ABSTRACT
For important minorities, Spain has been and will probably continue being a state ... but it is not their nation and therefore it is not a nation-state. The minorities which identify with the Catalan nation and more especially with the Basque nation ... illustrate the incapacity of Spain and her elites in building a unitary nation, however successful they may have been in building a state. 2
The incorporation of Euskadi into Spain under the hegemony of the province of Castile and the loss of the fueros led to the first manifestations of Basque nationalism. The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) was formed in 1893 under the leadership of Sabino Arana. The precepts elaborated by Arana were to dominate the PNV until the civil war and remain to some degree influential today. Sabino Arana's interpretation of nationalism was fundamentally different from the centralising, capitalist, liberal nationalism of nineteenth-century Europe. It was also different from the cultural assertiveness of Cataluna. Instead, Arana looked back to the past. The slogan associated with the PNV in this period was 'God and the Old Laws', referring to the PNV's defence both of catholicism against the onslaught of incipient secular values and of Basque autonomy through the fueros.
