Basque conflict
The Basque conflict, also known as the Spain–ETA conflict, was an armed and territorial conflict from 1959 to 2011 between Spain and the Basque National Liberation Movement, a group of social and political Basque organizations which sought independence from Spain and France. The movement was built around the separatist organization ETA, which had launched a campaign of attacks against Spanish administrations since 1959. ETA had been proscribed as a terrorist organization by the Spanish, British, French and American authorities at different moments. The conflict occurred mainly in Spain but also affected parts of France, where ETA often found refuge. It was the longest running violent conflict in modern Western Europe. It has been sometimes referred to as "Europe's longest war".
While ETA officially began its armed campaign in 1959, the roots of the Basque conflict trace back to the repressive policies of Franco’s regime, which suppressed Basque language, culture, and political expression. During the Spanish Civil War, Nazi German Luftwaffe carried out the bombing of Guernica on behalf of Franco's forces in 1937—a traumatic event that symbolized the brutal repression of Basque identity. This historical suppression of Basque autonomy created fertile ground for resistance movements, including ETA, which later took up arms to fight for independence.
The terminology surrounding the conflict remains highly contested. While the term "Basque conflict" is preferred by many Basque nationalist groups, including those opposed to ETA's violent methods, others reject the framing of the situation purely as a "conflict," viewing it instead as a struggle for Basque self-determination.
Several Basque scholars and political leaders argue that, in spite of the struggle falling short of securing full independence, the Basque people succeeded in obtaining substantial autonomy, cultural recognition, and democratic rights within Spain.
Conversely, some Spanish commentators and officials emphasize the role of state institutions in defeating ETA, presenting the outcome as a triumph of the rule of law and counterterrorism measures.
The conflict had both political and military dimensions. Its participants included political actors, militants, and civil society figures on both sides. On one side were the abertzale left—the Basque nationalist left advocating for self-determination—and, on the other, the Spanish and French governments and their respective security forces, which conducted counterinsurgency operations against ETA and other related groups. These operations also targeted smaller youth and grassroots movements such as those involved in the kale borroka. Far-right paramilitary groups, often operating with tacit or covert support during the Spanish transition to democracy, were active in the 1970s and 1980s, carrying out attacks against Basque nationalists and suspected ETA sympathizers.
Although the debate over Basque independence dates back to the 19th century, armed conflict did not begin until the formation of ETA in 1959. Between 1959 and the end of the conflict in 2011, over 1,000 people were killed, including members of the Spanish Armed Forces, police, private security personnel, politicians, journalists, civilians, and ETA members. Thousands more were injured, and dozens were kidnapped. The prolonged violence, political tensions, and repression led to significant social disruption, with tens of thousands of Basques—particularly during the Francoist period and the height of the conflict, reportedly leaving the region either in fear of violence or to avoid prosecution.
On 20 October 2011, ETA announced a "definitive cessation of its armed activity". With the end of ETA's campaign of violence, the Spanish and French governments regained control over the Basque Country. However, the broader Basque nationalist movement continues politically, focusing on regional autonomy rather than armed independence. Spanish premier José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero described the move as "a victory for democracy, law and reason," reflecting the end of violence and the return to peaceful political engagement.
Definition of the conflict
The term "Basque conflict" is used either to define:- the broad political conflict between a part of Basque society and the initially Francoist and later Constitutional model of the Spanish decentralized state
- exclusively describe the armed confrontation between the separatist group ETA and the Spanish state
- a mixture of both perspectives
José Luis de la Granja, Santiago de Pablo and Ludger Mees argue that the term Basque conflict, while technically correct in several languages as equivalent of 'question' or 'problem', should not give the impression of a war between Euskal Herria and the states of Spain and France, preferring the terms problema or cuestión, that would encompass both the problems in the integration of the Basque territories in the contemporary Spanish state and also the secular problems of cohabitation among the Basques themselves.
According to Paddy Woodworth in a 2009 article in The New York Times,
According to Gaizka Fernández Soldevilla, the narrative of the existence of a secular conflict between Basques and Spaniards has been one of the most used tropes by ETA and the abertzale left as pretext for the activity of the former. José Antonio Pérez Pérez points out that the perception of a war between an occupying Spain and a Basque people defending themselves from genocide would have served as justifying framework of the ETA armed activity. According to Luis Castells and Fernando Molina, the formulation of the existence of two symmetric violences, that would allow for a split of responsibilities between ETA and the states of Spain and France, carrying therefore a dilution of the responsibility of ETA, is a narrative heavily espoused by the Abertzale left, that also would present ETA as an inevitable historic response to the secular conflict. According to Fernández Soldevilla, in spite of the end of the armed activity, the narrative of the basque conflict, fixed and divulgated by abertzale organic intellectuals such as historians Francisco Letamendia and Jose Mari Lorenzo, publicists such as Iñaki Egaña or Eduardo Renobales or journalists such as Luis Núñez Astrain, would be still useful as suggestive message in order to delegitimize the current democratic system, mixing victims with victimaries and equating the Basque case to real conflicts such as those of South Africa and Northern Ireland.
This idea has been rejected, for example, by José Maria Ruiz Soroa and by the main constitutionalist Spanish parties. Some politicians have gone as far as rejecting the existence of even a political conflict and refer only to the action of a terrorist organisation against the rule of law. A group of Basque historians argued that, rather than a Basque Conflict, the situation in the Basque Country was one of "ETA totalitarianism." In 2012, Antonio Basagoiti, the head of the Basque branch of the People's Party admitted the existence of a Basque conflict, but stated that it was a political one between different entities in the Basque country. Joseba Louzao and Fernando Molina argue that the idea of pluralism used by a part of Basque historiography relates more to a particular state of the public sphere rather than to a positive engagement of the several political and social actors ; according to them, the appeal to pluralism finally led to its conceptual voidment and banalization, allowing for it to be subsumed within the metanarrative of the basque conflict.
Amaiur Senator Urko Aiartza and Julen Zabalo have written that
Background
The Basque Country is the name given to the geographical area located on the shores of the Bay of Biscay and on the two sides of the western Pyrenees that spans the border between France and Spain. Nowadays, this area roughly belongs to three different political structures: the Basque autonomous community, also known as Euskadi; Navarre in Spain; and the three Northern Basque historical provinces, administratively part of the French department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Approximately 3,000,000 people live in the Basque Country.The Basques have managed to preserve their own identifying characteristics such as their own culture and language throughout the centuries and today a large part of the population shares a collective consciousness and a desire to be self-governed, either with further political autonomy or full independence. For instance, the football club Athletic Bilbao, maintains a signing policy of only recruiting Basque born or raised players. Over the centuries, the Basque Country has maintained various levels of political self-governance under different Spanish political frameworks. Nowadays, Euskadi enjoys the highest level of self-governance of any nonstate entity within the European Union. However, tensions about the type of relationship the Basque territories should maintain with the Spanish authorities have existed since the origins of the Spanish state and in many cases have fuelled military confrontation, such as the Carlist Wars and the Spanish Civil War.
Following the 1936 coup d'état that overthrew the Spanish republican government, a civil war between Spanish nationalist and republican forces broke out. Nearly all Basque nationalist forces, led by the Basque Nationalist Party sided with the Republic, even though Basque nationalists in Álava and Navarre fought along Basque Carlists on the side of Spanish nationalists. The war ended with the victory of the nationalist forces, with General Francisco Franco establishing a dictatorship that lasted for almost four decades. During Franco's dictatorship, Basque language and culture were banned, institutions and political organisations abolished, and people killed, tortured and imprisoned for their political beliefs. Although repression in the Basque Country was considerably less violent than in other parts of Spain, thousands of Basques were forced to go into exile, usually to Latin America or France.
Influenced by wars of national liberation such as the Algerian War or by conflicts such as the Cuban Revolution, and disappointed with the weak opposition of the PNV against Franco's regime, a young group of students formed ETA in 1959. It first started as an organization demanding the independence of the Basque Country, from a socialist position, and it soon started its armed campaign. According to Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, ETA became a socialist and revolutionary organization using violence after inner struggles related both to the difficulties found in applying a Third World model of national liberation in an already industrialized territory and the division between purely nationalist stances and the revolutionary ones.