ABSTRACT
It is appropriate first to examine each approach in order to assess the role of religion in one of the last zones of violent ethno-nationalist conflicts in Western Europe: the Basque Country. The political regulation of religion has indeed offered a renewed form of activism for religious institutions – limited to the Roman Catholic Church in this context. In Spain, the revision, between 1976 and 1979, of the Concordat of 1953 that dated back to General Franco’s regime (1939-75) limited the institutional clout of the church while offering it new freedom. It was obliged to adjust its praxis to the new political and democratic regime and to the rapid secularisation of Spanish society.3 But this new arrangement did not mean that the church disappeared from the public sphere – quite the opposite. We can see the religious regulation of politics at work in the church’s attempt at moralising in the public sphere in the new democratic Spain, especially on ethical questions, including ethno-territorial questions. Along with other Spanish regions, the Basques share Catholicism’s longterm religious and social domination. However, a long and specific history of
interactions between religion, politics and territorial identity clearly gave its specificity to Basque Catholicism, at least from the time of the Carlist wars in the nineteenth century. This reminds us that it is important to remember that there are not one but many Catholicisms in Spain, and this internal pluralism can only be understood by overlaying a ‘conservative-progressive’ axis on a ‘centreperiphery’ axis. It is also notable that Basque nationalism has only recently freed itself from the hold of religion, part of a general process of secularisation (Itçaina 2007a). The ideological tenets of the Basque nationalist party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco, PNV), founded in 1894 in Bilbao, were indeed based on a strong Christian identity, thus relaying the anti-revolutionary mobilisation movement in defence of provincial privileges that marked nineteenth-century Spain (the Carlist wars) (MacClancy 2000). Excepting the Acción Nacionalista Vasca, a marginal secular nationalist movement in the 1930s, it was only in 1959, when the armed separatist organisation ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna, ‘Basque homeland and freedom’) was founded in the Spanish Basque Country followed a year later by the creation of Enbata in the French Basque region, that the first secular forms of Basque nationalism emerged. However, at this time the secularisation process was not complete, exemplified by the continued activism of some Christian groups (for example, a group of Christians in the Enbata movement in the early 1970s; Davant 1972) within the Basque political associations. However, Basque nationalism did eventually became a secular movement, with only implicit reference to religious affiliation in the Christian Democratic tenets of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), officially secular since 1977. On the other hand, interaction with religion did not totally disappear, since the church committed itself deeply to a new form of political regulation: mediation, through the search for a peaceful solution to the Basque conflict. In addition, this political activism revealed the internal divide within the Catholic Church, through a debate on Basque identity. The central argument of this chapter is that the recent involvement of the Catholic Church in the quest for peace has allowed the church to regain some legitimacy as a social actor, thus symbolically distancing itself from its problematic historical past. However, this change was especially remarkable given that it took place in the context of a more pronounced secularisation process in the Spanish Basque Country, compared to the rest of Spain. This was exemplified, for example, by fewer and fewer seminarians in the Basque-Navarre region,4 along with a regular but significant drop in church attendance – although in the 1960s and the early 1970s it had been the highest in Spain (Iztueta 1981). Surveys on religious attendance confirm this inversion: overall, the Basque exception stems from its society’s high level of secularisation, compared to a more moderate process in the rest of Spain (Pérez-Agote and Santiago García 2005). According to Alfonso Pérez-Agote, rejection of the church by the Basque radical nationalists was a factor in helping explain the uninterest and/or hostility of younger people towards religion. In terms of social trust, the church ranked only eleventh out of seventeen institutions in the Euskobarometro 2007 November survey.5 The hypothesis
developed by A. Pérez-Agote (Pérez-Agote 1986) at the end of Franco’s regime, which argued that the central role of religion had been replaced by politics, was thus confirmed. Nationalism and language became gradually more important than religion in a secularised Basque society. In a quite paradoxical way, there seems to be a discrepancy between the social decline of religion, and a clear politicisation of the interventions of religious actors in the public sphere. In a general context of crisis of legitimacy experienced by various institutions (for example, party membership decline, voting decline, lack of trust in institutions, etc.), we can argue that the church, despite its social decline, is still perceived by most political actors among Basque nationalists and non-nationalists as an important provider of meaning in a public sphere in search of stabilised interpretation of society and politics. Confronted with this phenomenon – which is somewhat less pronounced among Basques in France compared to those in Spain – the church was forced to reconsider its political and social positioning. It is a well-known fact that the massive support of much of the Spanish Catholic Church for the political transition from Francoism was one of the main factors in the emergence and consolidation of the new democratic regime, as it made possible the rallying of social groups which had hitherto been opposed to such a change. For example, some of the most conservative Catholics, including sectors of the army, were reassured by the inauguration of a parliamentary monarchy and by the democratic conversion of the church. It also illustrated the radical estrangement of the church from political power in the last years of the authoritarian regime (Pérez-Díaz 1993; Brassloff 2003). In a more tense context than in the rest of the country, the political transition in the Basque Country urged the church progressively to replace its leadership and adjust its rhetoric to the new political environment. It was indeed in its capacity as mediator that the Basque Church was given the opportunity of regaining its legitimacy as a social and functional actor. As an institution intrinsically predisposed to mediation (Palard 2006), the Catholic Church’s interventionism was naturally adapted to a territory in which fundamental political cleavages had historically been shaped by religion. In such a context, the church played, and is still playing, an important role in its attempt at settling the conflict in the Basque Country. This activism in the Spanish Basque Country may be analysed from three complementary angles. First, it was precisely the persistence of uncompromising attitudes in the conflict that conferred on the church its legitimate and social role as a mediator, even if the results remained inconclusive. Second, acknowledgement of this social role also influenced the religious institution itself, affecting its internal cleavages. Finally, this ambivalent role of Catholic mediation should be placed in the wider debate over competing conceptions of democracy expressed by both religious and political actors. In that sense, promoting peace in the Basque Country was, for these religious actors, a way to reassert the impact of their own ethical code in a definitely secularised political and social environment.
