Nationalism and the Spanish Dilemma: The Basque Case

Liberal democracies have been founded on the nation‐state model, which has now entered a state of crisis fundamentally for two types of reasons: the effects produced by globalization and the revival of the model itself. This work deals with the latter. It focuses on the problems that have arisen in Spain as a result of the presentation and approval of the so‐called “Ibarretxe Plan” to the Basque Parliament, in which the Basque people’s right to self‐determination is asserted. The right to self‐determination is the true expression of sovereignty. When claims to sovereignty come from one part of a sovereign state, it creates a problem whose solution depends on how the concept of sovereignty is understood. This study argues that only a rational understanding of sovereignty can provide an adequate solution to the problem, because only this establishes a balanced priority between the recognition of individual rights and the preservation of the identifying elements of every community without the legal‐political system self‐destructing. And how can all this come out well, I thought immediately, that one people—If the Muslims of Bosnia who speak Serbo‐Croat and who belong to Serbian stock, are a people—arbitrarily establish a state in a region where there are two other peoples who had the right, and what is more, the same right, and where there are, moreover, three different ethnic groups all living together, and not only that, without going further, in the capital of various cultures, but in every town and, in the towns themselves, in every house or cottage, they live cheek by jowl. And, again, how would I have behaved myself there, if I had been a Serb in Bosnia, seeing how, to put it politely, the strongest justified a state, to put it politely, that had nothing to do with me, in my, our region?( Handke 1996 , 41) [author’s translation]