Postwar

pariah movement Flemish nationalism had been transformed into a revolt of Dutch-speaking taxpayers reluctant to subsidize unemployed Walloon steelworkers (see Chapter 22). The Basques and the Ulster Catholics, however, were another matter altogether.

The Basque country of northern Spain had always been a particular target of Franco’s ire: partly because of its identification with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, partly because the Basques’ longstanding demand to be recognized as different ran counter to the deepest centralizing instincts and self-ascribed, state-preserving role of the Spanish officer corps. Anything and everything distinctively Basque was aggressively repressed throughout the Franco years: language, customs, politics. Contradicting his own centripetal instincts, the Spanish dictator even favored Navarre (a region whose sense of self and separateness never remotely approached that of the Basques or Catalans) with rights, privileges and its own legislature, for no other reason than to rub in the fact that the neighboring Basques could expect no such favors.

The emergence of modern Basque terrorism was a direct response to Franco’s policies, though its spokesmen and defenders always claimed deeper roots in their region’s frustrated dreams of independence. ETA—Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basquia and Freedom)—was formed in December 1958 to lead the armed struggle for Basque independence. From its earliest days as an underground organization it established working links—later given somewhat specious ideological justification—with similar groups abroad, who helped it secure money, weapons, training, safe havens and publicity: the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, as well as the OAS in France.

The strategy of ETA—and its political supporters in Herri Batasuna, the Basque separatist party formed in 1978—was a straightforward one of instrumental violence: to raise the price of keeping Basques in Spain to a politically intolerable level. But like the IRA and other comparable organizations, ETA also had ambitions to function as a society within the state. Catholic, stern and moralistic—in a manner ironically redolent of Franco himself—ETA activists targeted not just Spanish policemen (their first victim was killed in June 1968) and moderate Basque politicians and notables, but also symbols of ‘Spanish’ decadence in the region: cinemas, bars, discotheques, drug pushers and the like.

In the waning years of the Franco era, ETA’s activities were restricted by the very repression that had led to its emergence: by the end of the dictatorship, in the early 1970s, one quarter of Spain’s armed police were stationed in the Basque country alone. This did not prevent ETA from assassinating Franco’s Prime Minister (Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco) in Madrid on December 20th 1973, or killing twelve civilians in a bomb attack in the capital nine months later. Nor did the execution of five ETA gunmen in September 1975, shortly before Franco’s death, have any moderating impact upon the group’s activities. The coming of democracy, on the other hand, offered new opportunities.

ETA and its supporters wanted full independence. What the Basque region got, under Spain’s post-Franco constitution (see Chapter 16), was a Statute of Autonomy, approved by referendum in 1979. Infuriated—not least at the prospect of losing the support of moderate sympathizers satisfied by self- government and the right to linguistic and cultural self-expression—ETA stepped up its campaigns of bombing and assassination. In 1979-80 the organization killed 181 people; in the course of the next decade its murder rate averaged 34 a year. But in spite of this, and the fragility of Spain’s infant democracy, ETA and its political allies failed to turn their terrorist campaign to political advantage: their one success, in provoking a small group of right-wing army officers to hold up the Cortes in February 1981 in the name of law, order and the integrity of the state, turned to fiasco.

One reason for ETA’s limited impact, despite the horrific scale and wide public impact of its killing sprees, was that most Basques identified neither with its means nor with its ends. Indeed, many Basques were not really even Basques. The economic transformations of Spain in the 1960s, and the large-scale migrations within the country and abroad, had wrought changes that the old nationalists and their fanatical young followers simply did not grasp. By the mid-eighties, less than half the population of the Basque region had Basque parents, much less Basque grandparents. Such people rightly saw ETA and Herri Batasuna as a threat to their well-being (and implicitly to their very presence in the region).

As its political project lost touch with social reality ETA became ever more extreme—having forgotten its aim it redoubled its efforts, to cite George Santayana’s definition of fanaticism. Financed by crime and extortion, its operatives increasingly constrained to function from across the border in the Basque departements of south-west France, ETA survived and it survives still, murdering the occasional politician or village policeman. But it has failed either to mobilize Basque sentiment in support of political independence, or to bludgeon the Spanish state into conceding its case. ETA’s greatest ‘success’ came early in the 1980s, when its actions prompted the Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez to allow counter-terrorist hit men (the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion) to base themselves illegally on French soil and pick off ETA operatives, twenty-six of whom were killed between 1983 and 1987. Gonzalez’s decision, only revealed many years later (see Chapter 22), has cast a retrospective shadow across the early post-Franco years of constitutional democracy in Spain; but in the circumstances it was arguably a remarkably moderate response.

The Provisional IRA was much like ETA in its methods, and in some of its proclaimed objectives. Just as ETA sought to make the Basque provinces ungovernable and thereby secure their exit from Spain, so the Irish Republican Army aimed at making Northern Ireland ungovernable, expelling the British, and uniting the six northern provinces with the rest of Ireland. But there were significant differences. Since an independent Ireland already existed, there was—at least in principle—a practicable national goal for the rebels to hold out to their supporters. On the other hand, there was more than one Northern Irish community, and the distinctions between them went back a very long way.

Like French Algeria, Northern Ireland—Ulster—was both a colonial remnant and an integral part of the metropolitan nation itself. When London finally relinquished Ireland to the Irish, in 1922, the UK retained the six northern counties of the island on the reasonable enough grounds that the overwhelmingly Protestant majority there was intensely loyal to Britain and had no desire to be governed from Dublin—and incorporated into a semi- theocratic republic dominated by the Catholic episcopate. Whatever they said in public, the political leaders of the new Republic were themselves not altogether unhappy to forgo the presence of a compact and sizeable community of angrily recalcitrant Protestants. But for a minority of Irish nationalists this abandonment constituted a betrayal, and under the banner of the IRA they continued to demand the unification—by force if need be—of the entire island.

This situation remained largely unchanged for four decades. By the 1960s the official stance in Dublin somewhat resembled that of Bonn: acknowledging the desirability of national re-unification but quietly content to see the matter postponed sine die. Successive British governments, meanwhile, had long chosen to ignore so far as possible the uneasy situation they had inherited in Ulster, where the Protestant majority dominated local Catholics through gerrymandered constituencies, political clientelism, sectarian pressure on employers, and a monopoly of jobs in crucial occupations: civil service, judiciary and above all the police.

If politicians on the British mainland preferred not to know about these matters, it was because the Conservative Party depended on its ‘Unionist’ wing (dating from the nineteenth-century campaign to maintain Ireland united with Britain) for a crucial block of parliamentary seats; it was thus committed to the status quo, with Ulster maintained as an integral part of the United Kingdom. The Labour Party was no less closely identified with the powerful labour unions in Belfast’s shipbuilding and allied industries, where Protestant workers had long received preferential treatment.

As this last observation suggests, the divisions in Northern Ireland were unusually complicated. The religious divide between Protestants and Catholics was real and corresponded to a communal divide replicated at every stage of life: from birth to death, through education, housing, marriage, employment and recreation. And it was ancient—references to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quarrels and victories might appear to outsiders absurdly ritualistic, but the history behind them was real. But the Catholic/Protestant divide was never a class distinction in the conventional sense, despite the IRA’s efforts to import Marxist categories into its rhetoric. There were workers and priests—and to a lesser extent landowners, businessmen and professionals—on both sides.

Moreover, many Ulster Catholics felt no urgent desire to be ruled from Dublin. In the 1960s Ireland was still a poor and backward country and the standard of living in the North, while below that of most of the rest of the