Legacy and Rupture: The Political Learning of Young Left-wing Basque Nationalists in the Post-ETA Period

Abstract

The article examines ways in which the left-wing nationalist movement in the Basque Country has offered a framework of opportunity for the construction of activist youth agency. It also identifies transformations in youth activist practices over the last decade, following the cessation of ETA´s armed activity. Based on in-depth interviews, we set out to reconstruct the evolution of the political learning and trajectories of youth from the Basque Nationalist left during this period. The analysis of these young peoples’ narratives allows us to understand some of the meanings that they attach to their current political practices. With respect to inherited political traditions, continuity was manifest in the existence of enduring dispositions favourable to counter-hegemonic activism. Changes were manifest in the adaptation of these dispositions to new political conditions through progressively more individualized forms of political action, connected to emerging contemporary agendas.

Introduction

The Basque Country is a territory in Europe split between French and Spain. It maintains a strong national and cultural identity. With variations in intensity, Basque sub-state nationalism has factored in conflict and instability within both states and also within Basque society itself since the beginning of Modernity. The intensity of this conflict increased in the mid-20th century, a period in which the Spanish Basque territory was the theatre of armed actions carried out under the banner of ETA [Basque Country and Freedom], a political-military organization which emerged during the Franco dictatorship in the context of severely repressive state policy. These circumstances have resulted in high levels of politicization in Basque society relative to the rest of Europe and in the formation of a unique ‘political field’ (Bourdieu, 1998; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). ETA’s cessation of activity in 2011 and its self-dissolution in 2018 have opened a new political era in the last decade.

This political shift has involved a reorganization of the left-wing forces active around Basque nationalism sympathetic to ETA, some sectors of which were also listed as illegal organizations. In the context of the Spanish state, these political forces have since been fully incorporated into representative institutions at a regional level and in the Spanish national parliament. They have reformulated their political practices, which appear to be increasingly institutionalized within the framework of the democratic political arena.

On a discursive level, over the last decade movement intellectuals have generated different proposals to reframe left-wing nationalist discourse. Indeed, although they may at first appear immutable, nationalist discourses transform and adapt to changing historical contexts. Just as the urban generations of the 1960s reformulated conservative Basque nationalism, incorporating leftist ideologies from Europe and the example of anti-colonial national independence struggles from the Global South, young people in universities and activist movements are currently undertaking a new discursive framing.

The secessionist processes in Scotland and Catalonia and, above all, the works of various Catalan theorists, have influenced these new discursive tendencies. The lexicon of the nation has been replaced by the concept of sovereignty, a multidimensional and protean term associated with power relations, which has been adapted to changing historical frameworks and has been integrated by Basque nationalism. The fact that sovereignty can be interpreted at different levels (personal, cultural, political), attaching different meanings to the same signifier, has allowed a multiplicity of actors to reinterpret the term, each from their own social location while coming together under a shared conceptual framework. In this way, beyond national sovereignty and the right to decide, references to late modern activist agendas have proliferated in contemporary discourse, in terms of the construction of feminist sovereignty, transformative social and economic sovereignty, cultural and linguistic sovereignty, food sovereignty and local agricultural sovereignty. In this way, current pro-sovereignty strategy seeks articulation between diverse actors, in the context of a struggle for hegemony, that is, for the institution of a new meaning or legitimacy that reorders the political and social field (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985).

The influence of the political heritage of the 20th century has persisted even as these changes have occurred. From the Franco dictatorship until last decade, a broad cycle of mobilization combined with the institutionalization of the Basque political field. While inspired by the leitmotif of nation-building, this allowed a confluence of multiple popular sectorial demands, constituting a genuine protest cycle including broad and complex content. Since the 20th century, new nationalisms have elaborated discourses integrating alternative neo-identity values, including environmentalism, feminism, antimilitarism and resistance to state violence. In this sense, the particularity of Basque cycle of nationalist vindication and mobilization over the last 40 years revolves around its articulation of universalist leftist values with the demands of new social movements. The result has been an exceptionally active and mobilized civil society, incorporating a great diversity of community initiatives and organized social groups. The uniqueness of the Basque case has also materialized in a contentious political model, exercised fundamentally by young people, which has differentiated the Basque political landscape from that in other territories seeking sovereignty, such as Catalonia.

In this context, a subculture associated with left-wing nationalism persists in the Basque Country today. This subculture far exceeds the bounds of action of formal organizations and has roots across a wide social cross-section. It is characterized by a particular type of popular, participatory and community activism. Thus, a significant section of Basque society is involved in active, dynamic and densely interconnected community dynamics linked to nation-building and has a great tradition of self-organization inherited from the Franco era and maintained over recent decades.

Youth organizations and movements, whose participants have been socialized for decades in this activist tradition of self-organization, are embedded in this community framework made up of a dense fabric of relationships which enabled the reproduction of nationalism through the various periods during which it was forced underground during the Franco dictatorship. In addition to more conventional student and youth political organizations, the agency of nationalist youth is reflected most paradigmatically in gaztetxes and gazte asanbladak—self-managed youth spaces and local youth assemblies of an open and informal nature—and in the multiple feminist youth groups that proliferate throughout the Basque Country. All this has been translated into the possession, on the part of a large number of young people, of significant political capital, in the sense of the term as understood by Bourdieu—resources accumulated in the form of lived and inherited political experience, translated into political capacities, relational networks, cognitive and symbolic resources—(Bourdieu, 1998).

Taking the open political scenario in the Basque Country following the cessation of ETA’s armed activity as a starting point, the research carried out in this article focuses on the political learning taken by young Basque left-wing nationalists. These young people have been characterized in the past as protagonists of kale borroka [street fighting] and other forms of contentious politics, including civil disobedience, squatting, building occupations and demonstrations (Ferret, 2014). This dominant characterization has obfuscated both the innovative and creative dimension of these young nationalists’ actions in the construction of anti-hegemonic political cultures and practices and the similarities they share with other social movement participants globally.

The analysis that we present below has the following objectives: First, it looks into the existing constellation of nationalist and popular organizations as a framework of opportunity for the construction of political agency and youth activism. Second, it seeks to identify the elements of continuity internalized as political dispositions in earlier socialization processes that have been transmitted to young Basque left-wing nationalists and are present in their activist culture. Third, it aims to understand the new meanings that these young activists themselves attribute to their current political practices. Through this line of argument, we seek to understand the transactions that are produced between youth agency and context, going beyond the dichotomy between transmission vs change which characterizes existing studies of youth political socialization.

Continuity and Change in Studies of Political Socialization

Research on the political socialization of young people faces theoretical and methodological challenges related to understanding the relationships between cultural continuity and social change, between individual agency and political-cultural context and around processes of creating meaning that occur over time (Andersson, 2020). Although both forces, continuity and change, are inherent in socializing dynamics, the latent tension between them is subject to different interpretations. Some studies favour an emphasis on mechanisms of social reproduction and, conversely, others place more emphasis on dynamics of transformation.

The continuity hypothesis most often focuses on variables related to primary socialization. In particular, it prioritizes the study of the family institution, the primary agent of intergenerational transmission of political attitudes, together with other institutions that come into play later, including schools and the media (Schwarzer & Connor, 2012). These studies show that parents play an important role in the political education of their offspring and that the early acquisition of a political orientation influences the political evolution of adults, despite transformations in their political environment or family structure (Jennings et al., 2009). In Bourdieu’s terms, these affiliations would act as habitus, that is, an assemblage of systems of durable and transposable dispositions linked to social position, which organize the practices and representations of people in the field of politics. Studies also conclude that the higher parents’ level of politicization, cultural capital and economic well-being, the more likely that children and young people will adopt their values and political patterns (McIntosh et al., 2007; MacKinnon et al., 2007), in a process of the reproduction of class habitus (Bourdieu, 1998) and its dimension of self-efficacy. The precedent of parental activism and strong politicization seems to acquire greater significance in cases in which youth political participation and commitment materialize through non-institutionally established channels (Quéniart, 2016; Stolle et al., 2008).

One criticism of this approach is that processes of political socialization are understood in a normative and adult-centred way, which emphasizes the passive adaptation of individuals to a given political system and the integrating role this plays in this existing social order (Andersson, 2020). However, dynamics of transmission do not necessarily support the established order. This is the case with transmission of certain territorial identities, which encompass historical, geographical, linguistic and cultural elements associated with national and sub-national units in conflict (Barrett, 2007; Rico & Jennings, 2012). The possible continuity of this type of dissident youth political socialization is often interpreted as a risk to the political order, especially in those situations in which conflict has manifested in violent or warlike incidences in the recent past. In these circumstances, the persistence of beliefs, attitudes and practices held at an early age linked to family political socialization constitute a threat to political stability. Thus, socialization emerges as a key process relevant to conflict over both the preservation and elimination of intergenerational intergroup divisions (McKeown et al., 2020; Reidy et al., 2015; Taylor et al., 2018; Taylor & McKeown, 2019) and controversy over the construction of narratives around conflict (Velte, 2018).

While not denying the power of mechanisms of social reproduction, the vision that we adopt in this paper seeks to examine, in a historical and socially contextualized way, the changes that youth agency experiences and produces in its transactions with a dynamic environment, which distinguishes it from the preceding generation. We advocate for an analysis that conceptualizes young people as active agents in their own political learning processes (Youniss et al., 2002) in which they act and construct meanings for themselves. Studies that support the idea of youth agency understand political socialization not only as a unidirectional influence but as a matter of options, autonomy and creativity (Amnå et al., 2009) in progressively individualized contexts (Cuzzocrea & Collins, 2015). This perspective recognizes that socialization is more than transmission and adaptation.

This change in perspective has multiple implications. First, political socialization is reinterpreted as a constructive process, a change that implies the inclusion of other dynamics in addition to adaptation (Pfaff, 2009). Second, conceptualizing young people as active agents entails engaging in an analysis integrating, rather than delineating, the different contexts of their daily lives (Amnå et al., 2009), the activities that they engage in (Manning, 2014) and the factors that condition them. Third, it involves extending the analysis beyond the influence exercised by formal socializing institutions and the electoral context. This premise is more relevant than ever in contemporary society, marked by uncertainty and contingency. In this context, the socialization of individuals is never a finished process and, as such, social experiences produce subjects and demand ongoing reflective work on their part (Dubet, 2010). Youth transitions are today characterized precisely by the construction of their own networks of social interaction, in which socialization between equals operates in a subtle but powerful way (Bargel & Darmon, 2017), forging a matrix for political commitments in parallel with identity development of individuals and groups. Through collective identifications, young people can articulate common grievances, including shared feelings of hardship and of a connection with an ethnic or national group (Chryssochoou & Barrett, 2017) and act accordingly. Lastly, this perspective brings with it the assumption of an expanded concept of the political that can include repertoires of participatory dynamics and forms of civic-political engagement typical of younger generations, which are located outside the framework of conventional political institutions (Gordon & Taft, 2011; Harris et al., 2010; Manning, 2014; Pfaff, 2009). Under certain circumstances, the expansion of these practices and non-institutional political repertoires leads to ‘the political’, which Mouffe (2005) identifies with instituting power and antagonism constitutive of human societies, operating in conflict with ‘politics’ or instituted power.

A perspective emphasizing youth agency leads us to focus attention on those practices and social spaces in which young people acquire civic skills and construct forms of political commitment in the company of equals. Simultaneously, processes of subjectivation, individual self-realization and reflexivity accompany the learning of these commitments (Manning, 2014; Pleyers, 2019) and create the conditions for acquired dispositions to be applied in all areas of daily life. This materializes in the form of greater equity in interpersonal relationships, particular eating, consumption and recycling habits and other individualized forms of political action (Reedy et al., 2016). The practices embedded in youth movements and cultures have often not been identified as political, and, on the contrary, have been used to support the thesis of youth apathy (Gordon & Taft, 2011). However, diverse cultural and micro-social practices linked to youth movements and cultures present in the daily lives of young people are often connected with left-wing, anti-capitalist, environmentalist, and feminist social movements and subcultural networks (Pfaff, 2009). Currently, glocal youth from all over the world are experimenting with unconventional forms of protest (Letamendia, 2016), reappropriating social spaces and times, and developing novel cultural and political practices among equals (Feixa et al., 2016).

However, youth movements and cultures and their social networks are subject to social constraints, especially when they are counter-hegemonic. Political socialization implies transactions between individuals and the environment (Andersson, 2020), between the construction of meanings and dominant cultural contexts, between autonomy and constraints, in a dialectic that involves both continuity and change.

Particular contexts of learning and experimentation act as catalysts for processes of political socialization (Gozzo & Sampugnaro, 2016; Quéniart, 2016). That is, life experiences, political and social situations, and opportunity structures (Schwarzer & Connor, 2012) can facilitate or hinder the acquisition of participatory political skills. Macro-institutional, proximity and sociodemographic factors (Pachi et al., 2014), in addition to the political cultures associated with these, are part of this context of learning opportunities, social practices and youth political participation. More concretely, early exposure to some of these political cultures—those with a communitarian character, cultures related to societies highly mobilized around certain conflicts, and also those which include a large number of social movements—have a formative influence and can influence the development of habitus or activist dispositions towards change and not only reproductive inertia (Mihai, 2016). In turn, the emergence and development of social movements and participative practices depend on the existence of agents possessing certain dispositions that imply a particular way of seeing and understanding the world, certain knowledge, an ethos and an inclination towards struggle. These dispositions transcend the strict domain of political behaviour, and penetrate, by way of radical habitus, into personal and working life (Crossley, 2003). Their transferable character also allows for a potential adaptation of habitus to changing environments.

In a globalized world, the impact of macrostructural factors—the cultural and economic currents that dominate Late Modern societies, including the deinstitutionalization of the political field, individualization and neoliberal policies—stands out as an element that conditions youth political commitment (Furlong & Cartmel, 2007; Harris et al., 2010). At present, individualization and neoliberalism are forces that converge and feed off each other in the political field. Thus, models of political action that attempt to respond to the increasingly restricted options for youth agency in the face of neoliberal capitalism have appeared. These encourage forms of politicization of everyday life as means to affirm political agency and self-realization (Manning, 2014; Riley et al., 2013). This restructuring of the political field causes an increase in political practices linked to individualized commitments and related to ways of life that were until recently considered ‘non-political’ in the socialization of younger generations. These include lifestyle, eating and recycling habits, online activities, consumption and cultural choices.

Research Design

The results of surveys published periodically by the Basque government on youth political engagement in the Basque Autonomous Community show that, in recent years, a minority of young people are very or somewhat interested in politics: 29% according to the latest data (Basque Government, 2020). However, these general surveys leave important questions unanswered. What meanings do these young people attribute to politics? What do political interest and disinterest, political commitment and disconnection mean to them? How they start their political learning? In a context of a new political era in the Basque Country, we began a qualitative investigation in 2018, with the aim of delving into these questions. Over 2018 and 2019 we conducted 31 in-depth interviews and four discussion groups in which 32 young people participated; some of the respondents defined themselves as ‘politicized’ and others as ‘not politicized’ or ‘not interested in politics’ (Larrinaga et al., 2020).

Qualitative research has been identified as appropriate for research seeking to identify emergent forms of youth political participation (Chryssochoou & Barrett, 2017; Stolle et al., 2008). We believe that qualitative analysis is ideal for identifying and understanding the meanings attributed by young people to politics, and their political practices, and to understand more deeply their perceptions of cultural elements of continuity and discontinuity with respect to previous generations.

Taking into consideration the objectives defined in the introduction of this article, as part of the larger research project mentioned above, a sample of 17 young and young adults connected with the Basque nationalist left was identified, 8 socialized as women and 9 as men, between 18 and 35 years old. The breadth of the age interval sought to include narratives with respect to political learnings developed both before and immediately after the end of armed activity by pro-independence political formations. While the sample size is limited from a quantitative point of view, we believe that the purposeful selection of a small number of qualified informants can nevertheless contribute to the opening of an unexplored field of research—activist youth learning after the cessation of political violence in the Basque Country. Along these lines, a significant amount of existing research has demonstrated the validity of small qualitative samples to achieve solid and significant results, provided that certain conditions are met (Crouch & McKenzie, 2006; Young & Casey, 2018). The most important of these is to achieve a saturation or repetition of units of meaning sufficient to facilitate a satisfactory identification of themes and their dimensions. Finally, research using small qualitative samples has also been established as a valid methodology in existing research specifically addressing youth political participation (Ferret, 2014; Manning, 2014; Velte, 2018).

In order to meet the abovementioned conditions, purposive sampling took into consideration factors that were considered relevant to ensure a diversity of points of view. Participants were selected from different organizations, and social and community movements who have attended various types of schools. They have different social origins: nine interviewees come from working-class families, six from middle or professional backgrounds and two from upper-middle social environments. They also came from different regions of the Basque Country, both urban and rural. Finally, the linguistic factor was integrated into the design: 13 of the interviews were carried out in the Basque language and 4 in Spanish.

The Impact of Inherited Political Culture on the Political Learning of Young Activists in the Basque Country

The dispositions internalized from family life and the opportunities for activism provided by the culture inherent to the nation-building processes in Basque society constitute two of the fundamental pillars in the constitution of Basque left-wing nationalist youth agency. This culture developed in a context of conflict and anti-hegemonic resistance; consequently, it has been built from a foundation of community and solidarity networks. The young people who participated in this research engaged in their initiatory political practices with their peers in political movements born of popular initiatives. However, in some ways, these movements are the quasi-natural continuation of a highly politicized socialization experienced in families from an early age, which is materialized as significant inherited political capital. These young people attended school in the Basque language, have lived in an environment in which Basque culture is valued and have inherited the memory of the civil war (1936–1939) and Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975). They have also lived in a context of political violence. The intensity of family socialization is manifested not only in the political values and orientations transmitted—left-wing values of national and class solidarity and feminism—but also in children’s own experiences and their daily participation in popular festivals and cultural, community and political events. These experiences have shaped their memories and stamped their bodies, in the form of enduring political orientations.

Over the years, especially since I moved away, I’ve come to realize that O. [Basque town] was very dynamic, for better and for worse. There are always things to do in the town. My parents have been politically active, so it has always been part of our lives. I remember living through situations as a child that I was too young to understand. We had English classes in the centre and once, on the day O.G and H. [two ETA members] died, my mother called and said ‘today you’re not going to English’, because there were riots in the street. All that was part of the landscape (…) In O. there were many people in the social movements, and from the feminist movement. It was very industrial and it has given me that perspective (…). My parents have been politically involved in different ways. My mother learned Basque very young, and has been very committed to the feminist movement. My father comes from the movement in favour of the Basque language and has also been in the independence movement. Later on, from my mother (…) we received a lot of training on socialism and communism. When the Egunkaria newspaper was shut down [Basque language newspaper closed by police in 2003] and my father was arrested it was a turning point for me and my sister. My father had participated in the movement for the Basque language and in the creation of Basque language media (…) so, we began to read things politically (…). From there we began join in political activism (Woman, 25, social and transformative economy cooperative).

The social and cultural origins of the participants in this research are different but, in general, two basic orientations predominate in their political socialization. In certain families, inherited knowledge emphasizes social issues and class. In others, the values associated with Basque culture and language are considered the bases of national identity. Since the 1960s, left-wing nationalism has articulated these two dimensions in its ideology. In recent years, feminist principles have also been strongly incorporated.

I am from Ezkerraldea [industrial zone] and I think that being from there has greatly marked my socialization and part of my identity. In my family (…) the workers’ struggle has always been present, because my father was a worker at Euskalduna [shipyards closed in the 1980s due to economic crisis], and we have lived through those stories at home (…). My grandfather was a worker at Etxebarria [old metalwork factory] (Woman, 26, youth organization of the nationalist left).

My mother was born in France, her family were refugees from the civil war (…). My grandfather was in the war. His brother was shot (…). An uncle is close to the nationalist left (…). My mother is not an activist, and for my father, his life is Basque language and culture (…). That is what I have inherited, those values (…). Mine is a family built around nationalism (…) if my parents have left us something, it is their commitment to the language (Male, 33, journalist and digital activist).

As reflected in the interviews, the set of dispositions or political habitus in the family environment has continued post-childhood. In adolescence and early youth, the participatory opportunity structure, made up of a multiplicity of community spaces, has provided young people with the chance to exercise their sovereignty and gradually construct themselves as political subjects. Many of the young people participating in the research followed a similar initiatory trajectory, beginning with more informal forms of engagement—local youth assemblies, gaztetxes, self-managed spaces, popular initiatives and movements—and continuing to become involved in more formal political and student organizations. The density of the associative fabric, together with a bottom-up participatory culture, has provided many young people with established and accessible pathways to collective political commitment.

There was a squat because young people needed a place of our own. In fact, Guernica [Basque town] has always been very active, here there have always been many organized groups and social movements (…). The conditions were that the people managed the cultural space for themselves, that the city council did not get involved, that it was self-managed. For this reason, a participatory process was generated in the town (Woman, 30, self-managed cultural space).

Sometimes, the places and times at which youth come together are, in principle, for fun and sociability. However, these have also become sites of cognition and emotion where collective learning processes among equals have germinated. In these spaces, young people establish arenas of debate, knowledge and conflict, experience new ways of life, new ways of relating with others and develop multiple civic-political competencies: commitment, communication and negotiation skills, self-confidence, critical thinking and reflexivity. In this way, they acquire activist and counter-hegemonic dispositions which, later, allow them to question, on the basis of their own experiences and contradictions, nation, class and gender domination, while simultaneously weaving relationships of friendship, creating networks of sociability, having fun and enjoying their free time. Thus, experiments by young activists take on diverse, even contradictory manifestations in which the social, cultural and political merge, and in which political practices appear closely linked to daily life activities including cultural and digital consumption, leisure activities and even partying.

After a time, you start reflect ‘we had nothing in mind but partying, we were looking for opportunities to have fun’. But I think that the gazte asanblada [youth assembly] helped us a lot to socialize, especially to learn what it means to work as a team. I think that there we learned to work as a group, to see how the local organizations of the town worked (…). We learned, first of all, to dialogue with people of all ages, to reach consensus and organize things. In addition, we learned to think about the town’s issues. I believe that you develop that critical attitude by listening to others (…) and also by arguing with others. We worked as a group but also autonomously (…) and you learn to be activist. In our case, we learned how to confront the city council (…). You learn that young people are not just the future, that we are also the present. And that our opinions must also be heard now (Woman, 25, Platform for the Right to Decide in the Basque Country).

In early youth, the more generic political habitus internalized during the early years of socialization develops as an activist habitus, through experiences among peers, and thus becomes the germ of youth agency.

Transactions with a Changing Context: Youth Agency and New Meanings in Political Practices

The process undertaken by the forces of the nationalist left in order to integrate into institutional politics, accompanied by the unilateral dissolution of the armed organization ETA, has meant a new era for young people socialized within the nationalist framework. Like agency, political capital accumulated in the form of reflective dispositions and cognitive resources allows young people—especially young adults—to evaluate events and to seek coherence between current values and those of the recent past. Thus, their processes of repositioning are accompanied by narratives in which they think through and debate the foundations and potential repercussions of given changes. On the one hand, the disappearance of violence has meant that expectations in terms of developing other ways of doing counter-hegemonic politics and opportunities to seek alliances with different political actors predominate. However, on the other hand, fears have emerged that a demobilization of youth agency, inherent in political institutionalization, could obfuscate conflict with the state and weaken the community fabric.

I took a new direction in my activism (…). In my opinion, this change in the political cycle was a factor. It is not just that ETA has laid down its arms. I think it coincides with the transformative processes of the 21st century (…) The fact that political conflict is not so intense now, although it persists, I think it has helped (Woman, 27, feminist group).

My generation will be one of the last to get active in a context marked by conflict (…). Contradictions used to be obvious, they were in your face, and it was easier to take a position and get active. As there is no such explicit conflict right now (…) the consequence is a lack of politicization. So, keeping some points of reference alive and bringing contradictions to the surface is a challenge, otherwise it will be increasingly difficult to activate people. Before, the repression was obvious (Man, 26, squatted housing community).

Among the younger people interviewed, the signs of a generational break are more explicit. They were socialized in a later period and saw a less brutal side of the conflict and have not had the same experiences as their older peers and parents. For this reason, although they see themselves as inheritors of a political tradition and radical values of commitment, they are less burdened to materialize their radical habitus in other ways. All of these changes bare a relationship with processes characteristic of neoliberal globalization, the precariousness of the labour market for young people, the disappearance of a linear course towards an anticipated form of adult life and general uncertainty. All of these factors condition youth interests and shift their concerns and practices towards other foci of political interest.

I think that, in general, there is a break or a difference between the older and younger generations (…) I believe that the older people live their own struggle (…) We young people are working in other ways (…) It is clear to me that we are immersed in a fight for a new way of living. I became an activist because my parents are from the nationalist left. I mean, I am not denying that perspective. I think they have made a huge contribution and that is how we got where we are today. If it weren’t for them there would be no activist consciousness in the Basque Country (…). But, in some ways, I feel a bit distanced from this (…). That is why I am squatting (…). Some of us are ready to escape the model imposed on us by capitalism (…). Young people do not live badly because the Basque Country is not independent (…) young people live badly because they do not have money to study (…). Errekaleor [a squatted housing community] is just one example. I think this is more important than ethnicity. (Male, 20, student organization)

In general, a progressive individualization of political commitment is identified in the activist trajectories reported by both youth and young adults. This is expressed, above all, in distancing from the political organizations in which they were initially socialized, although more in terms of their political practices than ideology. Consequently, their practices tend not to materialize in the field of institutionalized politics, although some activists maintain formal ties. In a context of a progressively individualized culture and a lack of certainties, their political participation is predominantly rooted in those spaces where they are able to develop counter-power, autonomy and control. In those sovereign spaces, they try to build both different relationships and ways of life.

Politically, I have abandoned institutionalized activism. Now I am not a member of any structure [political organization]. But I understand that my life is much more politicized because, for example, all my food comes (…) from consumer coops. As for leisure, I think much more about what, how and all that. I try to interpret all my relationships through a more political lens. My work is political. We do politics when we offer a service or help another cooperative. And work itself is an instrument for doing politics within [the company] (Woman, 25, social and transformative economy cooperative).

The current change of cycle has been accompanied by new learning processes that have demanded introspection and reflexivity from activists. Thus, political and personal transformation has gone hand in hand, and deep processes of subjectivation and identity reconstruction have accompanied this process. Especially in the case of young adults, self-realization and individual transformation are now becoming an inseparable part of collective political commitment. Youth activists believe that any social change demands transformations in both oneself and one’s actions, not only in the public sphere but also in personal daily life. Individual actions—whether in relation to the use of the Basque language, sexuality and relationships, consumption and eating habits or life and work alternatives—are part of the activist commitment. This means that, in their perception, politics does not constitute an external sphere, separate from everyday life. On the contrary, the public and the private, the self and daily life appear closely connected in political practices.

You care about issues, and why you do things, etc. And, over time, you get your head in order, and you ask yourself ‘what we are doing here’ (Male, 33, journalist and digital activist).

The youth movement was in a phase of ‘we are going to reflect on ourselves, we are going to focus on relationships (…) and stop being always reactive [to the repression]’. I don’t know, I was on another page, willing to move on to a more constructive phase. Well, even though we didn’t use the word at the time, an important foundation was feminism. And not fixating so much on the external world to see how to change it, but internally, to see what roles, what power relations we reproduced among young people ourselves (Woman, 27, feminist group).

For young adults, within a conception of life in which personal and political action appear intertwined, the worlds of work leisure constitute further chapters of their ongoing commitment. Certainly, their engagement in both areas must be understood as a continuum in space and time. In attributing ethical importance to their decisions around work, they redefine the meaning of work itself. Work thus appears in their experiences associated with values such as individual and collective sovereignty, sustainability, care for others and justice, and also with the opportunity for creative self-expression. Thus, commitment is exercised continually, without separation between one delimited political activity and another. In fact, political practice appears deeply embedded in the daily expression of youth agency, and this commitment expands invading all areas and times of personal life.

For me there is no limit, I do not know how to set limits between work and social commitment. I mean: When am I working and when am I an activist? They’re all one and the same these days, so… I would say that it is not work, it is a passion, and that they pay me to follow my passion (Male, 27, association for the revitalization of the Basque language).

Where I buy oranges is political. Or who I buy milk from is also political. Because we influence those little things (…) all the little decisions we make are political (Male, 35, group for ecological transition).

Alongside the weakening of inherited political loyalties, collective regulation of youth by left-wing nationalist political organizations has been toned down. The collective and national no longer have a stable and consistent meaning for youth agency, and instead, they can be expressed in more varied way than before. In the absence of uniform patterns of valid behaviour for the new situation, in recent years, multiple manifestations of youth agency have been building new ties of belonging and new alliances in interplay with other agents and (re)creating connections in communities of interest around different causes. The consequences of this have included a diversification of activism and the conformation of multiple emancipatory political subjects that are organized around youth interests along the lines of contemporary emerging agendas: communitarian and alternative ways of life, anti-capitalism, feminism and environmental movements, language and minority culture activism, squatting movements and so on. In these initiatives, lifestyles which have a prefigurative function to anticipate future models are experimented with through a great variety of micro-political actions that fit loosely within a ‘container’ political project of nation-building.

Conclusions

Despite the limitation of its being based on a small number of interviews, our analysis suggests that nationalist youth are shifting towards new political practices. In the Basque Country over the last 40 years, the constellation of movements sympathetic to the nationalist left and its community culture have offered a favourable opportunity structure for political socialization and the shaping of counter-hegemonic youth activism, endowed with significant political resources. Our analysis shows, first of all, the importance of local context in youth political learning. Certain contentious socializing contexts favour the development of youth participation in activism in a way open to experimentation and political innovation, insofar as they provide young people with high-level political competencies and facilitate access to the political arena.

Second, the study indicates that although there is a strong transmission of culture and political memory, a change in the political cycle—in this case, the institutionalization of political forces with a contentious tradition and the end of armed activity—is connected to a transformation in the repertoires and models of youth political practices. De facto, there has been a weakening of inherited loyalties and a certain breakdown between generations whose experiences are different, especially in younger people.

Third, the research suggests that the evolution of activist youth culture in the Basque Country is not disconnected from other global trends present in both the Spanish and wider Western political arena. The end of armed activity by ETA and the integration of a coalition of left-wing nationalist forces into the political system cannot be dissociated from the changes produced both in the political practices of the related youth movements and in the new meanings that young people attributed to these practices. Young activists have embarked on an exploration of less organizationally regulated spheres and developed political experiences with a more individualized logic. Within this logic, sociopolitical commitment and self-realization, collective activism and daily micro-politics are combined, in line with contemporary emerging agendas. This trend towards more individualized activist repertoires in everyday life is consistent with the type of citizenship fostered by neoliberalism. The influence of neoliberalism, together with a weakening of the culture of contentious mobilization that can be linked to the end of the violent conflict, may in the future condition the counter-hegemonic character that Basque nationalist left youth activism has exhibited up to the present. In this regard, global neoliberal culture has significant implications for both the shaping of young people’s subjectivities and their forms of socio-political participation. Through rhetoric about freedom of choice and individual responsibility, neoliberal argumentation promotes the ideal of an autonomous citizen, a risk manager responsible for their own destiny. The logic of neoliberal subjectivity also creates conditions favourable to the incorporation of a whole range of informal activities linked to youth leisure, consumption and daily life into spaces for political activity, in both daily life and activist spaces.

In this respect, the activist dispositions acquired by young left-wing nationalists in their early political learning are dynamically rebuilt on an ongoing basis in interaction with not only their emerging local reality but also the structural, cultural and political conditions typical of Late Modern societies. Heritage and experimentation come together in their practices. This suggests that beyond one-dimensional explanations that privilege either continuity or change exclusively—that is, the persistence of structures versus the capacity of youth agencies—the political learning of young people involves a multidirectional, complex and permanent transaction between dynamic political practices and changing contexts at different scales.