Renegotiating Sovereignty: Basque Nationalism and the Rise and Fall of the Ibarretxe Plan

Abstract

Many minority nationalist movements in Europe are abandoning the search for independent statehood, embracing European integration, and adopting a ‘post-sovereigntist’ stance, emphasizing shared sovereignty and divided powers. This provides a promising way of escaping the classical difficulty of aligning nations with states. Basque nationalism has evolved in this direction, drawing on earlier traditions. The Ibarretxe Plan, approved by the Basque parliament in 2004 but subsequently rejected by Spain's national parliament, was presented as an effort to formulate such a third way between separatism and unionism. Yet ironically its effect was in large part to reaffirm actors' language of traditional sovereignty. This is partly thanks to the political context, but also to the power of doctrinal, ideological and symbolic issues related to sovereignty, the nation and boundaries. National self-determination may have entered a new phase but it still faces great difficulties in principle as well as in practice.

Acknowledgement

The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York under the International Peace & Security Program Initiative: ‘Contending Norms of Self-determination and the Sanctity of Existing Borders’.

Notes

1. Known in Basque as Eusko Alderdi Jeltzalea (EAJ).

2. While principally focused on Euskadi, the Ibarretxe plan, as an expression of Basque national identity, also considers the French Basque Country and the autonomous region of Navarre in Spain as part of Basque territory. Thus participants in the discussions on the Ibarretxe Plan also included political parties and associations from these other regions.

3. This seems a striking concession for nationalists to make, but the PNV has never been republican in principle. The foral tradition recognizes the monarch as a contractually bound overlord. It may also be easier to cater for complexity and plurality in monarchies than in republics, with their equal citizenship.

4. Although in customary Basque nationalist manner, it refuses to speak about Spain, insisting on the term ‘Spanish state’.

5. Citations are taken from personal interviews and press sources.

6. This drew on Article 8.1 of the Spanish Constitution, which states that one of the missions of the Armed Forces is to defend Spain's ‘territorial integrity’.