BASK B LGES : ETN K M LL YET L N TAR HSEL GEL M VE SPANYA’DAK DEVLET POL T KALARININ ETK S = THE BASQUE COUNTRY: A HISTORICAL CASE OF ETHNIC NATIONALISM AND IMPACT OF STATE POLICIES IN SPAIN

Spain is a state, consisting of 17 autonomous regions. Initially, Spain had historically autonomous regions like the Basque Country and Catalonia. In the seventeenth century, centralizing attempts made in the name of state-building had caused strong reactions from the historical regions of the periphery. The ethnocentric approach of the Basques had become the motor of the early Basque nationalism. Under the fourty years of Franco Regime, all the regional and nationalist actions were suppressed severely. However, the Franco Regime ended in 1975 and Spain achieved the transition to democracy. ETA, which first appeared in 1958 under the Franco Regime as a defender of the oppressed Basque people’s cultural and historical rights, has adopted separatist tendencies and applied terror to obtain its aim without taking into consideration that the Basque people later in the 1980s obtained its own democratic rights according to the new constitution after transition to democracy.