Politics
While there is no independent Basque state, Spain's autonomous community of the Basque Country, made up of the provinces of Álava (Araba), Vizcaya (Bizkaia) and Guipúzcoa (Gipuzkoa), is primarily a historical consequence and an answer to the wide autonomy claim of the residents.
Navarre has a separate statute of autonomy, also based on the historical medieval charters. Until recently, Basque only survived in the Northern part of Navarre in the areas designated as Basque speaking or mixed in Navarrese law. Questions of political, linguistic and ethnic allegiance and identity are highly complex in Navarre. Politically some Basque nationalists would like to integrate with the Autonomous Basque Community but this currently is not the view of the majority of the people of Navarre.
The Northern Basque Country today does not exist as a formal political entity and is officially simply part of the French department of Pyrénées Atlantiques, centered in Béarn. In recent years the number of mayors of the region supporting the creation of a separate Basque department has grown to 63,87%. So far, their attempts have been unsuccessful.
Read more about this topic: Basque People
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who’s out in front of nobody?... Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)