Boston Globe - Editorial

July 21, 1997

By Globe Staff

The public revulsion against terrorism displayed on the streets of Spanish cities last week is an indication of how much Spain and the new Europe want to move beyond the extremes of nationalism that have rent the continent for centuries. A million Spanish protesters said ``no'' to Basque terrorists who kidnapped and murdered a young Spanish politician. Basque separatists, who seek a breakaway country of their own, have murdered 800 people during the last 30 years.

Spain in particular has been plagued with secessionist movements within its borders. Catalonia, the northeast region around Barcelona, has all the qualifications of nationhood - a separate language and culture and a long history of national sentiment. In recent years, however, Catalonia has peacefully pursued its destiny within a greater union with Spain.

Even bloodier than the Basque separatists has been the Irish Republican Army, which seeks not independence, but to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and attach it to Ireland - against the wishes of the majority in the province. The IRA's basic message is: We no longer want to be a minority in your country; we want you to be a minority in ours.

The Scots, who forged a union with England in 1707, also have their separatists. They regularly outpoll their separatist counterparts in Northern Ireland but have not resorted to terror to get their way. To a lesser extent, the Welsh, too, have forged a separate national identity within the United Kingdom but have rarely resorted to violence.

Belgium is a country divided between French and Flemish speakers, a division that has degenerated into rioting from time to time. Flemish nationalists, who would like their own country, are vexed by the fact that most people in Brussels, the leading city in the Flemish part of the country as well as the national capital, speak French, not Flemish. Flemish nationalists realize that a separate country of their own would be greatly diminished without Brussels but that it would be impossible to absorb the city.

Stephane Dion, Canada's minister for intergovernmental affairs, has said that if only Montreal were 80 percent English-speaking instead of French-speaking, it would rob the Quebec separatist movement of its cohesiveness, just as Brussels does to the Flemish separatists.

The bloodiest resolution of all to the nation-without-a-country syndrome came with the breakup of Yugoslavia, where Croats and Slovenes had long suffered under what they considered to be a Serb-dominated federation cobbled together from the wreckage of the Ottoman and Austrian empires following World War I. In Bosnia the Serbs refused to become a minority and fought for a Greater Serbia, which they partly achieved. The Bosnian Croats, with an even smaller minority in Bosnia, have been even more successful creating a Greater Croatia - de facto, if not de jure.

In contrast, the peaceful separation of Sweden and Norway in 1905 was a model of how nations can become countries without bloodshed. The separation of Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1991 was the most recent peaceful divorce in Europe.

The problem of nations without their own national borders is not limited to Europe. Tibetans chafe under the Chinese yoke. The Palestinian national movement has become, in many ways, a mirror image of the Zionist movement that led the founding of Israel.

In Europe, however, as the continent becomes more economically and politically integrated, the power and influence of the nation state may begin to give way to the rising importance of Europe's regions, many of which have ancient histories of their own.

To a certain extent this is already happening in Catalonia, which is emerging not just as a Spanish province but as a major European regional center. It is the hope of many Irish politicians on both sides of the divide that their Europeanness will begin to erase the importance of nationality. Britain's new Labor government has promised to give both Scotland and Wales regional parliaments within the United Kingdom.

The Spanish already allow the Catalans and the Basques their own parliaments, school systems, and tax codes, not unlike the autonomy of American states. The Basque region is unique in Europe and America in that it is responsible for the collection and distribution of all taxes. There is no federal tax; the Basques pay Madrid for state-supplied services. The Basque separatist political party captures about 14 percent of the vote in elections - about what Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, gets in Northern Ireland - but that has not deterred the terrorists.

Hopefully the men of violence throughout Europe have listened to the message of 2 million marching feet in the Spanish streets that have spoken so eloquently against political murder.