Separatism was born in Madrid, thought EPALZA. The Basque country wanted to be itself, live its own life.
—Was that incompatible with being more or less united with Spain? No more than, say, Canada being part of the Commonwealth. But if Spain acted towards us in the way that the English landlords acted in Ireland, then separatism was inevitable. We became separatists finally because there was no other way of solving the matter. We were Basques, and Euzkadi was our homeland. It was as simple and as complicated as that. To build a wall of China around our country was an absurdity, of course. But if we were forced to by the attitude of others, then we would have to do so. Sentiments, hatreds, can run so high that one would prefer to be united with Alaska rather than with one’s neighbour …
Jagi-Jagi (‘Arise-Arise’), the youth movement which had split from the PNV, was overtly separatist. The split had come, in the words of a Jagi-Jagi member, because the PNV was ‘too concerned with Spanish politics’ and not radical enough in its social policies. But separatism, in Trifón ETARTE’s view, was not synonymous with isolationism or exclusivity. It meant wanting to be free to create a union of all Basques on both sides of the Pyrenees.
—A union with its own Basque personality which would then join other unions. Once our personality has been recognized, there is no problem involved in reaching agreement with Spain or with a confederation of the peoples of Spain. But first we had to be free – free from the central state which oppressed us …
The sense of oppression, beginning with the erosion and final abolition of the foral rights38 after the last Carlist war in 1876, was felt particularly at the cultural level. There was no Basque university; even to qualify as a nurse a woman had to travel to Valladolid in Old Castile to sit her examination. There was discrimination against Basque-speakers at school.
—We didn’t talk Basque at home. Yet my parents knew Basque better than they did Spanish, recalled Asunción CARO, daughter of a merchant navy captain. My father, whose native language was Basque, had to struggle very hard to pass his exams in Spanish. So when it came to us children, he hoped to spare us the same difficulties …
Her mother shared this view. She could remember being made to wear ‘the ring’ on her finger for speaking Basque at school – ‘a horrible punishment imposed by the Spanish schoolmistress, who removed the ring only when a pupil denounced another for speaking Basque’. Asunción CARO didn’t learn Basque as a child.
—It was considered vulgar, peasant-like to be caught speaking Basque by the majority of Spanish nuns at my school. We couldn’t speak our own language in our country … 39
A high proportion of the Bilbao nationalist petty bourgeoisie was indeed – and for the same reason – unable to speak Basque. Reflecting on the cause, when they knew that their grandparents, if not their parents, had spoken the language, reaffirmed their sense of oppression.
From shortly after the republic’s proclamation until the outbreak of the war, three projected home rule statutes were presented without becoming law. The first, in 1931, foundered in the constituent assembly because it included a clause guaranteeing the complete autonomy of the ‘Basque state’s’ relations with the church and the right to negotiate an independent concordat with the Vatican. The second, which omitted this clause and referred to a Basque ‘autonomous political administration within the Spanish state’, was narrowly defeated by Navarre.40 A third project was presented to a plebiscite in November 1933. While it won nearly 90 per cent of the vote in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, the two seaboard provinces, it secured less than 50 per cent of the vote in Alava to the south. The latter was used by the centre-right, which had just come to power in Madrid, to argue against the concession of a statute. Finally, after the Popular Front electoral victory, the third statute was retabled in parliament and was being considered by a parliamentary committee when the war started.
Too right-wing to find support in the republican-socialist coalition of 1931–3,41 the PNV was too nationalistic and liberal to be supported by the centre-right government which succeeded it until 1935. The right’s hostility to home rule had increased, and the Catalan statute was now identified with the left. From 1931 and an electoral alliance with the Carlists, the PNV had moved by 1934 to support of the Esquerra in its conflict with the central government.
Although the PNV followed a line ‘which sometimes seemed to take us closer to the right and at other times to the left’, it was, in EPALZA’S view, ‘a line which ran straighter than either right or left’.
A line which consistently pursued the goal of autonomy but which initially, at least, misread the map of political realities in its quest. Such was MICHELENA’s view.
—We were ourselves largely responsible for cutting off the possibility of home rule during the constituent assembly. We were too clerical – and the republican regime too anti-clerical. To bring in religious questions, to propose direct relations with the Vatican, as in the first proposed statute, was patently unacceptable to Madrid. The Catalans were more advanced in these matters than we. They knew it too. We were accused – by Prieto – of trying to create a Vaticanist Gibraltar in the north …
But the right, which had initially supported home rule, saw that the republic was ‘taking root’ and that Basque autonomy would only consolidate it. They began to oppose it.
—Under the centre-right regime we clearly saw that we would not be granted autonomy. And so, little by little, we began to move towards the defence of democratic positions, supporting the Esquerra in the conflict over its agrarian reform law …
The difference between the PNV and the Esquerra was clearly illustrated in October 1934. Whereas the Esquerra rose, the PNV – while considering that the major danger came from the right – ordered its members to abstain. In this it foreshadowed what many members were to feel should have been the party’s attitude at the beginning of the war.42
If there was mutual suspicion between the liberal republicans in Madrid and the PNV, there was outright hostility between the working-class parties in the Basque country and the nationalists. Street clashes led to shootings and even deaths in the first two years of the republic. Ramón RUBIAL, lathe operator and UGT metalworkers’ executive member, remembered that the cry ¡Gora Euzkadi! (Long live the Basque country) was enough to launch socialists into the attack. The Basque nationalists were ‘conservative, confessional and racialist’. Mining fortunes had been built on immigrant labour which lived in virtual ghettoes in the mining villages of Las Encartaciones.
—We believed that the liberation of the region had to come with the liberation of all Spain – the liberation from capitalism. When the new republican constitution incorporated the idea of regional autonomy, we accepted it. But our hostility towards the PNV as a party did not cease. The socialist party then, it must be recalled, was resolutely anti-clerical. A member could be expelled from his branch for getting married in church or baptizing his children. The church was allied with the capitalists, and we had a class position to defend … 43
The charge of racialism was supported by a young communist miner, Saturnino CALVO.
—The foremen and supervisors were Basques; the majority of the miners were from other parts of Spain. The PNV supporters had their own insulting word to describe us non-Basques: maketo.44 But the communist party’s attitude to the nationalists was, admittedly, pretty sectarian in the first years of the republic …
The view that the influx of immigrant workers was a threat and that the left-wing parties were the mortal enemy was widespread among PNV supporters. Pedro BASABILOTRA, the son of a building contractor who had returned from three years at a Catholic school in Scotland to join the party, staunchly believed that the Basques had to defend their heritage.
—The flood of immigrants threatened the purity of the Basque race, our blood. We weren’t racialists – no, no! I have nothing against the peoples of any nation, only their governments. Moreover, most of these immigrants joined the socialist party. The left was as sectarian as the
right. We were struggling for an independent state. If Britain would have helped us, I for one would have gladly supported joining the Commonwealth … 45
Failure to lead the struggle for the right to self-determination left the proletarian parties without the means to win over large sectors of the Basque workers and peasants. This was clearly demonstrated in 1936 when the Popular Front espoused home rule and the suspension of rural evictions, and the PNV lost five of the twelve seats it had won in the previous general elections of 1933. The Popular Front now won seven seats to put it level with the PNV. The latter joined neither left- nor right-wing electoral alliances in 1936, standing for a programme which was resumed in its election slogans as : ‘For Christian civilization! For Basque liberty! For social justice!’
Unlike the Catalanist petty bourgeoisie, the Basque nationalist movement was able to sustain a trade union.46 This was Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos, a catholic union in its origins. Its president was Manuel ROBLES, a linotype operator, who was elected to his post in 1933, the same year in which he became a PNV deputy to parliament. The union did not believe in the class struggle; the latter was ‘society’s sickness’.
—We couldn’t believe that the history of the world should be reduced to two classes. Certainly, it was the capitalists who were responsible for imposing a system opposed to the workers. But we always remembered Basque history, the time before we lost our freedom, in which the class struggle did not exist …
‘Communitarianism’, a third way between marxist socialism and capitalism, was the solution the STV proposed. The trouble with socialism, ROBLES believed, was that it did little to give the actual worker control over the means of production, which were taken over by the state. As to capitalism, the STV wanted to show the owners, the monopolists, that it was possible to run industry differently, to allow workers’ participation so that each would understand the purpose of what he or she was producing.
The STV, which by the 1930s was no longer a confessional union, set up consumer and producer cooperatives and organized the peasantry; in 1936 it claimed 100,000 members.47
While being the largest, the PNV was not the only Basque nationalist party. Acción Nacionalista Vasca, the result of a split from the PNV in 1930, declared itself republican from the start and joined the anti-monarchist bloc before the republic. In 1936 it formed part of the Popular Front.
—What differentiated us most from the PNV was our desire to separate politics and religion, explained Gonzalo NARDIZ, one of ANV’s founders. We were not separatists. Politically speaking, the existence of a nation with its own rights is compatible with the existence of the Spanish state. We considered separatism an impossibility, and devoted our efforts to finding a means of reaching an understanding with the Spanish state …
ANV adopted a socialistic platform which called for the nationalization of basic industries, banking and communications. Recruiting mainly in the urban petty bourgeoisie, it did not grow rapidly, evidence of the conservative nationalist milieu in which it had to operate.
The heartland of Basque nationalism lay in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, the two industrialized provinces. Basque-speakers were more widespread there than in Alava, the third Basque province, or in Navarre. The latter, as we have seen, narrowly rejected joining Basque home rule in 1931. Use of Basque had been gradually declining in Navarre and was concentrated mainly in the mountainous north where the peasantry supported nationalism. But where the peasantry was self-sufficient or relatively prosperous as in other areas of Navarre, it tended to Carlism. On the extensive estates along the Ebro in south-eastern Navarre, the agricultural workers joined the UGT or CNT.48
The Carlists by and large rejected Basque nationalism because it was ‘separatist’; regionalists, defenders of their fueros,49 they had no wish to ‘dismember’ the nation. The PNV had only once won a parliamentary seat in Navarre under the republic, and that had been in 1931.
But there were perhaps other reasons why sectors of the bourgeois Carlist leadership in Navarre did not support Basque home rule.
—We didn’t feel sufficiently identified with the Basque country to exchange dependence on Madrid for dependence on Bilbao and San Sebastián, explained Mario OZCOIDI, a Pamplona Carlist …
The financial and industrial strength of the two cities to the north might well be seen by a predominantly rural Carlist bourgeoisie as more threatening than that of unindustrialized Madrid to the south. Agrarian Navarre might be defenceless against one of the two most advanced industrial regions in the Spanish state.
That this was not necessarily the view of the Carlist peasantry, however, was suggested by Antonio IZU. He believed that the Carlist leadership, as personified by the Conde de Rodezno, was responsible for the split with the Basque nationalists.
—In the struggle between centralism and regionalism, the leadership always sided with the former. In this case, it argued that the Catholic faith could not be defended by coming to agreement with an anti-Catholic republican government and demanded a statute which would respect religion. We, who weren’t of the leadership tendency, would certainly have accepted the autonomy statute had Carlists and nationalists reached agreement …
But it was not to be. The division of 1931, and the Carlist rejection of its political heir, Basque nationalism, was to be fought out six years later in the green countryside of Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya.
D. Libertarians and the republic
Two months after the republic’s advent, in which a number of anarcho-syndicalist leaders had unofficially participated, the CNT declared that it remained ‘in open war with the state. We are confronted by the Constituent Cortes as we would be by any power that oppresses us.’
The republican–socialist coalition responded with a similar declaration. As a result, though not formally outlawed, the half of the country’s working class that was enrolled in the CNT was virtually outside the law. This was a serious situation for a new regime whose political success depended in great part on the incorporation of the working class. It was, if anything, an even more serious situation for the working class to find itself irremediably split at the start of a new revolutionary period.
The split, as is well known, was not new. The introduction of anarchism in the previous century preceded that of socialism in Spain; then, as now, the question of the state and the working-class movement’s participation in politics divided them. Until 1932 the CNT, undoubtedly the most revolutionary mass union organization that the European working class had endowed itself with, outnumbered the socialist UGT. Anarcho-syndicalism was deeply rooted in certain areas of Spain – amongst the industrial Catalan working class and the Andalusian rural proletariat; in certain points of Galicia and Asturias, and increasingly in the Levant, Saragossa and Madrid. Its major strength was amongst agricultural labourers, textile, building and wood workers. Almost the only place where it had strength in heavy industry or mining was in Asturias, especially in the steel town of La Felguera.
Outlawed during the dictatorship, the CNT took its stance of open war against the republic at its first congress for twelve years, held in Madrid. The decision represented a victory of the ultra-left ‘purists’ organized around the FAI, and manifested a division which, from as far back as the 1880s, had marked the movement. On the one hand, those who believed that revolution could be achieved by violent actions which would set the masses in spontaneous movement; on the other, those who thought that revolution required the prior organization and education, within a coherent revolutionary strategy, of the masses.
Both tendencies could agree on the ultimate revolutionary objectives: the abolition of private property, government and state, and the administration of production by the producers themselves: workers’ self-management. The proletariat would sweep aside rural and industrial capitalists, the state and politics would disappear, and farms and factories would be run by free associations of producers. How this was to be achieved, and the structure to be given to it once it had been achieved, was where the
differences arose.
The two differentiated but linked concepts which comprised anarcho-syndicalism, as its hyphenated name suggested, could by the 1930s be schematically stated in a series of polarities: rural/urban; local/national; artisanal/ industrial; spontaneous/organized; autarkic/inter-dependent; anti-intellectual/ intellectual.
The first in the series could broadly be categorized as the anarchist view. Libertarian communism and its attainment was characterized by its simplicity:
There is no need to invent anything, or to create a new organism. The nuclei of the organization around which the future economic life will be organized already exist in the present society: the trade union and the free municipality … [The latter] of ancient origin in which, spontaneously, the inhabitants of villages and hamlets gather, offers a way to the solution of all the problems of co-existence in the countryside.50
This view, as put forward by Dr Isaac Puente, one of the two most influential Spanish anarchist writers at the time, expressed total confidence in the masses and their spontaneity; the free municipality, which was the sovereign workers’ assembly in a small locality, must remain autonomous, for only its proper functioning guaranteed the functioning of the whole. No superstructure must exist over it, except that which exercised special functions that could not be carried out locally. Any form of ‘constructive’ anarchism must be rejected because it contained the seeds of bureaucracy which would lead to the restoration of the state. The free municipality was the only institution which guaranteed the development of individual freedom.
This vision was based on rural life, rural revolution. The insurrection would start from the villages, readied for war by ‘a handful of audacious comrades or a small rural syndicate’, while urban workers declared a general strike to hold back the armed forces. ‘The major part of the Spanish population lives in small municipalities and their reorganization in a libertarian form is the easiest imaginable thing.’51 Moreover, if the cities turned out to be an obstacle, a focus of reaction, ‘it will be preferable to wipe them off the face of the earth. The rural municipalities will absorb their reactionary plague and purify it.’52
Blood of Spain Page 83