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John Sullivan, ETA and Basque Nationalism, Routledge, London, 1988, pp275 £35

The Basque terrorist and nationalist organisation, ETA, is one of the most interesting political movements to have arisen in Western Europe since the war. It has striking similarities with the IRA in Northern Ireland, but also considerable differences, and an analysis of these distinctions helps to cast light on both bodies. For readers of Revolutionary History it is not unimportant that ETA, at the height of its popularity, and with real mass support in the final years of the Franco dictatorship, gave birth to an important Trotskyist current, ETA VILKR, whose trajectory might have some relevant lessons. These 300 people, many very talented and all of whom were very brave, the equivalent of 15,000 such individuals in Britain, had immense personal prestige in the community. If Trotskyism could have played a really significant role anywhere in Europe since the war one would imagine it would have been in Euskadi.

Like the IRA, ETA's genesis was in the late 'sixties, though the nationalist movement out of which it came went back much further. Unlike in Ireland it started its operations under a harsh dictatorship rather than an imperfect parliamentary democracy. Periodically ETA gave birth to left wing splits which generally took with them the majority of the existing activists. These leading elements felt the need for working class support since they also sensed the existence of class, and not merely national, oppression. The firs split, the MCE, had, and still has, some working class support and tended to Maoism. (For its present views see the exchange with the Socialist Workers Party in International Socialism 2/38). The second big split, in 1972, was the LCR-LKR (ETA VI) which adhered to the United Secretariat led by Ernest Mandel. It is clear that all splits to the left, which started with the assumption among the participants that nationalism and Marxism were but different aspects of progressive thought, found out that in practice a working class orientation was incompatible with a nationalist one or, more brutally, internationalism was incompatible with nationalism. Almost immediately, the cadres, however heroic and admired for their heroism they might be, found themselves totally isolated politically from their previous mass base.

The farmers, small businessmen, priests and lawyers who had smiled on the somewhat over-enthusiastic student patriots who killed Guardia Civil were quite disapproving of attempts to unite Spanish and Basque workers against employers who themselves might be Basques. As the ETA militants were generally lower middle class individuals and, because of their military tactics, always isolated from the mass working class movements, the LCR-LKR proved quite incapable of becoming a really important force despite, not merely a most distinguished record of armed resistance to the Franco regime, but also the orchestration of the biggest mass movement that the region has ever seen in the agitation against the Burgos show trial of its militants in 1970. According to Sullivan, it has, in the course of its decline since 1980, tended to go back to supporting the nationalism from which it had once broken. He seems to see it nowadays as simply a group of uninfluential cheerleaders of terrorism from the sidelines.

Sullivan's research is massive and has been years in the making. Indeed this book amounts to only about a third of his PhD. He seems to have read everything and met nearly every survivor from the sixties and seventies. His task was rendered easier in that periodic amnesties of Basque activists enabled them to speak quite freely about the past without fear of state reprisals. Such a study on the IRA would not yet be possible and might never be. Any serious disagreement with his conclusions, even if some find them unpalatable, will have to be founded on as great a scholarship and as deep a knowledge of the sources.

Ted Crawford