From ‘seeing’ to ‘seizing’ opportunity: critical events, turning points and cross-national ethnolinguistic mobilization in the Basque Country

Abstract

This article examines how social movement actors carry out the transition from ‘seeing’ to ‘seizing’ critical events as empowering structures of political opportunity. Drawing on qualitative data, the discussion looks at how Basque language activists affiliated with the ikastola schooling movement in France engaged with a chain of events linked to the rise of democracy and autonomy in the Spanish Basque Country from 1975 to 1987. The analysis shows how intersubjective perceptions of ‘opportunity’ inspired French Basque activists to orchestrate a strategic turning point through the formation of cross-border ties with parallel actors in Spain. Subsequently, consideration is given to some of the outcomes generated by the formation of these ties for activists in France. In addition to shedding empirical light on the Basque case, the article contributes to micro-cultural studies of macro-political processes in social movement studies by illuminating the discursive and organizational practices through which grassroots actors transform opportune situations into empowering outcomes during times of large-scale societal crisis and transformation.

Keywords:

• social movements
• critical events
• ethnic mobilization
• language revitalization
• Basque Country
• ikastolas

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of this journal for their extraordinarily constructive critiques and suggestions. Major thanks also go to Suzanne Staggenborg and Akiko Hashimoto at the University of Pittsburgh, and to Jeroen Moes at Maastricht University for guidance and insight on previous drafts. The author is also grateful to the following persons who were indispensable during the data collection phase: James Jacob, Jean-Claude Larronde, Txomin Laxalt, Eguzki Urteaga, Zoe Bray and Isabelle Charritton.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Information about Heraclitus of Ephesus was gleaned from the website of the Philosophy Department at Trinity College in Hartford CT, USA: http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/phil/philo/phils/heraclitus.html.

2. Minority language activism and ethnolinguistic mobilization are distinguished here from language planning and policy-making linked to governmental actors and agencies, see Wright (2000).

3. It should be noted that instances of migrant or ‘allochthonous’ language activism also exist within Europe. While these are far more recent and far less prevalent and visible than their autochthonous counterparts, some influential initiatives can be found, for instance, among Arabic and Berber speakers in France as well as Turkish and Kurdish speakers in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, see: Extra and Gorter (2001).

4. In Basque, the plural form of ikastola would be ikastolak. For consistency in English, however, I use Ikastola (singular) and Ikastolas (plural).

5. Each of these schooling initiatives, including Seaska, operates under the status of ‘associative education’; an institutional niche for private education in France linked to the 1901 Law of Association and 1959 Loi Debré permitting civil society actors to develop alternative schools eligible for public funding.

6. Although a majority of Seaska's members had agreed by the early 1980s to seek out state-level support and recognition for the ikastolas as ‘public’ schools, a dissenting minority wanted to remain in the private sector so as to preserve their full autonomy and independence from the French state. While some of these dissenters remained with Seaska, others migrated to bilingual Catholic schools linked to the association Euskal Haziak.

7. For a more general discussion of minority language politics in France, see Ager (1999) or Cohen (2000).

8. Given my limited proficiency in Basque, the process of data collection and analysis largely took place in French. While this lack of proficiency created some limitations in terms of data collection, the explicit dedication to bilingualism in the IM minimized these limitations considerably. All translations in this paper are mine and I claim sole responsibility for any mistakes or misinterpretations.

9. Given the specific aims and limited scope of this article, my primary aim is to understand how grassroots actors in France interacted with macro-level events in Spain. I thus largely excluded from my analysis explicit considerations of other strategically relevant political events and processes in later years, such as the electoral victory of François Mitterrand and ascension of the French Socialist Party in 1981 and the heightening of Europeanization in the 1990s.

10. These kinds of cross-national organizational initiatives would become more frequent and normalized over the course of the 1990s as European-level policy instruments would become utilized by activists to promote collaboration between the Southern and Northern Basque Country, see: Harguindéguy and Itçaina (2012) or Latamendia (1997).

11. In order to ensure anonymity and protect the identity of interview subjects, all names used in this article are pseudonyms.

12. In subsequent years, the further opening of borders in relation to processes of Europeanization would hasten the development of strategic cross-national ties among Basque activists, see Bray (2006).

13. In subsequent years, EHIK would become reorganized and re-named as Ikastolen Elkartea, see www.ikastola.net.

14. For example, the Institut Supérieur de Langues de la République Française was founded in 1994 so as to facilitate teacher training programmes and curricular development for schools across France oriented towards bilingual instruction in a regional minority languages, see: http://www.aprene.org/node/187.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Spencer Foundation (Chicago, USA) and Eusko Ikaskuntza (Bayonne, France).