Those of you who find the Northern Irish conflict too labyrinthine and tangled to fathom will be baffled beyond comprehension by the Basque situation, an affair as complex and impenetrable as the Basque language, a bewildering collision of consonants which has nothing in common with any other tongue on Earth. As a contribution to greater understanding of the murky matter though, Julio Medem’s documentary Basque Ball is a landmark achievement.
Entirely non-opinionated, the film consists of talking-head interviews with over 100 politicians, journalists and academics, its only stated purpose being to inform and educate. It does both, but it’s also hugely entertaining to boot. As with any good talking-heads documentary, the beauty of this straightforward approach is that the narrators’ various pronouncements are more or less immune to manipulation. No-one has yet been able to define exactly what ‘the Basque nation’ entails, beyond a love of mountains, melancholic folk music and furious allegiance to Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao football clubs, but the film does its damnedest to rectify matters.
Shane MacGowan, under fire once for some doubtless sober-as-a-judge pro-Republican remark, pleaded that the National Question was an area he felt “completely confused about, like every single one of the first-generation Irish people that I know.” It’s all too evident from Basque Ball that similar confusion runs rampant among the Basques collectively, with nothing like unanimous popular support for independence: most elections indicate that only one-third of Basques seem in favour of total severance from Spain, and only 16% can speak the language. This clearly renders the place at least as much of a ‘nation’ as Scotland or Wales, but even leftist-minded viewers broadly sympathetic to Basque separatism will have frequent cause to lament the nationalists’ appalling sense of PR, with several boneheaded statements no more intellectually advanced than Des O’Malley’s youthful observation that “Ireland is one nation, one country, because God made it one”.
Obviously, none of this is to deny that justified anti-Madrid sentiment festered and flourished under Franco’s police-state repression, setting forces in motion that, once awakened, were never likely to quietly disappear. These policies continued more or less unchanged under Felipe Gonzalez’ nominally Socialist government, which favoured ‘dirty war’ techniques of which Her Majesty’s Government itself would have been proud. Many Basques are also keen to disabuse outside observers of the notion that anything has meaningfully changed: to this day, Madrid refuses to talk to even the moderate Basque parties, stating that there is no conflict, and therefore nothing to discuss.
Basque Ball is an endlessly fascinating document, of far wider potential appeal than to political-geography obsessives. For the latter, it’s an absolute feast.