Conflict Research Society and Conflict Analysis Research Centre

University of Kent at-Canterbury

September 2008

«National Ethnic Movements in Western Europe - future independent states or the victory of ESDP? »

António Ramos dos Santos ( University of Lisbon)

Abstract: ESDP was conceived for EU’s abroad action on defence and security issues. Does the EU will react to the

new challenges that may take place in the Western Europe relating to the ethnic an nationalist movements in places

such as Scotland, Corsica or Flanders? But, in extremis, is ESDP prepared to deal with an unilateral independence of

the Basque Country? Would it be considered a pure internal affair of the Spanish State or a Community problem for the

EU. What kind of answer should we wait for?»

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I

The term conflict describes a situation in which two or more actors, who interact

with each other, porsue incompatible goals, are aware of this incompatibility, and claim

to be justified in the porsuit of their particular course of action. Ethnic conflicts are one

particular form of such conflict in which the goals of at least one conflict party are

defined in exclusively ethnic terms, and in which the primary fault line of confrontation

is one of ethnic distinctions. Whatever the concrete issues over which conflict erupts at

least one of the conflict parties will explain its dissatisfaction in ethnic terms. They will

refer to their distinct identity and point to a lack of recognition thereof. They will also

claim inequality of opportunity to preserve, express and develop it, as the reason why its

members cannot realize their interests, why they do not have the same rights, or why their

claims are not satisfied, why they do not have the same rights, or why their claims are not

satisfied. Thus, ethnic conflicts are a form of group conflict in which at least one of the

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parties involved interprets the conflict, its causes and potential remedies along an actually

existing or perceived discriminatory ethnic divide.

Empirically, it is relatively easy to determine which conflict is an ethnic one: one

knows them when one sees them. Few would dispute that Northern Ireland, Kosovo,

Cyprus and the Basque Country are, in one way or another, ethnic conflicts. That is so

because their manifestations were/are violent and their causes and consequences

obviously ethnic.

Basques and Catalans are transnational minorities, that is, ethnic groups whose

homeland stretches across several different states without them forming the titular notion

in many of them.

Apart from ethnicity, the other core component of ethnopolitics is territory. For

ethnic groups territory is then conceptualized more appropriately as place, bearing

significance in relation to the group’s history, collective memories and «character». The

deep emotional attachment to territory that ethnic groups can develop, territory is, or can

become, a valuable commodity as well, providing resources and a potential power base in

their bid to change an unacceptable status quo. In their attempts to preserve, express and

develop their distinct identities, ethnic groups perceive threats and opportunities. The

more deeply felt these perceptions are, the more they will be linked to be very survival of

the group and the more intense will the conflict be that they can potentially generate. This

links the issue of ethnicity to the notion of political power. The connection between

ethnicity and power has important political consequences in that any ethnic group that is

conscious of its uniqueness, and wishes to preserve it, is involved in a struggle for

political power. It either seeks to retain a measure of political power it possesses, or it

strives to acquire the amount of power that it deems necessary in order to preserve its

identity as a distinct ethnic group, that is, to defeat the threats and seize the opportunities

it faces.

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II

EU’s Defence Policy

State formation in Western was a process by which rulers forcibly accumulated,

concentrated, and centralized capital and means of coercion away from smaller units, thus

creating national states. European integration, however, is characterized by an apparent

willingness on the part of today’s rulers to pool and sometimes delegate their authority

over capital and coercion to a larger entity, the European Union. This transformation of

the European state, one of the most puzzling political phenomena of the late twentieth

century, has been well studied so far as capital is concern.

The European Union played a role in security affairs, since its existence had

arguably contributed to preventing armed conflicts on the Western part of the continent

after World War II.

In the contemporary era, the project of a European military organization goes

back to 1950s, when the architects of the ECSC, the ancestor of the EU, designed a

European Defence Community to complement it.

The idea of a truly autonomous defence organization resurfaced in the early 1990s

in the wake of the EU’s new common foreign and security policy.

The Treaty of Maastricht even cautiously mentioned the eventual framing of a

common defence policy, which might in time lead to a common defence. The European

security and defence policy, enshrined in the 2001 Treaty of Nice, is mot a single policy

like the EU’s external trade policy, where the Commission enjoys supranational

competence. It is not a collective defence pact like the North Atlantic Treaty either, let

alone an integrated European army like the one envisaged in the stillborn EDC. Yet, in a

way, ESDP is more unsettling of national defence postures than NATO and the EDC

were. The EDC was also wedded to a traditional conception of state sovereignty,

whereby states came together to defend temselves against a know enemy, the Soviet

Union, ESDP, by contrast, is not geared towards a particular threat in specific historical

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circumstances. Its objective is not national defence, but political integration, which

encompasses the institutional development of Europe, the formation of a European

identity, and the creation of region-wide industrial champions in the defence sector.

European defence has become rather uncontroversial, and that this lack of

controversy says something about the state of the European state. Indeed, in Europe today

it is considered quite «normal» to be in favour of common defence. Defence policy has

gone beyond the nation state. High public support for European defence has created a

historically unprecedented political space for bureaucratic elites to experiment and enact

new forms of transnational governance. But the puzzle remains of why these actors

decided to do so.

There is today a great deal of social interaction between security and defence

actors in Europe. That is because ESDP has led to the creation of a European security

and defence field, where states actors are in constant interaction with each other. The

level of interaction is unique in the West where two parallel developments that have been

unfolding since the end of World War II and are peculiar to Europe: the

internationalization of European defence structures and the Europeanization of foreign

policymaking.

Now that is strongly institutionalized, the European security and defence field

affects the practices, social representation, and power relations of security and defence

actors in a fundamental way. A transgovernmental field is a stricture and hierarchical

social space in which state actors from different countries look to each other, know their

place vis-à-vis each other, share and sometimes clash over social representations, and

struggle for influence over policy outcomes, domestic and supranational.

Characterizing the EU as an interdependent, multilateral system wherein decision-

making is shared between many actors leaves many questions unanswered, such as why

did this network come about in Europe and not elsewhere? Who holds power in tis

system? According to which norms and rules are decisions made?

ESDP has become a multilevel governance system or, as some authors called it,

a transgovernmental field, wherein national and supranational, state and non-state actors

participate. ESDP is for the military a means to improve their capabilities, while for

diplomats, it is a means to enhance their political voice. ESDP field is a struggle about

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positions. But it is also a conflict of visions. The social representations are deeply

embedded in national political fields. For the French, ESDP must lead to European

defence, for the Germans, it serves to further European integration, for the British, it must

remain a policy.

Rudolf Scharping said that « the deeper the integration, the smaller the room for

national decision-making. I support the idea of European armed forces. National

sovereignty is limited.» When it comes to ESDP, the policy language of a British

secretary is very different from the political language of a German minister. In other

words, there is a symbolic dimension to the struggles that take place in the making and

reproduction of a field. A policy that focuses on increasing military capabilities will

favour defence staffs and the armaments industry: not surprisingly, these two collective

actors have been quick to support the European Defence Agency. Conversely, a policy

that focuses on civilian instruments, such as rule-of-law, police, and human security

capabilities, will find a receptive audience among Commission officials, NGO’s and

small countries with big development programmes, like Sweden and the Netherlands.

Assuming that European military integration goes forward, and it is reasonable to

think that it will, to a greater or smaller extent, in an institutional framework that mixes

supranational, intergovernmental, and transgovernmental elements, an important question

is whether European defence is desirable.

III

A Case-Study: The Basque Country

The century-old Basque conflict in Spain would begin to affect the country’s

transition process to democracy following the death of General Franco.

Spanish regionalism is becoming an increasingly important consideration for the

state, particularly with regard to arbitrating between different political claims based on

multiple nationalist and regionalist identities.

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The state practice of asymmetric decentralisation, because when confronted with

regional cultural communities often makes exceptions, when decentralizing and endow

one or more units with a greater degree of autonomy than others, instead of creating

legally and administratively equal sub-units.

Such asymmetric decentralisation legitimates the claim that those territorial sub-

units with a greater degree of cultural distinctiveness apart from the state’s dominant

cultural traditions and ethnic bias also have greater rights to extensive self-rule, a

qualification used to justify the powers allocated especially to the Basque Country and

Catalonia.

The Spanish Constitution of 1978 was drafted as a compromise document. This

entailed compromise not only between left and right but also between the mainstream

Spanish parties and a number of moderate non Spanish nationalists. The resulting

provisions for differing levels of regional autonomy were too little for the Basques, good

enough for the Catalans.

In the Basque Country a campaign by radical nationalists against the document

discouraged over half the electorate from even turning up for the poll of those who did, a

significant minority still voted against the proposed new constitution. Thus the Basque

Country stood as the one region of Spain when the constitution was not popularly ratified

by the citizenry.

Decentralisation has been enacted and amended incrementally into the 1990s for

the various territorial populations belonging to different categories, as follows: A

historical nationality (Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country). While the Spanish

system has been termed asymmetric federalism because of the uneven distribution of

authority to its sub-state units, this is ad hoc numenclature as Spain is not

constitutionally a federal state, and has also been described as quasi-federal or

regionalist.

In Spain the current conflict over territorial autonomy arrangements has three

distinct dimensions: state-legitimating centralist; non-Spanish nationalist; Spanish-

identified regionalist; and is not a purely ethnonational conflict.

According to Basque nationalists, the Basque Country covers the territorial

occupied by seven historic territories, or provinces: Bizkaia, Araba, Gipuzkoa and

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Nafarroa (Navarre) on the Spanish side of the frontier, and Lapurdi, Behe Nafarroa and

Xiberoa on the French side. Meaning Iparralde, the northern, or French, part of the

Basque Country and Hegoalde, the southern, or Spanish, part of the Basque Country.

Heuskal Herria and its variants refer to the Basque Country as a linguistic and

Cultural territory, ignoring political and administrative frontiers. As such, these terms are

often used by Basque nationalist sympathists to avoid Spanish and French political

conceptualization of the Basque space. The phrase Zapiak Bat, or «the seven (provinces

are) one», first appeared towards the end of the nineteenth century with the emergence of

Basque nationalism, referring to this whole Euskal Herria.

In the late 19th century, Sabino Arana, founder of the first Basque nationalist

party, Eusko Alderdi Jeltzalia invented the term Euzkadi to refer to a national Basque

homeland. Today, the more commonly used version of this term is Euskadi, with an"s"

rather than a "z", to conform to the standardized Basque word for the Basque language,

Euskara. This ortographical shift reflects both a desire to mark distance from Arana’s

racial vison of a Basque homeland and the political context in which the Basque

government , or Eusko Jaurlaritza in Basque, was born in 1978.

Euskadi is the Basque name for the region known in Spanish as the Comunidad

Autónoma Vasca, or Autonomous Basque Community. In Spanish, the term País Vasco

is commonly used to refer to this restricted relation with the Spanish crown, maintains it

own territorial identity, despite the practice of Basque nationalists to include it in their

references to Euskal Herria.

In 2002, in an attempt to reassert its influence in the face of political conflict in

the Basque Country and especially the continued violence of ETA, EAJ launched a

proposal for a new relationship between Euskadi and the Spanish state. This so-called

Ibarretxe Plan, named after the president of the regional government, Juan José Ibarretxe,

who has led campaigning on this behalf, proposes a reassessment of current notions of

national and civic identity and of the relationship between the region, the state and the

European Union. While principally focused on Euskadi, the Ibarretxe Plan also takes

account of the French Basque Country and the autonomous region of Navarre in Spain as

part of Basque territory. EAJ included representatives of political parties and associations

from these territories in preliminary discussions of the project.

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With European integration, political actors on either side of state frontiers are

obliged to recognise each other’s existence and be prepared to work together in a way

that was not the case when frontiers were more or less closed. Thus borders in Europe

have recently shifted from being generally traditionally considered as mere peripheral

zones, assumed to have a static or frozen quality. From the point of view also of

centralising, states (as Spain or France), the areas on either side of their frontiers continue

to a certain extent to be seen as peripheral to the state. But the Schengen Agreement of

the EU and the relaxing of most EU internal frontier controls, there have been changes in

the nature and perception of borders. Many border areas have become sites of active

economic and cultural interchange and border regions have become active in taking

advantage of this unpredented protagonism in European affairs. This trend has been

particularly encouraged by financial assistance from the EU.

In the Basque Country then, since the early 1990s, local actors and institutions in

the French and Spanish parts of the Basque Country have embarked on common projects.

This has been further facilitated by agreements signed by representatives of the French

and Spanish states since Spain joined the EEC in 1986.

Nonetheless, many participants in cross-frontier cooperation projects in the area

have been disappointed by the slow-moving nature of the initiatives. Civil servants and

politicians in Euskadi express frustation regarding their relations with French officials.

Cross-frontier cooperation in France is ultimately managed by the French state agency

DATAR whose role is to ensure that the state follows very closely all territorial

development and regional politics. In an effort to bypass such restrictions, Basque

militants have developed their own relations across the frontier. In 1999, a movement

known as Udalbiltza brought together Basque municipal authorities from all over the

Basque Country. Paradoxically, debates on new ideas about sovereignty, national

identity, territorial and temporal boundaries, and self-determination have reinforced

existing positions and attitudes.

Basque nationalism is rooted in a vision of time and history that draws on the past

to dictate the present. While Basque nationalists present this vision as essentially modern,

open and forward-looking, the fact is that any re-definition of space and time is an effort

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to renegotiate boundaries automatically involves the drawning up of new boundaries of

one sort or another.

Recently, in an elaboration of the Ibarretxe Plan, the president of EAJ, Josu Jon

Imaz, declared that «faced with the option of dependence or independence, we place our

stakes on interdependence in Europe.» ( La Vanguardia 1/8/2005 " El PNV [EAJ] aboga

por una nación vasca no sometida a España ni Francia").

Thus Imaz evoked the idea of «shared sovereignty with Spain, France and Europe,

without submitting ourselves to anyone» in opposition to the ideas of «dependence or

independence» and «the nation-state». In this process, Imaz wished to stress the

importance of Basque society as «plural» and not composed «solely of nationalists» (La

Vanguardia, 31/7/2005 "El PNV (EAJ) aboga por construir una nación vasca que englobe

a Hegoalde y Iparralde frente a la unidad territorial imposta).

However, such a theoretical explanation remains interpreted differently by local

inhabitants, reformed in their own political frames. And the public speech given by

Imaz’s colleague Joseba Egibar that same day in another meeting elsewhere in Euskadi

could only help confuse things further. He stated that «co-sovereignty cannot be obtained

without the Basque people first becoming sovereign [Ibid.). So Egibar continues to see in

the idea of shared sovereignty the existence of a ruler and a ruled. He also criticized

Imaz’s use of the word society, saying that the «the right to self-determination was of the

people» and not of «societies» (Ibid.). Egibar’s position illustrates the continuing

traditionalist line of the PNV, until recently represented by the more primordialist Basque

nationalist Xabier Arzalluz.

So modern undestandings of plurinationality and post-sovereignty still need to be

worked out at the heart of the Basque nationalist movement. The potential dynamism

provided by European integration in terms of the possibility of rethinking and

renegotiating boundaries has been embraced by nationalists in the Basque Country as

permitting the realisation of their project of Basque reunification. In this vein, various

branches of the Basque nationalist movement have sought to adapt the European

discourse to the pursuit of their own political goals: the traditional Basque nationalist

party EAJ has done this by talking in terms of post-sovereignty, while the radical left-

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wing movement has attempted to create an atternative approach to cross-frontier space

reflecting separatist demands for independence.

In the new thinking espoused by EAJ, there is not one point of sovereignty, the

state: rather, there are multiple points, including the state, the EU and the stateless nation.

Seeing the EU as a realm of shared and mixed sovereignty enables nationalists to

embrace European integration, not as an infringement of but as an opportunity for

enlarging it. This has the additional political advantage of allowing proponents to fend off

accusations of insularity and to portray themselves as more cosmopolitan than their

adversaries among the state elites. In this way, minority nationalism integrates itself into

a new order, adapting its language to that of Europe’s in order to negotiate its own

demands. It is not only a matter of looking to the future, but also of reinterpreting the

past, as in the case of the many nationalist movements that have discovered a «usable

past» of divided sovereignty from earlier periods.

Many nationalists movements has also adopted the new regionalism in territorial

systems of action are constructed around a model of development combining the

economic, the social, the cultural and the political in different ways. Regions in this

manner are constructed, first as systems of action and there, sometimes, as actors

themselves within new networks of para-diplomacy, without the fixed boundaries with

territory has been endowed in the past. Rather citizens can adopt slightly different

boundaries, so that the cultural nation may not entirely correspond to the administrative

jurisdiction or economic region. This is not to advocate the «end of territory» or to herald

the advent of non-territorial self-government: rather, it reflects the complex and

openended conception of territorial common political geography.

Borders are multivocal and multilocal places, As place is given significance by

human interpretation, it acquires a plurality of meanings through diverse and often

competing views of the geographical landscape. While the frontier is and remains a real

divinding line in symbolic terms, as a boundary relevant to individuals in their

construction and expression of personal identity. In case of the Basque Country, different

historical interpretations of the same space exist, with varying consequences for the

inhabitants expression of self identification. A misleading popular idea is that, because

individuals have fluid, changing and situational identifications, these will logically fit

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together in a harmonious hierarchical arrangement like « concentric circles which would

encourage compatible loyalties from the local to the European level» This ignores the

political aspect of identity construction and expression, whereby identification with an

idea or symbol may alternate to the social and political context, giving its importance in

some cases and none at all in others.

Nationalism has traditionally been about shifting borders. Now, ironically, it is

precisely the general recognition and reaffirmation of existing state frontiers in

contemporary Europe that permit an imaginative and functional loosening of territory and

the permeability of those borders, This does not mean the fact that social and political

boundaries can continue to exist independently of and without necessarily corresponding

to fixed physical or state frontiers.

IV

Conclusion

At present, the EU is unprepared to accommodate autonomous members

(Elisabeth Nauclér, 2005). The European Union is a supra-state organization that does not

recognise the construction of sub-state autonomy among its members. The autonomous

territories do not have the right of participation on an equal footing with the independent

states, or to be represented in a decision-making process. The Treaty of Rome makes no

mention of autonomy and the question of division of power is an internal issue for each

state to resolve under its domestic regulations (Ibid.:114).

Nowadays, the ESDP is waiting for the approval of the Treaty of Lisbon to make

a new framework. Article 42.7 establishes the rules of the mutual assistance in case of

armed agression of one Member-State connecting this article with the article 51 of the

Charter of the United Nation. However, the policy of security and defence of each

Member-State is still under its control. The following article establishes the ESDP’s

Missions typology and Member-States and each government are still in power, being so

Madrid will still be in control in the future of the ethno-nationalists problems in Spain.

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No peaceful solution is possible without a deeper European integration even into what

ESDP concerns.

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