A nation is a community of people who consider themselves to be a nation (Seton-Watson: 1977). To create a nation involves a dramatic substitution of diversity with uniformity. People who felt themselves to be culturally distinct and distant must be transformed into a community bound by cultural affinity and solidarity. An array of divergent traditional loyalties must be ruptured, reshuffled and redefined in order to fuse neatly around the boundaries of this community. This monograph is a study of Basque nationalism and the means by which this complex, often violent, political phenomenon created the Basque nation.

To understand Basque nationalism I initially attempted to concentrate on only one manifestation of it – in the first instance, the Basque language schools (ikastolas), in the second, nationalism in a specific village. The intention was to use a small-scale study as a means by which to view the Basque movement as a whole. However, this narrow approach yielded a narrow, partial picture. The critical aspect of Basque nationalism remained obscure. This aspect was that Basque nationalism has transformed the culturally diverse human raw material upon which it operated into a national entity. It has endowed this entity with new collective representations and with claims to political rights, most of which are currently recognized by the Spanish state. The more I learned about Basque nationalism the more I became aware that it involved a closed system of belief that produced wide-ranging processes of ideological and political organization, mobilization and legitimation.