Study Abroad Series 1
Study Abroad Series 1: Spain’s Politics
When I was anticipating coming to Spain, one of the things that excited me the most was the prospect of learning about the politics of Spain, particularly as it relates to Catalan fights for independence that have been headlining the news the past few months. I like the way governments work. I find it incredibly interesting to see how different groups decide to fight for their own things, and how they decide to get things done. I really wanted to know the history of the conflict and the background to their fight.
One of the more fun classes I’m taking is a Spain Culture and Civilization class. I did not expect this class to teach me the history and politics of Spain, but I have been pleasantly surprised the past month to learn exactly what I had questions about. We’ve been learning further back history for a while. We started with the Spanish civil war after the King was overthrown, and then the Franco dictatorship and how that progressed. I’m going to give a bit of historical context to get into what I wanted most to talk about.
Firstly, Spain is made up of 17 autonomous communities, Catalan and Basque being two of them. They are sort of like states. Each state collects taxes for the central government of Spain and then the central government redistributes the money as needed across communities. This has been the tax system since 1975 when the constitution was created.
Franco was friends with Hitler and Mussolini, and after the Civil War, his political party was voted into power. The first part of his reign was hard dictatorship. The autonomous communities slowly had their rights taken away. Specifically Basque and Catalan rights were taken away under his reign because these were the two communities with more of their own culture and language.
One of the reasons Franco was in power for so long was that he frequently changed his tactics to be able to continue controlling the country. After Hitler and Mussolini failed, he lessened the fascist policies as a way to seem more appealing. It wasn’t as popular to be a fascist anymore so he cooled it down. Eisenhower even visited Spain. That’s when protests in Spain against Franco’s regime started.
Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) was founded by students in the Basque country in 1959 as a way to stop Franco (their name means Basque for Freedom in Euskara). They countered Franco in a violent way. The group killed Franco’s men, and so the general population thought that the violence was acceptable. They planted bombs in cars and then would flee to the Basque region of France, because France did not have any laws or ability to prosecute members.
ETA killed Franco’s chosen predecessor while Franco was very sick, and Franco died in 1975, causing his reign to end and Spain to quickly put together some form of constitution.
This is an important marker in current Spanish politics. Franco had restricted basque and cataluñan rights (that were the two places that threatened Franco’s union of Spain) to such an extent that these communities wanted more rights back when they were free from Franco. An offer was made to both communities: have control over your own taxes and collect them yourselves, or allow Spain to collect them and redistribute them over the country as needed. The Basque Country chose to collect their own taxes and redistribute them within their own community before sending the left over to the central government. This is the system they still use now, which allows their community much more economic freedom. Cataluña decided to allow Spain to collect their taxes and redistribute them over the country as needed. Now they wish to change their rights and gain independence and the right to self determination.
I want to take a look at the political terrorist group ETA and the impact it had on the people of the Basque Country. While at first ETA was widely accepted because they took down much of Franco’s regime, as time went on and they showed no signs of slowing violence, their popularity dwindled. The group fought for Basque independence by planting bombs to decrease tourism.
In the 90s, the Spanish government knew they had to stop ETA. They asked France to stop letting the members flee to Basque France for safety from the law. The government when so far as to fund a counter terrorism organization named GAL. GALs goal was to find ETA members and kill them. Instead of being sure of who they assassinated, the group simply found people who looked like they could be involved and killed them. The government funded GAL. The government funded a terrorist organization that violently exasperated the problem of the original terrorist organization.
By the turn of the century, ETA had planted several bombs in cars and metros across Spain, killing hundreds of innocent people. They did this in the name of independence for the Basque Country. I don’t know how much the political party made international headlines, because it was very much Spain specific. I do know that my lifetime of looking at politics has never seen or heard anything about it.
In the early 2000s while ETA’s power was dwindling, discrimination against people from Biskaya rose. My professor spoke about a time when she was working in Madrid after ETA attacked and her coworker asked her where she had hidden a bomb. Another story she told us was of her brother who was threatened by ETA. If his company didn’t pay them a certain amount he would be killed (this is how the group received money. The police could not protect the public from ETA so their only options were to flee or to pay). He abandoned his business and fled to Madrid, where he was labeled as a terrorist. The last story she told us was of a person from Bilbao who went to Madrid to watch a soccer game. He wore Bilbao’s team attire and went up to a police officer to ask for a good bar to watch the game. The police officer intentionally directed him to a bar where only Madrid fans were. The Madrid fans killed him and the public labeled it as “bad luck”. Now these are stories, and I don’t doubt there is some fault in them. I don’t think facts here are the important part. I think the sentiment that they portray is more important than making sure the story is 100% factual. And the sentiment was that being from Biskaya meant that you were a terrorist for Basque independence.
One interesting part of this is the lack of race in Spain’s effect on discrimination. While there is a difference in accent from parts of Spain, discrimination did not come solely based on this factor. For someone to show fear or discrimination towards someone from Biskaya, they generally had to know you were from there. They had to ask. It was not immediately evident that you should be afraid of someone because of something like their skin color.
I made several mental comparisons while learning about ETA. The first was to police racial violence in the US. If a black person is killed by a police officer, it’s considered to be “bad luck” or that they somehow “deserved it” or that the officer was “scared”. Basque people were killed in Spain without reason because people assumed they were terrorists just because they were from the Basque Country. It’s not a perfect comparison, blacks in America are not a terrorist group. The fear in the United States comes from a fundamental and systemic idea of darker skin being equated with something to be afraid of. And maybe there is a similar problem when it comes to ISIS and Muslim people in the United States when it comes to profiling a group as terrorist when the people from Basque had nothing to do with ETA’s terrorism and Muslim people have nothing to do with Islamic terrorist groups. If a white man goes and shoots 20 people in a school, he’s mentally ill and needed help. If a black or brown person does it, it’s terrorism and ISIS. People do not equate both to terrorist and violence. The US’s terrorism isn’t organized, it’s singular people deciding to get automatic weapons and kill children. I wonder if that makes it harder to fight because it is not one group like ETA being directly responsible for these killings.
What I found most interesting while learning about ETA was the questions I had as they related to activsm in the United States. Can we as activists learn anything from how ETA was taken down as a way to stop violence in our own country? What other comparisons can the discrimination of basque people and ETA be made to US problems? How can these comparisons best serve us in 2018? I don’t know the answer to these questions, all I know is the comparisons I drew. I would love to continue discussing this with anyone who is interested. Please leave a comment with your thoughts on what I’ve written and responding to the open questions.