ORGANISED LABOUR AND NATIONALISM IN THE LONG 1970s: CLASS, DEMOCRACY AND THE SUB-STATE NATIONS OF SCOTLAND AND GALICIA

A major feature of the political development of Western European multinational democracies since the 1970s is the growth of sub-state national communities seeking self-determination, with sub-state nationalist parties moving away from niche core-periphery political frameworks in favour of more inclusive, catch-all political narratives and social democratic programmes. Examining the cases of Scotland (UK) and Galicia (Spain), this thesis approaches the questions of how and why such a ‘civic’ form of sub-state nationalism was articulated within Western European multinational democracies during the ‘long 1970s’. Offering a broad historical, transnational comparative approach, it rests on four interwoven thematic strands: economic restructuring, devolutionary politics, democracy and socialism. Considering the current reassessment of class identities and politics in the 1970s, this thesis examines the under-researched relationship between ‘class’ and (sub-state) ‘nation’, understood here as linguistic constructions, inspired by qualitative discourse analysis. More specifically, it examines the evolving narratives of the regional workers’ organisations in Scotland and Galicia arguing that, within these institutions, workers’ representatives played a central role in the articulation of regional ‘socialist democratic’ narratives merging class and (sub-state) national interests as a response to the global socioeconomic and political challenges of the ‘long 1970s’. Pursuing different aims, these narratives were co-opted both by left-wing regional and nationalist political parties, arguably driving the sustained electoral growth of sub-state nationalism in Scotland and Galicia in the 1990s. Thus, this thesis analyses the rise of a ‘civic’ form of sub-state nationalism since the 1970s using a bottom-up approach.