The Basque Country (Basque: Euskal Herria) is the name given to the geographical area located on the shores of the Bay of Biscay and on the two sides of the western Pyrenees that spans the border between France and Spain. Nowadays, this area is fragmented into three political structures: the Basque autonomous community, also known as Euskadi, and Navarre in Spain, and three French provinces known as the Northern Basque Country. Approximately 3,000,000 people live in the Basque Country.
Basque people have managed to preserve their own identifying characteristics such as their own culture and language throughout the centuries and today a large part of the population shares a collective consciousness and a desire to be self-governed, either with further political autonomy or full independence. Over the centuries, the Basque Country has maintained various levels of political self-governance under different Spanish political frameworks. Nowadays, Euskadi enjoys the highest level of self-governance of any nonstate entity within the European Union.[21] However, tensions about the type of relationship the Basque territories should maintain with the Spanish authorities have existed since the origins of the Spanish state and in many cases have fuelled military confrontation, such as the Carlist Wars and the Spanish Civil War.
Following the 1936 coup d'état that overthrew the Spanish republican government, a civil war between Spanish nationalist and republican forces broke out. Nearly all Basque nationalist forces, led by the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) sided with the Republic, even though Basque nationalists in Álava and Navarre fought along Basque Carlists on the side of Spanish nationalists. The war ended with the victory of the nationalist forces, with General Francisco Franco establishing a dictatorship that lasted for almost four decades. During Franco's dictatorship, Basque language and culture were banned, institutions and political organisations abolished (to a lesser degree in Alava and Navarre), and people killed, tortured and imprisoned for their political beliefs. Thousands of Basques were forced to go into exile, usually to Latin America or France.
Influenced by wars of national liberation such as the Algerian War or by conflicts such as the Cuban Revolution, and disappointed with the weak opposition of the PNV against Franco's regime, a young group of students formed ETA in 1959. It first started as an organization demanding the independence of the Basque Country, from a socialist and Marxist–Leninist position, and it soon started its armed campaign.