From Militant Voices to Militant Irony: Examining Identity, Memory and Conflict in the Basque Country

Collective memory and identity so often go hand in hand with conflicts. Alongside the use of violence, conflicts unfold against the backdrop of different narratives about the past through which groups constantly remind themselves of the supposed origin of the conflict, and consequently, what position individuals are expected to take as members of the group. Narratives – as symbolic tools for interpreting the past and the present, as well as happenings that have yet to occur – simultaneously underpin, and are underpinned by, the position held by each warring faction. Drawing on previous works, this paper compares different versions of the 2016 truce period in the Basque Country stemming from three subjects identified, to varying degrees, with the main political actors involved in that conflict. These three cases have been selected from a total of 16 participants who were asked to define the Basque conflict and to provide an account of the 2006 truce period by using 23 documents taken from different Spanish newspapers. On the one hand, the results show two narratives reproducing the versions of two of the main political actors involved in the conflict, and on the other hand, a narrative characterized by a more personal and ironic appropriation of those versions. Results are discussed vis-à-vis the use of irony in history teaching in increasingly plural societies.

past, whether in informal contexts such as family or formal contexts such as school. These are narratives which, despite occurring prior to our own existence, end up forming part of our past and therefore our identity.
We can thus say that our personal identity is irredeemably linked to collective identity, since by appropriating the group's past accounts, we become emotionally involved in them and absorb the values, achievements, grievances and collective claims conveyed by those accounts. In fact, this socially shared sense of the past is what often leads us to identify with the positions defended by individuals who claim to represent certain groups or collectives, and to assume them as our own, in the first person plural. This way of transmitting the past and making it available and familiar to individuals has led some authors (Bar-Tal, 2014;Liu & Hilton, 2005) to study collective memory through the social representations theory (Moscovici, 1984). From this perspective, memory is considered as something dynamic, "actively engaged, socially and materially situated, reconstructive and oriented to the future" (Wagoner, 2015, p. 143). This dynamic implies, on the one hand, a process of objectification, by which the group's historical past is conveyed through a range of stories, images, rituals, monuments etc., and on the other hand, a process of anchoring, whereby the group's representation of the past becomes a framework against which to interpret the present and imagine the future.
Collective memory and identity so often go hand in hand with conflicts to the point that they seamlessly feed into each other. Thus, on one hand, conflicts deeply mark groups' collective memory and identity, whether in the form of deeds to be collectively remembered and celebrated or grievances and affronts not to be forgotten.
On the other hand, memory and identity are elements that underlie many conflicts, insofar as certain ways of enhancing a common sense of belonging are built upon groups' old -or recent -scars, grievances, resentments and hatreds, thus providing a rationale through which conflicts may be fuelled, reignited and perpetuated. In this sense, alongside the use of violence, conflicts unfold against the backdrop of different narratives about the past through which groups constantly remind themselves of the supposed origin of the conflict, and consequently, what position individuals are expected to take as members of the group. Thus, narratives -as symbolic tools for interpreting the past and the present, as well as happenings that have yet to occur -simultaneously underpin, and are underpinned by, the position held by each warring faction (see Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). This gives rise to a symbolic and argumentative context  saturated by different partisan narratives, these in turn being the symbolic tools or mediational means (Wertsch, 1991) by which people come to give sense to conflicts and build a position according to the group with which they identify.
In such divided and multivoiced contexts, the possible standpoints on the conflict are pretty much constrained by warring factions' discourses and voices, which individuals -identified with different groups -tend to appropriate and make their own. This would explain why in conflicts deemed as intractable (Bar-Tal, 2013)where groups are somehow locked in their own positions and versions of the conflict (see Nicholson, 2016)new favourable scenarios for reconciliation are usually perceived and anchored in light of the old narratives and ways of representing the conflict. In such cases, in which a window for peace seems to emerge, alternative approaches tend to be overshadowed by partisan ways of interpreting reality.

Identity, Memory, and Conflict in the Basque Country
The Basque Country conflict in Spain -now on the way to be resolved -is a clear example of this i . After fifty years of violence and social unrest, the armed group ETA (acronym for Euzkadi ta Azcatasuna or Basque Country and Freedom in English) announced a permanent ceasefire in March 2006. This announcement was surrounded by controversy since the very beginning due to the different ways in which the ceasefire was interpreted by the main political actors involved in the conflict. ETA considered the ceasefire as the first step to negotiate the independence of the Basque Country from the Spanish State. The Spanish Government (headed at that time by the Socialist José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero) deemed the ceasefire as an opportunity to initiate a peace process which could lead to a negotiated solution to the conflict. By its part, the main opposition party (the right wing People's Party) considered the ceasefire as a "truce-trap" and accused the Government of having secret deals with the terrorists and surrendering the country to ETA. In December that year, ETA planted a bomb at Madrid airport, leaving two people dead. That attack -justified by ETA as a response to the Government's passivity during the truce period -was the tragic outcome of nine months of political unrest during which the main actors involved resorted to different accounts in order to justify their own positions vis-àvis a process understood as a "democratic process" according to Batasuna, a "peace process" from the Government's point of view and a "trick process" by the People's Party.
Thus, following the bombing attack at Madrid airport, diverse ways of understanding that process were consolidated by means of various opposing accounts; accounts that also acted as tools by which people could interpret, recall and draw conclusions from the ceasefire according to their identification with the main figures involved. This is not to say that agency was vanished amidst warring factions' narratives and voices. Agency lays on the irreducible tension between those meditational means provided by a particular socio-cultural setting -in this case, the public narratives about the ceasefire period -and the way these are used by individuals as a resource in remembering (Wertsch, 2002). In Bakhtinian terms this implies different forms of multivoiced authoring (Bakhtin, 1981; see also Wertsch & O'Connor, 1994) in that different voices (in this case, those pertaining to the main figures involved in the conflict) would be appropriated and adapted to individuals' own intentions in different specific contexts. Such a personal appropriation of social discourses may take different degrees of agency and authorship, ranging from reproduction and acceptance, at one end of the continuum, to entire rejection on the other (Brescó, 2016;Wertsch & O'Connor, 1994). However, in polarised contexts saturated with partisan discourses, it is often the case that the rejection of one implies embracing some other. It is in these particular contexts -such as the Basque conflict -where personal appropriation of these discourses in the form of irony or satire becomes a way of resisting -and mocking -the warring factions' militant discourses saturating the public sphere.

Case Study: Remembering the 2006 Truce Period in the Basque Country
Drawing on previous works (Brescó, 2009(Brescó, , 2016, this section aims to compare different versions of the abovementioned truce period stemming from three subjects identified to varying extents with the main political actors involved in that Basque conflict ii . These three cases form part of a wider study in which a total of 16 undergraduate students -from the University of the Basque Country and the Autonomous University of Madrid -were asked to define the Basque conflict and to provide an account of the 2006 ceasefire period by using 23 short documents extracted from TV and different Spanish newspapers iii . The documents used for this studyarranged in chronological order -consisted of five pictures, ten broadsheet headings and eight brief extracts of statements delivered by some political actors during the truce period (see examples of each type in Table 1).
Participants were allowed to use the documents in any way they wished (e.g., only using those supporting their views on the truce period, omitting those others they deemed unimportant or at odds with their viewpoints, and adding whatever extra information they considered appropriate). Table 1 Examples of the Different Type of Documents Provided to Participants

Type of document Example
Broadsheet heading "More detentions, reports of torture and prohibitions of Batasuna's demonstrations" (Gara, pro  Green's version in which the attack was conceived as a form of communication, in this case as a mere warning. All in all, Blue´s version of the events would prove the uselessness of dialogue with the terrorists in line with the People's Party position against the government's attempt to reach a peace agreement with ETA. In light of this, the position taken by the People's Party throughout the peace process is no longer a failure, but a patriotic duty against a preceding immoral agreement. Gray's stance is removed from the position of the main political actors as he sees the conflict as something fictitious, fuelled by the actors themselves. From this standpoint, the claims deriving from each actor's position become meaningless insofar as they would constitute a resource for nourishing a conflict that all sides wish to keep alight. Such a critical distance is reflected in the way the truce period is narrated. Thus, from the very first sentence (On the 22 nd of March three gentlemen wearing hoods and fancy dress appear on TV announcing a truce), Gray makes clear his resistance to take seriously what the actors involved in the truce period claim to be doing. This ironic stance on what is considered a fictitious conflict is further reinforced by his explicitly likening the peace-process to a "cheap farce". Along these lines, the whole episode is narrated as if it were a play, one that starts off with the appearance on the stage (in this case, on television) of the three members of ETA announcing the ceasefire and the activation of all the political and media machinery, which continues to operate until the bombing attack on Madrid airport. This way of reconstructing the ceasefire period moreover underscores the fictitious nature of the position of the actors involved, actors whose 'performance' is aimed more at making their respective audiences happy -i.e., not losing popularity among their voters and supporters -than at having their claims satisfied -be it achieving independence, reaching an agreement through dialogue or defending the unity of the Spanish state.

Militant Voices and Militant Irony in the Basque Conflict
As we can see in these three examples, participants Green and Blue clearly identify themselves with certain political actors (ETA and the People's Party, respectively), thus assuming and to some extent reproducing their corresponding versions of the truce period, including the claims, criticisms and justifications contained in such versions. As a result, we have two militant accounts in which each participant seems to accept and adopt the voice of one of those actors and make it their own. From a Bakhtinian perspective, we could say that the actors' voices speak through the participants' accounts, or in other words, that participants have been to some degree talked-or ventriloquized-by those actors' voices.
Contrary to Green's and Blue's acceptance of such voices, Gray's critical stance on both ETA and People's Party positions is reflected through an ironic, even satirical, narrative style by which this participant criticises the absurd logic that characterises these actors' conduct and by extension the whole conflict at large. This is carried out by means of a certain way of using the voices of the political actors themselves in order to highlight their absurdity during the truce period. This resource, linked to irony, is close to the Bakhtinian concept of 'double-voicedness', "refer[ed] to the use of someone else's words in order to express one's own intentions and meanings that are hostile to others' words" (Marková, 2003, p. 63  In Gray´s case, we find a greater degree of agency in reconstructing the truce period compared to the cases of Green and Blue. Thus, whereas in the latter cases the participants' words expressed the view of the main political actors on the truce period, in Gray's case the words of those political actors are used to express the participant's more personal view of it. In this regard, Gray's satirical and distant stance is not incompatible with the adoption of his own positioning on the episode in question. As Frye (1957) points out in his work on Tropics of Discourse, "satire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured" (p. 223). This moral dimension related to the use of tropes and genres is further developed by the philosopher of history Hayden White who argues that the narrative forms used in reconstructing the past inevitably convey a moral content (White, 1986). In the particular case of irony, this author considers this genre as a meta-trope, a trope related to self-consciousness in the use of language when talking about the past. In White's own words, "[irony] represents a stage of consciousness in which the problematical nature of language itself has become recognized" (White, 1973, p. 37).

Citizenship?
Identity and memory are elements that can easily be found in many conflicts. Groups transmit and use narratives about the past in order to underpin their identity as well as their respective position within conflicts.
These narratives act as mediational tools through which the members of the group not only reconstruct the past -viz., how the conflict originated -but also anchor and give meaning to present events as well as the conflict's future horizon. Transmission of these narratives takes place in different contexts, such as the family and school. As for the latter, according to Carretero (2011), history teaching continues to focus on "intimate emotional adherence to national identity symbols and narratives -in detriment to critical thinking" (p. 38). According to Misztal (2003), this identity-based conveyance of historical narratives serves to both legitimize certain political structures and claim historically marginalized identities. In both cases, the objective lies in instilling loyalty towards the different collectives, leading individuals to assume as their own the collectives' past and future, their defeats and victories, their heroes and enemies. As Liu and Hilton (2005) state, social representations of the past have a mobilizing power as they outline a trajectory telling "us who we are, where we came from and where we should be going" (p. 537).
This leads us to highlight the role of imagination, or more specifically the politics of imagination (Bottici & Challand, 2011), both regarding collective identity -how our identity is imagined in opposition to a certain alterity (see Glăveanu & de Saint Laurent, 2015) -and collective memory -how the imagined collective future affects the way of remembering the past (see de Saint Laurent, Obradovic, & Carriere, in press). In fact, the role of collective memory -in this case, regarding conflicts -can be understood as a way of reconstructing the past in light of different imagined futures in order to foster current actions, thus proleptically guiding the present towards certain political goals (see the notion of prolepsis applied to collective memory in Brescó, 2017). From this point of view, it can be argued that collective memory conveys a script with guidelines for action as well as for interpreting the actions of other political actors involved in the conflict; a script that, in providing the story-line of the conflict, not only describes what happened in the past and how is the state of things in the present, but it also prescribes what lines of actions should be taken in the future. In making these scripts their own, individuals run the risk of becoming trapped in certain positions in the conflict, thus becoming actors of a ready-made story-line. This is usually the case whenever warring factions' discourses saturate the public sphere, thus making it difficult for alternative versions and voices to be articulated, let alone heard. In such cases, in the absence of any alternative available discourse, the use of irony constitutes a way in which to resist the official versions of the conflict. As we have seen in the previous section, the theatrical metaphor used by the third participant in our study (Gray), is not only a resource to mock official and partisan versions of the truce period; it also denotes a greater degree of agency through which that participant can denaturalize and distance himself from those versions, thus gaining more authorship over his own way of recounting this episode.
Identity and memory are highly flammable elements whose misuse in certain contexts may make them ignite into conflict. However, at the same time they can be important elements for an open and reflective citizenry.
Memory does not just keep hatreds alight. By looking at the past we can gain knowledge about our mistakes and wrongdoings, victims can be remembered and compensated, and more reflective ways of dealing with history can be promoted in order to avoid new conflicts in the future . In the same vein, the presence of different identities, far from being a threatening reality, constitutes an opportunity to reconstruct the group's inherited narratives about the past, which thus opens the door to rethinking and generating more complex and flexible identities and positions that are open to change and diversity (Rosa & González, 2012). History teaching, in this sense, is called upon to contribute to this endeavour by denaturalizing historical narratives and encouraging the democratic participation of citizens in the public affairs of plural societies (see Rosa & Brescó, 2017). In discussing the role of history teaching in an increasingly globalized world, authors such as Rorty (1989) and Turner (2002) see irony as a way in which to foster a sceptical attitude towards traditional national histories so that more open and cosmopolitan views can be promoted (see Smith, 2007 for a discussion on this matter). Irony can indeed be a means by which to prevent individuals from naturalizing certain narratives transmitted through the group, narratives which may hinder dialogue and reconciliation with others. In line with Egan's (1997) notion of ironic understanding regarding history teaching, Blanco and Rosa (1997) float the idea that "perhaps it would not be a bad goal to look for an ironic citizenship, but an irony based upon reflection and informed dialogue, not cynicism" (p. 15). Maybe irony is not enough, but it is probably a necessary element in order to endow people with more agency so that they can gain perspective on identity, memory and conflicts.
Notes i) Situated in the northeastern part of Spain, the Basque Country is an autonomous region with specific cultural features (e.g., the Basque language). A great number of people in that region do not feel part of the Spanish nation and would like to form and independent country. This scenario is strongly marked by the presence of the terrorist group ETA which started to operate in 1969 (at the end of Franco's dictatorship). Since then ETA has caused nearly 900 casualties, including policemen, politicians, civilians, and military men. Over the last ten years, ETA has been losing strength in terms of both its operational capacity and social support. In October 2011, the terrorist group announced the definitive termination of its armed struggle. Nevertheless, the Basque conflict is still open and unresolved as ETA has not handed over its weapons. ii) These actors are: 1) the Spanish Government, presided at that time by the Socialist party, who defended the legitimacy of the peace-making process; 2) the terrorist group ETA and its political arm Batasuna, who advocates for the independence of the Basque Country and legitimizes the use of violence; and 3) the right-wing People's Party -the main group of the Opposition at that time -who delegitimized the peace-process by accusing the socialist Government of making political concessions to ETA in exchange for keeping the cease-fire.
iii) The selected sources were: El Mundo and ABC (centre-right wing newspapers, close to the People's Party), El País (centre-left wing newspaper, close to Zapatero's Socialist Party), Gara (newspaper close to Batasuna -ETA's political arm -, and La Vanguardia (a Catalan centre-right newspaper). All political views on the Basque conflict were balanced across sources. iv) These two cases appear in Brescó (2009Brescó ( , 2016. v) All participants have code names in order to preserve their anonymity.

Funding
The author has no funding to report.

Competing Interests
The author has declared that no competing interests exist.