The Basque nationalist movement ETA (an acronym standing for "Basque-Land and Liberty) is the senior terrorist organization in the Western world, though its activities have diminished greatly in recent years. Basque nationalism is the single most important source of conflict in the Spanish system of constitutional and democratic federal monarchy that is now thirty years old. As such, it has generated an enormous bibliography, primarily in Spanish, but also in English and many other languages. There are several good narrative histories of ETA and of the senior, non-violent movement, the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), in Spanish and English, while the revised edition of Javier Corcuera's The Origins, Ideology, and Organization of Basque Nationalism, 1876-1903 (2007) provides a possibly definitive account of its origins and early development.

Amid this sea of publications, what contribution can another brief study in English hope to achieve? Cameron Watson has published a dissertation prepared in the Basque Studies Program at the University of Nevada that attempts to provide an account of the "ideological and intellectual origins of eta," on the assumption that these are inadequately understood, a debatable proposition. The origins of ETA terrorism have previously been broadly examined in terms of historical narrative, of social framework and even of cultural anthropology, as in Joseba Zulaika's Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament (1988).

There are several dimensions to Watson's book, which sometimes demonstrates historical perspective and objectivity, though more commonly his narrative and analysis simply assume the point of view of the nationalists, as is common with much of the contemporary literature. For the most part, it consists not in the intellectual history which is its professed goal, but in another thumbnail account of the history of the Basque Country and of nationalism, of which we have already had so many.

The historical treatment reveals certain weaknesses. The author finds a "crisis" in Spain during the first decade of the 20th century, but if that were to be considered the case, by such criteria all subsequent decades would also have to be characterized as reflecting crisis, depriving the term of much significance. Great stress is placed on the Basque nationalist interpretation of the Civil War and the Franco regime, without much perspective or contrast. Amid all the references to poverty and oppression in the Basque provinces, an uninformed reader would never guess that the dictatorship's economic policy greatly privileged the Basque economy, and that throughout the Franco years Basques enjoyed the highest per capita income in Spain.

The account of Spanish economic policy is systematically distorted, and the author insists that "state persecution in the Basque Country also involved ethnic differentiation," but without providing any evidence. In fact, Franco operated an equal opportunity repression, so to speak. During the early years of severe repression, there were in fact proportionately fewer executions in the Basque provinces than in some other regions of Spain, but the reader will never learn that from a book so eager to find arguments explaining Basque terrorism.

One feature that will not be found in many other studies is the attempt to contrast Basque nationalism with Spanish nationalism, though, aside from the Franco regime, the latter always remains nebulous. Watson places considerable stress on the moral equivalence conjecture, claiming that Basque terrorism should not be stigmatized any more than the Spanish state. That might have seemed convincing during the Franco years, but within the context of democratic federal Spain will probably only persuade those who believe in postmodernist theory.

When the book finally gets around to the intellectual origins of eta, comparatively little is added to preceding accounts. Several intellectual and theoretical influences are outlined, but this core portion of the study is incomplete, for a full account would discuss a great deal more than is found here. Probably no factor was more important in the origins of Basque terrorism than contagion—the influence of other terrorist movements in the Mediterranean, Western Europe, and elsewhere. The oppression of the Franco regime cannot account for it as an independent variable, since other regions of Spain were in some respects repressed at least as much, if not more. Equally significant were the history and culture of Basque nationalism, briefly traced by the author.

Though he seeks to find a certain call to violence inherent in the history of the movement, this is debatable. From its founding in 1895 to the beginning of the Civil War in 1936, the Basque movement was much less violent than many others in Spain. As the author points out, the PNV avoided violence and guerrilla struggle in the years following defeat in the Civil War, relying on political maneuver and elaborate international negotiation instead. Much intrigue and political subversion, but very little violence, in truth almost none at all. It is correct that the movement always featured an extremist, originally racist, ideology full of endless distortion and of hatred for Spain and Spaniards, but that alone does not constitute violence. The appeal to history here is not very successful. As Watson has to admit, the nationalist movement withered altogether under Franco, as—he might have added—the overwhelming majority of Basques concentrated on making money, something that Franco gave them considerable opportunity for.

Therein lies the origin of the problem. ETA was not primarily inspired by the Sartrean existentialist and other theories that Watson refers to, but by the concern to employ ever more extreme means to revive a moribund nationalism. By 1970, the etarras had seemed to demonstrate the political payoff in terrorism, so that a few years later, when Spain became one of the most democratic and decentralized countries in the world, the terrorism not merely increased, but was ratcheted up enormously, since there was no longer a police state to repress it. This cannot be explained by vague references to "Spanish nationalism."

A major gap in the book is the way that it largely ignores religion, even though Watson recognizes that the PNV was long an ultra-Catholic movement, one of the most religiously doctrinaire in the country. A major clue to the ideological origins of terrorism lies in the rapid secularization of Spain during the 1960s and '70s. No other country was so affected by Vatican II. To that time the Basque Country had been arguably the most Catholic region in Spain, as evidenced by indices of church attendance and the proportionate number of clerical vocations that were generated. Amid a new cultural context reflecting the rapid secularization of what had been an intensely Catholic society, the doctrine and practice of extremist nationalism acquired salvific dimensions as a kind of substitute for religion. Some of the earliest terrorist actions were planned in monasteries and seminaries made available as sanctuaries by priests for whom nationalism had become the new idolatry. The problem of guilt was no longer resolved by contrition and divine salvation, but by projecting it onto political enemies. The sacrifice necessary for redemption was no longer found in Christ but in the self-sacrifice and potential immolation of the terrorists themselves. No doubt Sartrean existentialism helped to rationalize such matters, but it was hardly at their root.

None of the radical political movements of the early twenty-first century has more features of a substitute for religion than does Basque nationalism. Noted Basque scholars have spoken clearly of the "apostasy" of much of the Basque clergy in its zeal for nationalism, [1] while a recently published dissertation has termed the movement simply a "substitute religion." [2] A summary of the latter work explains:

Those who consider themselves the legitimate representatives of the "people" have the right to demand of the faithful that they kill in the name of the nationalist cause and, if necessary, become martyrs by immolating themselves like kamikazes. And not for reasons of faith in God but of faith in a sacred entity that transcends us and is worthy of any sacrifice. The God for whom the nationalist is to immolate himself is none other but "the people." Here there is no other God than the people as directed by the nationalist leaders.

This study dissects the religious model of the Basque National Liberation Movement in doctrinal, ethical, symbolic, ritual and communitarian terms attempting to demonstrate how, by means of the transference of sacralization, the nationalist left abandons the laic concept of politics typical of modern civil societies in favor of a new cultic object, the People, whose persistence is made visible through daily combat. Similarly, it points out how violence fuels a community of endogamy and endows it with a strong component of martyrdom on the principle that, before the altar of the Fatherland, any salvific sacrifice is acceptable: its vision of reality and its normative apparatus separate two categories of people divided by an uncrossable barrier between those in contact with the truth and the uninitiated who, having not received and internalized the revealed message or having renounced the faith, belong to the sphere of the profane and the heretical … .

The call to the supposed primeval national unity or foundational myth pretends, in addition to justifying the recourse to violence, to develop mobilizing liturgies on behalf on behalf of a singular Exodus to the Promised Land of a believing community led by the orthodoxy of a military group and its corresponding political arm. [3]

This brings us a good deal closer to the ideological origins of terrorism than do speculations about existentialist theory.

Stanley G. Payne is professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author most recently of Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II (Yale Univ. Press).

1. Most notably the distinguished Basque Jesuit historian Fernando García de Cortázar. For extensive treatments of this theme, see I. Esquerra, ETA pro nobis. El pecado original de la Iglesia vasca (Barcelona: Planeta, 2000); J. Bastante, Los curas de ETA. La Iglesia vasca entre la cruz y la ikurriña (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2004), and N. Blázquez, El nacional clericalismo vasco (Madrid: Edibesa, 2004).

2. Saez de la Fuente Aldama, El Movimiento de Liberación Nacional Vasca, una religión de sustitución (Bilbao: Instituto Diocesano de Teología y Pastoral, Desclé, 2002).

3. N. Blázquez, Nacional clericalismo vasco, pp. 12–13.

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