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Spain The Basques
The homeland of the Basques, known by Basque
nationalists as
Euzkadi, occupies the littoral of the Bay of Biscay as it
curves
north into France. The region extends inland some 150
kilometers,
through the juncture of the Pyrenees and the Cordillera
Cantabrica, and thence south to the Rio Ebro. The region
covers
nearly 21,000 square kilometers, of which about 3,000 lie
on the
French side of the international frontier. The 18,000
square
kilometers on the Spanish side constitute about 3.6
percent of
Spain's total land area.
About 3 million people lived in this area in the late
1980s.
Approximately 300,000 people were on the French side of
the
border, while the remaining 2.7 million people were
concentrated
primarily in the two Spanish coastal provinces of
Guipuzcoa and
Vizcaya and, less densely, in the two inland provinces of
#Alava
and Navarre. This population lived under two distinct
autonomous
communities: Basque Country, which incorporated the three
smaller
provinces, and Navarre, which by itself constituted a
"uniprovincial" regional government.
The Basques are among the oldest peoples of Europe.
Despite
their having been visited by numerous waves of invaders,
the
Basques reached the tenth century still fairly isolated
from the
flow of West European history. In the tenth and the
eleventh
centuries, the rising kingdom of Navarre absorbed most of
the
rest of the Basque peoples, and it created for the first
time a
more or less unified Basque political entity. With the
kingdom's
decline, however, the region fell into disorder, and by
the
sixteenth century, the Basque provinces had been
integrated into
the kingdom of Castile. From this time until the
nineteenth
century, relations between Castile and the Basque
provinces were
governed by the fueros, local privileges and
exemptions by
which the Spanish king recognized the special nature of
the
Basque provinces and even a number of Basque towns
(see
Rule by Pronunciamiento;
Liberal Rule
, ch. 1). As a result
of the
centralization of the Spanish state and the Carlist Wars,
the
fueros had been abolished by the end of the
nineteenth
century. The Second Republic in the 1930s offered the
chance to
create a new autonomous Basque regime, but all such
efforts were
doomed by the Spanish Civil War. After the war, the Franco
dictatorship sought--unsuccessfully--to suppress all signs
of
Basque distinctiveness, especially the use of the
language.
Through most of the twentieth century, the thriving
Basque
economy, centered on the steel and the shipbuilding
industries of
Vizcaya and the metal-processing shops in Guipuzcoa,
attracted
thousands of Spaniards who migrated there in search of
jobs and a
better way of life. Between 1900 and 1980, the number of
people
moving into the region exceeded those who left by nearly
450,000,
the heaviest flow occurring during the decade of the
1960s. In
the 1970s, the flow began to reverse itself because of
political
upheaval and economic decline. Between 1977 and 1984, the
net
outflow was nearly 51,000. The consequence of this heavy
in-migration was a population in the late 1980s that was
only
marginally ethnic Basque and that in many urban areas was
clearly
non-Basque in both language and identity. One
authoritative study
found that only 52 percent of the population had been born
in the
Basque region of parents also born there, 11 percent had
been
born in the region of parents born elsewhere, and 35.5
percent
had been born outside the region.
The Basque region has been for decades the arena for a
clash
between an encroaching modern culture and its values
(speaking
Spanish, identifying with Spain, working in industry,
living in a
large city) and a native, traditional culture and its
values
(speaking Euskera, identifying with one's village or
province,
working on a small farm or in the fishing sector, living
on a
farm or in a small village). The former population was
found
concentrated in the larger cities such as Bilbao, while
the
latter lived in the small fishing villages along the Bay
of
Biscay or in mountain farmsteads, called caserios,
located
in the mountains of Guipuzcoa, Vizcaya, and Navarre. These
centers of Basque traditional culture have been in
constant
decline since the introduction of heavy industry to the
region in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and they could
well
disappear by the end of the twentieth century.
The use of the Basque language has also been in steady
decline for centuries, but the erosion has accelerated
since the
1950s with the rise in non-Basque migration to the region.
A 1984
language census confirmed what unofficial estimates had
already
observed: that Basque was a weakened minority language,
although
not yet moribund. Of the 2.1 million people in the Basque
Country
autonomous region, 23 percent could understand Euskera, 21
percent could speak it, but only 13 percent could read the
language and only 10 percent could write it. These data
indicate
that the Basque language has survived principally as an
oral
language without much of a written tradition, and that it
is
conserved not by formal teaching in schools but by
informal
teaching in the home. Officials in the Basque Country
launched a
number of important programs, especially in television and
education, to restore the language to a level of parity
with
Castilian Spanish, but the success of these efforts will
not be
confirmed for at least a generation. Officially, the
objective
was to make the Basque population bilingual in Spanish and
in
Basque; but that goal seemed quite remote in the late
1980s.
Data as of December 1988
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