The Basque Identity

In English, it's the Basque Country. In Castillian Spanish, el País Vasco. In Basque? Euskadi.

The Basque Country is something different to everyone. This oddball province of Spain, graced with a completely unique language and as well as a distinctive culture, struggles to identify with the rest of Spain. A sometimes violent separatist movement headed by ETA, or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom), a terrorist organization whose bombings and assassinations have led to the death of over 900 people since its founding in 1959, is the fruit of this failure to subgroup of the province has been calling for freedom from Spain and the formation of a new Basque nation, fully independent from its brethren. The question is: why? Why did the Basque country turn out to be so different from the rest of Spain? The answer lies in the language.

Thousands of years ago, before Roman rule of the Iberian peninsula, there existed a tribe called the Vascones in the modern-day regions of Aragón and Navarra, as described by the Greek historian Strabo. Part of the original Paleolithic peoples of the peninsula, it is this tribe that gave us the first iteration of the modern Basque language, a language that is basically a remnant of the pre-Roman languages developed and spoken there.

Basque-speaking peoples persisted under myriad conquests and governments, somehow always managing to keep their language and their identity alive. It is through this common bond of language that their culture began to develop: Basque speakers historically would stick together in their own communities, and within their own niche they made their own culture instead of simply going with the one that arose and evolved through the events that shaped Spain into what we know it as through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and today, a Spain shaped by a hybridizing blend of Roman-European and Arabic traditions.

Today, the Basque language is restricted to a small area detailed in the map. Even in the Basque country, only about 25% of the population can still speak it, with only 10% being able to read and write it - some basis for such a virulent separatist movement.


The interesting thing about the Basque language is that it is the one language of its language group - no other language in the world is anything like it. Basque is the last remnant of the traditional, pre-Roman language of Spain, one of the only pre-Indo-European language families still spoken in Europe. As such, it needs to be preserved. But this fact also leads to another important conclusion.

The thing is, the Basque country isn't a group apart from Spain: the Basque country is Spain, in its oldest, purest form. The Basque tradition reaches back millennia to the very roots of a people. While Spain evolved and took on many different traditions throughout its history, the Basque people quietly preserved our ancestral selves. There is nothing wrong with the hybridized Spain, of course. All these influences are what made and continue to make Spain so unique and relevant in European history. Instead of trying to estrange itself from the people that are its descendants, Euskadi should be proud to be a part of the nation that its ancestors fostered, close brothers with instead of stepchildren of the Spanish land. Because the Basque aren't outcasts; if anything, they're every Spaniard's core self.