When attempting to secede from a state, as the Scottish independence movement seeks to do, or to defeat a secessionist movement, as the UK’s governing political parties seek to do, it is natural to look abroad to similar movements and similar states to learn lessons from them.

In the past, Europe’s secessionists and the states they are in contention with looked to Scotland and the UK to learn from the SNP’s electoral victories and success in securing a legal independence referendum, and from the UK’s approach to managing (and, in 2014, defeating) the Scottish independence movement. Today, both Scotland’s secessionists and Scottish Labour, seeking to dislodge those secessionists from government, would benefit from looking in the other direction – to Spain, in particular.

The history of secessionism in Spain is more explosive than that of secessionism in Scotland. In the Basque Country, the campaign for independence became one of political violence in the 1960s after revelations that the fascist regime of Francisco Franco had been torturing Basque activists, plunging the region into a spiral of terrorism and repression.

Inspired by the revolutionary socialism of other nationalist movements around the world, particularly in South America and Vietnam, the left-wing Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Country and Freedom), more commonly known as ETA, would go on to kill 829 people, including 340 civilians, between 1968 and 2010.

READ MORE

John Swinney has a strategy - and we can start to see it take shape

There is a simple answer to the question: what is a woman

More recently, the wildcat Catalan independence referendum in 2017 devolved into violence when security services were dispatched to close polling stations, forcibly........

© Herald Scotland