6. Narcissism: Anthropology and Multiculturalist Violence (Mikel Azurmendi)

(originally published as “State Narcissism: Racism, Neoimperialism and Spanish Opposition to Multiculturalism (on Mikel Azurmendi).” Border Interrogations: Crossing and Questioning Spanish Frontiers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Eds. Benita Sampedro and Simon Doubleday. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. 65-89)

To the car-window sociologist, to the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unraveling the snarls of centuries,—to such men very often the whole trouble with the black field-hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s word, “Shiftless!”

W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk.

“La tolerancia española fue islámica y no cristiana.”

Américo Castro. España en su historia.

At the turn of this millennium, a new globalized form of democratic liberalism (neoliberalism) is being upheld in Europe and the United States as the only valid political future and sole prospect of salvation from “barbarism” (Sartori, Fukuyama, etc.). At the opposite end of the spectrum, postmarxism is emphasizing the internal contradictions of capitalism as the only other alternative to this barbarism, which, according to its theorists (Zizek, Hart and Negri), is being generated by capitalism itself. Ultimately, the first-world’s difficult relationship with history and difference is at stake and, as I will argue below, this tension is negotiated and legitimized through a discursive structure I denominate State narcissism,[1] which neoliberalism and postmarxism share. In this context, the discussions on multiculturalism and immigration developed in Spain over the last few years and epitomized by the work of anthropologist Mikel Azurmendi shed new light on the “barbarian” impasse reached by neoliberalism and postmarxism in the first world. Spain’s contradictory position in modern European history enables us to rethink this narcissistic impasse reached by first-world ideologies in new productive ways.

Multiculturalism and State Narcissism

Within this context, it is important to begin by underscoring the fact that both neoliberalism and postmarxism denounce multiculturalism as the theoretical harbinger of global barbarism, especially when implicated with migration issues. Interestingly enough, these negative reactions to multiculturalism linger on barbarism and irrationality; they point to the underside of any theory that does not rethink globalization and social difference without unconsciously retaining the nation-state as the only possible political outcome.

In the postmarxist camp, authors such as Zizek have denounced multiculturalism as the logic of late capitalism, thus equating it with neoliberalism:

The much-praised postmodern ‘proliferation of new political subjectivities’, the demise of every ‘essentialist’ fixation, the assertion of full contingency, occur against the background of a certain silent renunciation and acceptance: the renunciation of the idea of a global change in the fundamental relations in our society (who will seriously question capitalism, state and political democracy?) and, consequently, the acceptance of the liberal democratic capitalist framework which remains the same, the unquestioned background, in all the dynamic proliferation of the multitude of new subjectivities. (“Holding” 321)

Zizek concludes that multiculturalism, “the mad dance” of identities, will generate its own Jacobinism and thus propounds thinking beyond capitalism tout court:

Today’s ‘mad dance’, the dynamic proliferation of multiple shifting identities, also awaits its resolution in a new form of Terror. The only ‘realistic’ prospect is to ground a new political universality by opting for the impossible, fully assuming the place of the exception, with no taboos, no a priori norms (‘human rights’, ‘democracy’), respect for which would prevent us also from ‘resignifying’ terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice… if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it! (“Holding” 326).

What is interesting in Zizek’s reaction is his preventive recourse to “fascism” to qualify his own position in the eyes of liberals. That is, Zizek himself accepts his own “barbarian” positioning vis-à-vis neoliberalism and multiculturalism, thus mirroring his previous characterization of multiculturalism as Jacobinist. The encounter yields the contraposition of fascism and Jacobinism as the only two possibilities of politics in globalization; his later attempt to rescue Lenin points in the same direction (Repeating Lenin).[2] As I will elaborate below, this irrational upsurge in left-wing politics points to a form of narcissism that ultimately is enabled by the European state itself.

In defense of neoliberalism, intellectuals such as Giovanni Sartori attack multiculturalism while also emphasizing the Jacobinist telos of such politics. When pointing out the non-European formation of multiculturalism, which migrates from British Marxism to the American academic milieux of feminism and race studies, Sartori concludes that multiculturalism is close to ethnic cleansing: “Il multiculturalismo porta alla Bosnia e alla balcanizzazione; è l’interculturalismo che porta all’Europa” (112). In this context, interculturalism implies a neoliberal understanding of tolerance and pluralism, which ultimately are grounded in civil society and its traditional political parties rather than in newer social movements. Sartori clearly identifies the different histories of North America and Europe and concludes that the bases for the corresponding difference between multiculturalism and neoliberalism is migration: “Nel Nuovo Mondo (Usa e Canada) si tratta di riconoscere; l’identità di minoranze interne [mostly generated by migration]; in Europa il problema è invece di salvare l’identità dello Stato-nazione da una minaccia culturale esterna, e cioè posta dll’arrivo in casa di culture profondamente estranee” (113).

However, since Sartori’s analysis does not historically correlate European imperialism and postcolonial migration, he ends up using a “barbarian and irrational” language to deal with the supposedly ahistorical and unprecedented novelty of immigration: “Una popolazione allogena del dieci per cento può costituire una quantità accoglibile; del venti per cento è pressoché sicuro che verrebbe fortemente resistita. Resisterle sarebbe ‘razzismo’? Ammesso (ma non concesso) che lo sia, allora la colpa di questo razzismo è di chi lo ha creato” (106). Ironically enough, Sartori does not have an answer for the historical agency that has “created” immigration: imperialism is not a component of his understanding of the European nation-state. Consequently, Sartori ends up advocating a very irrational scenario in which an anti-immigrational Europe could be justified on mere numerical grounds rather than on political ones, thus, opening the gate for justifying racism even in our days. In Sartori’s account, the ahistorical European nation-state, void of imperialist history, and the consequent novelty of immigration from the Third Word, stripped of a colonial past, clash in a barbarian mirroring that points to a political formation I denominate ‘State narcissism.’

In short, postmarxism and neoliberalism share the political unconscious structure that I denominate State narcissism.[3] State narcissism describes the European state’s resistance to historical and new global differences, which irrationally resorts to ideas of sameness and assimilation, which are not democratic, since they originate during the absolutist monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a first tentative elaboration, State narcissism refers to the State’s new refusal to acknowledge an other that is overwhelming it to the point of forcing the latter into a regressive withdrawal into itself. This closure within oneself is denominated “secondary narcissism” in Freudean psychoanalysis and, thus, it is important to revert to Freud and his description of individual narcissism in order to articulate its relationship with State narcissism.

When commenting on the megalomaniac tendencies of psychotic individuals, Freud concludes that there is an originary narcissism in childhood: the earliest form of being. However, any new withdrawal from the world and others in a mature age represents a form of psychosis which he denominates secondary narcissism. In his words:

The libido that has been withdrawn from the external world has been directed to the ego and thus gives rise to an attitude which may be called narcissism. But the megalomania itself is no new creation; on the contrary, it is, as we know, a magnification and plainer manifestation of a condition which had already existed previously. This leads us to look upon the narcissism which arises through the drawing in of object-cathexes as a secondary one, superimposed upon a primary narcissism that is obscured by a number of different influences. (75)

Although Freud only refers to individual narcissism, it is important to note that this psychoanalytical elaboration allows him to formulate the idea of the super-ego and, from this new instance, to sketch a hypothesis about mass behavior and social anxiety, that is, about the irrational functioning of societies. Therefore, it is important to examine in detail Freud’s theorization of narcissism, and specifically its secondary formation, as a way to explain the cultural and social behavior of European states and ideologies, which at this point are marked by an irrationality and violence that is clearly narcissistic.

Freud locates the access of the infant to the social order precisely in a split of his/her primary narcissism. As the child interacts with parents and society, he/she renounces his/her original narcissism in which the infant him/herself is the only object of interest, but does not fully discard it. Instead, the child moves part of his/her narcissistic libido to the creation of an ideal ego. This split is explained by Freud in the following way: “This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego…. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (94). Freud emphasizes that the formation of the ideal ego is directly connected with the infant’s new access to the social: “For what prompted the subject to form an ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment—his fellow-men—and public opinion” (96).

Yet, Freud emphasizes that the ideal ego has another function, or to be more precise, its formation is only successful as a result of a simultaneous action: repression. As Freud argues, “the formation of an ideal heightens the demands of the ego and is the most powerful factor favouring repression…. a special psychical agency [super-ego] which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal” (95). In the following, I will equate “ideal ego’ and “super ego,” and will not use the form “ego ideal,” in the interest of brevity, although they are not technically the same in psychoanalysis.[4] Thus, the connection between ideal ego and repression is clearly established by Freud when discussing the way the ideal ego controls and regulates the ego’s relations with others and the world in general: “The ego ideal has imposed severe conditions upon the satisfaction of libido through objects [including people]; for it causes some of them to be rejected by means of its censor, as being incompatible” (100). The simultaneous articulation of narcissism and repression, in the form of an ideal ego, is for Freud at the core of the functioning of society, since the ideal ego is ultimately a narcissistic internalization of parental controls and societal rules. Consequently, and according to Freud, a severe rift in the body politics over the conventions and rules that govern the formation of the shared ideal ego has the effect of generating social anxiety and guilt:

The ego ideal opens up an important avenue for the understanding of group psychology. In addition to its individual side, this ideal has a social side; it is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation. It binds not only a person’s narcissistic libido, but also a considerable amount of his … libido,[5] which is in this way turned back into the ego. The want of satisfaction which arises from the non-fulfillment of this ideal [as in the case of the irruption of migrational others in a nation-state, which disrupt the bind between ego and ideal ego] liberates… libido, and this is transformed into a sense of guilt (social anxiety). Originally this sense of guilt was a fear of punishment by the parents, or, more correctly, the fear of losing their love; later the parents are replaced by an indefinite number of fellow-men. (101-02)

As Freud states, the consequence of this impossibility to fulfill the expectations of the ideal ego is guilt and anxiety, which produce further repression in the ego. Ultimately, this excessive repression is the origin of secondary narcissism. Incapable of relating to the outside world and to the other according to the ideal ego, the individual’s ego experiences excessive repression and thus withdraws into itself, avoiding any libidinal relationship, sexual or otherwise, with the outside world. As Freud explains: “When libido is pressed… the re-enrichment of the ego can be effected only by a withdrawal of libido from its objects. The return of the object-libido to the ego and its transformation into narcissism represents, as it were, a happy love once more” (99-100). At that point, the ego and the ideal ego almost coincide again, since the complete withdrawal from objects is impossible, and therefore there is a regression to a narcissism that, nevertheless, is not original but secondary.

Although Freud does not refer to the uncanny effects of repression in his article on narcissism, he states elsewhere (“The Uncanny’) that, when certain objects and others become destructive to the ego and the entire psychic structure of the individual, but cannot be fully repressed by the ideal ego in secondary narcissism, they become uncanny: the Freudian Thing or, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Real. However, because repression also defines the ideal ego and its relationship to the ego, the Real is ultimately the instance that constitutes and upholds the entire psychic apparatus that defines the individual; it defines what the ideal ego cannot repress and thus shapes the ego’s narcissistic relationship with the ideal ego as well.

In this sense, the European state constitutes the ultimate order and horizon of the modern individual and his/her politics. In the State, the ideal egos of the modern citizens come together and reach a social balance that, in return, regulates their respective individual egos. In this respect, the result of this balance can be understood as the State’s own ideal ego, which regulates its own ego—the institutions that define the State. The State, as the ultimate containment and horizon of the narcissistic bind between individual egos and their ideal egos, can also be considered a narcissistic institution. Furthermore and in the case of Europe, one could hypothesize that the (imperialist) nation is the ideal ego of the State. In short, the State finds in the nation its ideal ego, and thus the nation-state is ultimately this narcissistic bind that defines the State qua ideal nation.

Given the irrational attitudes of some European political theorists towards multiculturalism, as well as the European states’ own irrational reaction to global migration, I want to defend in this article that the theorization of State narcissism is crucial to understanding the above issues.[6] State narcissism, as the State’s secondary narcissism, emerges when the national, imperialist ideal ego must exert so much repression on the ego of the State that the latter withdraws from the differential object of immigration and retreats into itself, giving rise, in turn, to social anxiety at the level of the individual citizen. Therefore I want to hypothesize that the State’s secondary narcissism is a result of globalization and, thus, any political theorization must address State narcissism in order to resolve the irrationality and anxiety that define the European state and its theorists.[7]

Difference and Neoliberal Integration

The above authors and discussions have also generated specific but similar debates in Spain, one of the European countries most defined by its immigrational diversity (East Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia) and therefore a prime context in which to study State narcissism. More specifically, Mikel Azurmendi, a Basque anthropologist appointed by the right wing party in power from 1996 to 2004 (the Partido Popular) to direct the Forum for the Integration of Immigration (a branch of the Department of Immigration), generated quite a scandal when he declared that multiculturalism was a form of gangrene in the social body (“la gangrena del multiculturalismo;” Efe “Azurmendi”). Azurmendi’s ethnography of El Ejido (Estampas de El Ejido, 2001), the town where some of the most violent incidents triggered by immigration took place in Spain and Europe in 2000, prompted more than sixty Spanish scholars to denounce his work publically (Efe “Más de 60”). Finally, it is important to note that Azurmendi has previously written on Basque nationalism and terrorism, as well as on State violence towards Basque peasants in early modernity. In recent years, he has become the government’s spokesperson in matters of immigration as well as the most decidedly neoliberal and anti-multiculturalist intellectual in Spain—no postmarxist voice echoes Azurmendi’s anti-multiculturalism within the Spanish state, which makes the study of his work all the more important. It is my contention that the analysis of Azurmendi’s thought can shed important light on the interrelated issues of multiculturalism, neoliberal-postmarxist “irrationality,” and State narcissism. The diverse and complex relationship between Spain’s imperialist history and the global flow of (postcolonial) migration can clarify the above “barbarian” impasse and debate while emphasizing the importance of understanding State narcissism.

In his Estampas de El Ejido, after introducing most of the Andalusian characters of his ethnography by resorting to Greek mythology, as if to separate their “Western origins” from any historical Muslim influence, Azurmendi inquires of the other, the immigrant, and especially of the most “intractable” one, the Maghrebian, the reasons why he (or she) does not wish to assimilate. He concludes by denouncing multiculturalism and issuing a call favoring the immigrants’ full integration into Spanish society. That is, Azurmendi propounds the erasure of otherness and difference as the solution to migration so that, as I will discuss below, the State’s ego remains untarnished by globalization and continues to respond to the national ideal ego.

This approach allows him to affirm that there is no racism in southern Andalusia, in El Ejido, the object of his ethnography, although in February 2000 three Spaniards were killed by immigrants and, as a result, many residents rioted against immigrant settlements. In Azurmendi’s words:

Ni el racismo ni la xenofobia son el problema en El Ejido, y comienzo a suponer con fundamento que es uno de los lugares del mundo no solamente con menos racismo del previsible que pudiese existir, dado el volumen y la rapidez de la concentración de inmigrantes ilegales en la zona, sino un laboratorio, casi único en nuestro país, para ir resolviendo la vía integradora de la inmigración con menos costo de racismo. (287-88)

Azurmendi never addresses and evaluates what “racismo previsible” and “menos costo de racismo” mean and, furthermore, he does not elaborate a theory of racism, for ultimately his goal is to privilege the fully assimilative State in which difference and otherness disappear under the sway of the national ideal ego. Since State narcissism is at stake, it is important to analyze in detail the reasons for Azurmendi’s discursive and ideological maneuver.

Nevertheless, it must be noted that Azurmendi speaks out against the Spanish and European media and faults the latter for labeling the population of El Ejido racist: “El efecto de la prensa y los medios de comunicación ha sido aislar a la población del Poniente almeriense del resto de españoles y de satanizarla en su conjunto. Los de la zona de Poniente ya se han apercibido de que ni han sido ni son tratados como el resto de los españoles sino como un colectivo marginal de racistas asquerosos” (338-39). Azurmendi is quite correct in his assessment: the media have othered El Ejido as the only site of clear and blatant racism and, as a result, they have absolved the remainder of the Spanish state and Europe from any charges of racism. However, Azurmendi’s stand against the media does not explain why, instead of generalizing the accusation of racism to the entire Spanish state, he resorts to the opposite logic of absolving even the population of El Ejido, and thus, unconsciously the rest of Spain and Europe. Here a different discourse and ideology appears in Azurmendi’s writing, one that ultimately has little to do with discussing racism and very much with upholding State narcissism, so that the Spanish state continues to respond to the national ideal ego of the State. In last instance, if the immigrants are not integrated they become others that the ideal ego must repress, thus furthering social anxiety and guilt.

In order to negate racism and uphold a State free of difference, Azurmendi first frames the divide between Spanish and Muslim cultures in terms of moral superiority so that he creates a partition based on the Western idea of progress—one in which Spain is unproblematically aligned with the West and modernity. In this way, the difference between State and immigrant becomes a moral and, ultimately, natural difference that derives from modernity’s historical and teleological superiority. While addressing a social worker named Carmen, Azurmendi writes:

No le dije a Carmen que sospecho que nuestra cultura ha progresado moralmente más que la de los musulmanes porque ha detectado ya que una persona es alguien que puede ser herida y vulnerada, alguien que puede ser humillada y sufrir. Por eso precisamente es por lo que nos indigna el sufrimiento del inmigrante. A veces incluso más que a ellos. Y por eso comenzamos a ser sensibles hasta con los animales y con las futuras generaciones; (101, my emphasis)

Once he erects a moral divide between modernity’s progress and the other’s backwardness, Azurmendi moves on to uphold the West, and most specifically the Spanish state, as the socium of democracy and individuality. This is the founding discursive maneuver of Orientalism by which, as Edward Said states, “the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (43) is established as a way to proclaim Western superiority. Yet the historical problems of upholding such a divide in the case of Spain are incommensurable: the origins of Spanish modernity are essentially Muslim and French; Spanish modernity itself is not capitalist and thus falls off the Marxist, Weberian, and—most importantly—liberal understanding of modernity; Spain never consolidated as a nation-state in the nineteenth-century; there was a civil war in the twentieth century; finally, Spain boasted its difference (“España es diferente”) in ethno-fundamentalist ways under Franco’s forty-year dictatorship. Even in the postdictatorial transition, when joining the European Community, Spanish society and government exploited their difference as sign of instantaneous hyper-modernity, as if a recently acquired modernity were still supplemental in its excess rather than constitutive in its “normalcy.” The Spanish state’s own tendency to use violent and undemocratic means (most notably the GAL) calls into question its modernity (Woodworth). Even now, Spain has sided with North American imperialism (and against European modernity) in the war against Muslim fundamentalist terrorism and Iraq.

Furthermore, in order to defend a Spanish state where all its citizens are equal before the law, Azurmendi needs to attack the Spanish intellectual tradition that defends historical and cultural difference. It is important to note that a Basque anthropologist who spent but five months in Andalusia is able to dismiss local academics and their defense of cultural difference out of hand. After all, and unlike Azurmendi, Andalusian academics have dealt with and thought about this problem for years. Yet, Azurmendi disavows Andalusia of any intellectual authority: “Considero inaceptable, por consiguiente, la concepción casi ya clásica en los departamentos universitarios andaluces, de que la diversidad cultural tenga derechos” (352). Furthermore, he makes no references to the problem of Andalusis (descendants of Medieval Spanish Muslims who live in the Maghreb) who suffer immigrational discrimination as voiced by Mohammed ibn Azzuz Hakim, the most important Moroccan Hispanist (Gibson).

Once Azurmendi negates racism in Andalusia—and unconsciously in Spain and in Europe—and also asserts Spain’s Western character and moral superiority over the dissenting, intellectual voice of Andalusian academics, he makes an unproblematic apology for a “democratic and modern Spanish state” and, thus, upholds “assimilation” (adaptation, integration) as the only path to moral progress and democracy:

El proceso de adaptación cultural en una sociedad democrática o es individual o no existirá, por cuanto es cada persona la que debe responder, hombre a hombre, mujer a mujer, y responsabilizarse en sus recintos familiares, escolares, laborales, etc. No existe, por tanto, un supuesto colectivo “minoritario” que se adaptaría al nuestro, el receptor, supuestamente considerado “mayoritario”. No; hoy aquí, existe una sociedad con determinados valores, sociedad que únicamente puede recibir a otras gentes en la medida en que contribuyan a mejorarla. (353)

The fact that Azurmendi defends such Spanish individualism makes even more problematic the unmediated alignment of Spain with the West and its modern values. It will suffice to recall that Spain is a country run until recently according to patriarchalist Catholic values. As a result, abortion, for example, is still not fully legal and, thus, a woman has not full rights over her body. In short, the idea of individuality is not yet universal but remains gendered in Spain.

Azurmendi concludes by demonizing “multiculturalism,” and thus any form of difference. Multiculturalism, in his discourse, becomes the real culprit of all the evils that happened in southern Spain: “De aquí que uno de los grandes enemigos de cualquier planteamiento integrador de la inmigración en esta zona almeriense sea el multiculturalismo o creencia izquierdista, si no beata, en que todas las culturas son iguales o igualmente respetables y deben cohabitar unas junto a otras” (355-56). Consequently, Azurmendi disavows racism and avows the “integrative” modern Spanish state, void of non-modern-Western history and difference, as the real subject of his ethnography. In short, he turns otherness and difference into the ultimate real causes of racism and, in this new circular logic, immigrants and their moral backwardness are to be blamed for racism, not a progressive, democratic Spain. Immigrants are at fault in their resistance to assimilation.

Yet Azurmendi’s integrative definition of a supposedly modern, European Spain requires other discursive and political maneuvers so that all non-modern difference in Spanish history is repressed, for ultimately his anthropologist thrust, unaware of its imperialist unconsciousness and narcissistic nationalism, marks his approach to immigration and racism. In a trend that begins with Estampas de El Ejido (2000) but continues with Todos somos nosotros (2003), Azurmendi theorizes neoliberal assimilation by always focusing on a single type of immigration: the African. The reason is that the discourse of difference and assimilation only works against the African immigrant (Maghrebian or Sub-Saharan) but not against the Hispanic immigrant from Latin America (the second largest non-European immigrant group). In 2000, there were 199,964 Latin Americans in Spain (22% of all immigrants) compared to 261,385 Africans (29% of the total; Ortega Pérez); yet Azurmendi ignores Latin America.[8]

This complete neglect of Latin Americans is due to the fact that this immigrant group does not reflect the perfect “other” that, then, can be repressed through assimilation, as is the case of many Maghrebian workers in El Ejido or Muslim Spaniards in Ceuta. The Latin American immigrant is a “pseudo-other” tainted by Spain’s imperialist history: they are natives or African Americans in many instances but they are mainly Catholic and they also speak Spanish fluently either as their first or second language. This “pseudo-other” can be considered a historical abject, in the psychoanalytical sense (Kristeva), since it questions the divide between self and other, difference and sameness. Therefore the Latin American immigrant destabilizes the narcissistic balance between ego and ideal ego, since he/she cannot be either accepted or repressed by the ideal ego of the State. The reason for the unstable effects of Latin American immigration for the narcissistic balance between State ego and ideal ego lies in the fact that the neoliberal ideology of assimilation, represented by Azurmendi, needs to conflate many forms of social difference (economic, class, ethnic, sexual, racial etc.) under a single one: race and its “darkest” or most negative representation, Africa. Only by emphasizing racial difference can Azurmendi’s anthropological thrust make sense and repress the other under the ahistorical mirror of radical difference so that the State ideal ego is upheld and thereby the narcissistic relationship that defines the bind between ego and ideal ego, State and nation, is legitimized.[9]

The fact that an anthropologist upholds the State’s ego and its ideal ego (the nation-state) is not a coincidence, since anthropology is historically founded precisely in the act of othering the colonial subject. A postcolonial subject, such as the Latin American, who remains other but at the same time is also Hispanic, must be repressed more than the African immigrant because of its traumatic nature—it is a reminder of a failed repression. The immigrant hailing from Africa (who is taken to be radically different despite Spain’s Muslim history and slavery) holds in his/her radical difference the promise and legitimation of a full assimilation, since he/she has not become the traumatic reminder of a failed colonial repression. The Latin American immigrant is the traumatic Real of Azurmendi’s discourse, along with the Basques (as I will discuss later). In short, Spain’s own imperialist and colonial history becomes Azurmendi’s Real: the traumatic element that destabilizes the narcissistic balance between State ego and ideal ego in ways that the African immigrant, in his/her supposed “full otherness,” ultimate proof of his/her moral inferiority, does not. The Latin American immigrant represents the return of a repressed other, which, in its return, signifies the traumatic failure of the State and its ideal ego to repress the colonial other during the period of imperialist expansion. The Hispanic immigrant represents both the return of repressed history and the failure of State repression.

Thus, once the “radical difference” of African immigration is articulated as promise of full repression and the trauma of past Latin American colonialism is repressed once again, then history disappears and Western superiority appears to be as natural and self-evident as in any hegemonic ideology—hence Althusser’s pertinent claim that ideology has no history. Furthermore, only through this racial conflation of difference can the political alternatives of neoliberalism be narrowed down to one choice: assimilation (indirect repression) or direct repression. In this way, the abjection of history and its scaling of differences and positions are eliminated. At the end of this ideological maneuver, the Spanish state appears as the only subject of politics and, consequently, the practice of assimilation by the Spanish neoliberal order also emerges as the only possible form of politics. Consequently, the narcissistic balance between State ego and ideal ego is ideologically restored and the Spanish state can be thought of again as a nation even in the midst of globalization. However, the fact that the immigrational presence does not go away, and any attempt at assimilation fails, only proves that the balance between State ego and ideal ego is reached temporarily. Ultimately this balance points to an increasing secondary narcissism in which the State’s ideal ego needs to further repress any form of otherness, thus increasing social anxiety and distress. This increasing form of repression creates a new form of nationalism that is defined by its ideological failure to repress the global immigrational other, which then prompts the State to narcissistically retreat within itself, thus slipping into secondary narcissism. In this sense, this new globalized nationalism, resulting from secondary narcissism, can be called “neonationalism” in order to differentiate it from traditional nationalism.[10]

The State’s secondary narcissism also explains the ideological attack of authors such as Azurmendi upon multiculturalism. Only from a neonationalist, neoliberal viewpoint can multiculturalism be approached as a theory that upholds both the relativity and equality of all cultures and beliefs (with the pretended contradiction of having to respect fascism, racism, homophobia or misogyny). Neonationalism cannot think difference historically but nationalistically, according to the State’s ideal ego, and thus it assumes that any cultural difference is a radical difference without history which must be either assimilated or repressed nationalistically. It is this ontologized difference against which neonationalism imagines itself and represses any other form of difference. In this respect, neonationalism imagines multiculturalism as multi-nationalism and thus can only approach any other difference as national (fascism bad, democracy good) and think of subject formation as individuality (individual rights good, collective rights bad). In short, multiculturalism represents the traumatic symptom of the State’s ideal ego, which shows the latter’s necessity to repress any historical difference, because of its abjection, by first othering it as nationally different.

Instead, multiculturalism and especially its Hegelian strand (Butler, Laclau and Mouffe) thinks of difference in historical terms through particularity and universality. These Hegelian, multicultural theorists emphasize the historicity of cultural difference, so that universality can only be attained when all cultural differences come dialectically together by claiming their particular universality and by determining one another. In short, what multiculturalism affirms is precisely that Western culture is not superior or teleologically the only one to which we are all irremediably bound, but rather that Western culture must still accept its particularity and continue to determine and be determined by other particular cultures. A”truly” historically global culture will emerge only when all cultures determine one another. Furthermore, the apparent universality of Western culture derives precisely from its determination by other cultures (Middle Age Muslim and Chinese cultures, Native cultures of the modern colonial period, etc.) rather than from some inner epistemological or ontological trait or disposition. It is in this regard that Zizek’s claim acquires its true historical sense, for “democracy, human rights, and individualism” are not yet historically universal values and rights. They must determine and be determined by other non-Western cultures and values in so far as they are all affected by capitalism, which creates the possibility for universalism, as Marx had already foreseen.

Archaeology of State Difference: From Conversion to Integration

Yet, in order to understand the reasons for Azurmendi’s use of African-Andalusian racial tensions as a narcissistic screen to project the moral progress of a putative democratic Spanish state and, thus, legitimize Spanish neonationalism through increased repression and secondary narcissism, it is important to look elsewhere in his texts: to the intermittent and most times in-pertinent remarks about the Basque Country. The Basque Country, nationalism, and violence appear as a sub-text in Azurmendi’s ethnographic palimpsest on immigration. The Basque Country and its violence are the historically abject and traumatic instances that Azurmendi cannot successfully repress through the State’s ideal ego. Furthermore, they sustain his entire discourse of ideological balance between State ego and ideal ego.

In Estampas de El Ejido, the two subtexts of the palimpsest, the immigrational-Andalusian and the Basque, intersect in one instance. In an ethnography where the immigrant other speaks very few times and the Andalusian natives’ voices explain the whole conflict, Azurmendi nevertheless dismisses and represses both texts/voices—the immigrant and the Basque—as precisely the marks of people who do not want to integrate and, by refusing to do so, destabilize the State’s narcissistic balance and show their own “racist” nature:

Y me horroricé de que Mohamed me hubiera dicho, poco antes de empezar su sesión, que venía de Euskadi, de contar cuentos en las ikastolas. Me decía que venía impresionado de constatar cuán bilingües eran aquellos niños vascos. Seguramente tú, pobre Mohamed, habrás sido el único hispanohablante que haya entrado a contar cuentos en castellano en aquellas ikastolas. Se lo dije así y pareció entenderme. Seguramente Mohamed apreció en aquella tierra no haber sido tratado como español, pese a serlo y hablar árabe. Y es más que seguro que Mohamed apreciará aquí no ser homologado con los payasos y otros contacuentos que circulan por las ikastolas de aquella tierra, donde muchísimos padres creen que, efectivamente, ellos sí son de una raza pura. (226, my emphasis)

In short, the only instance of clear racism in Spain is the Basque Country. This is the kernel of the Real, the un-writable text of Azurmendi’s ethnography: Andalusia and Spain are not racist, only the Basques are. In short, Azurmendi can only denounce Basque racism and Spanish democratic moral progress as projected on the narcissistic screen of El Ejido. When he is boasting against multiculturalism and Andalusian academia, and even when he dismisses the words of an immigrant, he is still speaking against a Basque Country that is ultimately racist in toto. The Basque Country is the land of “payasos y contacuentos” who believe they belong to “una raza pura.” In short, Azurmendi needs to dismiss a multicultural encounter such as the one taking place between Mohamed and the children of Basque schools, to uphold the integrationist, non-differential Spanish state and its “democratic moral progress” because Basque difference is ultimately traumatic and therefore cannot be successfully repressed by the State’s ideal ego.

Yet it is important to examine why the Spanish Basque Country and the conflicts that take place there are at the basis of Azurmendi’s neoliberal reformulation of Spanish neonationalism: a State ego endowed with a national ideal ego that represses global immigration. This examination is important especially if we consider that Azurmendi has dedicated most of his work to the Basque Country and has only recently shifted to the issue of immigration. It is even more disconcerting if one considers that his two most important previous works (Nombrar, embrujar, 1993; Y se limpie aquella tierra, 2000) are dedicated precisely to the critique of State oppression against the Basque rural classes. Therefore his work has shifted from the denunciation of State oppression against internal minorities in the past to the defense of State assimilation of external minorities in the present. As I will explain in what follows, the anthropological othering of the Basque peasant classes as a single identity ultimately explains the continuity and coherence of Azurmendi’s past and present work. The othering of Basque rural masses in the past lends itself to be written as the othering of global immigration in the present so that the State’s national ideal ego (the nation-state) is upheld retroactively. Yet, it is also important to explain why his initial denunciation of State oppression ends up becoming a neoliberal defense of State assimilation, where labor exploitation is the main purpose and thus ‘oppression’ still remains an operative term—as exemplified by the quota system implemented by the Spanish government in recent years (Ortega Pérez). Is there continuity in Azurmendi’s work between his conceptualization of State oppression and integration? Are these two activities also a narcissistic reflection on/of the State’s ideal ego? Are they both different (internal / external) deployments of the same State power and oppression, the same State ideal ego, or do they represent a break, from absolutism to democracy, from immorality to superior morality, from an absolutist ideal ego to a democratic one?

In his Nombrar, embrujar (1993), Azurmendi clearly states the thesis that the Inquisition terrorized the Basque peasant masses on both sides of the border, the Spanish and the French, with the complicity of local elites in order to enforce the masses’ submission to the State. Azurmendi makes patent that this oppression was not only political but also cultural, since rural culture and language (Basque) were proscribed by the Inquisition under suspicion of witchcraft. In his own words: “La verdad aquí contenida tendrá algo que ver, por tanto, con la comprensión de la estrategia por la que la elite social vasca, en connivencia con el poder central de España, proscribió el sistema de signos popular, implantando en la mente de las gentes, y no sólo con la violencia, otro sistema más suyo” (14). By doing so, Azurmendi also states that the new repressed rural culture and landscape become the benign and utopian horizon for the idealizations of later political ideologies in the nineteenth century: Carlism, foralism, and nationalism.

Yet, Azurmendi’s anthropological approach collapses several historical realities into a single, homogeneous other: the Basque peasant. This social group becomes, in Azurmendi’s text, an other that mirrors narcissistically the absolutist State and turns unconsciously its ideal ego into a nationalist one—a contemporary State ideal ego (the nation-state). In this way, historical and political abjection are also eliminated. In his book, he presents three chapters, out of five, in which a straightforward analysis of contemporary Basque language, without many dialectological distinctions or historical references to the past, is made to stand for the Basque rural cultural system. Different areas of the Basque Country, which were disconnected at the time under different political systems, are treated homogeneously. Furthermore, the non-Basque speaking rural areas (parts of Alava and Navarre) are repressed from his analysis, so that rural culture and the Basque language are made to coincide. Conversely, his analysis also avoids the towns and cities in which Basque was spoken in order to disavow Basque speaking non-rural areas and reify the identification between rural life and Basque language. The lack of a thorough historical analysis allows Azurmendi to avoid any reference to the different areas of the countryside and towns dedicated to industry (steel and ship construction), which, until the end of the eighteenth century, were the other important sector of the Basque economy, alongside agriculture. For this reason, the important witchcraft trails that took place in Durango in 1500 (Caro Baroja 13-14), for example, are not cited by Azurmendi even once because, if we are to believe Juan Aranzadi (127-222), they had more to do with Italian fraticelli and other spiritualist heresies. In short, the Basque Country is dehistorized and turned into an anthropological object that can be analyzed through language (expressions, etymology, mythology, etc.) in a study that is not conducted, nevertheless, linguistically—at least one of the etymologies Azurmendi propounds is clearly wrong, [11] and its correct origin is generally accepted by the majority of Basque linguists.

In Nombrar, embrujar, Azurmendi, unlike in his future books on immigration, does cite Latin America, but only in order to “nativize” the Basque Country. In his own words:

Aun sin pretender parangonar dos conquistas tan distintas entre sí, la de América y la que un siglo más tarde efectuaron las instancias jurídicas y judiciales hispano-francesas a ambos lados del Bidasoa vasco, también ésta contiene una buena dosis de germen conquistador. Las diferencias mayores estriban tal vez en el hecho de que la invención del indio vasco se constituyó a partir del requerimiento de los elementos cultural y socialmente dominantes de su propia tribu. También aquí hubo un descubrimiento, inventándosele al indio de aquí todo tipo de rasgos peculiares que lo hacían realmente diferente y virtualmente inferior y peor. (302, my emphasis)

However, in this nativization of the Basque peasant masses, Azurmendi clearly affirms that State power—the repression by its ideal ego—is at stake since the latter seeks the domination of different internal groups, not only the Basque peasants. In his own words:

Se fabricó así in vitro un espécimen de pecado y se pasó, luego, a la prueba de su verificabilidad: hallar al pecador. Claro está que no hizo falta buscarlo mucho, pues en todos los reinos y gobiernos existía una común asignatura pendiente por unificar lenguas, culturas y creencias populares que balcanizaban cualquier intento de centralización ideológica y viabilidad de una política unificada. (302)

Yet, Azurmendi’s anthropological thrust to nativize the Basque peasant is clear in that there is a much closer historical parallel than the conquest of America: the subjugation of the Moriscos in southern Spain---which is contemporary to the witchcraft trials in the Basque Country in the 1500s---and culminates in 1609 with their expulsion (Domínguez Ortiz, Vincent). The Moriscos become a historical abject in Azurmendi’s discursive unconscious, for they cannot be nativized; they represent a bygone Muslim Spanish history of conquest and cultural splendor that is far from Basque subalternity but, nevertheless, is, positionally speaking, closer to the Basques than to the Latin American colonial subjects in that both are internal minorities who suffer State oppression. The American conquest is ultimately a case of colonialism towards an exterior other who is not a minority and, in many instances, is already constituted as empire (Aztecs and Incas). Yet the Moriscos become a retroactive and Real trace of a multiculturalism that defeats any nationalist reformulation of the State and its ideal ego.

Azurmendi further emphasizes the centrality of State power when he creates a “subaltern Basque Country” oppressed by the kingdoms of Castile, Navarre, and France. In short, the only instance that can put these three political realities together is the nativization of different peasant groups who only share a language—furthermore the “peasants” from Labort are fishermen. Therefore, Azurmendi creates a Basque subaltern peasant nation that dates as far back as the 1500s and is consolidated, through State repression, by the 1600s. In short, his anthropological thrust responds to a contemporary State ideal ego (the nation) and thus becomes nationalist: it tends to repress other historical and social differences on behalf of cultural uniformity and homogeneity. The narrative continuity that Azurmendi imposes over different historical interventions by unrelated kings and states in the French, Castilian and Navarrese Basque-speaking territories makes clear his nationalization of the peasant masses:

Aprovechando la vieja tradición de intervención regia en asuntos de enfrentamiento banderizo entre linajes gentilicios vascos, inaugurada ya con éxito por Enrique IV de Castilla en 1466 al sajar por lo sano las mutuas acusaciones de hacerse el mal por medios “mágicos”, los gobiernos posteriores decidieron buscar, esta vez ellos mismos, al hacedor de mal: ya que el pecado existía, debía encontrarse también a mano el pecador. Máxime cuando constaba oficialmente en la Corte de Henri IV [France and Navarre], por las informaciones que la propia nobleza [French] vasca hacía llegar a ella, que los diablos expulsados de India y Japón por los misioneros europeos habían venido a instalarse en regiones tan recónditas y bárbaras como el Laburdi y la cornisa pirenaica. (302-03).

In the above quote, Castile, France and Navarre are narrated as a single State power concerned with a single object of subjugation: the nationalistically uniform Basque peasantry. The fact that the missionaries themselves provide a colonial reference to the origin of witchcraft (India, Japan), further emphasizes the fact that the “conquest” had already succeeded, and thus the imperialist states were now concerned with subjugating internal minorities in order to consolidate an absolutist order—not a nationalist one.

Towards the end of his book, Azurmendi further reduces Basque peasants to “the Basque-speaking peasants of the Spanish state” (thus excluding French, Navarrese, and Alavan peasants) and explains the subalternization of the Basque language in the following terms:

Para afirmarse colectivamente, a la comunidad campesina solamente le restaba, en adelante, ir a las iglesias, pues, tras los procesos inquisitoriales, se le cerraron definitivamente las puertas de sus Juntas Provinciales, en las que había acostumbrado a reunirse para debatir sus problemas y elegir directamente a sus diputados. Es el caso que, al menos desde 1615, esto es, una vez que el gran inquisidor juez hubo demostrado que sólo en castellano se estaba habilitado para detectar la acción maligna y diabólica, las propias Juntas Provinciales exigieron que para reunirse y hablar en ellas de esa otra acción, la benigna y en pro del colectivo aldeano, era también menester saber hablar y escribir en castellano. De manera que vascos cultos que también hablaban euskara decidieron, por primera vez en la historia de su pueblo, que cuanto menos euskara se hablase en los Batzarrak, más purificada comunicación se lograría…. (199)

Moreover, Azurmendi connects the outlawing of the Basque language from two provincial parliaments (Batzarrak) with the lack of a non-religious production of Basque print culture. He concludes that this lack of literary production blocks Basque peasant classes from entering modernity: “La ausencia de libro en euskara se convierte desde entonces en efecto y, a la vez, causa de la permanente inadecuación de la baserritarra red de significados para hacer frente a las formas de vida moderna” (199). Yet, the absence of Basque print culture is older than the linguistic changes in the two provincial parliaments and coexists with the high moment of economic and industrial development in the 1500s in those very same provinces when Basque was not outlawed. Furthermore, nowhere in Europe did print culture help the emancipation of the peasant masses; the written word was always a privilege of the ruling classes. In short, Azurmendi equates the repression of Spanish-Basque peasants and the outlawing of Basque language from two provincial parliaments with the blockage of the Basque Country from modernity, which, as he elaborates in the last chapter, becomes the foundation of Basque nationalism. However, it is Azurmendi’s anthropological approach which is nativizing and thus ultimately nationalist; it responds to a contemporary State ideal ego which exerts repression in a nationalist way even retrospectively through intellectual history.

Consequently, as Azurmendi approaches the twentieth century at the end of his text, suddenly State oppression becomes secondary and Basque nationalism, which does not resonate with the State’s ideal ego, becomes the only problem in the narcissistic nationalist othering logic that he himself constructs in his text. Yet Basque nationalism cannot be othered as non-national and thus ultimately becomes traumatic and irrepressible. In short, at a time when the absolutist State has subjugated all minorities and, thus, has repressed any form of difference, the historical persistence of the Basque problem, now under the guise of nationalism, is unthinkable for Azurmendi. For him, this problem ends with the subjugation of the Basque peasant masses by the end of the 1600s; thus Basque nationalism returns with the traumatic impetus of any failed repression.

Consequently in his next work, which deals with contemporary Spanish-Basque politics and terrorism, La herida patriótica (1998), Azurmendi adopts the historical conclusion of his previous work: only the Spanish state, qua modern national one, represents the political ideal ego of modernity and thus, the persistence of Basque nationalism and terrorism is a traumatic reality that must, nevertheless, be repressed. Hence Azurmendi’s resort to organicist, medical metaphors (“herida”) in order to signify the asocial or natural character of this problem: it is beyond the State’s ideal ego and its repression. Its uncanny nature must be understood as nature, as originating beyond society. Yet, this natural state of things Basque is also a natural anomaly (“herida,” “llaga,” “daño”), which must be dealt with by the specialist that deals with humans’ physical nature, with the body: a doctor. He concludes that Basque nationalism is an organic disorder that, therefore, needs medical treatment or therapy: “De hecho, afirmo que es llegado ya el momento de que el liberal lo parezca también, y de que trate con una terapia de choque la base del sistema cultural abertzale [Basque nationalist]” (83). In this sense, Basque nationalism is not only nature but also nature gone wrong, a pathology, which therefore requires treatment for natural (self-evident and self-legitimizing) reasons: “el nacionalismo es una herida patriótica, una permanente llaga que hace daño en lo más hondo de la identidad: ¡Nos han robado lo que debimos ser! ¡Hemos perdido lo que debemos conseguir!” (177). Thus, the State becomes the only solution to the problem of Basque nationalism in the sense that the former represents the only healer that will bring the Basque Country back from nature and into society. In this way, the Basque problem is also legitimized as originating in nature, in a non-human state, and is therefore impossible to solve by social means.

In short, it is not contradictory but logical that Azurmendi moves from criticizing the State to becoming an apologist of it, since his understanding of Basque history is nationalist and ahistorical—responds to a single State ideal ego, the nation. Azurmendi tends to nativize and anthropologize Basque history, so that it is caught in the only two alternatives that an imperialist, nationalist State offers: othering (and consequent social assimilation) or traumatic repression (and consequent naturalization). The fact that a historical problem that should have disappeared at the end of the seventeenth or eighteenth century still persists in our days and, moreover, it has also taken the shape of a nationalist trauma that defies the State’s national ego, prompts Azurmendi to connect both historical developments. In order to link them historically, Azurmendi needs to find a nationalist impulse already in the subjugation of the Basque peasant masses, which no longer is mainly conducted by the State, but rather by the Basque local ruling classes. They become the new culprits of Basque nationalism’s retrospective existence and articulation at the end of the ancient regime, precisely at the moment when the subjugation of the Basque peasant masses should have ended and the absolutist State should have become liberal.

In Azurmendi’s most complex and comprehensive work on Basque history, Y se limpie aquella tierra (2000), although he moves away from an anthropological approach and shifts towards a more historically grounded analysis, he nevertheless does not abandon the nationalist approach to his new object of study: Basque ideological discourse. It is not a coincidence if he finds the origins of Basque nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century among Jesuits such as Manuel Larramendi and enlightened noblemen such as Xavier Munive. Here, nationalism results from an atrophy of an earlier Basque discourse, the Renaissance theories of Tubalism, which legitimized the Basques as the original inhabitants of Spain. Azurmendi denominates this atrophy “traditionalization:”

Así es como el viejo mito queda modificado suficientemente para sostener la legitimidad de las nuevas y más radicales reclamaciones de las elites vascongadas del XVIII. A esta operación llamaríamos tradicionalización del mito, porque el nuevo relato de una mano de yeso avejentado sobre el otro, pintando como vieja la norma de no modificación de costumbres que recién se inventaba ahora. Si los antiguos fundamentaron sus privilegios en el tubalismo, los del XVIII los fundamentan en la inalterabilidad del tubalismo, al insertar en él la voluntad de negar las nuevas condiciones y nuevos usos sociales. (312-13)

More specifically, Azurmendi traces the Basque “innovative traditionalization” to the work of Larramendi, who rewrites the Tubalist myth according to the new social and economic conditions that regulate agriculture at that moment: the mayorazgo (landholding) and the leaseholds owned by oligarchic absentee landholding:

Larramendi constituye con ello un hito en la mitologización vasca pues Tubal queda convertido en mayorazgo, fundador desde los inicios del sistema económico-social vasco vigente entre los siglos XVII y XVIII; instaurador de los fueros y costumbres o modo de ser y de vivir de los vascos supuestamente desde sus inicios; y Guipúzcoa queda significada como una gran familia, un único solar o entidad constitucional compacta, única y soberana desde sus inicios, al mando de las Juntas generales. (312-13)

Azurmendi’s condemnation of the Basque enlightenment, centered around the group of noblemen called “Caballeritos de Azcoitia,” responds to the same logic: “Los Amigos prefirieron no ver ese Otro y seguir mirándose en el espejo de la mismidad de Dios y de su enviado predilecto, Tubal” (367-68). Azurmendi notes that, as a result of “traditionalization,” both Larramendi and the enlightened noblemen begin to develop, in different forms and degrees, projects and ideas that point to an independent Basque Country, one endowed with its own history. Furthermore, Azurmendi finds that the “othering” of the Spanish monarchy and state lies at the core of this traditionalization and nationalization of the Basque Country:

Pese a lo inopinado del artificio, la propuesta de Puztaburu [Larramendi’s textual alter ego] podría parecer una radicalización intempestiva del elemental narcisismo del mito de los Padres Fundadores, no obstante se halla tensado desde una concepción radicalmente nueva: la aparición del Otro, sucio y peligroso, como factor de unificación identitaria y política. Si el relato de Tubal fue confeccionado para sancionar dentro de la monarquía hispana un puesto de privilegio y honor de los vizcaínos del siglo XVI, ¿Cómo es que el de Puztaburu, mediante los mismo elementos, esté forjado para legitimar un puesto autónomo e independiente respecto a la Monarquía? (320)

This becomes the foundational—and thus also traumatic—moment of Azurmendi’s entire discourse. The first political subject to other the State according to an ideal ego, which does not correspond to the State’s ideal ego, is the enlightened Spanish-Basque elite. This is the traumatic moment that, since it defies the modern State’s narcissistic balance between ego and ideal ego, between State and nation, it also challenges the contemporary nation-state and its ideal ego. Azurmendi’s discourse finds its traumatic kernel in this Basque historical moment, one that articulates an ideal ego that challenges the State but nevertheless cannot be repressed in nationalist terms, since its political historicity is abject.

Azurmendi’s response to this traumatic moment is to endow it with a nationalist origin, so that then he can criticize its inability to culminate in a modern Basque nation-state. Azurmendi nostalgically accuses the Basque enlightenment of not developing a Basque nation-state, similar to that of England or, later on, France and the United States. More specifically, and because the strong pull of the French Enlightenment, Azurmendi accuses the Basque Enlightenment of not being French and, thus, of not following the formation of the French nation-state and its declaration of “liberty, equality and fraternity:”

el resultado de los Amigos del País fue un estrepitoso fracaso al no hacer nada por plantear la génesis de una experiencia secularizada y, menos aún, por generalizar una instrucción pública, dos tareas con las que se hubiese perfilado algún atisbo de modificación de las condiciones de desigualdad sociales, culturalmente esquizofrénicas, económicamente explotadoras y políticamente paternalistas. (337)

In short, Azurmendi ends up thinking of the Spanish Basque Country as a negative (French) nation-state.

Yet, his own denunciation of the traumatic nature of the Basque Enlightenment’s supposed nationalism, which nevertheless does not live up to the ideal ego of the modern State, points to the imperialist origins of the new Basque discourse. The Basque Enlightenment reacts to the decline of the Spanish empire and the rise of an absolutist north-European hegemony, which results in the triumph of the French royal house, the Bourbons, in Spain:

Resulta aleccionantemente desolador ver cómo la imaginación más vigorosa de los vascongados del siglo XVI, atrapada en la red cultural elaborada casi doscientos años atrás, actuaba para impedir la comprensión del cambio social en curso, porque ahora que decaía el papel vascongado en el conjunto de los asuntos político-económicos de la monarquía, ya sin un Imperio en ultramar y sin poder dar salida a las gentes de casa a quienes la escasez e incluso el hambre comenzaban a presionar, precisamente ahora era menester reemprender otro vuelo cultural con otra imaginativa propuesta renovadora…. ¿por qué no se inventó un Túbal republicano, a lo inglés, consolidando un pacto donde convenir el estamento propietario tuviese su marco político junto al marco de los campesinos, ferrones, trajineros y demás gentes del país? (295)

The decadence of Spanish imperialism and the rise of a new absolutist monarchy, which no longer favors Basque industry and economy, results in an agricultural refashioning of the Spanish Basque Country—hence its traditionalization. Yet, this reorganization of the Spanish Basque Country cannot coincide with the project of the nation-state, since the latter is a result of the rise of industrial capitalism in countries such as England or France.

As Emiliano Fernández de Pinedo adds in his recounting of popular uprisings in Europe during the 1600s and 1700s, the popular rebellions that occurred in the Basque Country against the rulings classes and the monarchy are not specifically Basque but European; their origins are not nationalist or anti-nationalist, as Azurmendi’s analysis would require, but anti-absolutist. Furthermore, Fernández de Pinedo also recounts several attempts led by the nobility to independize different parts of Spain, including areas lacking a previous political identity, such as Andalusia. Therefore, even the formation of an independent political identity does not yield a nationalist formation:

El motín de la sal de Vizcaya es uno de los tantos que sacudieron al occidente europeo con el cambio de coyuntura. En la Península Ibérica había sido precedido por el de las sacarosas en Oporto (1628) y el de Santarem (1629), uno y otro de claro carácter antifiscal. Fueron el primer anuncio del profundo malestar que iba a manifestarse en la monarquía hispana en la década de los cuarenta y que alcanzará su cenit en la rebelión de Cataluña y Portugal, sin olvidar los intentos de independencia de Aragón con el duque de Híjar y el de Andalucía con el duque de Medinasidonia… Las características del levantamiento vizcaíno son semejantes a las que tuvieron lugar por la misma época en Francia. La principal causa, al menos la más aparente, fueron los nuevos impuestos… (75-76, my emphasis)

As the Spanish Basque Country’s seaborne commerce-industry and its inland-custom houses prove, the Basque economy had been clearly Atlantic. When the Spanish monarchy began to lose its Atlantic hegemony, Spanish-Basque writers and ideologues noted this change, legitimized its results (the agricultural turn of the Basque Country), but sought to redeploy this new economy in an Atlantic framework. In his Corografía, for example, Larramendi does not give much space to the farmstead (baserria). However, he devotes long paragraphs to denouncing the loss of an industrial economy.[12] Similarly, the Caballeritos of Azcoitia, as Jesús Astigarraga has masterfully demonstrated, sought industrial solutions to the agricultural crisis in the Basque Country following similar trends in Europe (23-76). The Caballerito’s interest in the French enlightenment as well as in the new agricultural technology developed in Europe was Atlantic in spirit and configured the model followed by the rest of the decadent Spanish empire. It is not a coincidence that Swedish and German scientists, brought to the Basque Country by the Caballeritos, yielded industrial and scientific discoveries: platinum and tungsten. Furthermore, Azurmendi neglects to mention that the biggest success of the society founded by the Caballeritos, the Real Sociedad Vascongada de Amigos del País Vasco, was on the other side of the Atlantic, in colonial Latin America (Astigarraga 67-69), whence it derived the majority of the membership and of economic support. In short, the Basque enlightenment was, historically speaking, an Atlantic reaction to an Atlantic problem.

The fact that ultimately the Spanish monarchy and the church curtailed and destroyed this enlightened project shows its non-nationalist nature. It is a modern and enlightened Basque response to an ancient-regime crisis in the Spanish monarchy; it is only historically logical that the result did not follow the project of the nation-state. Yet it is also clear that, throughout the nineteenth century, the Spanish monarchy did not manage to solve this Basque Atlantic problem, and, later on, Spanish liberalism also failed in its centralist attempts. The Basque Enlightenment marks the beginning of a Basque non-Hispanic modernity that does not follow the project of the nation-state but attempts to give an Atlantic solution to the problem of a shrinking economy that loses its industrial might and thus condemns the masses to a very new phenomenon: the re-ruralization of the Basque Country. It is this problem that then explodes with the Spanish civil conflicts of the nineteenth century known as the Carlist wars.

Azurmendi’s nationalization of Basque history and its ideologies, his reading from the State ideal ego’s position, explains why, when dealing with contemporary global immigration, he resorts to a nationalist paradigm that disavows history, defends the State as the ultimate subject (ego) of history and politics, and thus ends up “othering” the immigrant as the State’s other, so that it can then be repressed. The mirroring effect between State and immigrant other is perfect, not despite the fact that Azurmendi disavows the Basque problem, but precisely because he misconstructs Spanish and Basque history as a national/ist problem. That original and traumatic misconstruction, which points to the status of the Real as held by Basque and colonial Latin American history in Azurmendi’s discourse, is the one that supports and gives shape to his anti-multiculturalist defense of the State vis-à-vis the immigrant. Azurmendi also represses immigrant history by forcing it into a nationalist history of assimilation.

Ironically enough, a very worrisome continuity emerges between the Inquisition’s discourse of conversion and Azurmendi’s discourse of integration. From conversion to integration, the State emerges retrospectively as the ahistorical ideal ego of politics, one that secures ideological continuity between inquisitors such as Avellaneda or Lancre and anthropologists such as Azurmendi in the legitimation of the State’s ideal ego, from its absolutist consolidation to the present day.

Given the Spanish state’s lack of modernity and Azurmendi’s own anthropological and nationalist treatment of Basque history and subalternity, it is only coherent that he go from joining ETA in the 60s to upholding Spanish state power in the 90s. Both alternatives respond to a nationalist understanding of Basque history, which ultimately represses Basque reality—just like the Inquisition did in the 1500s and 1600s.