Immigration and Minority Nationalism: The Basque Country in Comparative Perspective

Conventional wisdom suggests that ‘nations without states’ are seeking to preserve cultural and linguistic homogeneity within their homeland by advocating for independence or political autonomy. Accordingly, large-scale immigration has typically been seen as a threat to national minorities because newcomers tend to integrate into the culture of the majority group. In addition, even if immigrants learn the minority’s language, they are unlikely to sympathize with the nationalist movement or vote for nationalist parties. This dissertation seeks to explain why Basque nationalism, despite its historical grounding in racism and exclusivity, developed a group-based multicultural approach in response to foreign immigration. To account for this unexpected outcome, I develop two interrelated causal arguments that integrate the role of ideas and the imperative of nation building for nationalist elites. Nations are forged by a rich legacy of memories and nationalist history requires both an act of collective remembering and collective amnesia. The ideas that stem from the memories of repression constrained the choices of Basque nationalists, preventing the rise of ideas of racial purity and exclusion in favour of multiculturalism and openness. A second argument that I advance is that changing contexts are motivating nationalist elites to find new policy areas with which to distinguish the values of the majority and minority nation. The emergence of a stricter immigration framework in Spain and a backlash against multiculturalism in Europe provided Basque nationalists with an opportunity to link open citizenship and multiculturalism to the distinctiveness of the Basque nation. I apply the arguments developed through an in-depth study of the Basque case to the nationalist movements in Scotland, Quebec, and Flanders and conclude that diversity is an effective, but risky, new value that minority nationalists are employing to further their case for independence.Ph