Visions of Sovereignty: Nationalism and Accommodation in Multinational Democracies

PART I

The Paradox of the Internal Differentiation in National Movements

Introduction

Secessionism and Non-Secessionism in Substate National Movements

Variation in secessionism among nationalists is part of one of the great puzzles of ethnic politics (Hale 2008: 1). Although Ukrainians and the citizens of the Baltic republics chose independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Central Asian republics remained bastions of nonsecessionism. Nationalists in Spain’s Basque Country, the Igbo territory in Nigeria’s First Republic, and Québec in Canada have historically been more inclined toward independence than nationalists in Catalonia in Spain, Yorubaland in Nigeria, or Nunavut in Canada (Díez Medrano 1999; Hale 2008: 57). Most scholars who have focused on the problem of variation in secessionism have centered their attention on paired comparisons of national movements in which one case is clearly pro-secession while the other is nonsecessionist, such as comparing Ukraine with Uzbekistan or the Basque Country with Catalonia (Díez Medrano 1999; Conversi 1997). They have generally failed to investigate the complex heterogeneity of political orientations within national movements and their temporal evolution.

This book, by contrast, focuses instead on within-case variation, and opts for a within-case research design, choosing the relevant nationalist party (and its leaders and militants) as its primary unit of analysis. Another focus will be the within-case temporal evolution of national movements themselves. This book’s remit is national movements in states with well-established democracies and advanced economies.

There is a dearth of systematic comparative research into the sources and patterns of internal variation in the political orientation of national movements within such states. This book examines why some nationalists opt for a secessionist orientation or a highly decentralizing orientation while other nationalists within the same national movement opt for a variety of non-secessionist orientations. In addition, temporal variation within these cases is examined; that is, I examine how national movements evolve over time, developing new political orientations that are secessionist or highly decentralizing and that may represent a radicalization of nationalists’ preferences, when compared to previous orientations. The aim of this study is to uncover the sources and patterns of such within-case variation in national movements.¹

Variation in secessionism is also interesting because separatism is widely held to be the culmination of national development, the peak manifestation of nationalism, reflecting a nation’s collective desire to establish or protect its own state in the international arena, one that is equal or superior in status to all other states (Hale 2008: 3). Yet, we find that many nationalists opt for a variety of non-secessionist orientations.

These differing orientations have a variable impact on the stability and on the continuity of state structures and institutions. Orientations can evolve over time; their strength and robustness is subject to variation, and new orientations can be created that represent a radicalization of nationalists’ preferences. Within-case variation, therefore, constitutes an unresolved and under-theorized puzzle in the study of nations and nationalism. This variation may be expressed internally within a national movement, in the typical trifurcation that I shall show occurs in a movement and in the temporal evolution of the different orientations within a national movement. It may also be expressed externally, in the cross-regional comparison between national movements. This book will have less to say about the overall orientation of national movements and the cross-regional comparison between national movements. Instead, I am primarily interested in explaining the tripartite structure in the national movements examined here and the evolution over time of the diverse nationalist orientations that make up the national movement.

Substate national societies² are historically settled and territorially concentrated societies that have developed national consciousness but do not have their own sovereign state. From a demographic standpoint, they may be a cultural and linguistic minority in the state in which they are located. A substate national society or stateless nation is a dynamic political entity, not a set of static ethnographic characteristics. It is not a unitary whole; it is a field of differentiated and competing stances taken by different parties, movements, or politicians, each jousting to represent the relevant nation (Brubaker 1997: 61). The national movements that are currently showing renewed strength and energy are those that stem from nations without a state (Guibernau 1996:133). This kind of peripheral nationalism emerges not from the state but from nations included in a larger state, and it presents fundamental differences in origin and purpose compared with the nationalism instilled by the state in order to create the nation (De Blas Guerrero 1994:34).

In the political party systems of stateless nations, there is a recurring empirical pattern. Although all nationalists pursue nation-affirming and nation-building goals, the national political parties³ of stateless nations tend to bifurcate and, at times, trifurcate into two or three basic political orientations: independentism,⁴ autonomism, or federalism. Thus, some nationalists seek their own fully sovereign state while others seek an autonomous special status or to become a constituent unit within a classic federation. These are competing forms of nationalism: They all agree that the nation exists, but they disagree on the degree of sovereignty the nation should seek. Hence, their different visions of sovereignty.

Internal variation within national movements is an undertheorized area in the study of secessionism, and to understand it one must also study non-secessionism among nationalists. In the social sciences, the more common research agenda has been to study secessionism: how it arises and what can be done to control it (see, e.g., Hechter 2000: ch. 7; Lustick, Miodownik, and Eidelson 2004; Cornell 2002; Hale 2000). The most methodologically defensible way to study the political behavior of secessionist nationalists is precisely to compare and contrast them with the diverse varieties (and subvarieties) of autonomist nationalists and federalist nationalists. Placing variance at the center of our research agenda is more likely to provide us with the most significant advances in our understanding of secessionist nationalism and of its counterparts, autonomist nationalism and federalist nationalism (see Varshney 2002: 6; Mahoney and Goertz 2004: 653–54).⁵

This book is a study of the national movements of two substate national societies, Québec and Catalonia, and their relations with the respective states that encompass them, Canada and Spain. The focus is principally on the contemporary period (1976–2010), although some reference to earlier epochs is made. The temporal endpoint of this book is 2009–2010. Reference is also made to the national movements of other stateless nations (e.g., Puerto Rico, the Basque Country, Scotland) whenever this will help to illuminate the arguments made here. Miroslav Hroch (2000) refers to national movements as movements that give an absolute priority to the values and interests of the nation, although he says that not all such movements are nationalist.⁶ This book’s focus is on the complex rainbow of political preferences expressed by the nationalists of stateless nations. The focus here is on identifying the nationalists and the variation in their express political orientation. The book problematizes the national movement itself and places intra-national movement variation at the center of research and analysis. A national movement is a quintessentially political phenomenon, and the most methodologically fruitful way to study the institutionalized component of the politicized national movement is to investigate the political trajectory of national political parties and the discourse and attitudes of their leaders and militants.

This book is less interested in addressing what is a nation? or what is the genesis of nationalism? than in studying nationalism as the end result of the jousting and wrestling among nationalists. The relevant battleground is the political party systems of the nation(s) under study; thus, if one wants to understand the behavior of nationalists and the variation in their political orientation, one must study the discourse of the political parties (and their militants and leaders) that recognize the existence of the nation and take that recognition as a vertebrating principle of their ideology and action. Here I ask how nationhood is actually lived and practiced by the nationalists in the institutionalized forms one observes in the political sphere and how nationhood is expressed as a political category, as a typological scheme, and as a cognitive framework. How do the diverse and variable nation-promoting and nation-invoking efforts of politicized nationalists negotiate or compete with each other (Brubaker 1997: 16)? I partially agree with the general spirit of Brubaker’s observation that nationalism can and should be understood without invoking ‘nations’ as substantial entities. Instead of focusing on nations as real groups, we should focus on nationhood and nationness, on ‘nation’ as practical category, institutionalized form, and contingent event (16). When studying nationalism and the national movements of a particular nation, it is especially important to avoid reifying the national movement of the nation in question. Instead, it is more useful to problematize the national movement itself and to disaggregate it, to focus on its component parts, and to compare and contrast these component parts. This book’s focus is on the component parts of institutionalized national movements; the political parties that represent the variable political orientations within the national movement; and, thus, ultimately, on the nationalist militants and leaders who give life to these political parties.

This book begins by setting the historical context for the study of the national movements of Québec and Catalonia. In the early chapters, I provide an explanation of the process that led to the establishment of the contemporary tripartite structure between independentists, autonomists, and federalists in these movements. Once the tripartite structure within the two national movements was established (in 1994 in Québec and in 1989 in Catalonia), they maintained (until 2010) this typical tripartite diversity of political orientations, which is at the root of the nationalists’ trilemma: the circumstance that the nationalists of stateless nations have three fundamental political orientations from which to choose. This book seeks to explain the political origins of the internal variation in substate national movements by first examining the political space occupied by stateless nations’ nationalists; the national consciousness of the independentists, the autonomists, and the federalists; and the role of national parties in such movements. Then I examine the visions of sovereignty held by these three varieties of substate nationalism, and I will make reference to other cases of minority nationalism beyond Québec and Catalonia. Finally, I explain the political origins of the variation in secessionism and non-secessionism in national movements by examining in detail the attitudes and discourse of stateless nationalists, especially in Québec and Catalonia.

The focus on stateless nationalists and the internal variation in their national movements is an opportunity to observe how they translate their sense of identity and belonging into a political agenda. Thus, this book is an empirical investigation into the political processes by which nationalists’ conceptions of political membership are translated into a concrete program of political mobilization. The national movement of which they are a part is the sum of a variety of political mobilization efforts that are observable in the tripartite structure of the national movement but have in common a unifying sense of political membership and identity.

National identity is one of the most consequential forms of political membership, often trumping other forms of identity. Nationality claims are infused with a high degree of intersubjectivity. As Max Weber ([1922] 1978: 922) noted, ‘If the concept of nation can in any way be defined unambiguously, it certainly cannot be stated in terms of empirical qualities common to those who count as members of the nation.’ The source of nationhood, for Weber, is not to be found in the objective differentiae of language and religious practice that might happen to separate the members of two different groups, but in the intersubjective awareness that the salient intergroup differences, whatever they might be, are sufficient to demarcate two nations (Hechter 2000: 14). The use of intensive fieldwork techniques and of positivist-qualitative methods to study national political parties and their leaders and militants is, therefore, the most appropriate tool to elucidate these matters, as I argue in more detail in the Appendix.

The approach followed here, focusing on the nationalists’ political parties and their militants, offers a promising perspective for advancing the frontiers of knowledge. For example, Lustick, Miodownik, and Eidelson (2004: 209) set out to focus on the relationship between institutionalized empowerment of potentially secessionist groups and the appearance of secessionism. They developed a modeling platform that was used to create a virtual model state, Beita, containing a disaffected, partially controlled, regionally concentrated minority; used constructivist theory to determine behaviors by specific agents in Beita; and then tested the most popular theoretical positions on this issue. Categories such as secessionist group and regionally concentrated minority, however, are overbroad and overlook precisely what matters: A secessionist group is a variable category that, in fact, is often part of a trifurcated national movement, and it is this internal variation that needs to be studied and explained. Another common research agenda in the social sciences has been to study the presence or absence of nationalist or ethnic violence and radicalism in developing societies (e.g., Varshney 2002) or the puzzle of the differing success of the mobilization strategies used by ethnic groups in less-developed countries (e.g., Yashar 2005). Regarding nationalist violence in Europe, a typical comparison has been between the Basque national movement and the Catalan national movement (e.g., Conversi 1997; Díez Medrano 1999). Although studies such as these are important contributions, the cases of ethnonational violence are actually not as numerous as one might expect (see, e.g., Fearon and Laitin 1996). As Cordell and Wolff (2011: 3) put it, although ethnic conflict doubtlessly remains an important source of violence in the twenty-first century, not every conflict has regional or global repercussions, nor are there, in fact, that many ethnic conflicts. Further, as Cordell and Wolff argue, although cases such as Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Cyprus are about ethnic conflict, other cases, such as Canada, Estonia, Belgium, and France, are about identities and conflicting interest structures, yet their manifestations are less violent and are better described in terms of tensions than conflict (3). Much more common as a political problem, and nearly universal for stateless nations’ national movements, is the question focused on here: In democratic states, stateless nations’ nationalists have various political strategies available to them to achieve their nation-affirming and nation-building objectives; therefore, we need to investigate why some nationalists opt for a secessionist orientation while other nationalists within the same national movement opt for pro-autonomism or pro-federation orientations.

Several scholars engaged in the study of nations and nationalism have failed to recognize the internal variance in the nationalist camp and the rich diversity of heterogenous political orientations within substate national movements. John Breuilly (1993: 2), for example, argues that nationalism is a term used to refer to political movements seeking or exercising state power and justifying such action with nationalist arguments. The latter is a political doctrine built upon three basic assertions, including the idea that the nation must be as independent as possible. This usually requires at least the attainment of political sovereignty. Ernest Gellner (1983) famously wrote that Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent (see also Hobsbawm 1990: 9). Michael Hechter (2000: 7) argues that nationalism is defined as collective action designed to render the boundaries of the nation congruent with those of its governance unit. He argues, however, that "groups seeking to advance the congruence of nation and governance unit (say, by promoting national sovereignty) are unambiguously nationalist. Still, nationalism is a variable, not a constant. To the degree that a given group aims for something less than complete sovereignty—or for goals that are quite irrelevant to its attainment—then it is perforce less nationalist" (8; emphasis added). Hale (2008: 244) noted that separatism may not be the only strategy to deal with the dilemmas of multinationalism within the same state, but he did not elaborate, nor did he focus on that puzzle. For Neil Davidson (2002: 15), national consciousness is the more or less passive expression of collective identification within a social group, while nationalism is the more or less active participation in the political mobilization of a social group for the construction or defence of a state. Finally, for McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow (2001: 229), a nation is defined as a body of individuals who claim to be united by some set of characteristics that differentiate them from outsiders, who either strive to create or to maintain their own state. They only distinguish between state-led and state-seeking nationalism. The internal variation within national movements has been under-investigated, and this book fills the void.⁷

In this book, I center discussion on the spectrum of political preferences expressed by nationalists. As Brubaker (1998: 276) has noted, I do not think nationalism can be well understood as nation-based, state-seeking activity. In the first place, nationalism is not always, or essentially, stateseeking. To focus narrowly on state-seeking nationalist movements is to ignore the infinitely protean nature of nationalist politics; it is to ignore the manner in which the interests of a putative ‘nation’ can be seen as requiring many kinds of action other than, or in addition to, formal independence.⁸ We need to look at nationality claims not just through a sovereignty lens and to acknowledge that nationality demands can, therefore, be less than the demand for an independent state but more than mere regionalism (O’Leary 1998, 69; Keating 2001: 28). Secessionist nationalism coexists with other forms of non-secessionist nationalism within substate national movements, and identifying the sources and patterns of such internal differentiation is the focus of this book.

Scholars who have extensively studied the Québec case seem to agree that all of the political parties that are present in the province’s National Assembly are national parties. Both francophone and anglophone political scientists agree on this point. On the francophone side, Alain Gagnon has written Québec’s competing minority nationalism,… is represented across the board by all the political parties in Québec’s National Assembly, and [at the time of this writing] singlehandedly by the Bloc Québécois in Ottawa (Gagnon 2003: 298). Politicians such as Bernard Landry, former prime minister of Québec and chef du parti of the Parti Québécois (PQ) when I interviewed him, confirm this evaluation. Landry said that all the political parties in Quebec are nationalist. This is why it is called the National Assembly … Well, there is a consensus in our society about the national fact, but some think that we can exist within Canada and some do not.⁹ On the anglophone side, Hudson Meadwell (1993: 203–4) has written, Nationalism dominates Québec politics. Indeed, since the formation of the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1968, one single question has increasingly defined political discussion and action: how much decentralization should govern relations between Québec and Canada? Unlike most other cases in which movements have produced a single ethnoregional party (for example Scotland, Wales, and Brittany), both the provincial Liberals and the Parti Québécois are nationalist parties that differ fundamentally on how much decentralization is desirable. This is a luxury that other movements do not often enjoy. Paul Hamilton (2004: 666), writing about Québec in comparison with Scotland and Wales, also agrees: As in Scotland, all of Québec’s political parties are nationalist, albeit with different visions of Québec’s relationship with the Canadian federation.

In Catalonia, Miquel Caminal (1998: 162) has written that all of the parties (except the Partido Popular de Catalunya) in that stateless nation are national parties, fundamentally committed to catalanism, and they all share in the affirmation and defense of Catalonia as a nation. A national party is one that assumes the existence of a political nation and identifies with it. Such parties may not be nationalist in a formal sense, in that they are not necessarily independentist. In fact, as will be demonstrated, a national party may be either independentist, autonomist, or federalist in its political orientation. All national parties are strong advocates of the political sovereignty of the party within the systems in which they operate, whether at the state or at the substate level. The federalist parties may put an emphasis on the will, while the autonomists and independentists may emphasize being (2000: 325). Political catalanism is widely diffused and present in all the ideological options that find political expression in Catalonia. It is a political patrimony held by all political forces there (Molas 1988: 14). In this book, I will henceforth refer to the parties that compose the national movements under study as national parties.¹⁰

The fact that there are independentist nationalists is obviously unsurprising and uncontroversial: Their political orientation is along the lines of what one would expect of nationalist militants and activists. More novel is the study of autonomist nationalists and pro-federation nationalists. The latter two types are less examined and arguably more interesting because their orientation is contrary to the outcome that many would expect of nationalist militants and activists. The ideology of autonomist nationalists is premised on the idea—as expressed by Jordi Pujol, president of the Catalan Generalitat (government) from 1980 to 2003—that it is possible to be a nationalist without seeking the independence of one’s own nation and that nations such as Catalonia may live and develop within the framework of larger political institutions (Guibernau and Rex 1997: 151). In 1989, he stated, We are a nation without a state. We belong to the Spanish state but have no secessionist ambitions (McRoberts 2001: 67).¹¹ This curious form of nationalism stems from the assumption that it is possible for a nation to live and develop within a multinational state if this state is genuinely democratic and allows enough space for its nations to feel represented and cultivate their difference (Guibernau and Rex 1997: 150).

Similarly, pro-federation nationalists’ ideological stance was well expressed by Benoît Pelletier (2004b), who was Minister for Intergovernmental Affairs in the Jean Charest provincial government from April 2003 to 2008, in a speech he gave on November 17, 2004 at the Catalan Parliament. Catalonia and Québec are engaged in a process of affirmation…. These are national realities we are talking about here, and not simply regions or local collectivities. Nations are distinguished from administrative entities by their cultural effervescence, political dimension, and their predestination for autonomy. This does not mean that statist sovereignty, acquired or not within the context of secession, is a way possible for all nations. On the contrary, it is possible for nations to seek to fulfill themselves within … more vast structures. This is the case for Québec within the Canadian ensemble (my translation; see also Pelletier 2004c). As we shall see in more detail later, the Québécois and the Catalan political party systems are so infused by a nationalist political culture that most scholars and analysts would assert that the majority of political parties therein are national.

In sum, variation in secessionism and non-secessionism inside stateless nations’ national movements is one of the remaining puzzles in the study of ethnicity and nationalism. There is a paucity of scholarship squarely centered on these issues. This book examines the political heterogeneity within the national movements of stateless nations and recognizes the full spectrum of secessionist and non-secessionist preferences available to nationalists. If we have national movements that are subdivided into a variety of political/constitutional orientations, all of which consider themselves national, then we need to account for this internal differentiation as well as the evolution over time of these orientations, and we need to explain how nationalists’ preferences are radicalized.

Chapter 1

Accounting for the Internal Variation in Substate National Movements

If the concept of nation can in any way be defined unambiguously, it certainly cannot be stated in terms of empirical qualities common to those who count as members of the nation.

—Max Weber ([1922] 1978: 922)

Within-Case Variation in National Movements

The national movements of Québec and Catalonia are two of the most important cases of stateless nationalism encompassed by my scope conditions. The universe of cases included within this book’s focus includes stateless nations’ national movements, located in or belonging to states with well-established democracies and developed socio-economic conditions,¹ where the principal causes for the divide between the majority and minority nations are differences in language, culture, history, and/or institutions. Despite some notable differences between these stateless nations,² their national movements exhibit the same political dynamics: In many of them, the tripartite taxonomy between secessionists, autonomists, and federalists is well established,³ and the argument in this book accounts for this internal differentiation.

Thus, the book’s discussion will not encompass Kashmir/India, Morocco/Western Sahara, Aceh/Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Tamil Northeast, or the Iraq/Kurdish region conflict, for example. I am interested in the national movements of national peoples, which includes ethnonationalists and national minorities, as opposed to minority peoples (Gurr 2000: 16). Nationality claims are a special kind of demand: They call for specific forms of recognition and accommodation and carry with them an assertion of the right to self-determination (Keating 2001: 2). Moreover, a common characteristic of nationality demands, as opposed to other group demands or other versions of the politics of difference, is that they have a territorial base, and they are accompanied by the claims that the nation is historically constituted as a self-governing community and that its people consider themselves a nation and wish to determine their collective future as a unit. Cases are more comparable if they are in well-established democracies where the level of socio-economic development is within the same range. These are the parameters within which my theorizing is expected to be valid (Mahoney and Goertz 2004: 660).

Importantly, in most of these cases of stateless nationhood, there are two or three major national parties, one being pro-independence (or genuine free-association) and the others being pro-autonomy or profederation, as shown in Table 1.1, which is a nonexhaustive list of some of the cases covered by my scope conditions.

In this book, I examine both positive and negative cases. Following Mahoney and Goertz (2004: 653–54), in small-N research the researcher seeks to explain the positive cases that possess the outcome of interest by contrasting them with negative cases that lack the outcome in order to maximize leverage for making valid causal inferences. With respect to my within-case analysis, the positive cases are the independentist national parties (and their militants) because they represent the expected result: A significant part of the literature on secessionism (and the common sense notions of many laypersons) would say that most nationalists ultimately seek to create their own state, and these parties and their militants epitomize this generalized expectation. The negative cases, thus, are the proautonomy and pro-federation national parties (and their militants) because they posit a different and unexpected political outcome.

Moreover, this book also examines how national movements tend to vary over time, experiencing moments of foundation, growth, development, and decay. At times, new political orientations within national movements are founded in the sphere of parliamentary politics that constitute a radicalization of nationalists’ preferences. Temporal variation within national movements is an important, and yet under-theorized, area. By focusing on within-case temporal variation, we can examine how the different tendencies within a national movement have evolved over time. In particular, I will examine how new varieties of nationalism that represent the radicalization of nationalists’ preferences within national movements are created. Variation over time within national movements that shows the radicalization of nationalists’ preferences can be illustrated by referring to two contemporary exemplars. The Catalan national movement has historically had two dominant currents: federalist and autonomist. Similarly, ever since the Parti Québécois came to power in 1976, the Québécois national movement has had in recent history two principal currents: pro-independence and pro-federalism. Yet, from 1976 to 2010, both of these national movements evolved and diversified, and both produced a new institutionalized political current within the movement, espoused by nationalist political parties, which represented a radicalization of nationalists’ preferences. These are indeed nationalist parties, but with different orientations: Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) is independentist and the Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ) was an autonomist party.

ERC’s transformation into a secessionist party during the late 1980s represented the establishment for the first time in the Catalan parliamentary sphere of a genuinely secessionist formation. The ADQ’s founding in 1994, out of discontented elements of the federalist party in Québec, resulted in the creation of an autonomist formation that was more decentralizing in its program and nationalist animus than the federalist party out of which it emerged. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 depict the temporal evolution of the Québécois and Catalan national movements, and the consequent radicalization of nationalists’ preferences, during 1976–2010.

Thus, new varieties of nationalism were founded in these two societies, and formal institutions (i.e., political parties) were created that espoused the new nationalist tendencies. These two new parties represented the radicalization of nationalists’ preferences. Therefore, with respect to the variation over time in national movements, in this book I provide responses to a number of analytically significant questions: When and how do new political orientations that embody a radicalization of nationalists’ preferences within the institutional component of a national movement get successfully established? When and how do these more radical and novel varieties of substate nationalism become institutionalized? How do these more radical nationalist orientations move from the substratum of sociological nationalism to the institutionalized sphere of parliamentary politics and electoral competition?

Table 1.1. Within-Case Variation in National Movements

1. In the provincial elections of March 26, 2007—to the surprise of many political observers—the ADQ came in second, beating the PQ and becoming the official opposition to the PLQ minority government of Premier Jean Charest. It obtained 30.80 percent of the vote and 41 seats in the Québec National Assembly. However, in the provincial elections of December 8, 2008 it lost these gains and received only 16 percent of the vote. The party has been weakened and rudderless since 2008, but it embodied autonomist nationalism from the late 1990s through 2010. This book covers the period through 2010, but it should be noted that in December 2011, the ADQ opted to fuse with a new political party led by François Legault: the Coalition Avenir Québec, a new nationalist party that promises not to demand the sovereignty of Quebec and that rejects the typical dualism between sovereigntists and federalists in Quebec (Lessard 2011).

2. The BNG invokes Galicia’s right to self-determination, and a sector within it seems to see full national sovereignty as its ultimate goal, while seeing the attainment of the greatest degree of selfgovernment as its immediate objective, using the autonomist route (Tésis políticas aprobadas en la Asamblea XII- 2006). It is an instrumental autonomist party.

3. On the Corsican case, see Bernabéu-Casanova 1997; Loughlin 1985; Bernabéu-Casanova and Lanzalavi 2003; Giudici 1998; Loughlin and Daftary 1999; Ravis-Giordani 2004.

4. In the past, at least one-half of independence supporters have not voted for the SNP. When independence reached its peak of support at the time of the referendum in 1997, a clear majority of these supporters would have voted for the Labour party, not the SNP. This is puzzling because it seems to indicate that a considerable portion of Scottish nationalists are supporting Labour, not the SNP, and yet Labour is pro-devolution only (McCrone and Paterson 2002). In addition, as noted by Eve Hepburn (2006: 225), in the past, every one of Scotland’s principal political parties has declared itself to be the national party of Scotland. The monopoly of the SNP over national identity politics of the 1960–1980 period has been replaced by a complexity of political actors, rivalries, and pacts over the constantly evolving national question.

5. The PNV in the Basque Country recently came forward with a proposal for genuine free association known as the Plan Ibarretxe, which was defeated in the Spanish Cortes in 2005. It has oscillated between autonomist positions and more sovereigntist stances.

6. In Wales, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservative Party have repositioned themselves to compete within the political space occupied by the nationalist aura of Plaid Cymru (Elias 2006: 212).

7. According to Anwen Elias (2006: 193), Plaid Cymru is a party that has traditionally rejected the nineteenth-century vocabulary of sovereign statehood, and thus it is the inheritor of a post-sovereigntist legacy. Yet, since the late 1980s, the party has put forward a proposal for full national status within the European Union, and in September 2003, the party’s Annual Conference voted to modify this phrase to independence in Europe.

8. The island of Puerto Rico is a special case because it is neither a classical colony at this point, in the mold of the European colonies in Africa and Asia, nor a classical stateless nation, but rather an unincorporated territory belonging to the United States that may possibly be in transition from autonomism to federalism, or may yet one day attain its independence. Yet, it is properly included within my universe of cases because it is a stateless nation belonging to the United States with close to four million U.S. citizens. The U.S. invaded Puerto Rico in 1898 and decided to keep it as a colonial possession. In 1917, the U.S. Congress passed a statute providing that all persons born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens. Furthermore, there are no barriers to movement between the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico, and more than four million persons of Puerto Rican descent live in the U.S. and continually move back and forth to Puerto Rico.

Figure 1.1. Within-case temporal variation in Quebec, 1976–2010.

Figure 1.2. Within-case temporal variation in Catalonia, 1976–2010.

National Movements and National Parties

The following parties are studied in this book: In Québec, the Parti Québécois (PQ); the Parti Libéral du Québec (PLQ); and the Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ). In Catalonia, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), the federation of Convergència i Unió (CiU), consisting of Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC) and Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (UDC); the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC); and Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds (IC-V).⁴ These national movements are trifurcated into independentists (ERC, PQ), autonomists