HOW can the struggle for the Independence of Euskadi [ine "Basque country 1 be Integrated into a political conception and a strategy against the state? The following article by a Basque revolutionary socialist militant considers the relation between the search for authentic national independence and the struggle for a self-managing society.
JOSE IRIARTE "BIKILA"*
T wO positions, both of them one-
sided, exist on the question of independence. The first, upheld by some sectors of the left and by bourgeois nationalists as well as by some sectors of the right in the stateless nations, takes a point of view that could be defined as evolutionist/economist.
The basis of this conception is the idea that the internationalization of the economy and its European expression mean that national independence for the stateless nations is an obsolete or inappropriate choice. Why have an independent state, at a time when the existing states are in the process of losing their sovereignty? 22
However, the attempt to politically structure Europe is being made not in the pursuit of an internationalist ideal but by actually existing states which are trying to create a union in their image and in the interests of the most powerful. The Europe they are trying to build is by no means destatized, but is rather a macro or super state (taking the form of a federation or confederation of states)
founded on the more or less reconverted old apparatuses of the bourbequeath to it in a scaled down manner all their failings: apparatuses of between the citizens and the apparatus, social stratification, racism, discrimination, and so on.
The second, more traditional, position concerning independence is that prevalent among the majority of the nationalist Removal of internal frontiers in Europe
From this point of view, the right to a separate nation state is completely justified. Faced with those who put the accent on a future without internal state frontiers in Europe (and who do not acknowledge that the national state will only disappear if there is a macro-state to replace it) the demand for an independent national state separate from the Spanish state or France has its own logic of radical negation and rupture. The problem with this demand is that it seems simply to put a plus where there is a minus and vice versa within the framework of the same model, concentrating on the national struggle rather than on the elaboration of an alternative future to that of the current states (with their dual class and national nature) and to "undesirables" and tightly controlled internal spaces. An alternative point of view would search for new premisses, while preserving what is correct in the old positions. It should not only take into account the interrather than their simple negation.
The Spanish state (and the French state) is a very complex sum of coercive apparatuses and of consensus (social and national), which exists to perpetuate the interests of the dominant classes which support it. No strategy of national and social liberation can avoid this reality. The Basque and Catalan bourgeois nationalists, who in no way challenge the system, and who do not wish to destabilize it, try to squeeze some crumbs out of the Spanish state, to become a power alongside it, and hope to win, at the same time, a place in the European Community, whether in terms of direct representation (regional chambers and organs, zones of economic investment adapted to their possibilities) or indirectly through the Spanish state.
However, the historic identification "independence = separate national state" is not self-evident, either in its internal or its external aspects.
Independence and anti-imperialism
Independence is the absence of external domination. It presupposes the disappearance of the imperialist international order, in the cultural, political or economic domains. The independent national state can guarantee independence in part, but any radical and global conception of independence must be associated with a vision of a largely, or even completely, destatized international society (of nations — these will not disappear).
The state is by its essence a factor of distortion, of permanent struggle. From this point of view, the federation of national republics, the confederation or association between independent entities, faces another dilemma: that of liberating itself from the weight of the characteristic features of the state (army, bureaucracy, and so on), to emancipate the nation and the society from the weight of a historic contingency born from capitalism and the world market.
It is the same in the internal sphere. The nation is a historic result produced through long evolution or through tumultuous regroupments which have succeeded in forming a collectivity. In this process, political, economic and cultural factors intervene in each nation with their own weight and autonomy. This is what has happened in Euskadi. The role of the state in this process has been essential in * José Iriarte "Bikila" is a leader of the newly formed Basque revolutionary organization EMK-LKI. This article, which has been cut for space reasons, first appeared in the Basque magazine Hika.
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EUSKADI National national tendencies and the progressive interdependence of the national econo- mies, but also, at the same time, the neces- sities of the struggle against the actually existing national states. It should amount to a transcendence of these two positions,
Senegalese revolutionaries form new organization
February 3, 1992 • #221 International Viewpoint the formation of a national model, in the identification with the nation-state, generally not very democratic and not very homogenizing.
This has led to many problems: Few national states are formed by a single national component, many are multinational and, in applying the national model (nation-state) all factors of difference are