In Europe

nationalistic.’
    As we talked and walked, I noticed that my Basque acquaintances were driven by more than simply the pursuit of political independence. I kept sensing that something else was not being said. Monica and her friend were singularly pleasant, intelligent and committed people, but at a certain point I kept running into a brick wall. ‘Why are all of you so attached to those rituals? Why is independence so important that everything else has to take second place?’ I was given no answer.
    Their nationalism was an amalgam of the old and new, of resistance, but also of nostalgia. On the one hand it was a belated product of the nineteenth century, an outgrowth of the fundamental conflict that divided Spain throughout a large part of the twentieth century: is Spain a land of several nations, as the republicans believed, or should it remain the unified nation held dear by Franco and his followers? On the other, it fits perfectly with those other movements that arose in Europe in the late twentieth century, peculiar and significant counterparts of modernisation and globalisation.‘The Basque movement is a typical agrarian movement,’ Monica said. ‘That's what makes it different from Catalan nationalism.’
    Hence the movement's popularity, one supposes, in the alternative young people's circuit, here and throughout the rest of Europe. Nostalgia was – and is – an important signal: in essence it is an indictment of a modern age filled only with materialism and a blind faith in all that is new. But nostalgia can also produce monsters. From Kosovo and Ruthenia to the Basque Country, everywhere Europeans have been driven mad by the longing for a fatherland that no one ever knew, that in many ways never even existed.
    All this lends the Basque Country a certain ambiguity. It is privy to the ocean's vast skies, but at the same time as impacted as an Eastern European mountain village. It is probably the most autonomous region in all Europe, it has a status of which Northern Ireland can only dream, it is modern and industrialised, it has profited greatly from Spanish and European subsidies, but none of that has brought cosmopolitanism or tolerance: in the eyes of the nationalist Basques, Madrid remains a colonial power, to be fought with all available means. What is to become ofthat language and that independence, I ask my acquaintances, now that a significant part of the population is non-Basque, now that almost two thirds of the Basques do not speak a word of Basque, now that almost all opinion polls show that the opponents of secession far outnumber those in favour of it? I ask them: ‘Can the Basque Country you dream of ever come about democratically, when members of the opposition can only campaign when surrounded by ten bodyguards? What kind of country would that be, for heaven's sake?’ Once more there is no reply.
    In Guernica, the notorious German bombardment of 26 April, 1937 is commemorated with a modest monument close to the Mercury Fountain, a large stone with a hole in it, ‘in honour of the victims’. That is the only text on which all parties could agree.
    The bombing is viewed in as many ways as there are viewers. For most Europeans it was a characteristic Nazi atrocity against an innocent Spanish town, a rehearsal for Warsaw and Rotterdam. For the average Spaniard it was, first and foremost, one of Franco's dirty tricks. To this day, the Basque nationalists see Guernica as Madrid's violation of their ‘holy city’. And the old supporters of the Franco regime take a fourth view: the whole bombardment never happened. Guernica, they say, was torched by the ‘Red’ Basques themselves. The Germans admitted their culpability years ago, but the Spanish government has never been willing to rescind Franco's reading. ‘Let bygones be bygones’ is how people deal with the past in these parts.
    The issue of Guernica is typical of the relationship between Madrid and the Basques. Both parties are possessed of a brutality that keeps all wounds open, and in that they resemble each other more than they care to admit. Suspected ETA terrorists – and even the editor-in-chief of a Basque-language daily is readily counted among them – can be detained for years without due process. Amnesty International regularly accuses the Spanish police of torturing prisoners. But when a victim files a complaint, even that complaint is seen by the Spanish government as an indication of one's ETA affiliations.
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