This is the script for my video posted on May 20, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
The Basque Country of Spain is best known for being incredibly distinct from the rest of the country. Its language is the only living language in its family, its culture is very different, and its people are genetically descended from those who lived on the Iberian Peninsula during the Iron Age, despite having intermingled with other groups for thousands of years. The natural question is how does a region that’s so different from the rest of its own country play into Spain’s broader geopolitical dynamics?
When the Roman Empire conquered Iberia, the Basques were already there, though in Latin they were called the Vascones. Unlike the rest of Spain, the Basques never fully assimilated into Rome due to their region’s rugged geography, pastoralism, and limited urbanization. But around the year 1200, King Alfonso VIII of Castile took advantage of the King of Navarre being away in North Africa to seize the Basque provinces of Alava, Gipuzkoa, and Bizkaia. Navarre itself held out as an independent kingdom for three more centuries until Ferdinand the Catholic annexed it in 1512. You may already be aware that Castile is the progenitor of modern Spain, and this is how the two became intertwined.
Even then, though, the Basques held onto their identity. They were exempt from many aspects of Castilian and later Spanish rule like conscription and direct taxation, but in the 19th century a feud over the Spanish throne pitted the supporters of Don Carlos, who were largely Catholic and fought for the cause of Spanish tradition, against the largely liberal and democratic Queen Isabel II and Alfonso XII. The Basque provinces and Navarre were the rural heartland of the Carlists. These civil wars over the throne are called the Carlist Wars, and they ultimately resulted in the Basque people losing their exemptions, which at that point had been in place for centuries.
From the 1870s to about 1900, the Basque Country transformed into a powerhouse for iron smelting, steel production, and shipbuilding, in part because they already had a strong tradition of industrial-scale whaling and fishing. The region’s population grew rapidly as largely Spanish migrant workers arrived. Spain’s industrial cores, the Basque Country and Catalonia, both experienced this, and the influx of Spanish migrants was a driving force for the nationalist movements of both regions.
In 1936 the Spanish Republic approved the very first Basque Statute of Autonomy, and a coalition government led by the conservative-Catholic Basque Nationalist Party took power. When Francisco Franco began his rebellion, the largely Catholic and conservative Basques of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa sided with the republic against him because they interpreted Franco as totalitarian, centralist, and ultimately anti-Basque. In other words, they viewed him as a threat to both Basque autonomy and their conservative Catholic regional order. Meanwhile, the regions of Alava and Navarre, which were dominated by anti-Republican Carlists, sided with Franco and gave him some of the regime’s most committed troops.
In 1937, Franco’s German and Italian allies bombed the Basque city of Gernika, as depicted in Pablo Picasso’s painting of the same name. Hundreds died, and though Franco denied responsibility for decades, the Basque Country did come under his regime’s control. The regions of Alava and Navarre, which had mostly been loyal to him, kept a lot of their independence, and this drives a lot of intra-Basque rivalry today, because the trade-off was the banning of Basque names and public use of the Basque language, and any expression of the unique Basque identity.
In 1959, a group of university students in Bilbao founded a group called ETA, short for Basque Homeland and Liberty in English. Through the 1960s its focus evolved from cultural nationalism to Marxist-Leninist national liberation, and it began to conduct bombings and assassinations against Francoist figureheads, as well as kidnappings. In 1973, they killed Franco’s prime minister and designated successor Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco by digging a tunnel under a street for five months and waiting to detonate it until Blanco’s car drove overhead. Some argue that this made it possible for Spain to transition more quickly back to a constitutional monarchy after Franco’s death.
But the violence didn’t stop. Long after the Franco died and the Transition restored Spain’s constitutional monarchy, ETA kept going. In response, the Spanish government formed state-sponsored death squads to target the ETA, but they kidnapped and tortured innocent people as well, which Basques commonly cite as evidence against the legitimacy of the anti-ETA campaign. In 2011 though, amid a lack of funds, weapons, and public support, ETA declared a permanent ceasefire, and in 2017 they voluntarily handed over their weapons before fully dissolving in 2018. Most of the region today wants autonomy while remaining part of Spain, though about 25% still push for independence.
As you can see, the Basque Country has a rich and complex relationship with the rest of Spain. Today, local authorities have full autonomy over most tax collection, and Basque institutions pay a single annual quota to Madrid for services the central state provides. This dynamic, called the Concierto, is arguably the single biggest reason the Basque Country is among Spain’s wealthiest regions. Today, Basque political parties wield outsized influence on the state, because their combined political bloc is big enough to leverage concessions in their favor in exchange for their support on Spain’s broader issues.
From a geopolitical angle, the Basque Country is one of the few examples in Europe of a region having full tax autonomy and pushing money upward. The existence of this dynamic changes the constitutional and economic debate across the continent. Beyond that, Spain’s political factions simply cannot form a government without Basque votes, meaning that the Basque Country is disproportionately impactful on the Spanish government’s overall strategy and decision-making. Relative to other parts of Europe like Catalonia and Scotland that have pushed for secession, the Basque Country demonstrates that a stateless nation can still secure sovereignty incrementally inside a state, without falling apart or being assimilated.
Keep reading
- Why is Corsica fighting for autonomy from France?
- Why hasn’t Ireland reunified?
- Why does Hungary speak a language from western Siberia?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.