Young radical nationalists: Prisoners of their own myth? The case of the Kale Borroka in the Spanish Basque country

Abstract

How and why do some young people become street fighters who rally behind a political ideology? This article attempts to explore this complex issue. First, using ethnographic data, the article examines political and violent socialization, and its connections to and influences upon individual, peer and discourse conditions. Second, it explores how individual predispositions, i.e. those dispositions acquired from a certain family, social class or peer group in an ideological background, constitute, or not, prerequisites for young men to turn to nationalist street fighting, such as the Kale Borroka in the Spanish Basque country. Finally, the article shows that the current representation of young activists is not a mythological construct, rather it is an extension of complex processes in early socialization, a product of virtual and physical interactions raisonnantes with the police organizations, and lastly, a form of self-referential violence.