Development of Euskadi

The Basque Country (now known as Euskadi) is located in southwestern Europe on the shores of the Bay of Biscay on the Franco-Spanish border. This region was traditionally composed of seven provinces, three being French (Lapurdi, Behe-Nafarroa/Lower Navarre and Zuberoa) and four being Spanish (Araba, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, and Nafarroa/Upper Navarre). The Basques and their land have traditionally been oriented towards the sea, as shown by its coastline of 252 kilometers stretching from Baiona (French Bayonne) west past Bilbao. The climate is traditionally rainy; this, along with an exceptionally mountainous topography, helps feed the 700 kilometers of major rivers that flow down towards the Bay of Biscay (or in Upper Navarre, towards the Ebro and the Mediterranean).

The Basques themselves one of the oldest peoples in western Europe, if not the world; genetic testing and linguistic evidences hints that the Basques might be the only non-Indo-European people to have survived to the present day; the pioneering archeological work of the late Joxe Miguel Barandiaran suggests that the Basques might even be direct descendants of the Neolithic inhabitants of southwestern Europe. In the 1st century BCE, the Romans noted that the 'Vascons' were the only people in the Iberian peninsula to successfully resist the Roman Empire. Thereafter, the Basques maintained their independence from the Visigoth invaders of Spain in the 6th century, the Moorish invaders in the 7th century, and the growing Spanish and French monarchies for the better part of the Middle Ages. (The province of Gipuzkoa was only unified with the Kingdom of Castile in 1200, while Bizkaia and Araba remained independent until 1332 and 1370, respectively. The northern Basque Provinces were slowly absorbed into France over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, and Navarre's partition between France and Spain came in the 16th century.) Despite the annexation of the Basque provinces, the provinces of Gupuzkoa, Biskaia, and Araba remained essentially self-governing under the Basque fueros. These were the ancient laws that governed every area of Basque life and that were maintained by democratically-elected assemblies called juntas. Unusually for their time, the Basques were quite egalitarian, allowing peasants and fishermen to preside over meetings in which Spanish noblemen were seated.

When a unified Spanish kingdom was established late in the 15th century, the southern Basque provinces preserved their customs, laws, and diplomatic relations. The northern Basque provinces were gradually integrated into the centralizing French monarchy. In the 18th century, unlike the Catalans, the Basques remained quiescent, but in both Spain and France they complained that the Bourbon monarchies of each countries were taking too much power away from the Basque provinces. In the aftermath of the French Revolution the three provinces of the French Basque Country were eliminated and their territories and populations absorbed into the mostly Francophone département of Pyrénées-Atlantique. Revolutionary French efforts to persuade the Spanish Basques to request union with France failed; consequently, the Spanish Basques fought the French whenever possible.

In the 19th century, the Basques agitated for autonomy in both Spain and France. In Spain, Basque nationalism took the support of several armed rebellions in support of the conservative Carlist cause, which promised to respect traditional Basque autonomy and to preserve the preeminence of the Roman Catholicism so important to the Basques. When the Carlists were finally defeated in the 1870's, the Basque fueros were vindictively abolished in 1876 by the victorious liberals. In France, Basques enjoyed less cultural autonomy but did enjoy more prosperity and political stability; here, Basque agitation took the form of demands for a separate Basque département including the three historic Basque provinces.

Ironically, although France has traditionally been more centralizing, it was in France that Basque demands were first met. In 1908, the three historic Basque provinces of France were made into their own separate département, named Bayonne after the French name of the French Basque Country's largest city. Although Bayonne département initially lacked any significant amount of autonomy, the mere fact of its creation signalled the emergence of Basque political power in France. In the following decades, French Basque activists gradually gained a greater status for Basque, culminating in the 1924 decision of the French state to allow the organization of a semi-formal Basque Cultural Association with the right to tax willing Basques to fund Basque-language cultural institutions, including the ikastolas -- Basque-language semi-public schools.

The Basques in Spain -- more numerous and better-organized than their French comrades though they might have been -- found it more difficult to gain self-rule. As time passed, the rapid industrialization of the Spanish Basque Country made Basque self-government essential; while the Spanish Basque Provinces were rapidly becoming one of the richest industrial areas in Spain, the rapid industrial growth attracted large numbers of immigrants from elsewhere in Spain who threatened to overwhelm the Basques in their own homeland. This coincided with a Basque literary renaissance that built on the long and venerable Basque oral literature; beginning in the early 19th century, a steadily increasing number of plays, poems, and novels were written in the Basque language. Simultaneous and related efforts were made to formulate a unified Basque literary language combining elements of the different Basque dialeects to produce a language that could be understand by all Basques and become a language suitable for industrial modernity; eventually, a Gipuzcoan/Labourdin-based language called Batua was adopted by most Basque writers and intellectuals. United as never before and possessing new strength, over the 1920's the conservative Basque Nationalist Party led demands for Basque self-rule.

Finally in 1927, the new liberal Spanish government gave in to Basque demands and decided to establish the Spanish Basque Country as self-governing. The provinces of Gipizkoa, Biskaia, and Araba were all automatically included, but in Nafarroa the population was divided between a Basque-identified north and a Spanish-identified south. Much to the displeasure of many Navarrese, the decision was made to divide the province on ethnolinguistic lines, handing Upper Navarre over to the Basques after a successful referendum while maintaining the rest of Navarre as a separate self-governing region. In 1928, the Spanish Basque Country -- including the provinces of Gipizkoa, Biskaia, Araba, and Nafarroa -- finally became a self-governing entity under the formal name of Bascongadas, with considerable internal autonomy and the ability to collect taxes. The ancient Basque city of Gernika, in Biskaia province, was selected as Bascongadas' capital, while the High Justice Court of Bascongadas was located in industrial Bilbao, also in Biskaia. To this day, the four constituent provinces maintained some autonomy, with elected provincial assemblies and municipal governments, but the Bascongadas parliament in Gernika remains the dominant political factor in Bascongadas' political life.

Just like their counterparts in the New Principality of Catalonia, Bascongadas' politicians were quite concerned with preserving Basque autonomy and the ancient Basque language of Euskara, for over the previous half-century use of the Basque language had declined. In the late 1860's, it was estimated that more than half of Bascongadas' population spoke mainly Basque -- Biskaia and Gipuzkoa were almost entirely Vascophone, although at most only one-fifth of the Navarrese and Araban populations spoke Basque. By the time that Bascongadas became self-governing only two-fifths of the Bascongadas spoke Basque at all, with many Vascophones preferring to use Spanish in their daily affairs. A series of language laws passed by the Bascongadas government in the 1930's required all government workers and graduating students to be at least minimally fluent in Euskara. The Bascongadas government also took it upon itself to provide Euskara-language public services for all Basques throughout Bascongadas; these services included a Euskara-language public education system that all natively Vascophone children could attend.

In 1950, that year's Spanish census revealed that the language situation in Bascongadas had stabilized: Two-fifths of the Bascongadas population remained native Vascophones, while an additional tenth of the population claimed passive fluency in Euskara. Unlike Catalan in the New Principality of Catalonia, however, Euskara in Bascongadas simply did not acquire large numbers of natively Hispanophone speakers. Perhaps because of the considerable grammatical and vocabulary differences between Euskara and Castilian Spanish (far greater than those between Catalan and Castilian Spanish), perhaps because Euskara's traditional association with social and political conservatives alienated the Hispanophone industrial working class of Bilbo (Spanish Bilbao), outside of the strongly Vascophone areas of Nafarroa and Gipuzkoa few Hispanophones claimed even passive fluency in the language. This, in itself, was a serious problem, inasmuch as it suggested that Biskaia's historical role as a stronghold of Basque culture and language was declining; it was aggravated, however, by the fact that the booming industrial centres of Biskaia attracted tens of thousands of Hispanophone immigrants from elsewhere in Spain between 1950 and 1970. This mass immigration disrupted the linguistic equilibrium in Biskaia province and Bascongadas as a whole. The Bascongadas government desperately increased public funding to Euskara-language mass media and began, from 1954, to create a Euskara-language public education system for natively-Hispanophone schoolchildren. Nonetheless, the shift away from Euskara as a first language in Biskaia accelerated over this period.

In the meantime, the situation for Basques in France's Bayonne département deteriorated significantly as the post-Second World War popularity of Bayonne as a resort city attracted tens of thousands of Francophone immigrants. The populations of the inland provinces of Behe-Nafarroa and Zuberoa were less affected by this immigration and remained mostly Vascophone, but in rich Labourdin province and Bayonne département as a whole Basques became a minority. This demographic shift worried many French Basques, and in the early 1960's the terrorist movement ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna - Freedom for the Basques) bombed some popular tourist destinations in the city of Bayonne. The resulting crackdown by the French government upon ETA adroitly separated the vast majority of French Basques from the pro-ETA minority by finally extending state funding to the ikastolas and providing other Euskara-language public services in the interior provinces.

The movement towards a pan-Basque political union of some kind came with remarkable swiftness, and out of an unexpected confluence of factors. The French government hoped that some loose association between Bayonne and Bascongadas could placate Bayonne's Basques; the Spanish government wanted to cement Spain's ties with the restof the European Confederation; the Basques of Bayonne and Bascongadas wanted some framework within which they could coordinate regional affairs. Accordingly, in 1967 the Euskal Nazioarteko Elkartea (ENE) (Comunidad Internacional Vasca [CIV] in Spanish, Communauté internationale basque [CIB] in French) was formed.

As the first true cross-frontier regional political framework created in modern Europe, and to this day one of the strongest, the CIB was brought into existence by the Pact of Roncevalles, signed by the heads of government of the European Confederation, France and Spain, Bascongadas and Bayonne, and the seven Basque provinces in what was known as the “1+2+2+7 formula.” In the Spanish border community of Hondarribia an assembly of 50 parliamentarians -- 26 elected by the Bascongadas and Bayonne populations at large, 2 each appointed by each of the signatory governments of the Pact of Roncevalles -- exists, partly to serve as a regional forum to debate affairs of common interest but mainly to supervise the workings of the CIB's bureaucracy. This bureaucracy helps the two Basque regional governments to maintain common standards on language policy, education curricula, and government-subsidized mass media.

It is in this complex institutional framework that modern Euskadi has emerged.