4 - From the illuminated few to the Basque moral community

Summary

Let us join under the same flag, found purely Basque societies, write Basque newspapers, open Basque schools and even Basque charitable institutions. That everything seen by our eyes, spoken by our mouths, written by our hands, thought by our intelligences and felt by our hearts be Basque.

(Sabino de Arana, ‘Regeneración’, El Correo Vasco, 11 June 1899, C. W., p. 1674)

Arana's was the message of nation-building. But the message also had to be heeded, understood and acted upon by large numbers of disparate, often incompatible, individuals. And in the Basque country the task of nation-building was not straightforward. With industrialization the cleavage between town and country had deepened and become more truculent. In Bilbao new social sectors advocating different versions of centralizing ideologies had been propelled into prominence. The social configuration had become more complex and less coherent. In short, as raw material for nation-building, the residents of the Basque country were divided by culture, divergent economic and political aspirations and history. They had never shared a common identity. The job of the early urban nationalists was invention, not regeneration.

The nucleus of the nation: the origins of the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV)

The inauspicious beginnings from which the Basque nation eventually emerged can be traced to the Euskaldun Batzokija (The Basque Society), a political/recreational club founded in 1894 by Sabino de Arana and his followers.

Faithful to Arana's primitive nationalism, the organization of the Euskaldun Batzokija mirrored the model of organization the early nationalists sought for Vizcaya.