National independence versus the state
HOW can the struggle for the independence of Euskadi (the
"Basque country"] be
Integrated into a political conception and a strategy against the state? The following article by a Basque revolutionary socialist militant considers the relation between independence and the struggle for a self-managing society.
JOSE IRIARTE "BIKILA"*
However, the attempt to politically structure Europe is being made not in the pursuit of an internationalist ideal but by actually existing states which are trying to create a union in their image and in the interests of the most powerful. The Europe they are trying to build is by no means destatized, but is rather a macro or super state (taking the form of a federation or confederation of states) founded on the more or less reconverted old apparatuses of the bourgeois national states, which bequeath to it in a scaled down manner all their failings: apparatuses of coercion, bureaucracy, separation between the citizens and the apparatus, social stratification, racism, discrimination, and so on.
T WO positions, both of them one- sided, exist on the question of independence. The first, upheld by some sectors of the left and by bourgeois nationalists as well as by some sectors of the right in the stateless nations, takes a point of view that could be defined as evolutionist/economist.
The basis of this conception is the idea that the internationalization of the economy and its European expression mean that national independence for the stateless nations is an obsolete or inappropriate choice. Why have an independent state, at a time when the existing states are in the process of losing their sovereignty? 22
The second, more traditional, position concerning independence is that prevalent among the majority of the nationalist left.
Removal of internal frontiers in Europe
From this point of view, the right to a separate nation state is completely justified. Faced with those who put the accent on a future without internal state frontiers in Europe (and who do not acknowledge that the national state will only disappear if there is a macro-state to replace it) the demand for an independent national state separate from the
Spanish state or France has its own logic of radical negation and rupture.
The problem with this demand is that it seems simply to put a plus where there is a minus and vice versa within the framework of the same model, concentrating on the national struggle rather than on the elaboration of an alternative future to that of the current states (with their dual class and national nature) and to class and national nature) and to the capitalist super-states, to external frontiers closed to all
"undesirables" and tightly controlled internal spaces.
An alternative point of view would search for new premisses, while preserving what is correct in the old positions. It should not only take into account the inter-
International Viewpoint #221 • February 3, 1992 national tendencies and the progressive interdependence of the national economies, but also, at the same time, the necessities of the struggle against the actually existing national states. It should amount to a transcendence of these two positions, rather than their simple negation.
The Spanish state (and the French state) is a very complex sum of coercive apparatuses and of consensus (social and national), which exists to perpetuate the interests of the dominant classes which support it. No strategy of national and social liberation can avoid this reality. The Basque and Catalan bourgeois nationalists, who in no way challenge the system, and who do not wish to destabilize it, try to squeeze some crumbs out of the Spanish state, to become a power alongside it, and hope to win, at the same time, a place in the European Community, whether in terms of direct representation (regional chambers and organs, zones of economic investment adapted to their possibilities) or indirectly through the Spanish state.
However, the historic identification "independence = separate national state" is not self-evident, either in its internal or its external aspects.
Independence and anti-imperialism anti-imnerialism
Independence is the absence of external domination. It presupposes the disappearance of the imperialist international order, in the cultural, political or economic domains. The independent national state can guarantee independence in part, but any radical and global conception of independence must be associated with a vision of a largely, or even completely, destatized international society (of nations - these will not disappear).
The state is by its essence a factor of distortion, of permanent struggle. From this point of view, the federation of national republics, the confederation or association between independent entities, faces another dilemma: that of liberating itself from the weight of the characteristic features of the state (army, bureaucracy, and so on), to emancipate the nation and the society from the weight of a historic contingency born from capitalism and the world market.
It is the same in the internal sphere. The nation is a historic result produced through long evolution or through tumultuous regroupments which have succeeded in forming a collectivity. In this process, political, economic and cultural factors intervene in each nation with their own weight and autonomy. This is what has happened in Euskadi. The role of the state in this process has been essential in * José Iriarte "Bikila" is a leader of the newly formed Basque revolutionary organization EMK-LKI. This article, which has been cut for space reasons, first appeared in the Basque magazine Hika.
the search for authentic national
the formation of a national model, in the identification with the nation-state, generally not very democratic and not very homogenizing.
This has led to many problems: Few national states are formed by a single national component, many are multinational and, in applying the national model (nation-state) all factors of difference are erased. The very definition of the territory to be demarcated by the state frontier has created many problems.
We have seen examples of this in the ex-Soviet Union and we see them in Yugoslavia. We have this problem in Euskadi, with a working class of diverse national origin, and territories which are not at all clearly demarcated and still less won over to a democratic Basque national project that can integrate them.
This is the situation in Navarre, where different (Basque and Spanish) identities are today superimposed on each other and where the point of convergence is precisely the Navarre identity. Without the consent of those who feel this Navarre identity, any voluntary adhesion of Navarre to the Basque nation is unthinkable, unless imposed by state force. A nation based on voluntary adhesion
A delimitation of the nation on the basis of voluntary adhesion, very much more flexible in terms of territorial conception and based on consent in the administrative domain, would avoid many problems, some of artificial origin, and some due to the difficulty of separating drastically that which is not very clear, either in reality or in the consciousness of the inhabitants. It is not by chance that the conflicts become destructive and violent, leading to chauvinism and xenophobia, exactly in those areas where this delimitation is neither clear nor conclusive.
It is necessary to understand that a good part of the population has diverse national origins and that, to win it to a Basque national project, it will be important to recognize and respect the cultural rights stemming from that origin.
This destatization of the nation also involves a self-managing economic project, the free association of the producers and of units of production, an articulation between the social plan and those sectors where the market is judged necessary. And naturally, such a project is also required in the political and administrative domain, where the weight of the state, of the apparatus (police, army, bureaucracy) is a permanent source of oppression and hierarchy.
The path of self-managed independence rejecting both the existing order and the statist and European capitalist road is on the order of the day: it could help us to go beyond the limits of strictly national independence. *