2.- THE CITIZEN AND THE COMMUNITY.

Citizen : In a democratic society, the citizen is the subject of political life and as such enjoys rights and duties, and takes part in the State and in society, with the aim of feeling self-obliged by the democratic laws. A citizen is a free man, subject to rights and who, like his equals, gives his consent to be subject to the law which guarantees said rights.
In turn, the citizen must freely decide which social, cultural and political organization to choose. The essence of being a human being does not derive from the fact of being a member of a social group, but rather of having the capacity to decide how he wishes the rules governing such a social group to be.
Thought regarding modernity advocates the notion that only the individual may be subject to rights, this superseding those of collective entities and the like ("the people"). Nowadays, nothing democratic can evolve against the principle of the citizen, as the status of citizen grants the right to choose among ideological plurality.
Being a citizen implies recognition of an equal fundamental degree of dignity, whose legal translation involves at the very least the need to respect the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man.
For the nationalists, the citizen is not subject to rights, but rather to duties towards the homeland. The citizen has no other rights apart from those which grant him or her the right to belong to the community, and to belong to the community, evidence must be given accepting nationalist ideas. To this end, Arzalluz has said that in Euskadi "there are citizens and Basques". That is, there are people who do not accept what nationalism orders, for which reason they are not patriots (the citizens) and others who follow the duties imposed by the nationalist community (the Basques).

Citizenship : this is the legal status of an individual person, which means that all citizens have a particular set of rights and freedoms which are linked to duties and responsibilities.
Citizenship, defined by the right of man to his freedom, is inseparable from equality and, therefore, has a universal vocation. Citizenship is linked to democracy and political participation, which means that the individual and his rights are basic values and constitute the foundation of all legal order.
To speak of the citizen effectively means providing the individual with supremacy over groups, which not all people accept and, in contrast, defend the superiority of groups over the individual, imposing the supposed rights of the people of Euskal Herria over and above the rights of life and political participation of people by means of threats and murders.
The concept of citizenship must be considered as a set of rights whose establishment has been evolving over the centuries, whereby it cannot be considered as a natural fact. Rather, it constitutes social construction, which has become enriched as rights have been extended and the level of equality and demands for human dignity have risen.
Citizenship is a status which should be displayed both within and outside the country itself, given that any state is compelled to defend its citizens who are unfairly treated in other nations, using the methods available to them.
However, one thing is to attribute pre-eminence to the individual and another very different thing is to believe that only the individual has rights, or that the individual cannot ask for protection so that what he loves be respected due to his forming part of the identity of the group in which he has grown, in the event that he should be urged to abandon his special characteristics if he wishes to avoid exclusion, due to the fact of said group not happening to be among the dominant majority.
Coexistence between the rights of the individual and the rights of groups, together with the need to seek common goals which may in a particular sense unify citizens' actions is, probably, the most complex challenge existing in society nowadays, and in whose solution it is clear that the historical-social reality of each country must be taken into consideration.
Being a citizen refers not only to the world from a legal point of view but also to the relationship between the way the human social condition evolves, the way the field of social identity is constructed and with the way of guiding individual initiative within society itself.
The main function of citizenship is to consolidate coexistence by making it possible for rights to be equal in an unequal society.

Basque citizenship: the Statute of Autonomy of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country attributes the political status of Basques to "those who have administrative residence, in accordance with the General Laws of the State, in any of the municipalities incorporated in the Basque Autonomous Community, and to residents overseas and their descendents, should they apply for such status, who may have had their most recent administrative residence in Euskadi, provided that they maintain Spanish nationality." (Sec.7).
In the Statute, the political subject of citizenship is defined as administrative residence - in other words, by means of the expression of a voluntary act of tradition linked to a municipal area of Euskadi.
Notwithstanding, nationalism bases the principle of citizenship on the nationality obtained through ideological commitment to a specific project involving national construction, so as to be able to thus shape a nationalist community. Arzalluz has stated that in Euskadi "there are Basques and citizens", meaning that the only Basques are nationalists, the patriots, and that the rest are mere citizens or inhabitants, whose rights shall be limited.

Full citizenship : this means that in terms of citizenship of individual rights, we must all be equal. Notwithstanding, in Euskadi, the fact is that full rights are denied to a part of the Basque population. Forbidding people to elect and be elected by means of threats which oblige them to leave or to avoid a commitment to occupy a political post, by murder or by a census and an identity card based on ideological commitment, constitutes the most absolute way of denying the right of citizenship.

Multiple citizenship : proclaiming multiple citizenship implies that citizens belong to modernity - that is to say, be able to be, for instance, from Vitoria, from Alava, Basque, Spanish and European at the same time or, in other words, a citizen of the world.

Principle of citizenship : this must be interpreted democratically - that is to say, like the concept of "one person, one vote", that of individual responsibility, dignity, non-discrimination, respect for the opinions of the others, solidarity, tolerance and sustainable development. In this principle of citizenship, the political status of Basques is recognized as applying to all those persons who hold residence in one of the municipalities of Euskadi. In short, a citizenship based on shared rights and not on ethnic similarity.
Citizenship is the main instrument for the integration of individuals among the people of Spain, its being based on freedom and equality before the law.
However, neither history, nor language, culture, ethnic group, territory, nor the land (Euskal Herria) can be transformed into subjects of rights, as they tend to limit citizens' freedom and would make them subordinate subjects. Individuals have the status of citizen over and above that of members of a real or supposed national community.

Principle of territoriality: to think of territories is to think of conquests, reconquests, the recovery of lost territories, over and above people. To think of territories is to dehumanise politics, whereby it is necessary that Basques should think less in terms of metres and territories and more in terms of people, of citizens.
An example of the priority given to territory over people is Udalbiltza, which is the embryonic version of a Parliament with one sole ideology, chosen by territories, not by people, in order to constitute the nationalists' pure community: if a councillor from a town hall is present in said assembly, he is counted as the whole municipality.
The principle of territoriality is used in pro-sovereign theses, and the democratic principle of one person, one vote is not accepted; yet as these two principles may clash if one of the territories consulted should fail to accept the unity of Euskal Herria, then violence would be used, which is why ETA is there. So in practice these two principles are difficult to reconcile, given that a clearly anti-democratic proposal for drawing up an electoral roll has been submitted which does not beat about the bush, in which there are only nationalists and as such the problem is solved.

Autonomous Community : according to the Spanish Constitution, this refers to a territorial institution which enjoys autonomy for the purposes of administering its interests.
According to the Statute of Autonomy, it is the way in which the Basque people are brought together within the Spanish state, in accordance with the Constitution, and is made up of Alava, Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya, and shall have the right to incorporate Navarra, should the latter desire it and by complying with a specific procedure.

People: this is the free and voluntary association of free and equal individuals, democratically-speaking. Notwithstanding, the term people may have quite different meanings: philosophically-speaking, it is understood as being an organic whole which involves attributing the interpretation of this abstract and totalitarian idea of people to a person or a small group of people.
Sociologically-speaking, it coincides with the concept of population - in other words, it is a collective of quantitatively-measurable individuals who make up a state.
Or ideologically-speaking, it is interpreted as being those persons or groups which, by professing certain ideas or possessing specific qualities and because they are or are considered as being in the majority, may be equivalent to a people. In other words, the concept of people is made to coincide not with all citizens, but rather with a specific group of them.
Rousseau tends to favour a sociological notion when he says that members of the social pact "collectively take the name of people and in particular are referred to as citizens, as contributing towards sovereign authority."
According to the liberal conception of people, it only exists as an imaginary whole and solely at the time of electoral activity.

Basque people : for Basque constitutionalist democrats, this is the sum of all Basques who really exist at any given time, because "people" is society, citizenship, the infinite variety of a crowd whose essence lies in its very plurality. The concept of people has an exclusively democratic and rational substratum, whereby any other considerations (origin, race, language and culture, etc.) should be irrelevant in politics.
Notwithstanding, for nationalists, it is a community in which its members speak in the name of the Basque Country (Euskal Herria), because they believe themselves to be chosen to make up the authentic people and be the repositories of all their previously defined essences. They look for differences with everything that is outside and, in turn, diffuse internal cultural differences so that the identity of the Basque people may be unique, unchanging, uniform and incompatible with other identities.
Its members (the guiding party) are the sole interpreters of what the People blessed with a "willing to be" want, and deny the status of authentic Basque to anyone who puts individual rights before the will of the people. Such a person becomes an enemy of the People.
They use violence because the Basque people are denied the right to decide, and blame for the violence is directed at those who do not wish to willingly comply with the duties of the People (the blame is directed at the victims), given that they (the murderers) are devoted to the purifying task of freeing the People from its enemies and of ensuring its plans are carried out.
They repeat that the fate of the history of the Basque People is inextricably linked to independence, the freedom of the People, due to their being the possessors of natural and historical rights that cannot be waived. They attempt to legitimise themselves through origin, history and victimisation - in other words, by saying that they have always been here (since Cro-Magnon times or the like) and are the true natives, either because the Basque People had an identity which emigrants sent by the enemy have diffused or got rid of, and therefore the previous situation must be recognized, or also because the People have always been persecuted and "theirs" has been denied to them, and so they have the right to recover what has been lost.
They say that, to be able to fulfil the duties imposed by the People, these clash with the limitations established by the rules of democracy, and that the rights of the People are previous (historical) to those of democracy: Moreover, by not being able to be waived, the rights and freedoms of each individual cannot limit them.
They also boast about the fact that they still have not accepted the rules of democracy (the Constitution) because it is foreign, imposed and strange to the essences of the Basque people.
For members of the People, the only possible way out (national construction) is for everyone to embrace nationalism, and if one is not in favour of the task, then violence is used to domesticate the unruly ones who disregard the duties and fate of the People. As the fate of the People is that in Euskadi, in its pure, natural state, there should only be nationalists (Udalbiltza), this is why they reject a project of common coexistence for nationalists and non-nationalists (Constitution and Statute).
In short, nationalist considerations are based on the transfer of individual rights to the people. In this way, when nationalism speaks of freedom, self-determination, autonomy and rights of personality, etc., it is not referring to those possessed by each and every citizen, but rather to freedom, self-determination, autonomy and rights of the Basque People. Individuals shall only enjoy such rights if they identify themselves with the features of collective identity of the people, which previously defined by the PNV, mean the identity or personality of a pre-existing cultural community.
Yet from a democratic point of view, the only Basque people is that referred to in section 7 of the Statute of Autonomy - that is to say, the group of inhabitants of the territories of Alava, Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya, in addition to those residing overseas. And in the reality of politics, there exists no subject of political rights called the Basque People other than that of citizenship.

Basque collective subject : for some years now, the obsessive search for a collective subject has prevailed over the politics of Basque nationalism, because the Basque collective subject in itself has never existed and, moreover, the historic moment of its creation has passed, with the desire for it today being untimely.
The fact that nationalists insist and reiterate that recognition of the Basque people as they are is necessary, or that a referendum would enable the right of the Basque people to be recognized as active subjects, or that recognition of the right of the Basque people of self-determination or to decide their future, etc., is necessary, means that said collective subject does not exist and that it has serious difficulties in existing. This is why a search is being carried out to see if by magic or by means of some kind of act said non-existent collective subject may be recognized.
Nationalism seeks the creation of the political subject in terms of the Basque people not through the political institutions, but rather through the expansion and radicalisation of its own subjectivity, which it is never going to find in real history. A national state cannot be totally identified with the collective subject: that has never existed. The only collective subjects existing are those who have the capacity to put limits on subjectivity so that room for public negotiation, commitment and limitation may come about and so that this may be objectified in plural, democratic institutions which constitute the limits required to make up a public niche.

Basque society : is made up of a wide cross-section of people, of the combination of citizens who speak for themselves, because it is the individual, the human being, who is the only one capable of holding Human Rights. It is unacceptable that anybody should speak in the name of the Basque people.
It is a society that evolves with different identities shaped from many changing, non-exclusive cultures, which is why we recognize ourselves as being Basque, Spanish and European citizens.
It is a society of changing, mixed differences, in which coexistence in plurality is assumed as a basic notion, agreed upon by consensus in the Constitution and in the Statute of Autonomy.
It is a society which has accepted the European culture of citizens' rights and freedoms - that is, constitutionalist thought in order to regulate both relationships between the individual and political society, and in order to facilitate free and civilized coexistence between individuals who hold differing aspirations and ideas. That is to say, certain rules of coexistence are agreed upon by means of a basic consensus which put the spotlight on the individual of all political relations, rules based on the respect and protection of an inviolable field of individual rights and freedoms gathered together under the Spanish Constitution and the Declaration of Human Rights which are the limit of what the majority may agree upon.
It is based on a democracy agreed upon by consensus, capable of representing complex and divided social foundations such as those existing in the Basque country, in addition to an autonomous democracy based on the rights of citizens in the exercise of freedom, and of the autonomy as a way of developing democracy, which brings citizens closer to political participation and as a formula for solidarity with the other citizens of Spain.
We Basques are not legitimised by origin, which attempts to grant more rights to some than others, but rather by human rights which make us all equal in duties and rights, not because of Basque history which, like all others, has been contradictory. We Basques are legitimised by the democratic will - in other words, whereby with current arguments it may be justified as being honest and appropriate, democratically-speaking, given that the society of citizens is legitimised originally by the will of the individuals who comprise it and by the guarantee of their rights.

Basque Autonomous Community : is made up of the group of inhabitants of the territories of Alava, Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya.

Euskadi : this is a word invented by Sabino Arana to refer to the nationalist Basque Country, but which today by having been accepted by all Basques, the nationalists hardly use because it fails to serve to identify themselves as a separate group. In this sense, the nationalists have said that a non-nationalist Euskadi is not Euskadi. Notwithstanding, Euskadi does not exist as a nationalist country; this is mere fiction which the nationalists have invented, because the real Euskadi means the combination of all Basques who live here, who make up a plural society.
Politically, the Basque Country or the Basque Autonomous Community are synonyms for what exists according to the Constitution and the Statute of Autonomy, but that would legally not exist if a breaking-off of the constitutional-statutory agreement proposed by nationalism were to prosper, as this would affect the legality itself of Euskadi. This would mean that the historical territories would be cut off from the agreement and might put forward their own aspirations without being compelled to have to be joined to the other two.

Basque Country : according to the Statute of Autonomy in its section 1: "The Basque Country or Euskal Herria, as an expression of its nationality and in order to gain access to its self-government, has become an Autonomous Community within the Spanish state under the name of Euskadi or the Basque Country, in accordance with the Constitution and this Statute, which is its basic institutional standard."

Euskal Herria : this is not used as a translation of the Basque People or of peoples who speak Basque, but rather as a project of territorial annexation. It is a project which nationalists regard as having the right to carry out. It has replaced the term Euskadi, because the latter refers to a shared reality, whereas Euskal Herria is a non-shared project.

Spain : the aversion and hatred on the part of nationalists towards the terms Spain and Spanish goes to the extremes of denying their use, or replacing them with the Spanish state, or simply State. Thus, the Plaza de España in Vitoria is called Plaza Nueva in the nationalist media, and the autonomous television channels say it's raining in the State, etc. Deep-down, the hatred towards the word Spain is no more than the desire to not recognize Spain as a democratic, plural, autonomous state in which individual freedoms are guaranteed.

Party : this is meant to show awareness of those general interests of the Basque people which precisely only it knows how to formulate and defend: For this reason, its leaders speak in the name of the Basque people as a whole and state that they are defending its will.
For many nationalists, the party is what is truly important, the symbols of the Basque people (flag, national anthem, aberri eguna (Patriotism Day), etc.) are those of the party, and to this end the ikurriña (Basque flag) must always be flying in the batzokis (PNV Basque Nationalist Party Clubs), but not the town halls, as the latter is for everybody. The party is the only one which has the power to interpret the will of the people and therefore constitutes its visible head and guiding light.

Nationalists : are those who cannot imagine that Basques are like the rest, of mixed race and evolution. They the repositories of certain essences of the Basque people preset and defined by themselves and therefore they are the only ones who may defend Euskadi. On one occasion, a nationalist delegate from Alava said that if in Euskadi the constitutionalists were to govern, "it would be like putting the fox among the chickens." Notwithstanding, in Alava they do govern and there is quite a lot more freedom than in the other provinces.

Abertzale : is the one who fights actively against external and internal enemies of the "Basque people" in order to obtain social and political division between Basques and Spaniards, and be able to construct the nationalist community to last forever.

Constitutionalists : are democrats who advocate and defend plurality and integration into the Spanish state, and who recognize Spain as a democratic and autonomous country. However, for nationalists they are nothing, the enemies of Euskadi, from outside.

Those people : Arzallus has repeatedly referred to and continues to refer to voters of the PP and PSE in this way; "those simple people who are cheated and manipulated by those from outside," and has even said that their vote is not qualitative, but simply quantitative.

Spanish : those from HB and PNV mutually refer to each other as "Spanish" in order to defend each other. Thus, those from Batasuna refer to the "Spanish PNV" and the young supporters of the PNV (EGI) quite often brand ETA and HB as being Spanish, because they both compete with each other to see who the authentic, true Basques are.
For the other Basque citizens, these adjectives are the names given to the people from a particular region or country and therefore do not imply any insult, but rather a part of our identity. What we really have here is a denial of the status of Basques to others.
It is not said that you are not a democrat, or that you are totalitarian; it used as an attempt to throw the adversary out of the social group, although from the legal point of view all us Basques are Spanish.
For ETA and Batasuna the term Spanish is a reason to kill or harass Basque citizens in order to drive them out of Euskadi. Although when they accuse the PNV or nationalists of being Spanish, it is to warn them that they must follow in their footsteps.

Authentic Basque : is the one who is compelled to accept the political project and the cultural identity advocated by nationalist ideology., as only those who accept the nationalist definitions of what is Basque are Basques. Nationalist leaders not only say what we have been but also what all us Basques are duty bound to be. Only nationalists are true Basques, and as Rosa Diez said on one occasion, "the rest of us are fake Basques."
In practice, for nationalists, the authentic Basque is the most radical one in terms of incompatibility with what is termed "Spanish", the most "anti-Spanish."

Anti-Basque : is the one who thinks in another way, votes for another party, who accepts the ideology of the Basque collective identity, who is not nationalist. It is the one who says that nationalism is not something natural and consubstantial to all people, but rather an ideological product like any other.
It is unacceptable from a democratic point of view that any party or ideology may say or decide individually what the personality of Basque citizens should be. The lack of freedom of non-nationalists is reflected in the fact that nationalists do not accept that more individual personality may be expressed in each citizen than that according to the collective identity advocated by nationalism.

Pro-Spanish: nationalists refer to those Basques who are non-nationalists as being pro-Spanish, so as to deny them the status of Basques, the status of citizens with full rights, because they consider that they have another homeland which protects them.
On Basque public television, when party opinions are put forward, they first offer those of the "Basque parties" (PNV, EA and Batasuna) and then those of the "the parties who are obedient to the State" (PP and PSE).

Pro-Basques : this form of address has been applied to the political trends which from the constitutionalist field have accepted or tried to accept or share some nationalist principles.
Notwithstanding, pro-Basque is all Basque by the fact of being so, in the same way as all Andaluz is pro-Andalucia or all Alavés is pro-Alava. Pro-Basque is that Basque who is neither a Spanish nationalist, nor a Basque nationalist, but rather a universalist person who defends the continuance of Euskadi in the Spanish state in a democratic, realistic way.

Communitarians: the constituent social way of being is claimed from the point of view of current communitarianism, it being stated that the human being is impossible if we think in terms of isolation. People become this, obtain identity, know who they are as they are born into society, as they form a crossroads in social relationships, as they become incorporated into the complex social fabric in which they become what they are, and may end up overcoming the initial social obstacle which makes it possible for them to become so. In short, communitarianism is a theory which advocates the priority of the community over the individual.
Communitarians state that neither individual freedom nor the existence of the human being can sustain itself for a long time outside the network of the inter-dependent communities to which we all belong. We humans are members of different family, neighbourhood, social, religious, ethnic and professional communities, not to mention the political body. In practice, this means that the rights of the person are transferred to the community.
Unfortunately, communitarians tend to adopt a collectivist attitude, emphasizing the rights of the community over those of the individual. They are convinced that the passion for individual rights must be compensated for by a renewed sense of social responsibility. Notwithstanding, they rarely achieve such a balance.