Tomás
Urzainqui Mina. Historian
It
is awful that after all we have been through, and what may
come, our conception of the Basque nation is still based,
on the one hand, on important cultural elements (language,
ethnicity and folklore) and, on the other, on the autonomous
administrative structures marred by the violent domination
of two foreign states and their will of integration. Stubbornly,
we go on with the same failed schemes of 100-years ago, and
the wrong approach.
Yet,
nothing can be done until we find the profound and palpable
omnipresent nation. Until then, both France and Spain have
it easy. They will continue with their orchestrated censorship
as if the problem were an internal conflict caused by an enraged
"healthy regionalism" or a "particular identity" rather that
what it really is--a conflict among nations
But
if we would discover and accept that we are in a political
society with a hibernated state, the problems that we now
have would be resolved the only way in which the occupation
of a nation by another nation --or the occupation of a state
by an expansionist grand-national state-- can be resolved.
The
pretension to present the cultural community as political
society is a pathetic attempt that lacks positive results,
generates abundant sterile work and a collection of failures.
It's like to maintain the ostrich attitude before a problem
of a politico-juridical nature. We should not fear immersing
ourselves into the political society of our own national state.
The
puzzles for more autonomy by way of the Spanish Constitution
take us to nowhere as it has been demonstrated many times
now. They are architectural games that maintain the occupation.
There is no way out of inanity. The statute of autonomy, food
for the opportunists, consecrate our minority status, dependence,
and margination.
The
calculated and stereotyped formulation of the supposedly division
among Navarrese and Basques, nationalists and non-nationalists,
Basques and Spaniards, is nothing but a convenient approach,
unreal and, especially, one that goes against the integration
of society. They seek the disintegration of the dominated
national political society for the only and exclusive benefit
of the dominant grand-national states, the Spanish and the
French.
Navarrese
and Basque is the same thing. They refer to the same people,
the same society, and the same nation. To separate them, or
to make them different, is as ignorant and incoherent as to
distinguish the Germans from the Germanics, the French from
the Gauls, the Portuguese from the Lusitanians, the Hungarians
from the Magyars or the Swiss from the Helvetics.
Ignorance,
fostered and promoted by the apparatus of the grand-national
states, especially the one dealing with education, was utilized
politically to divided and distort the society of the dominated
nation. The dominant states lie and hide to paroxysm to debilitate
the Navarrese society as much as possible as they fail to
destroy it.
Yet,
we are not able to get out of that illusion of the cultural
nation thinking that only the ethnic culture is to be trusted;
and have failed to recognize the importance that the political
culture has. It is the political society, which makes the
nation; if truly integrating, plural and intercultural, the
only one that exercises the laws of its juridical system with
ease, in guarantee of the citizen rights, and the truly recovery
of its sovereign nation-state, which protects it.
The
political parties that call themselves nationalist still fail
to incorporate into their speech the true political culture
of this country; they mix-up political culture with a self-styled
foral provincialism, which is the result of the foreign political
domination. Evidently, the present myths of the "Basque states",
of "voluntary integration", the "political pact", and the
"historical rights" are not political culture but cruel lies
and tragic errors yet to discover and reject; their goal is
our integration in to the Spanish state.
The
culture of the political society is articulated in the cultural
heritage of the territories that constituted Navarre. The
actual territories, the so-called historic territories of
Araba, Bizkaia, Gizpuzkoa, Lapurdi and Zuberoa are forced
divisions of the political territories of the whole Navarre.
Those territories were politically Navarrese long before they
became known for their present names. It is the process of
killing the Navarrese nation by the successive military conquests
what indeed fractured the territory.
In
any case, the centrality and historical legitimacy of our
national sovereignty resides in Navarre. This means that these
territories, just as residual Navarre, had their own Navarrese
centrality. But when these territories were under foreign
control, they became peripheral, dependent, and marginal.
In the history of European geopolitics, the Pyrenean political
centrality is located in the Kingdom of Pamplona, later called
Kingdom of Navarre. These territories with title deeds, senoriales
and condales, are either within their Navarrese centrality
or taken by force from it and subdued to the centrality of
a foreign state but always maintaining their inalienable right
to rehabilitate themselves within their territory, which is
Navarre.
In
his recent book entitled "The Construction of Nations", English
professor Adrian Hastings asserts that the European nations
predate 1789 and that a great number constituted themselves
since the fall of the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle
Ages. He also reminds us that Navarre and Scotland are the
two nations in Western Europe that remain in hibernation since
Modern Age, and may wake-up. They are two states with the
inadvisable right to recover their own place in the European
chessboard. Therefore, to forget or to ignore the State of
the dominated nation doesn't make possible the resolution
of the conflict.
99.02.12
