Stateless people in a multinational state: the case of the Basques
This article was originally published in the Slovenian magazine Razpotja, in Slovenian (translated by Luka Lisjak) as “Narod brez države v večnarodni državi: primer Baskov.” Here’s the full version in English.
Before the idea of Nation-States was born — commonly associated with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, but with greater traction after the French Revolution and the idea of a universal education system -, different peoples lived in their villages and cities, speaking their languages undisturbed.
The centre of life was the church and the noble family that dominated the land at a given time, but in general each region had its own language or dialect that was spoken freely. Not that tensions sometimes did not exist, or even that there were not pressures from monarchies that sought to centralize power also through the imposition of the language of the ruler — as well as local elites who sought to learn the language that would bring them closer to power.
But “modernity” brought changes and with the State a new category was created — of those stateless. Stateless nations of those who were left behind in the building of the modern nation states and had to struggle to keep their languages and identity alive despite prejudice, abuse and often violence and brutality. The turn of the…
