Between Accommodation and Contestation: The Political Evolution of Basque and Catalan Nationalism

AbstractThe recent emphasis placed by several mainstream nationalist parties in Europe on sovereignty objectives invites analysis of the drivers behind this phenomenon. Their evolution is characterized by a complex set of dynamics that influences their options when faced with strategic decisions over participation in an existing state and/or challenging it by pressing for statehood. Spain constitutes a major laboratory for studying such dynamics owing to a diverse range of nationally- oriented parties. The experiences of the Basque Country and Catalonia show the continued relevance of center-periphery cleavages, especially when aggravated by European and global pressures and constraints, but party positioning between accommodation and sovereignty politics is influenced too by changing relationships between Basque and Catalan nationalist elites and civil societies and between mainstream nationalist parties and their direct competitors within party systems. Notes1The territorial conception of the homeland that is claimed to have such a right, however, is a differentiating factor in the discourses of nationalist parties. While all Basque nationalists associate with the wider Basque cultural community that straddles the Pyrenees, in practical terms, many in the Basque Nationalist Party concentrate on the autonomous community of the Basque Country (Basque name Euskadi) as being the fundamental unit to emphasize when pressing current demands for recognition of this right, whereas Sortu (“Create”) continues in the Batasuna tradition of placing greater emphasis on the wider Basque population. However, while wary of the risks to irredentist ambition of an initial enhancement of autonomy limited to Euskadi, even Sortu and its allies recognize that public sentiment with regard to the “right to decide” varies across the Basques territories and so too does Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya with regard to the autonomous community of Catalonia and the Catalan-speaking territories. Personal interviews with Laura Mintegi (Bildu), April 2014 and Oriol Amorós (ERC), Sept. 2014.2Lieven De Winter, Margarita Gómez-Reino, and Peter Lynch, eds., Autonomist Parties in Europe: Identity Politics and the Revival of the Territorial Cleavage, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials, 2006); Anwen Elias, Minority Nationalist Parties and European Integration (London: Routledge, 2009); Eve Hepburn, ed., New Challenges for Stateless Nationalist and Regionalist Parties (London: Routledge, 2010).3Diego Muro, “Territorial Accommodation, Party Politics and Statute Reform in Spain,” Southern European Society and Politics 14(4): 453 (2009).4Using similar concepts to those adopted here but focusing on a somewhat earlier period, see Jaime Lluch, The Moral Polity of the Nationalist: Sovereignty and Accommodation in Catalonia and Quebec (1976–2010) (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics, Generalitat de Catalunya, 2013).5Juan Díez Medrano, Divided Nations: Class, Politics and Nationalism in the Basque Country and Catalonia (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995); Daniele Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain: Alternative Paths to Nationalist Mobilisation (London: Hurst, 1997).6Among others, Paola Lo Cascio, Nacionalisme i autogovern: Catalunya, 1980–2003 (Catarroja: Afers, 2008); Luis Castells and Arturo Cajal, eds., La autonomía vasca en la España contemporánea 1808–2008 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2009); José Luis de la Granja, El nacionalismo vasco: Claves de su historia (Madrid: Anaya, 2009); Fernando Molina, “The Historical Dynamics of Ethnic Conflicts: Confrontational Nationalisms, Democracy and the Basques in Contemporary Spain,” Nations and Nationalism 16(2): 240–60 (2010).7In particular, Santiago De Pablo and Ludger Mees, El péndulo patriótico: Historia del Partido Nacionalista Vasco (1895–2005) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2005); Santiago Pérez-Nievas, Modelo de partido y cambio politico: El Partido Nacionalista Vasco en el proceso de transición y consolidación democrática (Madrid: Instituto Juan March de Estudios e Investigaciones, 2002); Oscar Barberà Aresté, Alianzas políticas, relaciones de poder y cambio organizativo: El caso de Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (1978–2003), Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2011); Juan B. Culla, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya 1931–2012: Una història política (Barcelona: La Campana, 2013).8Galicia, in north-west Spain, also has a significant nationalist movement but has been omitted from this study since it differs from the Basque Country and Catalonia in nearly all the above respects. It could have been used as a counterexample to our comparable cases, but the conviction that comparison is more likely to be effective if based on a modest number of cases has prevailed in the design of this collection. For further justification of the Basque-Catalan comparison, see Richard Gillespie, “Pro-Sovereignty Politics in Catalonia and the Basque Country: Are the Two Cases Comparable?,” in Javier Muñoz-Basols, Laura Lonsdale, and Manuel Delgado, eds., The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies (Routledge, 2015, forthcoming).9For example, D. Muro and A. Quiroga, “Building the Spanish Nation: The Centre-Periphery Dialectic,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 4(2): 18–37 (2004).10Leadership authority within the PNV, however, was undermined by factionalism during the early years after democracy returned to Spain. The greater importance of the provincial level of government in the Basque Country was seen here in the way it initially provided an institutional/organizational basis for factional politics to thrive in the party in the late 1970s and 1980s before reforms to the party statutes were made to strengthen the authority of the party leadership. See Raúl Gómez and Santiago Pérez-Nievas, “Faccionalismo e integración vertical en contextos multinivel: El caso del Partido Nacionalista Vasco,” in Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Papers 92: 97–117 (2009). http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/papers/02102862n62/02102862n92p97.pdf (accessed 20 Sept. 2013).11On this area of debate, see especially Thomas Jeffrey Miley, “Blocked Articulation and Nationalist Hegemony in Catalonia,” Regional & Federal Studies 23(1): 7–26 (2013); Kathryn Crameri, “Goodbye, Spain?” The Question of Independence for Catalonia (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014); and Andrew Dowling, “Accounting for the Turn towards Successionism in Catalonia,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 27(2/3): 219–234 (2014).12In the view of most of the participants in the “Nationalisms in Spain” workshop referred to in the preface, this “outbidding” should not be described as “ethnic,” since the main political forces do not see themselves in such terms and they seek support for their projects from Basques and Catalans regardless of origins, families, names, etc. Nor is the outbidding necessarily “nationalist” since, while many observers would regard it as being implicitly nationalist, representatives of the Catalan proindependence party, Esquerra Republicana, have rejected the label and view nationalism as a right-wing phenomenon, alien to their own brand of left-wing, proindependence politics. Interviews with former ERC president, Josep Lluís Carod-Rovira and member of the Catalan Parliament Oriol Amorós, Feb. and Nov. 2014.13Maiol Roger, “ERC larga una ofensiva para repetir la victoria en las municipales de 2015,” El País, 26 May 2014. http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2014/05/26/catalunya/1401129946_741770.html (accessed 27 May 2014).14While this state of affairs has prevailed for a quarter of a century, signs of an end to the PP-PSOE duopoly were evident in public opinion poll findings by 2013 as both the PP and PSOE became discredited and IU together with Union, Progress, and Democracy (Unión Progreso y Democracia [UPyD]) made gains. More recently, a further challenge to duopoly has emerged in the form of Podemos.15Eusko Jaurlaritza and Gobierno Vasco, Propuesta de Estatuto Político de la Comunidad de Euskadi, 25 Oct. 2003; Michael Keating and Zoe Bray, “Renegotiating Sovereignty: Basque Nationalism and the Rise and Fall of the Ibarretxe Plan,” Ethnopolitics 5(4): 347–64 (2006). The plan was not simply about the relationship of the Basque Country to the Spanish state but also involved an attempt to leave ETA with no arguments to justify the continued use of political violence.16Balfour and Quiroga, The Reinvention of Spain, 199.17Miquel Noguer, “CiU carga contra gais e inmigrantes para evita que el PP le adelante en Cataluña,” El País, 4 Nov. 2011, http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2011/11/04/actualidad/1320363485_434389.html (accessed 12 Aug. 2012).18Jaume Bosch, De L’Estatut a l’Autodeterminació: Esquerra nacional, crisi econòmica, independència i Països Catalans (Barcelona: Editorial Base, 2013), 20–21.19Andreu Orte and Alex Wilson, “Multi-Level Coalitions and Statute Reform in Spain,” Regional and Federal Studies 19(3): 415–36 (2009); Albert Falcó-Gimeno and Tània Verge, “Coalition Trading in Spain: Explaining State-Wide Parties’ Government Formation Strategies at the Regional Level,” Regional and Federal Studies 23/4: 387–405 (2013).20Richard Gillespie, “Political Polarization in the Basque Country,” Regional & Federal Studies 10(1): 112–24 (2000); Ludger Mees, “Visión y gestión: El nacionalismo vasco democrático 1998–2009,” in Walther L. Bernecker, Diego Iñiguez Hernández, and Günther Maihold, eds., ¿Crisis? ¿Qué crisis? España en busca de su camino (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2009), 161–205.21Ángel Smith, The Origins of Catalan Nationalism, 1770–1898 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).22Daniel Verdú, “El viaje hacia el soberanismo,” El País, 22 July 2014. http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2014/07/22/actualidad/1406048711_733501.html (accessed 22 July 2014); Ivan Serrano, “Just a Matter of Identity?: Support for Independence in Catalonia,” Regional and Federal Studies 23/5: 523–45 (2013).23Montserrat Guibernau, Catalan Nationalism: Francoism, Transition and Democracy (London: Routledge, 2004).24Personal interviews with Lluís Corominas (November 2013), Joaquim Forn (November 2013), Jordi Pujol (November 2013), Carles Puigdemont (November 2013), Jordi Vilajoana i Rovira (February 2014), and Santi Vila i Vicente (February 2014), CiU, 2013–14. 25De Pablo and Mees, El péndulo patriótico, vii, 465–66.26Guibernau, Catalan Nationalism, 130–33.27Lluch, The Moral Polity, 15–21. A poll by Metroscopia published in Oct. 2014 saw support for full independence among Catalans still rising at 29% (up from 27%) but greater growth in support for enhanced and guaranteed competences for Catalonia within Spain at 47% (up from 42%), while support for the status quo had fallen to 16% (from 19%) over the previous month Miquel Noguer, “Solo el 32% de los catalanes quiere unos comicios plebiscitarios,” El País, 4 Oct. 2014, http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2014/10/04/catalunya/1412441342_680421.html (accessed 4 Oct. 2014). 28José Álvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa: La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2001); Xose M. Núñez Seixas, Los nacionalismos en la España contemporánea (siglos XIX y XX) (Barcelona: Hipotèsi, 1999); Sebastian Balfour and Alejandro Quiroga, The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).29André Lecours, Basque Nationalism and the Spanish State (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2007).30Michael Eaude, Catalonia: A Cultural History (Oxford: Signal Books, 2007), 52.31The author found evidence of this sentiment in several interviews with leading members of CDC, UDC, ERC, and the CUP, 2013–14. 32Interestingly, the latter effect (of nationalist radicalization of territorial demands prompting opposing statewide parties to unite in opposition) has not been seen in the more fragmented party system of Catalonia following the prosovereignty shift by the CiU. Arguably, this is because of the influence of Catalanism extending to the PSC but not to the PP.33Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió (CEO) poll result, showing opposition at 45.3% and support at 44.5%. Pere Ríos, “El no a la independencia de Cataluña gana al sí por primera vez desde 2012,” El País, 19 Dec. 2014, http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2014/12/19/catalunya/1418984873_128596.html (accessed 20 Dec. 2014).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRichard GillespieRichard Gillespie holds the established chair of Politics at the University of Liverpool where he is co-director of the Europe and the World Centre. He is currently leading a research project comparing nationalist movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

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