by Kanishk Tharoor
For Basque separatists, who earlier this week vowed to persist with their armed struggle for full independence from Spain and the creation of a Basque socialist state, playing up the supposed ancient national authenticity of "Basqueness" has always been important. We, they say puffing out their chests, are the oldest surviving people of Europe. How pleased our ski-masked friends at ETA would be to learn that a famous Oxford historian and geneticist now supports their claims.
Famous for his synthesis of DNA studies and archaeology, Stephen Oppenheimer has made a discipline (read: vocation) out of excavating/decoding ancient migrations. His recent article in Prospect (essentially a plug for the represented book) enters a new salvo into a war fought for decades in classrooms, archives, laboratories and peat bogs. Who (what/when/how/why) are the British?
According to Oppenheimer, prevailing views on the history of British identity are dead wrong. The Vikings, "Anglo-Saxons", even the Celts were only marginal players, "minority elites" in the creation of British peoplehood (Oppenheimer also questions the very clarity of categories such as "Anglo-Saxon" and Celt, which has been done before). It was an older people that form the bulk of the British mass, the Basques.
Such notions have been whispered in the shadowy regions of academia for a while now, fantasies of a common pan-European tongue and people that predate the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. But never have they been pushed so far into the light of public discourse.
Oppenheimer has already managed to irk the hardcore anglosaxonist cadres of the net. Doubtless the fighting celticists will join the rumble next.
He may also have moved a step closer to solving the thorny problem of the Basque language, not clearly part of any family of modern languages (though this probably won't stop scholars from churning out fantastical theories, because, well, it can be fun). And perhaps historians may be pressed to stop using kitchen terminology to describe the elusive peoples of ancient Europe.
More interestingly, we may see our ski-masked friends in Donostia, Bilbo, Gasteiz and the rest of Vizcaya issue a victorious grunt, and say: "You see, we told you all along. Our regionalism is not out-dated in the era of the European Union. There is nothing more European than being Basque. Oxford says so."
