Mobilization models and sites of memory in Basque nationalism. The limits of a political culture.

Abstract

The article analyzes the rise and expansion of nationalist political identity as a factor of cohesion, both in the socio-political and in the symbolic realms, and its transformation into a genuine «political culture». This leads us to question the concept of community which some authors employ to characterize the PNV of the republican period, to the nationalism of the Restoration. As well as the idea that the generation of Lizardi, born at the beginning of the 20th Century, carried out the work of primitive accumulation of modern and traditional elements that would eventually be configured as such in the Republican years. I argue, instead, that there was a cultural and political universe which may be deemed nationalist, but that these shared their symbolic world and identity with other people and groups that, like themselves, affirmed the existence of a differentiated Basque reality, although they did not share the political formulations of the followers of Sabino Arana. Otherwise, nationalist sites of memory, especially shrines and hermitages, were frequently shared by that more extensive collective of diffuse basquisme.