A couple of days ago the Guardian set out to undermine some of our confidence in consumer-generated media by assembling a team of topic experts to review a fairly random set of Wikipedia entries. You have to wonder whether any of them went on to correct any of the errors they detected, which is after all the whole point of this marvellous resource.
Mark Kurlansky, author of The Basque History of the World (highly-recommended!) gives the Wikipedia article on the Basque people 7/10.
He cites three main objections to it, one of which reads as follows: "The entry talks of Navarra as though it is a non-Basque region where a lot of Basques happen to live. There are actually seven Basque provinces, each with its own dialect of Euskera and slightly varying traditions. Four of them are in Spain and Navarra is one of them."
Hang on. There are three provinces in the autonomous Basque region of Spain, and Navarra isn't one of them. It may be part of the mythical fatherland, but so was Czechoslovakia as far as the Germans were concerned in the 1930s.
Navarra/Nafaroa/Navarre has always been an unusual trans-pyrennean hybrid. It almost became a nation state in its own right and gave the Bourbon/Borbón dynasty (not generally Euskera-speaking) their first monarchical gig before they went on to rule both France and Spain. Although the north of the old kingdom is indeed culturally Basque, the Navarrese sided with Franco in the Civil War.
Anyway, the "territorial agenda" is once again big news in Spain. Yesterday ETA indulged in some small scale bombings, just to remind everyone of their continued existence. The nationalist-dominated Basque parliament is pressing for direct EU representation and want to scrap the Statute of Guernica (part of the 1978 constitutional fudge), in order to reposition the three provinces as free associates of the Spanish state.
The debate is now more open as Zapatero has established an annual parliamentary debate on regional matters. His predecesor Aznar didn't exchange a single word with the Basque leader ('Lehendakari') Juan José Ibarretxe for the last two years of his premiership. Indeed the former PM probably signed up to Dubya's coalition of the willing partly in order to give the War on Terror some domestic dentures. He managed to outlaw Batasuna, the political wing of the more hard-line Basque nationalists, but the strategy came unstuck when his party was ejected from power after trying to pin the blame for the Madrid bombings on ETA.
The Basques have more to lose than the Catalans, who appear to be driven primarily by a wish to have to pay less for the lackadaisical diegos of Andalucia. (Catalunya knocks up 18% of Spanish GDP). They too have drafted a new 'Estatut' which the PP says threatens the inviolability of the Spanish state. Is this the beginning of balkanisation or readjustment to changed international institutional circumstances? The role of the traditional nation state in the global economy is certainly not the same as it was in 1978, but these debates are spiced up with the condiments of identity, culture and historical politics.
Zapatero sits on top of an informal coalition. His party, the PSOE has historical sympathies with the Catalan workers, and right now he needs to hold their support in parliament. Interesting times.
Another one of Kurlansky's objections to the Wikipedia piece on the Basques was that "It says: "Aquitanians spoke a language which is proven beyond doubt to be akin to Basque." I am not familiar with the Aquitaine language but would be very surprised if it bore any relation to Euskera, the Basque language."
Yet clearly some scholars do believe that the Aquitanii had Basque roots; and when you search Google for 'basque AND aquitanii' you find several pages that support this - such as this one on answers.com, which refers to "Basque names of deities or people in late Romano-Aquitanian funerary slabs."
