimicking’ of the state by a movement seeking to break the cycle of continuous repression. As Carr and Fusi (1993: 160) stated:

The governments of Franco reacted to its activities by an indiscriminate campaign of repression which ended by completely alienating Basque opinion, including, that originally hostile or indifferent to ETA. Unable to distinguish a political problem from one of public order, the regime pursued the one political solution that most benefited ETA; it could not ever make a relatively harmless gesture of goodwill such as the concession of some form of economic autonomy proposed by Basques loyal to Franco.

The only social movement activity of note that the PNV was involved in was with the nationalist-Catholic trade union Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos (ELA-STV),8 founded in 1911 (ibid.). The insistence of founding all political participation through the Basque Government’s Consultative Council was to lead to the neglecting of social issues that would be better addressed from the grassroots level (Jáuregui 1981: 75; Morán 1982: 268).

The mass influx of migrants to Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa throughout the 1950s and 1970s was to significantly change the notion of viable political protest as trade unionism began to emerge as a means to political mobilisation (Zirakzedah 1991: 37-40). The traditionally middle-class elite now had a new population of migrant workers, as well as the rise of a Basque industrial class, that saw the need to mobilise protest as a means of increasing living standards and achieving an awareness of civil liberties. ELA-STV began a strategy of protest that was designed to at once confront the state on issues of labour representation, whilst providing a support base for nationalist protest activism (Kaplan 1980: 106). Under the umbrella organisation of Alianza Sindical de Euzkadi (ASE),9 the PNV was able to co-ordinate protest activism, as in the general strike of 1947, so as to ensure that strategically and ideologically it would not clash with the official doctrine emerging from Paris (Giacopucci 1992: 14). More importantly, they proved to be an integral point of contact with the Castilian migrant communities, especially in assimilating them politically, socially and culturally into the Basque national community (Clark 1979: 251). An aspect of cross communal communication of strategies that the Irish Catholic community could not achieve with its minority position vis-à-vis the Protestant majority community.

Yet slowly, the readiness of the average Spaniard to embrace foreign trends was to lead students, for example, hungrily turning towards the ‘social’ poets, novelists, dramatists, bards and musicians of the West for inspiration, in organising counter cultural points of reference and movement action to the official one offered by the state (Carr 1980: 163). In fact, militancy in itself could be interpreted as a form of opposition to a state that encouraged the worker to eat, sleep and watch football (Zirakzedah 1991: 44).

But why was the labour movement so important to the nationalist causes? Especially considering that outside the student unions in Northern Ireland, trade unions in the province remained an important bulwark to Catholic working class progression through the labour movement ranks. In the main, it was due to the nature of the regime. The very fact that out of all of Spain, over 30% of labour protest was initiated in the Basque Country, suggesting that trade unions were a ready made source of organised political resistance to Madrid (Clark 1979: 256).

Between 1963 and 1974, the most crucial period of unrest as it would convince the regime to reform, some 37% of all industrial unrest manifested itself in the Basque Country (ibid.). Considering that in 1967 alone, up to 39% of all strike action was initiated to protest political and social rather than economic issues, then the political potency of labour movements in the general nationalist scheme of things was quite significant (ibid.). This is a further example of my theory that movements, ‘mimic’ the state. In a system defined along Rightist protection of economic and class interests, the parallel development of Leftist activism was a natural response to a state that viewed ideological challenges as “acts of sedition” (Zirakzedah 1991: 35-37).

Conversely, the rise in Basque nationalism could be viewed as the adoption of a statist paradigm that would signify to the centre the unwillingness of a minority to subsume their collective identity to the state’s (Watson 1996: 31). In doing so, they challenged the state via ‘mimicking’ the state’s intent. The fact that each protest was followed by heavy repression at the hands of Guardia Civil led to the belief commonly forming in the Basque Country that the nature of economic oppression was colonial in origin and that the military were the occupying army protecting the colonialist power’s profits at the expense of the indigenous population (Pérez-Agote 1984; Zulaika 1988).

Thus, strike action was a peripheral rejection, utilising mobilised protest marches, of the encroachment of the state on Basque civil society, granting a continuum between past rebellions and current protest actions (Giacopucci 1992: 16). This was similar to Northern Ireland, whereby the NICRA activists saw that to gain a continuum in protest action one had to link the repression to an established historical precedent that would give reason for the exploitation of cycles of protest (Townshend 1987: 179). In this way, the peripheral movement gains control over aspects of the struggle between state and national movement.

The state was slowly becoming a symbol of an elite in ascendancy that was highly unrepresentative of the community it was meant to control (Calamai 1978; Cazorla 1993). This fear of the re-emergence of direct police control over the region, and the rise of a non-Basque political constituency, not surprisingly, ran correspondingly to a period when economic inspired strikes would soon change into rallies for solidarity that would combine leftist social goals with an overtly nationalist political platform (Clark 1979: 259). This was to create a diversification of movement repertoire that would last to this day that accordingly influenced the ideological direction in reaction to the consistent policy shifts emerging from the centre.

When Franco came here this country was a very Catholic one and the Vatican thought that as a party we would go with Franco because they couldn’t. But we refused Franco we went to the left wing and that is quite strange with a national movement that is why we are more than a 100 years old but we are Christian Democratic and Social Democratic.10

Integral to the mobilisation of protest activism was the emergence of a new generation of activists, who could not remember the atrocities of the Civil War and hence feared little, the direct consequence of open confrontation with the state (Giner 1976: 192-194). The Francoist state was continuously reshaping its political environment without necessarily incorporating the very disenfranchised who would prove the greatest threat to the state’s integrative process. The Falangist’s complete control over the judiciary, police, education and media would create a totalitarian environment ripe for the exploitation of cleavages produced within the polarised national polity (Giner 1984: 89). The lack of access points made available to differing societal aspirants would force the Basque periphery, as the major nationalist ideological challenger to the state, to undertake a reciprocal perpetuation of the crisis of state as a means to societal change (Kaplan; Reinares 1989; Laqueur 1993). It was here that ETA would emerge as the progenitor of this crisis, and the catalyst for the spiral into the reciprocal development of competing nationalist identities of the state centre and Basque periphery (Hollyman 1976: 216).

In such a climate, ETA had to expand its repertoire in order to incorporate new protest strategies so as to create a voice that could be present when the promised democratisation arrived. Working out of churches and private homes this expansion would commence with the re-education of the population towards permanent anti-state activism, and the radicalisation of the National community in direct opposition to the state (Hollyman 1976: 216).

The Emergence of ETA and the Commencement of New Strategies of Engaging the State.

The basis for the usage of terrorism against the Francoist regime was founded in arguments pointing to the violent nature of regime formation and consolidation. It was a response to state engendered repression that sought to challenge the centre in the same way that the centre had challenged the periphery (Reinares 1987: 122). In this way, Fusi (1985: 123) believes that ETA was born directly from the PNV’s perceived passivity. For José Mariá Leizaola, frustrated with the inability of the Lenda-kari 11 in exile, the formation of ETA on July 31 1959 by Basque law students returning from Paris, under the leadership of José Echevarrieta Ortiz, was to signify a move away from NVDA to a militant stance towards the government (Janke 1980: 4; see also Baeza 1995).

The PNV had seemingly lost its ability to provide opportunities within their own organisation to absorb a new generation of activists discontent with the perception of past inaction (Linz 1985: 223). Critical of EGI’s liaison officer, Mikel Isasi’s, toeing the PNV party line, the ETA group were to utilise the radical Ekin magazine to devalue the part political organisation action that EGI were pushing. Leading to seven out of twelve original members of Ekin, headed by José Luis Emparantza ‘Txillardegi’, leaving to establish the military campaign in the formation of ETA (Sullivan 1988: 29). Here Ekin, in breaking with EGI, fell into the classic disillusionment paradigm that della Porta (1995) feels is integral to the embracement of VDA as the main strategy of mobilisation and oppositional formation to the regime.

ETA was able to create space for itself within the wider national movement by becoming the symbol of physical resistance to the innately violent way in which the Francoist regime had gone about its state centralisation (Grugel 1990: 100; Watson 1996: 31). They were ‘mimicking’ the state. The fact that the state refused to repeal extreme methods of law enforcement only served to legitimise this new strategy of escalating conflict in order to control the nature of state-peripheral polarisation (Kaplan 1980: 109-110). In such circumstances ETA, like the IRA and the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (CRB), sought to engage this at a pace at which the centre was not ready, in order to exploit the cycle and gain maximum advantage for the movement.

Slowly, with the expulsion of del Valle (a founding member of Ekin) from the PNV, and the pressure of the Spanish Security Forces to remove potentially militant activists from the Spanish territory, ETA began viewing their plight in terms of colonial oppression and occupation (Sullivan 1988: 32). In turn, this would lead to the marginalisation of the fledgling movement onto the periphery of internal Spanish political relations (Ibarzábal 1978: 78). What was clear was that for many ETA activists the PNV was now viewed as a cultural movement, as opposed to a fully committed political movement (Sullivan 1988: 33). The absence of the PNV Government also granted significant space for ETA to mobilise popular support through engaging the Security Forces and forcing them to increase state repression (Farrel 1976: 34).

ETA’s first priority was to organise resistance to the Francoist regime at a militant level without exposing their activists to the response of the Security Forces; as the desired engagement was preferred to be enacted on the general population so as to more easily mobilise the people against the state (Laqueur 1993: 497). For this reason, it was in the traditional social groupings, called caudrillas, that the cell nature of the movement was to take shape:

With the creation of a tighter organisation composed of young men with a fervent commitment to create an independent Euskadi, ETA’s members discovered that the ideas which they had taken from the PNV and from Ekin were a poor guide to developing a strategy in an industrialised society in the 1960s (Sullivan 1988: 38).

Since its formation in 1959, ETA had formulated a five prong attack upon the state through publishing periodicals and journals such as Zutik (Stand Up) and Berriak (News), the dissemination of propaganda, and providing courses in social movement strategy; the Basque language and culture, as well as legal considerations (Janke 1980: 8). What was developing was a tacit recognition amongst ETA activists for the need to influence the pace of reform (ibid.). ETA was a responsive movement that itself accepted the necessity to ‘mimic’ the state in order to achieve maximum gains. The fact that the date of ETA’s formation was some nine days after the introduction by Franco of his stabilisation plan showed the unwillingness of the agitators to accept any further consolidation of the Falangist state (Carr & Fusi 1993: 53-54). At this stage though, the repression was culturally based, and as such ETA’s own activism would concentrate on undermining the cultural predominance of the Movimiento (Pérez-Agote 1984: 91). It would not be long, however, until this proffering of a peripheral alternate mode to societal organisation would bring the ire of the centre.

The arrest and the sentencing to twenty years imprisonment of the ETA elite along with the new more conservative EGI elite, on seditious acts against the state, demonstrated that not even moderate Basque protest activism would be tolerated (Hollyman 1976: 217-218). The natural consequence was a further exploitation of the way in which basic civil rights, such as the suspension of habeas corpus, was to re-occur continuously as a tool of government repression in times of increased tension (López Garrido 1982).

ETA responded, and on July 18 1961 they were to launch a symbolic attack on the state that would greatly effect the nature of Falangist and Basque relations for another nine years (Clark 1984: 35; Preston 1986: 22). A bomb was exploded during a veterans day train ride that was to be the catalyst for a massive government crackdown that would see 110 ETA activists arrested and the suspension of habeas corpus throughout the region (Ibarz 1981: 95). Basque civil society was polarised and the state commenced a counter-offensive that would allow ETA to create a space for itself as the physical opposition to the state that would emerge from the formation of the First Assembly of ETA in 1962 (Garmendía 1979: 18-20). The Basque peripheral movement had radicalised with the state acting as cause for this new militancy and the movement as catalyst.

The Movement and the Cycle: The Strategic and Ideological Radicalisation of ETA and the First Engagement of the Spanish State.

Throughout 1963 and 1964, after the March 1963 Bayonne Second Assembly, papers began to be published that openly talked of the climate of national exclusivity created by other Basque groups that were forcing militant ETA activists to respond from a position of marginality (Conversi 1997: 96). Especially, considering the internal peripheralisation that had occurred within the PNV after the 1961 crackdown at the hands of the Guardia Civil (Sullivan 1988: 38). ETA, however, pulled off a major coup with the return of Antonin Etxebarrieta, the former PNV-EGI militant, from revolutionary Cuba and his defection to the militant wing of the national movement (Giacopucci 1992: 21). This would pave the way for the emergence of a syncretic strategy that would absorb colonial liberationist with indigenous tactics.

In the lead up to the 1964 Third Assembly, the move by Zabilde, a major ETA strategist, to utilise VDA as a catalyst in polarising the community behind the ETA movement was coming into focus (Sullivan 1988: 44). Like the IRA, ETA’s usage of VDA was to be responsive to the state’s repression so as to dictate the pace of change (Reinares 1987: 122; Thompson 1989). Unlike the IRA, where nationalism ruled as the main tool of movement mobilisation, VDA was to become the core strategy of mobilisation and engagement as it now sought to recruit only those who saw the total dismantling of the state through complete armed insurrection, rather than it augmenting nationalism, as the main mode of mobilisation (MacClancy 1988; Zulaika 1988; Waldmann 1989).

The publication of José Luis Zabilde’s La insurrección en Euskadi in 1964 was to become the ideological base for strategic militantism that viewed terrorism per se as a rational political choice in a political environment that was non-conducive to more pacifist options of oppositional expression (Reinares 1987: 122). ETA’s Ortiz, in turn, had been greatly influenced by the works of Mao Tse-tung and saw the debate that emerged from the Second Assembly of 1963 as an opportunity to break from the PNV through the re-evaluation of past protest strategies (Janke 1980: 4). The key was to formulate a movement that would initiate and then, through responsive action, perpetuate cycles of action-repression-action in order to create space in a political system dictated by opposing national elites. As such, this was a tactic of protest, as opposed to open military conflict, designed to place the Basque question at the centre of Spanish national political debate.

The nature of the debate was one that was to encompass the complete spectrum of social movement strategic analysis. More importantly the ideological link was provided by Federico Krutwig’s Vasconia,12 published in Buenos Aires in 1963, between Third World liberation strategies of revolution and traditional militant Basque nationalism proposed by Txillardegi (Conversi 1993). It would also clearly define the tension between the PNV and ETA (Núñez Astrain 1995: 60). The PNV responded, in their paper Alderdi, to persistent government accusations of compliance to terrorist activity by denying that they would ever resort to such anti-Spanish state activity (ibid.). Not only was ETA attempting to polarise Spanish society in general, but the Basque political community as well. As Sullivan (1988: 42) noted:

Krutwig’s enduring contribution to ETA’s strategy was his theory of the cycle of action/ repression/ action, which held that, where popular protest against injustice met with oppression, the revolutionary forces should act to punish the oppressors.

Clark (1986: 123) feels that since the adoption of the action-repression-action theory at the Brussel’s Fourth Assembly in 1965, ETA showed their willingness to adopt violence as an integral part of their overall strategy of widening the scope of protest repertoire; something that would set them apart from other movements. It provided a strategy which would create a “suitable reality of the Basque circumstance” for the movement (Giacopucci 1992: 21). A notion akin to leading Irish nationalist polemicist John Mitchell’s argument in the United Irishman in 1848 that “Ireland’s opportunity would come when England was in difficulty” that was to become a mainstay of Irish Nationalist doctrine (Coogan 1995: 16). Following strategies formulated by the Black French sociologist, Frantz Fanon, Zabilde and ETA were to produce the paper A Letter to the Intellectuals that would seek to forge alliances with the broader Spanish and European Left through its ability to act as the militant wing of both the nationalist and leftist movement (Garmendía 1979: 287-303; see also Ortzi 1975, Conversi 1993). Overall, it was a sign that the state as target and reason for mobilisation, had not lost its power.

The Fifth Assembly of 1966 and 1967 was to be a watershed as the new leadership elected by the Fourth Assembly attempted to incorporate a Trotskyist agenda, in a similar way that INLA would a decade later in Northern Ireland (Conversi 1997: 97-98). One which would place the national agenda as a secondary goal to that of the achievement of a socialist society. This subverting of the nationalist doctrine in favour of a Marxist ideology, in the same way that the Official IRA chose, was not attractive to the emerging grassroots nationalist bourgeois elites who preferred nationalism itself, to nationalism as a means of organisational structuration to combat the fascist state (Hollyman 1976: 222). Quite opposite to how the broad Left viewed the situation.

Such ideological variations have in common the insistence on the Basque homeland and freedom first, as a consequence of which class freedom is envisaged as developing within its newly gained democratic boundaries (ibid.).

This is dependent on the attitude that Basques themselves may have as individuals to the validity of VDA as a response to state aggression (Jáuregui 1981; Zulaika 1988; Wilson 1991: 40). Moral support is one thing, but active support is another. ETA realised that Krutwig’s cycle of action-repression-action had to be implemented immediately so as to bring around a rapid response from the state that would ensure a continuous state of mobilisation (Kaplan 1980: 110; Reinares 1987: 123). The old guard, under Txillardegi, Beltza, del Valle and Madariaga, pushed a nationalist line that was able to halt a general shift to the Left as it was feared that if a greater co-operation with the Spanish Leftist opposition occurred then a corresponding movement towards a socio-political Castilianisation would emerge amongst the Basque population (Garcia de Cortazar & Montero 1983: 259). The ETA leadership after all realised that it was the nature of the state resistance that could forge the essence of peripheral counter-movement social identification.

ETA had to decide between the PNV methodology which concentrated on legalistic and institutional constitutional change, or, that of a revolutionary Left, which in itself was hostile to national movements which they perceived had roots in a bourgeois misreading of history (Padró-Solanet 1996: 452-453). Thus the Fifth Assembly proclaimed ETA a Basque socialist movement of national liberation under the belief that ETA would create a ‘Basque Workers’ Society’ under the leadership of the twenty year old Txabi Etxebarrieta (Farrel 1976: 36; Hollyman 1976: 223). For the young Etxebarrieta, VDA was seen as a response to the regime, and this led him into direct conflict with the older elites, headed by Patxu Iturrioz and José Luis Zalbide, who saw this tactic as a consequence of an expansion in the movement’s ability to engage the state through direct confrontation (Giacopucci 1992: 25).

This new notion was founded by the ‘Political Front’, one of the four fronts in which ETA was divided (Conversi 1997: 90). The other fronts held varying responsibilities so that the organisation’s diverse strategies would more readily attack the complex monolith that was the Francoist state (Sullivan 1988: 42-43). It was a maximisation of opportunity structures created in the cycles of protest under the guise of one over riding dogma that promised social liberation: through a perpetual struggle with the state (Carr 1982: 730). The ‘Workers’ Front’, modelled along the Vietnamese Troung Chin, was charged with welding the working class interests into a formidable national movement; the ‘Cultural Front’ against linguistic and cultural Castilianisation of Basque society; and the ‘Military Front’ was the militaristic response to state oppression (Giacopucci 1992: 25). The expelled group became known as Komunistak after a brief existence under the nomme de guerre ETA-Berri (New ETA).13 This de-emphasis of the bourgeois nationalist struggle would lead to a drop in their support amongst a people who desired to control their wealth, not necessarily share it around (Hollyman 1976: 223-224).

VDA would become the centre of ETA’s activity as its usage was timed to correspond to cycles of protest decline when the government would need to commence reforms that would increase political participatory structures for marginalised communities (Krutwig 1963; Jáuregui 1981: 417). For now the state and the Security Forces were clearly defined as the prime enemy of the movement, enabling ETA to create, what Carr (1982: 734) calls, a policy of ‘magnicide’ designed specifically to force a reaction from the far-Right in order to create a basis for a mobilisation of popular discontent. Noting that without such radicalisation of the periphery it is doubtful whether or not the final reshaping of the state’s political system would have occurred. ETA realised this, and utilised VDA as a means of getting the state to listen:

All over the world the negotiation is the only solution and here what they call terrorism. The ETA has a great or a quite important support in the population so if you don’t change the situation it is very difficult to finish with the result you want.14

The aim of engaging the state through VDA had emerged at the same time as the emergence of the Organic Laws. This was no coincidence, as ETA and the PNV had come to realise that this new division of power between Parliament and Prime Minister was preparing Spain for political changes steeped in unitarist traditions (Rokkan & Urwin 1983: 176). Already, the PNV was proving inactive as the Movimiento was increasing pressure upon the periphery in a bid to crush extra-parliamentarian opposition (Núñez Astrain 1995: 60). ETA responded with an act that was designed to inflame the divisions between the Security Forces and the Basque community (Bruni 1993). On June 7 1968, the police commissioner for Bilbao, Melitón Manzanas, was to make an error that would not only cost him his life but send Spain into a spiral of reciprocal violence that would last to this day (Sullivan 1988: 92-112; Conversi 1997: 99).

After an incident in which two Civil Guards were shot at a road block, Txabi Etxebarrieta was himself pulled out of a car and shot dead in retaliation. The Basque Country rose in dismay (Clark 1984: 49). This was a flagrant political targeting that equally disgusted the PNV as it did ETA. Up till this time ETA had not purposefully killed government officials (ibid.). Mass demonstrations ensued and Txabi’s funeral became a symbol of nationalist resistance (Aretxaga 1988). Yet, more significantly, ETA’s response, in assassinating Manzanas in front of his home, signalled that governmental physical force would be met in kind.

This was in direct opposition to the political conservatism of the PNV, which to be fair was hampered by limitations of its party organisational structure (Clark 1979: 44; see also Brezzi 1979; Heiberg 1979). ETA, though, had achieved the desired response. By the end of 1968 hundreds of Basques, ETA activists or not, had been incarcerated, tortured, and intimidated. Mass demonstrations and nationalist strikes commenced that would directly question the legitimacy of the state (Conversi 1997: 99). The regime had not expected such public displays of support for the Basques, which led to an upswing in mobilised discontent that created new opportunities for protest throughout the rest of Spain. On January 24 1969 a state of emergency was declared throughout Spain which lasted until March 25 (Carr & Fusi 1993: 148). The cycle of reform-protest-reform had begun.

The perennial restructuring of protest cycles due to the nature of the combat with the government, led ETA into a shaky period of fragmentation by 1970 (Ortzi 1975; Clark 1984: 44). Those who would support the Sixth Assembly of 1970 would see the benefits of uniting with the wider Spanish Left into a Socialist Front against the regime (Jáuregui 1981: 417; Heiberg 1989: 107). The fact that the majority of the Fifth Assembly elite was incarcerated allowed for those youths schooled in the activism of 1968 to expel ETA-V from ETA-VI (Conversi 1997: 104). A new Marxist ideology was to replace nationalism (Ortzi 1975). Yet as ETA-VI would soon find out, this would only isolate them from a population base that had acquired a new national revolutionary identity in direct opposition to the Greater Spanish identity of state (Conversi 1997: 103). This corresponded to the breakup of the IRA between the Officials and Provisionals along similar strategic differences.

The state had declared war on a national identity and the nation would respond in kind. The protest activism of a region had been ritualised into an ideological counter-movement to the state with nationalism at its core (Preston 1986: 22). The cycle of reform-protest-reform had created a polarisation of society, yet more significantly, the reciprocal development of two competing and exclusive national ideologies of state (Kaplan 1980: 124). Matters came to a head during the September 18 1970 jai-alai, sporting championships, Joseba Elósegi, the commander of the Basque military unit present during the bombing of Guernica in 1937, set himself alight in front of Franco, offering himself up to the flames of nationalist intent (Preston 1986: 27). The symbolism of the sacrifice of a war hero, perhaps the sole member of the resistance left within Basque public life, before the dictator was as effective as Jan Palacka’s similar sacrifice before the Soviet tanks in 1968 in mobilising popular opinion against the futility of the state’s repression when the collective soul was at question. The fact that it was done in the name of the activists accused of killing Manzanas highlighted that repression would only strengthen the need for the perpetuation of the national movement.

The Burgos Trials: The Reassertion of the State Centre and Peripheral Marginalisation.

The response of Carrero Blanco and Franco was to make an example of 16 ETA terrorists, that Elósegi had protested about, in a show trial (Halimi 1976). This only served to mobilise anti-Francoist forces into demonstrations of mass rallies, protests and marches throughout the Basque Country (Preston 1986: 28). Amongst the activists who would become known as the Burgos detainees were two Basque priests which allowed for Monsignor Cirarda Lachiondo to intercede on the behalf of the Vatican to force the government to hold the trials in public (Sullivan 1988: 30).

This was a tactical defeat for the Francoist regime that knew a public trial of priests, from the very religious order from which they claimed their moral authority, would not show the regime in good light (Pérez-Agote 1986). Not only did this lead to the final rift between the once allied Church and state, but, it also focused the attentions of the Spanish community upon the inadequacies of the judicial system (Hermet 1986: 458). Finally, on November 22 1970 Monsignor Cirarda and Bishop Argaya Goicoechea of San Sebastian proclaimed a joint pastoral letter which condemned the processes of the trial and the validity of the application of the recently reintroduced Law of Banditry and Terrorism (Preston 1986: 30). Church disapproval forced many conservatives to re-evaluate the validity of such harsh systems of repression as means to establishing a stringent social order (ibid.).

The significance of the Burgos trials lay in the symbolic representation of the trial through the mass media (see Sartre’s “introduction” to Halimi 1976). O’Brien (1969: 217) noted that the trial as a drama is a transmittance of a regime’s symbolic power to dictate moral rights and wrongs of society, and as such the power of the state over the masses. Yet, it is within this very symbolic reinforcement of power relations that the peripheralised movement can shape popular opinion in their favour (Tarrow 1983, 1993a; della Porta 1995, 1996). This occurs through manipulating the circumstance to heighten public awareness to the nature of the repressive apparatus of state. The movement under trial is granted the public forum that could only have been previously achieved through NVDA or VDA (Heiberg 1989: 107). In addition, it attains to a greater legitimacy due to the fact that the state has viewed them a sufficient enough threat to have prosecuted them (ibid.).

In the case of the Burgos trials, the ability of the defendants to stipulate how in fact their values were indeed separate from those of the state was to be a propaganda coup in exemplifying the two competing national movements’ relationship vis-à-vis the Spanish state (Sullivan 1988: 110-112). The continuing cycles of reform-protest-reform had produced a polarisation of two opponent communities, that forged new identities on the threads of past rebellions and state consolidations due to the nature of state reformulation in times of conflict. At the core of this reciprocal development was the state. ETA was a response to the state as much as it was a child of the cleavages produced by the state (Núñez Astrain 1977; Reinares 1987). With each upsurge in repression or reform, the periphery would counter likewise.

Where ETA differed from the PNV was that as a movement it was more responsive to these periods of state consolidation and reform, as it held no responsibility to the state except as a fulcrum of popular discontent. The Burgos trials and the January-March 1969 state of emergency would create space for a new radical nationalist doctrine to emerge that would be embodied in the fall of ETA-VI by 1972, and the rise of an ETA-VI/EGI realignment that would place the onus of mobilisation back on the Castilian dominated state (Zulaika 1988: 61; see also Ortzi 1975). Yet, the state itself had forged an equally sustainable national identity built on institutional violence which became the core of state nationalism.

The cross Spanish support for the Basque activists surprised the regime, especially as they had offered themselves as the guardians of a pan-Iberian identity (Ortzi 1975). One hundred lawyers held a sit-in at the Palace of Justice in Madrid and 3 000 students clashed with armed police in Barcelona (Carr & Fusi 1993: 156; Conversi 1997: 101). More importantly was the galvanisation of support for the movement in the Basque Country with over 180 000 workers going out on strike in Euskadi (Carr & Fusi 1993: 156). ETA chose this moment to kidnap, on December 1, the West German Honorary Consul Eugen Beihl in San Sebastián (Preston 1986: 31). This was done by the more nationalist oriented ETA-Fifth Assembly as opposed to ETA-Sixth Assembly whose members were in the Burgos trials. Nevertheless, it was a sign that by ‘mimicking’ the state centre the periphery could take advantage of openings made by a state in transition.

The German Government began to exert pressure on the regime to grant clemency; as they were Spain’s second largest foreign supplier and customer, plus third largest investor, Franco had to listen (Conversi 1997: 101). Once again the value of coordinating VDA with NVDA was proving to be an invaluable tool in the ETA’s attempt at forcing the state’s hand. When Beihl escaped and local villagers recaptured him and gave him to ETA-V, the public support that Carrero Blanco and the Castilian media had claimed was proven to be somewhat premature (Preston 1986: 32). ETA had now come of age as a major oppositional movement force within the Spanish political scene.

The trials went ahead on December 3 whilst the government implemented a policy of house to house searches, unrestricted detention, exile and complete censorship of all mail. To the surprise of the regime, Colonel Manuel Ordovas allowed the first defendant Jesús Abrisqueta Corta to recall how he had been tortured by the police with evidence being provided by the next three accused (Sullivan 1988: 110-112). The trial was adjourned until December 9, due to the regime’s embarrassment about the nature of the torture (ibid.). In fact, when Omaindía Nachionda jumped up and sang the hymn of the Basque Warrior, Eusko Gudariak, with the other 15 accused and much of the audience joined in, the publicity coup was complete (Preston 1986: 32). Support from all over the country followed quickly (ibid.). The Parliament was besieged by the civil guard, whilst police clashed with the people in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Oviedo (Pérez-Agote 1984: 116). On December 28 when three of the accused were given double death sentences the ETA tactics of action-repression-action were proving successful, as the more subtler methods of the PNV were inadequate in speeding up the state’s response to popular pressure (Preston 1986: 32). The price, though, proved high. Of the sixteen trialled, nine were sentenced to death, whilst the rest were sentenced to a combined period of 518 years imprisonment (Sullivan 1988: 112).

In the wake of the Burgos trials many young activists, such as Eustakio Mendizábal Benito, saw that reform could only occur through physically dismantling the state (Janke 1980: 8). The centre was now forced to review its stringent strategies of population control as the periphery was now in a continuous state of mobilisation. According to Carr (1980: 171) however, the response of the Government, as in the immediate aftermath of the Burgos trials, was to “jump into the bunker.” With the eventual assassination of Mendizábal Benito by the Security Forces, ETA had proof of the willingness of the government to partake in extra judiciary methods of controlling the periphery (Arango 1985: 180; Ammann 1995: 27-29). Spain was irrevocably polarised and only through a re-examination of the nature of state unitarism could the nationalist cleavages be resolved.

The Ideological Schism over the Nature of the Enemy: The Re-evaluation of the Nature of Violence within the Cycle of Periphery Movement Development.

ETA-VI, until 1972 was still the majority group due to ETA-VI’s staunchly Marxist-Leninist approach of addressing the national question in the overall structure of a global revolution (Ortzi 1975: 390-391; Preston 1984: 44). This new adaptation of revolutionary doctrine was to allow ETA, similar to the Provisional IRA, the chance to redefine their continued existence in terms of any future state centre led reactionism. The success of the ETA-V lay in its support base amongst the common people. This served them well in battles with the intellectual elite over the issue of revolutionary legitimacy within the Basque community (Hollyman 1976: 228). An internal conflict emerged when a group of ETA activists supporting the Marxist doctrine of the Sixth Assembly, published a new manifesto in the internal magazine Kemen that called for:

1. the overthrow of the state by popular armed councils;
2. the unification of the Basque Country under a populist government;
3. the socialisation of wealth; the liberation of all political parties and trade unions; and
4. the equality of Basque and Castilian languages.

Nationalism had been usurped by an internationalist revolutionary doctrine that was to deny access to all classes that did not fall within this proletarian paradigm. Thus, alienating the PNV from the more radical nationalist Left (Conversi 1997: 105). The desired polarisation was now dividing the Basque national movement as it did the Irish in Northern Ireland. The PNV, like the SDLP in Northern Ireland, had portrayed themselves as the middle ground (Llera Ramo 1985). Yet, without direct contact with the radicals of ETA, they would be unable to negotiate with the centre, since a radicalisation of the crisis would only further stratify the conflict between the state and movement (Hipsher 1996: 292). The subsequent hunger strikes failed to amass popular support as it led to sixty days solitary confinement for the detainees (ibid.). The result was a swing back to ETA-V and a re-evaluation of the worth of NVDA without VDA augmenting it (Hollyman 1976: 230).

ETA activists became disheartened with what they felt was the negation of the nationalist question in favour of a pan-Iberian Marxist revolutionary front (Sullivan 1988: 28-31). Txillardegi and Benito de Valle were frustrated with this humanist Marxist line that placed a greater emphasis on underground movement alliances rather than direct confrontation with the state (Jáuregui 1981: 308; Zulaika 1988: 55), similar to the split between the Official and Provisional IRA. Yet, the split was not to fully occur until the formalisation of the democratic centralist ideological doctrine by a young activist, Eduardo Moreno Bergareche, at the 1973 Hasparren Assembly in France (Janke 1980: 6). ETA would be further divided between traditional nationalists of ETA’s main wing (ETA-m), founded on the principles of the Fifth Assembly and those who sought to reformulate themselves along democratic-centralist lines (ETA-pm) (MacClancy 1988). ETA-pm viewed itself as a political entity along the lines that, like Sinn Féin in the early 1980s, would become the electoral representatives of the wider national movement (Núñez Astrain 1995: 66). A division that was to be solidified with the formation of ETA-pm in 1974 (Grugel 1990: 110).

The strategy was to create space for public debate on issues that had been perceived as resolved through manipulating the media’s hunger for sensationalism (Clark 1986b; Chaffee 1988: 545-572). This strategy hinged upon humiliating the state, through showing its inability to confront direct challenges to its authority. This was similar to the belief held by the Provisional IRA High Command in 1974 that by launching a bombing campaign they could force the British to the table (Coogan 1995: 385-391). Both strategies failed as what emerged was a simultaneous criminalisation of the movement and a reinforcement of the state’s right to implement counter-insurgency as a defence of its position.

When looking at ETA, the nature of terrorist activity can been seen to be one that is designed to accommodate state reactionism. Thus, suggesting that the act of violence is more than an expression of collective frustration, but, rather a move to widen the field of communication, whilst expanding the repertoire of the movement, with the target, ie, the state. The leaving behind of 9-mm “Parabellum” case shells as a calling card of ETA, after machine gun attacks, is a sign that ETA acknowledges the worth of terrorism as a communicative device, through manipulating media coverage, to the centre (Clark 1986b: 124). Even the traditional call to the Basque papers Deia of Bilbao and Egin of San Sebastián before an event occurs shows not just the staged manner of the attack, but also the desire of the group to foster sympathetic relations with certain sectors of the nationalist community, whilst condemning the Madrid dailies as lacking independence from the centre’s control (ibid.).

ETA’s muse was the state. Every repression was ‘mimicked’, every reform intensely followed (Laqueur 1987: 224-225). When the state relaxed, ETA would increase its strikes. When the state attacked, ETA responded (Reinares 1987). Each action between centre and periphery was a message that would shape the future of state development and peripheral counter-movement mobilisation (Díez-Medrano 1994). With this in mind, ETA would see the June 8 1973 appointment of Carrero Blanco, the sole figure of continuismo,15 to the Premiership as a sign that the Basque people’s demand for autonomy would be considered an anathema to the state’s official Francoist/Falangist identity (Cotarelo 1993: 34).

This would provide a conundrum to the Spanish Left determined to avoid a revolutionary scenario (Boggs & Plotke 1980; Maravall & Santamaria 1993: 195-196). For ETA, the movement that was born of Falangist repression, the solution was not so ideologically challenging (Preston 1990). Knowing full well the consequences, on December 20 1973, six months after his ascension to power, Blanco was assassinated (Forest 1975). ETA had provided the Leftist opposition an opportunity that would test the ability of the Spanish state to incorporate future competing nationalist agendii and ideological movements.

For this reason, the Bordeaux press conference called by six ETA terrorists in the house of a Basque engineer, in front of nine posters of ETA activists killed in gunfights with police in the wake of the Carrero Blanco assassination on December 20 1973, played a major role in convincing middle-class Basque nationalists of the benefits of terrorism in removing major obstacles to reform that the PNV had failed to do (Janke 1980: 3). Here were six “freedom fighters,” placed almost religiously before an altar to past martyrs of the struggle, explaining how they had removed the chosen successor of their main protagonist, and the head of the unitarists within the Spanish state (ibid.). A position ETA was able to exploit amongst the broad Spanish and Basque Left to justify their assassination of Carrero Blanco as the official ETA press communiqué stated:

Luis Carrero Blanco, a hard man, violent in his repressive attitudes, was the key which guaranteed the continuity and stability of the Francoist system. It is certain that, without him, the tensions between the different tendencies loyal to General Franco’s fascist regime- Opus Dei, Falanga, etc.- will be dangerously sharpened. We therefore consider our action against the president of the Spanish government to be indisputably an advance of the most fundamental kind in the struggle against national oppression and for the cause of socialism in Euskadi and for the freedom of all those who are exploited and oppressed within the Spanish state (Preston 1986: 49).

More significantly for ETA, the removal of Carrerro Blanco was to grant them greater legitimacy amongst the Spanish Left as a major political player (Kaplan 1980; Rodriguez-Ibañez 1980). It also sent the message to the rest of Spain that ETA was the organisation that best suited the title of revolutionary vanguard against the state (Hollyman 1976: 214). As the smoke cleared, the influence of ETA intensified with each close-up camera angle of the remains of the Dictator’s Deputy, on a second floor balcony, opposite the church where he had just received confession in fortress Madrid. The image of the utter futility of repression was borne into millions of living rooms throughout Spain. As Jean Grugel (1990: 104) stated:

ETA was responsible for the single most audacious blow to the authorisation state in December 1973, when Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco was assassinated in Madrid. This event, more than any other single act, became the symbol of resistance to the dictatorship.

ETA demonstrated that, though the state had created the cleavage between centre and periphery, the national movement could, through VDA, change the shape of the struggle so as to assert greater control over the rate of state response. The appointment of Arias Navarro to the Premiership on December 29 1973 showed that any hope for continuismo was defeated (Carr & Fusi 1993: 195-196). The Spanish state, and hence national ideology, would change (Ló Pezrodó 1977). The question now was, in what way? Whatever the nature of this redefinition of state continuity, one thing was clear, it would equally change the nature of Basque political identification as the state was the raison d’être for its continuous mobilisation.

The Death of Franco and the Reinvention of the State.

The advantages of social movement organisation were seen as a deepening of the processes of democratisation since they allowed for profound political, social and economic activity to occur outside the realm of the state (Linz 1972; Linz & Stepan 1992). Yet, the great problem with movement activism mobilised along strategies of NVDA was that it lent itself more readily to the processes of electoral formalisation in response to the shifts in political opportunity structures of state that emerged in the wake of Franco’s decline (Pérez Calvo 1977; Fusi 1984; Silver 1987). A demobilisation of extra-parliamentary collective action that the state calculated would legitimise its own reform process, and hence negate the extreme demands of the Basque periphery:

Movement demobilisation and institutionalisation were strategic, norm based responses to changes in political opportunities over time and in attitudes regarding the desirability of democracy (Hipsher 1996: 274).

The very push for demobilisation of illegal protest activism in favour of more traditional means of conflict resolution via the parliamentary system was to signal a change in state strategies (Pérez-Agote 1987). ETA, lacking the electoral traditions of the PNV, would have to face this shift with much chagrin. A situation that the PNV were to exploit, as the SDLP had done in Northern Ireland, to their maximum advantage. This enabled past elites to continue in positions of influence without necessarily being accountable for past injustices (Linz & Stepan 1992). More importantly, it allowed these once isolated elites to influence reform even when they renounced the previous power sharing agreements. Thus, bringing into question who was controlling these cycles of action-reaction-action (Gunther et al. 1986; Gunther 1992; Higley & Gunther 1992). In fact, the increase of assassinations between 1968 and 1975, some 34, during a period of state restructuring, heightened the significance of the Basque national question to the process of governmental succession (Calamai 1978: 58; Laqueur 1987: 224-225).

This suggests that the action itself was more often than not employed so as to create polarity between the reforming state and alienated national community. One that, Laqueur (1993: 442) felt, was aimed at highlighting the palpable differences between the state’s doctrine of unity and reality of life on the periphery. More significantly, this points to the fact that for the majority of ETA activists any process of democratic reform that negated the national question, was no resolution to cleavages within Spanish society. Cleavages that ETA felt were so clearly defined along national lines. The fact that they were a people questioning the right of other Spaniards to co-exist in regions that they called their own, brought doubts over the very nature of oneness in cultural and social identity between the regions, and begged the question of whether or not the Spanish state was a legitimate ethno-political entity?

The revenge killings during the 1970s are more descriptive of a movement in conflict rather than one out of control. A situation proven, according to Clark (1984: 124), in that up until the early 1970s not one attack was unplanned. Rather, they were systematic in their application as tools of socio-political mobilisation. One designed to taunt the state into responding with suitable force. Thus, the promulgation of the August 1975 Anti-Terrorist Law, which saw the death penalty being applied to five ETA and FRAP militant activists, including ‘Txiki’ and ‘Otaegi’, in September 1975 by the Arias transitional Government, was criticised by many moderate Basques as the government falling into ETA’s hands (Conversi 1997: 106). Carrero Blanco’s assassination proved that extreme protest action could force the government to react in ways that would further mobilise the people against the regime, through escalating the crisis during low ebbs of the reform process (Carr 1982: 736).

The February 12 1974 announcement by the Arias Navarro Government of an official policy of “opening” up the system, only two months after Carrero Blanco’s death would catch ETA by surprise (Arias Navarro 1976; Llorca 1986; Tezanos 1993: 36). ETA was defined in terms of its resistance to an immobile state monolith; if this monolith could reshape, then the only way ETA could justify its continuous existence would be in an institutionalisation of the conflict. In doing so ETA would perennially be defined in terms of its action, instead of its nationalist ideology; and with autonomy and freedom of association on the table, any redefinition of state would effect the Basque movement greatly.

From an electoral perspective groups amongst the nationalist Right, such as the PNV, tended to always view NVDA as a limited means for attaining exposure of their plight, and as such, a tool that would have to be utilised less with the removal of Franco from the political scene (Clark 1979: 381). For ETA, the realisation that democratisation of the system would satiate much of their demands, hence diminishing the reasons for continuing their extra-legal activism, would cause a major strategic rethink of the role of the state in providing a target for activism (Zirakzedah 1991: 97). There was a risk of the movement dissipating unless it could prove that the original cleavages between competing identities still existed, and Spanish society was not as fluid as commonly thought (Hills 1980; Tamayo 1988). VDA and an upswing in the cycle would change this. Hence, eleven days after Franco ceded power to Juan Carlos, ETA exploded a bomb at Café Redondo in Madrid killing twelve people (Conversi 1997: 106). It was frequented by off duty soldiers.

Spanish society had been defined for nearly four decades, from 1939 to 1976, between victors and the defeated of the Spanish Civil War (Fraser 1986). This allowed for a virtual criminalisation of the opposition that threatened to polarise society as had occurred in 1936 (Preston 1986: 4). Not only did this bring about a lack of legitimacy for the government, but also a radicalisation of those placed upon the periphery. In essence these groups felt that Spain was governed as one would govern a conquered territory (Linz 1986; Reinares 1994). Hence, they designed their counter-strategies upon this premise. This was due to the fact that Franco had turned the army into an institution whose prime concern was social control rather than national defence (Castells Arteche 1978; Preston 1985).

Central to Franco’s rule was the institutionalisation of the Nationalists’ victory in the Civil War over that of the Republic, and as such all opposing viewpoints were considered treason as well as anti-statist (Fraser 1986: 189-209). A situation whereby state controlled violence could act as a catalyst for the expression of political frustrations that occur through predesigned marginalisation of a given community. Thus, within the Spanish context terrorism, and broader VDA, were not necessarily the sole property of a national movement in the immediate period prior to democratisation and its early periods of restructuring (Moa Rodríguez 1985; Piñuel 1986).

The era of Arias Navarro’s continuismo (continualism) was to bring about further repression and the ignoring of civil rights. The government now implemented a policy of intimidation through harassment and internment of wives and girlfriends of suspected terrorists (Preston 1986: 73). A forerunner to GAL, under the names of Antiterrorism-ETA and the Basque-Spanish Battalion, these squads also machine gunned bars where prominent nationalists were known to have frequented (Alvaro Baeza & Forte 1983). More often than not this tactic backfired as funerals of innocent bystanders were utilised as popular demonstrations of public solidarity against the harshness of the regime (Aretxaga 1988). This only serves to highlight the ability of movements to adapt to given social and political environments formed by reactionary states when faced with governmental impasses and a crisis in the effectiveness of more traditional protest repertoire (Calamai 1978: 59).

As far as the democratic opposition is concerned there were no doubts: behind these unprecedented facts were the forces of reaction, working at re-establishing the terrorism-repression spiral, in an extreme attempt to obstruct Suárez’ reforming plans and the struggles of the workers movement (ibid.: 60).

The sentencing to death of ETA activists ‘Txiki’ Jon Paredes Manot, José Garmendía Artola and Angel Otaegi Etxeberría, and the subsequent blanket repression of the region, saw general strikes paralyse the region on August 29 and September 11-12. In the interim, the Government introduced their draconian Anti-Terrorist Law (Preston 1986: 73). ‘Txiki’ Paredes and Angel Otaegi were executed along with three FRAP members on September 27 1975 (ibid.: 73-74). For the first time since the announcement of the intended reform of the state monolith, the government left the door ajar enough for ETA to exploit.

Creating a New Enemy: ETA’s Search for a New Movement Ideology and Strategy.

ETA was not going to relinquish the one strategy of their repertoire that enabled them to directly threaten the state, ie, terrorism. The emergence of Roberto Lertxundi, a radical young physician, suggested that the next generation, like those in 1959, would feel that VDA still held strong political relevance (Rodriguez-Ibañez 1980: 89). Central to this was the ratification of the Koordinatora Abertzale Socialista, KAS, in October 1975, as the strategic and ideological basis for a broad nationalist revolutionary movement front (Grugel 1990: 110). One that would cast itself as guarantor of the nationalist struggle in a period when new post-democratic elites were determined to minimise the importance of peripheral nationalism within the new Spain. The six points of KAS being:

1. a complete amnesty for all political prisoners;
2. the expulsion from Euskadi of all Spanish police and security forces;
3. an improvement in the standard of living for all the ‘popular’ classes of Euskadi, especially the working class;
4. the reunification of Navarre with the other provinces of Euskadi;
5. recognition of the right of Euskadi to form an independent state;
6. the control by the Basque government of the armed forces which are stationed in Euskadi (ibid.: 110).

The new strategy would again be revolutionary. Yet, this time it would move into incorporating a wider social platform that could be mobilised into electoral support in times of crisis along the old Gramscian line of creating a popular hegemonic “bloc” (Rodriguez-Ibañez 1980: 94). A point ratified by the Ninth Congress of ETA. The shift came as ETA arrived at a decision that the PCE, with the dismantling of FRAP, were more interested in integration than logistically supporting a nationalist revolution (Story 1979: 168).

The great problem with the usage of VDA is that once it commences it cannot be restricted by enforced moral limitations. VDA also legitimises the state’s utilisation of violent policing as a means to self-defence (Calamai 1978: 61). Thus, the overt use of violence as the main tactical strategy serves to militarise the situation to the point whereby solely political actors fail to create significant space for their ideals within their own militancy; as they have now become associated with anti state activism. Thereby, creating a polarisation of society whilst limiting opportunities for moderates within the movement to gain representative legitimacy.

This was to emerge as the main reason behind the split between ETA-m and ETA-pm in 1975, as ETA-m felt the opening up of institutional opportunity structures would serve only to diminish the strength of the armed-wing of the national movement (Arango 1985: 181; Reinares 1987: 125). A situation that in Northern Ireland would lead to the mobilisation of counter movements amongst working class Protestants that would see such activism directly threaten to the institution that defined their distinct version of Irishness, ie, the Ulster state and the Union with the Crown (Clayton 1996; Dunn & Hennessey 1996). In Spain, as in Ireland, this would lead to the political intractability of the crisis and perpetuation of the struggle in the reciprocal nature by which one defines the other, that is, state repression is needed to define the movement militant.

From a peripheral perspective, the Franco years were ones of overt homogenisation that only served to radicalise the majority of the population. The assassination of Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco was a signal to the centre that democratisation without restructuring the entity of the Spanish state would be flawed by a lack of legitimacy. ETA’s continued strikes were a demonstration of this point, yet the inability of the centre to respond had much to do with successful de-politicisation processes implemented by Franco (Cazorla 1993: 84). The Second Arias Navarro Government of December 1975 to June 1976 symbolised this neo-conservatism (Carr & Fusi 1993: 209). Yet, it was in Arias’ premiership that the opposition was to push for ruptura democrática in the formation of large based coordinating councils that began to collaborate clandestinely in the guise of popular fronts (Gunther 1992: 47).

Mass demonstrations calling for an amnesty for all political prisoners occurred throughout March 1976 with up to 80% of the Basque work force going out on strike (Clark. 1979: 269-271 & Conversi 1997: 143). In the Basque Country, the policy of mass demonstration in combination with strike action was proving a useful tool in uniting the Left and the nationalist into a workable social movement. ETA militants, though, continued their campaign of VDA which so infuriated the Arias Government that it pushed the Minister for the Interior, Manuel Fraga, to declare war on ETA on April 8 1976 (Preston 1986: 82). Just as the regime seemed to move more towards compromise on the issue of democratisation, it became quite obvious that if ETA could not prove itself adept enough to embrace a more traditional form of electoral political participation, then the PNV would attain the majority moderate vote amongst the Basque body politic. A position that ETA had come to recognise as a means of dividing the periphery, and hence the legitimacy of their national movement to act in unison against state. As ‘Patxi’ an HB activist told me:

The bringing of democracy was meant to divide us. It legitimised the Spanish state without letting us organise separately. So we did not support it.16

In July 1976 hundreds of political prisoners were pardoned, the Movimiento itself was eventually disbanded, whilst political parties were legalised. The elections were scheduled for June 1977 (Gunther 1992: 48). The announcement by Adolfo Suárez, with his ascension to power on July 3 1976 that “sovereignty resides with people” was to lead to an ideological shift amongst the Left as they realised that any future support of extreme nationalists, like ETA, would be an electoral liability (Story 1979: 176: Balcells 1992: 203). Even the PCE realised that it would be futile to isolate fully the Basque vote (de Blas Guerrero 1993a: 591). The response of ETA-pm, after the July assassination of Pertur, the first major ETA activist to push for a review of exclusive VDA strategies, was to move towards a scenario whereby ETA could formalise their demands through a renunciation of violence, but held the right to return to arms if the Government back-tracked on Autonomy. By the end of 1976 the Basque Revolutionary Party (EIA) was formed in order to enfranchise the demands of the militants within the national movement’s electoral front to the state’s reforms (Zirakzedah 1991: 192).

Suárez himself understood little of the Basques and the motives behind their actions. His main concern was to balance precariously the demands of the Falangists with those of the Left. The desire for a revolutionary break from the state was one that he could not come to terms with. His mistake, I feel, was regarding the Basque problem as one of public order. The killing of demonstrators by the Security Forces throughout 1976 eventually forced ETA out of their self-imposed ceasefire when on October 4 1976 they assassinated the president of the Guipúzcoa Provincial Council Juan María Araluce Villar and his four guards (Preston 1986: 105). Fraga’s the then Minister for the Interior, major mistake in the lead up to the first full elections was in increasing the military presence in the Basque Country. As Gilmour (1985: 219) stated:

If the Basques had to choose between ETA and a government in which the Franco/Fraga ‘reasoning’ predominated, it clearly was going to side with ETA.

Tactically the Suárez Government was not prepared for an escalation of the crisis. This was to allow ETA to threaten the very process of democratisation if they were kept out of government-opposition negotiation. The PCE, in following the Italian Communist Party leader’s, Berlinguer’s, Eurocommunist line, and the PSOE, in seeking reconciliation, failed to deal with the realities of overt repressive policing in the Basque Country (Bell 1979: 21). Especially considering that the new Special Power Acts in April 1975, and the Prevention of Terrorism Law in August 1975, had been used to subjugate all wings of the national movement (ibid.). For the average Basque, this proved that the state again was determined to marginalise them due to their national identity. Terrorism, once again, was viewed as the tactic most likely to remonstrate to the centre the discontent of the periphery (Reinares 1987: 126). As Laqueur (1987: 6) points out, it is no coincidence that terrorism increased in the Basque Country whilst declining through the rest of Spain throughout the democratisation process.

King Juan Carlos responded to this crisis by granting Adolfo Suárez to formulate a Government of renewal before the elections (Morán 1979; Figuero 1981; Melià 1981). A Minister for the Movimiento (de Blas Guerrero 1993b: 50), he nevertheless persuaded the Falangist dominated Parliament to commit political suicide by approving the Law of Political Reform in October 1976 (Maravall & Santamaria 1993: 200-201). At the heart was the promulgation of the Law of Fundamental Reform on December 15 1976 (ibid.: 201-202). Constituting a bicarmel parliament to replace the Francoist Cortes, consisting of a lower house of which the Chamber of Deputies of 350 members proportionally elected in four year terms, a Senate with 248 members of which four would come from the majority vote, seven from the Spanish islands and North African enclaves, 41 to be appointed by the King and only 50 from the provinces (Fry & Gregory 1983: 41). By the end of 1976 ETA had killed 60 policemen, whilst losing 20 of their own; a further 150 activists were gaoled (Carr & Fusi 1993: 156). ETA signalled that the further negation of their role would lead to a continued usage of VDA against the state. The cycle would continue and this time it would define the movement, as the state had done before, and would continue to do so as the ideological opponent of ETA (Burton et al. 1992: 23).

The Centre’s Democratisation Process: A New Opportunity for Peripheral Rebellion.

The sense that a time for change had emerged on the periphery, along with similar pushes for a decentralisation of state emerging from Catalonia and Galicia (Rokkan & Unwin 1983: 154). These movements were in fact just as diversified in their objective goal as the Basque national movement. Herein lies the main dilemma for the centre. If the territorial objectives of autonomy are to preserve cultural, linguistic, social and political integrity, how can the centre accommodate conflicting demands of one group without necessarily isolating other communities? The solution, that the Spanish Government in transition sought, was the absorption of regionalist movements into the party political system in order to negate much of the extreme demands (Linz & Stepan 1992: 124). This had the reverse effect of pushing extremists onto the periphery, and away from the centre, which would force them to take more extreme means of redressing their grievances. Rokkan and Urwin (1983: 171), following on from Lipset and Rokkan (1967), felt that this is a prime example of how the state can assist in further radicalising a movement, hence, politically homogenising a given national community, through placing exclusive preconditions on participation.

From the perspective of the Basque national movement, the democratisation process was to launch a two prong attack on the monolithic Francoist state. The first, was to establish a parliamentary democracy; and the second, was to dismantle the state centralism in favour of regional autonomy (de Antonio 1991: 153). The advantage to ETA was the Suárez Government’s inability to interpret the significance of the national question amongst the Basque community (Gilmour 1985: 219).

It was these divisions that were to highlight, in the eyes of groups such as ETA and the PNV, the fundamental differences between the broad democratic oppositional movements and the national movement. The leader of the Republic in 1936, Santiago Carrillo, was formulating a broad movement called Junta Democrática, the ‘Democratic Government’ project, that sought alliances between some socialists and various liberal monarchists, whilst the PSOE would proffer a wider leftist platform called the ‘Democratic Programme’ (Fry & Gregory 1983: 30-31). What held these groups together, and eventually allowed Felipe Gonzáles to unite these two splinters under ‘Co-ordination Democracy’, was the ideological negation of the need for devolution to outright independence, as well as terrorism, as platforms for resolving the national question (ibid).

The main argument was that where there was still ethnic tension then there the processes of democratic consolidation were incomplete (Burton et al. 1992: 4). Linz and Stepan (1992: 124) felt this was a purposeful formation of a new national identity, within the wider ideological centralist government, away from statist paternalism towards state liberalisation. Suárez, schooled in Falangist politics, knew that the shape of the state’s ideology would shape the peripheries (Morán 1979).

ETA-pm were just equally as interested in expanding their base over ETA-m, as much as they desired to seek new means of dictating change to the state (Conversi 1997: 148-149). Thus, their forcing of the union of EIA with the Movimiento Comunista de España under the name Basque Left (EE)17 was a sign that the militants of the movement sought to broaden their popular base into a new consolidated national electoral front prior to the 1977 elections (Preston 1986: 125; Zirakzedah 1991: 194 Reinares 1993: 619). The goal was to break the cycle of action-repression-action in order to entice the moderates back towards the nationalist Left’s cause, through a strategy of democratic mass mobilisation (Hipsher 1996: 274). Yet, this could not be achieved whilst the state still refused to deal directly with the issue of devolution, and its role in the overall liberalisation of Spanish society.

Franco’s intransigent centralism and its heavy-handed application to the Basque Country were at the heart of ETA terrorism and the considerable popular backing it enjoyed, at least up to 1978 (Preston 1986: 4).

What the democrat forces had failed to recognise was the multi-nationalist nature of the polarisation of Spanish society. In this regard I agree with Preston (ibid.) that it was in this misreading of the significance of the national question in the process of movement formalisation, and the subsequent slow rate of state democratisation, that the chance for a permanent cessation of hostilities was lost. Especially as ETA took this as a sign of the unwillingness of the state to entertain the notion of Basque sovereignty, preferring rather a state about democratic unitarism (Clark 1986a).

Yet, even when ex-ETA members, such as Pertur, sought to reconcile the movement towards more peaceful means, he was murdered in the summer of 1976. Evidently, by Miguel Angel ‘Apala’ (Preston 1986: 144). Apala, who had broken with Pertur’s ETA-pm would seek escalation of the crisis through a redefinition of the role of violence as a means to the institutionalisation of the state engendered cycle of repression-action-repression (Ross 1993; Conversi 1997: 106). The state saw this as a chance of portraying ETA as an anti-democratic force. The fact that José María Portell, a loyal ‘abertzale’ journalist, was also killed before the June 15 1977 elections, when he made it known that he intended publishing a book that would implicate ETA-m in the assassination suggests that ETA was not ready to rid its repertoire of VDA (Preston 1986: 144; Tezanos et al. 1993: 888). Nor did they desire to reopen channels with the government at a time when the June elections, that would be opposed from the outset, were designed to simply redefine the state in a bid to survive pressures coming from the political periphery. The Government failed to take note of both deaths, in particular the second one’s proximity to that of the elections.

The PSOE had similarly miscalculated the significance of the national question as the PNV would win 7 out of 26 seats reserved for delegates of the regions (Mujal-León 1979: 101). The 1977 vote had convinced Carrillo that allies must be found amongst national movements in order to be a voice within the Basque Country (Story 1979: 183). This would lead Suárez to include nationalist parties in the December 25-27 1977 Pact of Moncloa on one condition: ETA’s exclusion (Ekin 1992: 65). In return, the Basques would receive a pre-Autonomy Council on December 30 1977 (Story 1979: 101). Out of this the PNV were to re-emerge as the moderate electoral voice of the national movement (Janke 1980: 10; EAJ-PNV 1995).

More and more the Basque Government in exile was coming to the fore. Made up in the main of PNV and PSOE members it began negotiations with Suárez and the leader of his Basque section of his party (Mujal-León 1979: 101). The PNV was represented by Juan de Ajuriaguerra, José María Benegas of the Basque branch of the PSOE, and the Union of Christian Democrats’ (UCD) Juan de Echeverría (Núñez Astrain 1995: 97). They created a body called the Basque General Council that would be responsible for negotiations concerning Basque autonomy (Janke 1980: 10). The UCD’s push to block a nationalist candidate as head led to their backing of the PSOE’s Ramón Rubial over the PNV’s de Ajuriaguerra (Preston 1986: 135). Rubial, and his usage of the Pacts of Moncloa as the state’s guarantee for liberalisation of all aspects of Spanish civil society, would not prove a popular choice (Calamai 1978: 60; Laqueur 1987: 225). ETA would benefit from this miscalculation.

More and more, ETA came to be viewed as a radical representation of youth frustration, as even children of immigrants adopted the ideology of ‘cyclical revolution’ (Preston 1986: 126). The xenophobic policies were viewed with disdain as many felt ETA no longer had the right to exist when the main cause for its formation, state Francoism, had been defeated. Yet the bombing of the ‘Basque revolutionary’ weekly Punto y Hora (Place and Time) on October 5 by a fascist organisation called the Alliance of Apostolic Anti-Communists (AAA) released a new wave of violence by ETA-m which culminated with assassination of Pamplona’s Police Chief Major Joaquín Imaz Martínez in late November (Calamai 1978: 60; Burton et al. 1992).

The subsequent police crackdown, and the mutiny of a Bilbao division of the Civil Guard, had its desired effect as mass protest demonstrations were often interrupted by chants of “Long live ETA! ETA the people are with you!” (Preston 1986: 127-128). Protest and terrorist action were merged and a new enemy found (Jáuregui 1981: 233; Pérez-Agote 1984: 16). Utilising the KAS document ETA, ‘mimicking’ again the state’s response, would in November 1977 form their own social movement pact, to counter the Pact of Moncloa, in Herri Batasuna (HB) (EH 1994: 1-2). ETA was responding to the state in the only way it knew how, through ‘mimicking’ it so as to create new opportunity structures within the cleavages shaped by the state’s own policy. ETA knew that as long as independence was not addressed, then democratisation held little legitimacy amongst the Basque population.

Since the Spanish state was still perceived as the main enemy, the whole democratic process was seen merely as a façade disguising the perennial Spanish attempt to eliminate Basque identity (Conversi 1997: 149).

The Suárez Government’s efforts to placate nationalist demands with welfare and social security reform, in the same way as the British Government had done in Northern Ireland in the wake of the failure of the Sunningdale Agreement, failed (Gunther 1992: 55). The revolutionary movement refused to dissipate.

The Statutes of Autonomy as a Means of Absorbing Centre-Periphery Tensions.

The ridding of the nationalist rhetoric and mythology for the PNV, EA, EE or ETA-m would have been suicidal since nationalist symbolism, and nationalism per se, had been an integral tool in the overall politicisation of the Basque national polity. What had emerged, according to Watson (1996. p29), was a sense of ‘being’ for the average Basque within protest cycles and individual activism that was found in the active and mobilised movement. Strategically, the cultural struggle had metamorphised into a political one creating unofficial channels that could be exploited when the national Left and Right sought joint action (Jáuregui 1981: 233; Sullivan 1988: 48). Where there was room for shift was in the hegemonic nature of much of the ideology of the overall movement that was still based on ethnic, cultural, and social issues.

What was clear was that both the PNV and ETA had no desire to become a bargaining chip of the Spanish Democratic Opposition. This is where I believe Tilly (1993a) has misinterpreted the significance of revolutionary nationalism over the movement itself as the raison d’être for continued popular mobilisation. This was shown by the general population’s tendency in the post-autonomy era to vote for the limited national option of the PNV, as opposed to the wider platform of mass movement organised social doctrine proffered by the Euskadiko Ezkerra and Herri Batasuna,18 that included aspects of nationalism as a major doctrine of change (Arango 1985: 182; Shubert 1990: 248) .

The fact that the PNV, through negotiations with the UCD and PSOE, would leave negotiations for autonomy in the hands of the Catalans on the night of May 22, 1978, whilst ETA was banned, would push ETA even more to not recognise this settling of the “Basque” issue by Catalans and Castilians (Clark 1979: 349). The PNV would eventually abstain from the process with a walkout instigated by the EE’s Letamendía before the ratification of the constitution (Hills 1980; Tamayo 1988). The boycott called by most members of the combined national movement’s fledgling political party organisations, under the lead of the PNV, for the December 1978 referendum was mostly heeded, with 56% of the population abstaining from voting (de Pablo 1994: 24). Of those voting, 68.8% ratified the Constitution compared to an average of 20%, more throughout the rest of the Spanish regions and Madrid (Carr & Fusi 1993: 245-252). The Catalan vote of 90.4% was viewed as a betrayal (Balcells 1992: 204). The response across the nationalist spectrum was clear. Xabier Arzaballus stated in a rally held prior to the December 1978 referendum:

Ancient Basques lived within an ensemble of kingdoms that were later called Spain... and as a guarantee that its way of life would be represented, the right of secession was always reserved. We also reserve [that right], be it or not in the constitution (Gunther 1992: 62).

A response that was reiterated by more radical nationalists of EE, when Letamendía stated:

The right to self-determination is a fundamental democratisation right, without which the constitution has no meaning for us. If the Basque people, someday, were to face this alternative, you can be sure that Euskadiko Ezkerra would vote for independence... Euskadi is not a region but, rather, a nation divided into two halves (Gunther 1992: 62-63).

The fact that the vast majority of the Basque people, and their political representatives, either did not see fit to vote for the reforms or rejected it outright, could be seen as a sign that autonomy was no substitute for independence to a people who lost faith in the state that they had competed with for so long (Coleman 1995: 5). As one Basque activist told me:

The Basque Parliament is limited also because of the unfinished parts of the constitutional charter. The problem with the Basque Parliament is it is limited by the centre. 19

ETA responded by rejecting the Pact of Moncloa as illegal, instigating the worst cycle of violence experienced in Spain, from October to December 1978 (Arango 1985: 182). The revolutionary wing was now seeking legitimation through the electoral system. ETA-m, through the formation of a political wing called Herri Batasuna (HB),20 would partake in the 1979 elections after viewing the success of EE during the 1977 elections (Janke 1980: 14). It followed the rise of Sinn Féin as a viable formalised political alternative in the wake of the 1981 Hunger Strikes. Engagement of the state was one thing, but getting the state to listen was another. Soon the strategists came to realise that if no formal channels were sought, then the possibility of the cycle merely continuing the responsive development of state centre and periphery without a resolution was a reality (Burton et al. 1992: 23).

All Basque parties and movements refused to recognise the legitimacy of a plebiscite whereby only 44% of the population participated (Conversi 1997: 145). The fact that Article 2 of the New Constitution talked of the “indivisible unity of the Spanish nation, common and indivisible fatherland of all Spaniards;” whilst acknowledging “the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions which form it” seemed somewhat contradictory. Especially, when Article 145 insisted that: “No federation between autonomous communities will be permitted under any circumstances.” For the PNV these were fundamental non-negotiable demands. The resultant victory of the PNV in the elections re-emphasised this point Mujal-Léon 1979: 101). Carlos Garaikoetxea, a committed anti-Francoist nationalist, was appointed the new head of the Council (Llera 1993: 171). The state’s intransigence was once again shaping the demands of the Basque community.

The failure of the 1979 Basque Autonomy Statute, as well as the 1978 Constitution, to fully placate a substantial proportion of the Basque community, including the failure to explicitly mention the three historical nationalities by name, was to be a resource for future mobilisation (Burton et al. 1992: 21). This would ensure a perpetuation of the cycle of conflict as the exclusion of ETA from the political process would exclude a sizable amount of Basques from full political participation. ETA, in turn, realised the potential of transforming states attempting to establish a new order, a new political centre, in sustaining cycles of mass action and state repression that served to fuel the radicalisation of the periphery (Eisenwein & Shubert 1995: 271). A situation that Burton, Gunther and Higley (1992: 23) call a “dialectic of rocks, clubs, and tear gas.” One that would inadvertently burn the bridges of reconciliation as in the Northern Irish context. As one Basque activist told me it was the ‘dialectic of CS gas and democracy’ that convinced her that the new Constitution and promised autonomy was both carrot and baton:

As a teenager it left an indelible impression. Each time we marched they, police, attacked. It soon became clear that they would deny us independence no matter how we voted.21

The problem was that the Security Forces had been fed on a doctrine of repression, and they had come to see any form of public disturbance, protest, demonstration or flagwaving as sedition, and anti-state activism (Carr 1980: 175). ETA during this period took the opportunity to reorganise, so as to create space themselves within the emerging cleavages that the new democracy had provided, in a bid to broaden its support base (Clark 1984: 204-218). The most important change in strategy was to be ETA’s entering the fight for prisoners’ rights, along the same road as the IRA had been doing since 1975. Evoking the KAS document in March 1979, HB sought a collaboration with EE when they called for a “national day of struggle” in support for demands for a general amnesty of all political prisoners as a sign of goodwill before the vote for autonomy (Janke 1980: 15).

Similar to the events occurring in Northern Ireland, ETA was now searching for a new defining point that would allow the movement to remain relevant as they realised most Basques now preferred a negotiated settlement to outright rebellion. HB, like Sinn Féin, was to emerge as a focal point for future protest strategy as a new cause was needed to grasp the Basque community’s attention (Jáuregui 1981: 310). The re-promulgation of the Anti-Terrorist Law, and its implementation solely in the Basque Country, was to provide the necessary cause for future mobilisation. The state upped the cycle of action leading to the arrest of 652 persons between December 4 1978 and December 5 1979, and a further 329 by June 1980 (Clark 1986a: 285). ETA was waiting for this response, and acted accordingly in order to regain lost ground.

Conclusion.

With the implementation of the democratisation process upon the Basque nation, the Basque national movement was forced to live within a unique political situation. The years of acting as the oppositional Left’s militant vanguard had paid off in as far as they had forced the Basque issue of independence onto the table of the state centre’s political agenda. Yet, at the same time this very process of state initiated reform was to place ETA in the same boat as the IRA, and the more moderate PNV as the SDLP. The desired address of democratic enfranchisement had led to many social demands of the national movement being resolved. This not only gave a great advantage to the moderates, by isolating the support base of the radicals, but also brought into question the necessity of the periphery to secede from a state that was now taking the issues of cultural differentiation seriously. Justifying militancy in periods of overt repression was one thing, in times of rapproachment it was another.

A dilemma emerged amongst the Basques as they realised that what the state was offering was more than appeasement. They were political opportunity structures that would ensure the end of the perpetual continuation of the cycle of repression-protest-repression between state and periphery. This dilemma would mean that accepting the olive branch would lead to the abandonment of the goal of full national independence. Yet, it would also lead to the recognition of the cultural distinctiveness of the Basque national polity. For the moderates this was negotiable. ETA however, would see this as a sign of the centre attempting to diminish their main support by placating the moderates. The only way they could conceivably redefine themselves in a period of state consolidation was to, subsequently, challenge the state directly in a new protest cycle of action-reaction-action. A new upswing in violent protest that the state would not be ready for; as ETA had no desire to forgo their revolutionary doctrine for the moderates to claim the benefits.

ETA had learnt from the IRA’s previous cessations of arms, that though accepting political opportunity structures placed before the movement by the state may have brought peace. Yet, the initial issues of national self-determination were far from resolved if the raison d’être for mobilisation, the state, still existed. National sovereignty as such, due to the ritualisation of protest within the collective frame of movement identification, had now become entrenched in the new doctrine of the movement.