While campaigning in the European Parliament, Iñaki Galdós wrote an interesting article in Berria explaining that EH Bildu announced that Hego Euskal Herria would defend in Europe the NATO refusal in the 1986 referendum. Subsequently, Galdós recalled the pragmatic changes that took place in neutral countries and in the parties of the leftist sovereigns. In 2012, the Scottish SNP went from being against NATO to being favourable. With this logic, Galdos has shown his willingness to play a chuleta if the possible Basque republic achieved independence, “that whoever governs (...) would continue to be a member of NATO txintxo-txintxo”.

That chinchito means assuming our right to decide and sovereignty is limited: we cannot take decisions against Washington’s will, for example, to leave NATO in order to gain autonomy in international relations. It is often thought that one way to facilitate secession is the will to maintain as its own the international alliances and dependencies of the State of origin.

The fact is that among the members of NATO, apart from the decolonization processes, there has never been an independence. You're not in the world's first military alliance, and then you get secession at home. The births of the new States are geopolitical acts, so competitions between powers have a great deal to do. This does not mean that lowering the price of secession is not a strategy, the Basque Republic would be more possible if the process of European integration were deepened by democratising and federalising it. This would mean that Brussels was autonomous from Washington. Then, yes, the Basque republic would be more likely to achieve a deannexation than an independence in the EU federation.

The scenario mentioned is not easy. Therefore, the second possible scenario for obtaining the Basque Republic cannot be ruled out: Continue western decadence until there is geopolitical chaos that creates possibilities for secession. A sign of decadence and weakness is that Washington and Brussels will soon want to unite the states of their sphere of influence, for example by resorting to governments that want autonomy in their international relations. Irakli Kobakhidze, Georgia’s Prime Minister and winner of the 2022 Sabino Arana Prize, knows that well. They have little value in bringing the objective of entering NATO and the EU into the constitution. Even though many Western countries have similar laws, this small state in the Caucasus does not like to do so because they think it can make it difficult for them to intervene in the country. Consequently, several members of western governments have participated in illegal demonstrations in Tbilisis and have been criticised, threatened and sanctioned by the Georgian authorities. Furthermore, the Commissioner of the European Commission, Olivpatronato Várhelyi, informed Kobakhidzer by telephone that if they continued with legal approval it could further polarise Georgian society, which could lead to uncontrolled situations when, as happened, they were shot days before Robert Instance, Slovakia’s Social Democrat Prime Minister.

Since the 1980s, a EU Prime Minister has not suffered such major attacks. However, the media came to justify almost the attack on Fico and hit the victim politically. I would argue that it does not behave chinchito, calling for negotiations in the war in Ukraine and denouncing the massacre that Israel is committing against the Palestinians.