Basque Nationalism: Is Autonomy Enough?

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In the modern European Union, lies an ancient culture and language unrelated to the dominant cultures around it. These are the Basques who have struggled to retain their customs through invasions and cultural repression. The territory which they call home is a small but powerful force within Spain. Spanish ideologies exerted upon them in recent memory have put a damper on Basque cultural practices and language, but out of this came Basque nationalism. The means used by Basque nationalists to gain independence are sometimes questionable and violent, and have had an impact on the economic health of the region. The Basque Country gained autonomy in the Spanish Constitution of 1978, but many feel that autonomy doesn’t go far enough.

Spain, a country of nearly fifty million people on the Iberian Peninsula, contains the vast majority of Basque people in Europe. Basque Country in Spain (Euskadi in the Basque language) encompasses the north Spanish provinces of Álava, Vizcaya, and Guipúzcoa (see Fig. 1). The province of Navarre directly to the east of Euskadi is sometimes included in the term ‘Basque Country’ because of its large population of Basque people. However, Navarre is a separate autonomous region within Spain and will be excluded from the term ‘Euskadi’ for the purposes of this report. Euskadi is a mountainous region situated between the eastern Cantabrian mountains and the western slopes of the Pyrenees and is bordered by France to the northeast, the Bay of Biscay to the north, and the rest of Spain to the west, east, and south. In the 2010 census, there were 2,178,339 people living in Euskadi, a majority of which were people of Basque descent. The largest cities include Bilbao (pop. 353,187), Vitoria-Gasteiz (pop. 2...

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