Sabino Arana

By now you have seen his name mentioned a couple of times at this blog.

Well, it is time you learn a bit more about this renown Basque nationalist.

For that, we are back at Reference.com:

Sabino Arana y Goiri

Sabino Arana Goiri, self-styled as Arana ta Goiri'taŕ Sabin (January 26, 1865 – November 25, 1903), founder of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and a creator of Basque nationalism. Author of several books and numerous articles arguing in favour of Basque nationalism based on the idea of the Basques as a special race with a land of their own, the "purity" of which must be preserved.

He died in Sukarrieta at the age of 38 after falling ill with Addison's disease during time spent in prison. He had been charged with treason for attempting to send a telegram to President Theodore Roosevelt, in which he praised America for helping Cuba gain independence from Spain.

Background

The Third Carlist War had substituted the Ancient Regime system of Basque Fueros by a limited autonomy. The Basque Country and Navarre were integrated into the Spanish customs system. Basque industrialists profitted from the Spanish captive market with the iron ore and the Bessemer converter and Biscay became "the iron California". Workers from all of Spain were attracted to the area as labourers for the burgeoning industry.

Arana was born in Abando, a neighbourhood that had been recently incorporated into the city of Bilbao as the new extension for the growth of the industrial era.

He claimed that he had a quasi-religious revelation on Whitsunday, that he communicated to his brother Luis Arana. From then on he devoted himself to the nationalist cause of Biscay, later extended to the Basque Country.
Ideology

He was an early defender of the use of the Basque language in all areas of society, to avoid its increasing marginalization in the face of the dominant Spanish. He learnt the language as a young man, but was ready to contest for a professor position at the Instituto de Bilbao, competing against Miguel de Unamuno and the winner, Resurrección María de Azkue, who became an erudite scholar of the language. He made a strong effort to establish an agreed orthography for the Basque language, and proposed several neologisms to replace words of Spanish origin. Some of this innovations like the characters ĺ and ŕ were not accepted for the standardization efforts for the Basque language of the 1970s.

His first published work was Bizkaya por su independencia ("Independence for Biscay"), composed of a mix of historical and pseudo mythical stories and fabrications of earlier battles of the ancient people of Biscay.

In 1894 he founded the first center for the new nationalist party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco) to provide a place for gathering and proselitizing.

Sabino Arana, like many Europeans of his time, believed that the essence of a country was defined by its blood, and was disturbed that the immigration into Biscay of many workers from central Spain during the industrial revolution, into a small territory with little political power, would result in the disappearance of the pure Basque race.

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Another essential part of his ideology was devout Catholicism; he considered this to be an essential part of the Basque identity. However his Basque nationalism kept him away from Carlism that was the dominant ultra-Catholic and conservative movement in the area and the ideology of his father.

Despite his religious integrism and his extreme xenophobic and racist views, he is considered by many Basques to be the gadfly that sparked the movement for the cultural revival of the Basques, and for the freedom of his people. The party he created has moved on from his most controversial ideas to an inclusive concept of the Basque essence, based not on bloodline but rather on culture and convivence.

He was a prolific writer, with over 600 journalism articles, most of them with a propaganda purpose. He liked to shock and provoke, in order to get attention from a society that he deemed unaware of its fate. Overall he was in favour of an ethnic cleansing that would eliminate any trace of Spanish blood in order to restore the imaginary pureness of the Basque race.

There are three key aspects of Sabino Arana's political figure:

~He was an innovator, being the first to proclaim that the Basques are a separate race.

~He was not a conventional conservative; he strongly opposed slavery (legal in Spanish-held Cuba until ten years before its independence) and defended the right of South African Zulus to their land.

~He was an infatigable worker, taking action in many areas; he learned the Basque language as an adult, undertook a number of activities to promote the Basque language and culture, created a political movement, and designed the symbols (flag, anthem, country name) used to this day by Basque nationalists.

During his time in prison he proposed the foundation of a "League of pro-Spain Basques", which would have been in favor of Basque autonomy within Spain. It is still unclear whether he had sincerely changed his views or he was trying to improve the conditions of his imprisonment. His death left the question unanswered and neither his brother Luis nor the party followed through with his proposal.

The mixed influence of Sabino Arana in the Basque society

Sabino Arana's ideas are considered to have spawned the democratic nationalist movement that currently is supported by about 60% of Basques.

Today, he is viewed as a controversial figure by many people in Europe, who call him racist for his xenophobia and ethnocentrism and his ideas of a pure race.

During the Spanish Civil War, the Basque society was profoundly polarized between the Carlist (the Carlists fought on Franco's side) and the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (heirs of Arana) who chose in the last minute to fight alongside the Republican government. In the 1950s, there was a schism between the traditional PNV (most of them into exile, including the lehendakari) and a new group called EKIN (which later on, became ETA). Even though both parties refer to Sabino Arana as the ideologist and pater patriae of the Basque Country (Euskal Herria), the PNV dissociates itself from violence. ETA still thinks of itself as the "National Liberation Front", and even refers to itself as izquierda abertzale (or leftist nationalists), a clear reference to the revolutionary movements of the 1960s.

The Partido Nacionalista Vasco, holders of the intellectual property of his works, has chosen not to reprint them since 1976, keeping only the more "moderate" part of his message in their charter. On the other hand, some Basques still revere him as the father of the nationalist movement, who managed to start the turnaround of the decay of the Basque language and culture. Many Basque cities name streets after him.

The estate of his Abando home is now Sabin-Etxea ("Sabino-House"), the EAJ-PNV headquarters.

Jon Juaristi has remarked that perhaps the most influential part of his heritage is the neologistic list of Basque versions of names in his Deun-Ixendegi Euzkotarra ("Basque saint-name collection", published in 1910). Instead of the traditional adaptations of Romance names, he proposed others that in his opinion were truer to the originals and adapted to the Basque phonology. For example, his brother Luis became Koldobika, from Frankish Hlodwig. The traditional Peru, Pello or Piarres ("Peter") became Kepa from Aramaic כיפא (Kepha). He believed that the suffix -[n]e was inherently feminine, and new names like Nekane ("pain"+ne,"Dolores") or Garbine ("clean"+ne, "Immaculate [Conception]") are frequent among Basque females. Even the name of the son-in-law of the king of Spain is Iñaki Urdangarin, Iñaki being an Arana alternative for Ignatius instead of the traditional Inazio.

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