Less Divided after ETA? Green Networks in the Basque Country between 2007 and 2017

The long violent conflict between the Spanish state and the separatist organization ETA has made the Basque Country an extremely polarized political community, with ethno-nationalist cleavages permeating many aspects of public life, including relations among participatory civic organizations. In this context, ETA’s announcement of its unilateral abandonment of violence on October 20th, 2011 could be regarded as a large-scale critical event with the potential to alter everyday relational structures among Basque civic organizations. In particular, it could be expected that in the new post-conflict scenario differences in organizations’ political identities might be less of a burden for engaging in common collective action, resulting in lower levels of fragmentation and polarization. This research paper proposes to examine this hypothesis focusing on a paradigmatic example of a collective action field contaminated by the national violent conflict: environmentalism. This study conducts a longitudinal network analysis of coalition building in the Basque environmental collective action field between 2007 and 2017. In particular, the analysis will focus on the overlap between two types of ties: joint involvement in public events of collective action, and political identity similarity, controlling for other potentially structuring factors of coalition formation. By looking at how this overlap evolved throughout time we can obtain a good relational picture of the evolution of socio-political boundaries within Basque environmentalism, which might be indicative of broader trends in Basque organized civil society. Retrospective data on coalitions is obtained through a self-collated dataset of more than 400 environmental collective action events reported in four local newspapers, while data on organizational traits are obtained through surveys, extensive documentation, and in-depth interviews with expert informants. In terms of societal impact, this research suggests an innovative empirical strategy to incorporate the role of civic organizational fields as part of the assessment of social cohesion and reconciliation in post-conflict settings. From a theoretical standpoint, the paper can contribute to the literature on social movement coalitions by introducing a still rare longitudinal design that allows to analyze the influence of changing contextual factors on coalition networks.