ABSTRACT
Since the late 1980s, Plaid Cymru has proposed the notion of ‘full national status for Wales within the European Union’ (Plaid Cymru 1989) as an expression of its constitutional aims for Welsh self-government, according to which Wales would take its place in Europe alongside other small nations such as Luxembourg, Denmark and Belgium. In September 2003, however, the party’s Annual Conference voted to modify this expression in favour of ‘independence in Europe’. Such a move may seem surprising when the following two observations are taken into account. In the first place, Plaid Cymru has, since it was established in the mid 1920s, persistently rejected the nineteenth-century vocabulary of sovereign statehood as the expression of its constitutional aims, preferring to use terms such as ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ as more appropriate representations of its long-term aspirations for the Welsh nation ( Christiansen 1998: 130–2). Second, this move seems out of sync with the similarly ‘post-sovereigntist’ formulations adopted by other minority nationalist parties in Western Europe, constitutional alternatives which appear propitious in a European context where traditional structures of political authority are being undermined (Keating 2001b).
