ABSTRACT
Had George Orwell gone to Bilbao instead of Barcelona and written a homage to Euzkadi—the Basque name for ‘the fatherland of the Basques’—it would have been an altogether different book from the Homage to Catalonia that he published in 1938. For events turned out quite differently in both regions after July 1936. Indeed, the Basque country was perhaps the only Spanish region loyal to the Republic where the military uprising of 18 July 1936 was not followed by a working-class revolution. To begin with, Orwell would have encountered serious difficulties in joining a left-wing Marxist party like the POUM— the party he joined in Barcelona—or even in studying such a peculiar Spanish phenomenon as anarcho-syndicalism in the Basque Country. In contrast to Catalonia where anarcho-syndicalism had been the main force in the labour movement since the first decade of the century, socialism had become the dominant ideology of Basque workers since the end of the nineteenth century. Compared with the strength of both the Socialist Party and unions (PSOE and UGT) in the Basque region, the POUM, CNT, and even the Communist Party had been for many years almost non-existent. It was only after 1931, with the rise of the Basque Nationalist trade-union federation, the Solidarity of Basque Workers (SOV), that Socialist hegemony in the Basque Country was challenged. This was hardly a threat from the left: SOV was a moderate, Christian-inspired union movement with several priests prominent in its ranks and close links with the centre-right Nationalist Party (PNV). Its membership was restricted to workers and employees of pure Basque descent, its unions rejected ideas of class struggle and advocated a conciliatory line in labour disputes. Finally, SOV shared the PNV’s ideal vision of social harmony for the Basque Country based on ‘national’ (meaning Basque) solidarity between workers and employers. 1
