Michael Keating & Zoe Bray – Ibarretxe Plan

In December 2004 the parliament of Spain’s Basque Country approved a controversial proposal for a ‘New Political Statute’ for the region, the so-called Ibarretxe Plan, involving the creation of a Basque State ‘freely associated’ with Spain. The Plan was presented in September 2002 as the fruit of exhaustive reflection on Basque sovereignty involving a wide array of civil groups, regional unions, associations and political parties not represented in the regional parliament. Although not calling for secession from Spain, it challenged the basis of Spanish state sovereignty as enshrined in the constitution of 1978 by claiming the right for residents of Euskadi to vote on their relationship with the Spanish state. Dismissed by Spain’s two principal political parties, the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Espan˜ol or PSOE) and the conservative Popular Party (Partido Popular or PP), as unconstitutional and therefore nonnegotiable, the Plan was rejected by the Spanish parliament, or Cortes, on 1 February 2005.

In the traditional European state system boundaries took the form of physical borders which kept people in and out and served to delineate coinciding systems for politics, institutions, identities, culture and functions. European integration represents in principle an erosion of such fixed borders, allowing different systems to find their own boundaries.
Objectively the Ibarretxe Plan is consistent with this. It is not a proposal to set up a territorial and institutional frontier which concretizes the cultural one, but rather an effort to provide people with different ways of living out their identity within the Basque autonomous region, and to redefine the relationship of this region to the Spanish state and, to some degree, the other Basque provinces.

Ethnopolitics, Vol. 5, No. 4, 347–364, November 2006 ‘Renegotiating Sovereignty: Basque Nationalism and the Rise and Fall of the Ibarretxe Plan’