Wales: Plaid Cymru

This chapter examines the European attitudes of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party established in 1924, and the main mouthpiece of minority nationalist demands in Wales ever since. During Plaid Cymru’s lifetime, the party’s attitude towards European integration has undergone several important transformations. The chapter identifi es three stages in the evolution of Plaid Cymru’s position on Europe. Firstly, during the mid-1970s, Plaid Cymru combined a strong ideological commitment to an international framework for Welsh self-determination with vitriolic opposition to the EEC as it was developing at the time, not least due to the negative implications of economic integration for the Welsh economy. By the mid-1980s, however, Plaid Cymru had abandoned its opposition to the EEC. In its place, the party adopted a passionately Europeanist discourse that called for ‘full national status for Wales within Europe’. This European dimension provided the framework for rethinking how best to achieve other policy goals that had hitherto been conceptualised in exclusively domestic terms. This second stage of zealous Euro-enthusiasm was to characterise Plaid Cymru’s attitude towards European integration until the late 1990s. More recently, however, developments in European integration, combined with the transformation of the Welsh political environment in the wake of devolution in 1999, have forced Plaid Cymru to reconsider its position on European integration once again. The failure of European integration to create a Europe of the Regions, and growing disillusionment with actually existing Europe, led Plaid Cymru to abandon its post-sovereigntist rhetoric in favour of a more conventional demand for ‘independence for Wales in Europe’. At the same time, a growing Euro-scepticism among the Welsh electorate and new pressures on Plaid Cymru to transform itself into a credible political party of potential regional government, have led the party to de-emphasise a ‘Wales in Europe’ discourse that no longer serves as an attractive vote-winning agenda in post-devolution Wales. Instead, the party has sought other, more promising, ways of advancing its nationalist goals via domestic political channels. Plaid Cymru’s entry into coalition government in May 2007 has opened up new opportunities for infl uencing European policy making and bolstering Welsh autonomy. With such opportunities not forthcoming at the European level, the party’s commitment to ‘independence in Europe’ has been relegated to the domain of symbolic politics.