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Sabino Arana and the Creation of the Basque Nationalist Movement The
University of Nevada Press recently published a book entitled Basque
Nationalism by the prominent Iberian historian, Stanley G. Payne.
Professor Payne provides an outspoken interpretation of this
controversial subject. A Spanish language translation of the work has
provoked considerable discussion in Europe. The following is a brief
excerpt from the book. Arana’s
first major political statement was a little book, Bizkaya por su
independencia, published in 1892. This consisted of a fanciful
interpretation of four dimly understood battles in medieval Vizcayan
history, which Arana converted into the guideposts of “Vizcayan
independence,” something which, of course, had never existed in any
organized sense at any point in Vizcayan history. The booklet attracted
a certain amount of interest, and in June 1893 Arana was feted at a
luncheon in Begoña (outside Bilbao) by some twenty friends and
admirers. There he announced his intention to form a political movement
that would work for the independence of Vizacaya, restoring its
supposed original “state of liberty.” This shocked even his own
associates, men who represented different shades of Carlism, Integrism,
(a theocratic, nondynastic offshoot of apostolicist Carlism), and
Vizacayan “neofuerism.” Amid
the stability and revival of prosperity that accompanied the
Restoration period, Basque language and culture was receiving new
attention from scholars and devotees. Four new journals dealing with
culture, philology, and Basque affairs were founded between 1878 and
1885, but...only one survived more than a few years. These same
years brought further development of historiography, especially in
Vizcaya, which culminated in the appearance of the first volume of E.J.
de Labayru’s Historia general del Señorío de Bizcaya in
1895. The best achievements of this new generation of Basque
historiography reached a new height of scholarship, but nevertheless
most of it was polemical and unsystematic, arguing either for or
against Carlism. One notable variant consisted of the Basque studies
and the investigations of Navarrese institutions and history by Arturo
Campión, which helped to create a cultural climate of non-Carlist
provincialism or provincial regionalism in Navarra. None
of the new literature on the Basque region proposed anything so radical
as Arana’s position. The nearest thing to a precursor would have been
found in the writings of Joseph Augustin Chaho half a century earlier.
A French Basque from Soule, Chaho was a progressive in his general
views but had defended what he interpreted to be the basic motivations
of Basque Carlism. In his booklet Paroles d’un Bizkaien aux libéraux
de la Reine Christine and then in his Voyage en Navarre pendant
l’ insurrection des Basques (1837), Chaho posited a common
identity among all the Basques—on both sides of the Pyrenees—and
interpreted support for Carlism as based on the defense of Basque
liberties, which he deemed the freest, most egalitarian and
well-structured constitutional system in the world. He concluded that
the political problem of the Basque region would never be solved unless
the Basques were fully allowed to affirm their separate identity. In
the development of a Vizcayan independence movement Arana faced
seemingly overwhelming obstacles and lacked a genuine base of support...
Arana had to begin his Vizcayanist campaign almost singlehanded. In
mid-1893 he founded a biweekly journal, Bizkaitarra (the
Vizcayan), in which he began to expound his doctrines while publishing
articles on Euzkeran grammar and philology, Basque history, culture,
and local politics. His efforts centered on Vizcaya, for while
affirming a common identity of all Basques, he deemed it contrary to
the spirit of Basque institutions for the inhabitants of one province
to prescribe for those of another. In his Begoña speech, Arana noted
that at least eight different political parties functioned in Vizcaya:
three Catholic (Carlist, Integrist, and Foralist) and five liberal
parties (Spanish Conservatives, Liberals, Radical Republicans, Federal
Republicans, and Possibilist Republicans). There was no Vizcayanist
group in Arana’s sense, and he proposed to remedy this in July 1894
with the organization of the first Euzkeldun Batzokija (Basque Center)
in Bilbao. During the past year a mob had harassed the Spanish prime
minister in San Sebastián because of a slight increase in the Basque
tax quota; the Arana brothers’ first political incident occurred in
August 1894 when they burned a Spanish flag after a Basque musical
concert before the symbolic “foral tree” of Guenica. Their little
group finally took explicit political form on July 31, 1895, with the
organization of the Bizkai-Buru-Batzar (Vizcayan provincial council) of
what was eventually termed the Basque nationalist party (PVN). The
political slogan of Arana’s embryonic organization was Jaungoikua
eta lagi-zarra (God and the Old Laws). |
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