Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

152 Rethinking Ethnicity

phenomena. It is as much concerned with similarities between nationalisms and other social phenomena as with differences between them. Nor are the historical instances that I am interested in examining and comparing necessarily organized movements.

Nationalism in three countries

This chapter continues the comparative project begun by the investigation of nationalisms in Northern Ireland and Wales in Chapter 9. That discussion focused on language, violence and the history of the integration of each region into the United Kingdom state. In Northern Ireland the objectives of contemporary nationalisms are the reunification of Ireland and the removal of British government. In Wales, by contrast, secession is an insignificant nationalist project compared to the protection and promotion of Welsh culture – particularly the Welsh language – and the economic and social development of the areas in which that culture retains its vigour.

Northern Ireland and Wales also differ with respect to the kinds of political action that are perceived as legitimate by nationalists. In each place a gulf separates constitutional nationalists, who pursue their goals through electoral means, from those who advocate the use of force. In Northern Ireland, however, armed struggle still has considerable legitimacy in the eyes of a large number of nationalists, whereas for the great majority of Welsh nationalists even modestly violent direct action is bitterly controversial. These different nationalist discourses reflect different regional histories and experiences of incorporation into the British state. As a consequence, it is possible to argue that the nationalisms of each region are, in some senses, qualitatively different phenomena (although both can legitimately claim to be nationalist).

I will return to these issues. For the moment they provide the context for the argument that follows, and indicate its antecedents. In this chapter the scope of comparison has been extended to include Denmark as well as Northern Ireland and Wales. The choice of cases reflects, in the first instance, my own research experience of these countries, rather than any extrinsic logic of comparison. But so does my scepticism about existing theories of nationalism: in their different ways, Wales, Northern Ireland and Denmark did not seem to ‘fit’ the analytical models to which I first turned in order to understand them.

But as case studies they are particularly appropriate for this discussion. They are integral, if peripheral, elements of modern European industrialized society, the conventionally recognized birthplace of nationalism. Northern Ireland and Wales are each part of a nation-state political system, while Denmark constitutes one in its own right. All have long histories of political change available for inspection. If, therefore, their nationalisms can be shown to differ significantly from each other and from the ‘state modernization and industrialization’ model, that will be telling support for my argument. In the context of these comparative intentions, I want to pose an apparently simple question: what is the nature of nationalism in each of these countries? This entails a further, deceptively simple, question – does nationalism exist in each of these countries? – that requires us to remember the definitional

Nations and Nationalisms 153

criteria of nationalism outlined above. Moving from the more to the less straightforward, I will begin with Wales.

Wales

Wales has been an integral part of the British – and before that the English – state since the so-called Act of Union of 1536. But it remains culturally and politically distinct. Having been spared the depopulation of the Highland Clearances or the Irish Great Famine, Wales is linguistically the most ‘Celtic’ strand in the United Kingdom’s ‘Celtic fringe’, with approximately 20 per cent of its population still speaking Welsh. Although representing a history of decline, this is significantly higher than the equivalent figures for speakers of Scots Gaelic or Irish. From the late eighteenth century Wales, like other European cultural peripheries, experienced a romanticist ‘revival’ of ‘folk’ culture, sponsored and invented by an urban élite brought into being by industrialization (Morgan 1983). Under the aegis of nonconformist Liberalism, the seeds of nationalism were sown. Medieval classics such as the Mabinogion found a new audience as the eisteddfod movement campaigned to create a publicly respectable voice for a language which still, at that time, dominated rural and working-class life. Today, despite centuries of in-migration the Principality retains a cultural identity which, elusive as its definition might be, can legitimately be called ‘Welsh’.

Economically, Wales – particularly south Wales – is part of the metropolitan British economy. Its first industrial revolution, beginning in the eighteenth century, was characterized by the interdependence of coal mining and metal manufacture in the southern valleys. Here there developed a characteristic working-class communal life: culturally and linguistically Welsh, Nonconformist in religion and politically socialist. This economic strength eventually turned – with mass unemployment in the 1930s, post-1945 restructuring, and the return of recession in the 1970s – to decline, only partially arrested by recent inward investment and U.K. and European subsidies.

Due to the antiquity and nature of its incorporation into the British state, Wales is institutionally less autonomous or distinct than, for example, Scotland. It has political distinctiveness, however, in terms of the politics of party. Wales has been characterized for the last century and a half by movements with strong links to religious Nonconformity: first Liberalism and then, from the early 1900s, the socialism of ‘the Labour Ascendancy’ (Morgan 1981: 272–303). As much as anything, Wales differs from England politically in that Conservatism has always been a minority affiliation.

Although nationalism in Wales can be traced back – in the agitation for the disestablishment of the Anglican state Church – into the nineteenth century, not until the twentieth was there a nationalist movement. The Welsh Nationalist Party was founded in 1925, and was renamed Plaid Cymru in 1945. It won its first seat in the British parliament in 1966. At the time of writing it returns three members to Westminster, one to the European parliament, and is the official party of opposition in the National Assembly of Wales. While its support remains strongest in y fro Gymraeg, the Welsh-speaking rural west and north, it also has significant

154 Rethinking Ethnicity

representation in south Wales. From its beginnings, the Blaid has emphasized cultural issues (language and education), economic development and political devolution within the United Kingdom as the best way to represent Welsh interests. Secession or independence have always been marginal to the party’s platform. Its commitment to non-violent electoral politics increasingly emphasizes the Assembly and Europe as the most significant political arenas.

Although it is the dominant political voice of Welsh nationalism, Plaid Cymru remains a minority party in Wales, electorally. Its ‘left-leaning’ oppositional vision of the political future of Wales has always competed with the articulation of class conflict and communitarianism offered by the Labour Party. Since the Welsh Labour Party can now claim to have delivered devolution, and even shows signs of enthusiasm for the Assembly, this competition has sharpened. The Blaid also competes with the other major voice of nationalism in Wales, Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society), founded in 1962. Using non-violent direct protest, in judicious combination with lobbying, the latter’s achievements include state funding for Welsh language education and the statutory definition of Welsh as having ‘equal validity’ in Wales.

Welsh is everywhere: road signs, toilets, train timetables, in the bank, and so on. There is a Welsh language television station, Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C), and a modest but locally significant Welsh-medium cultural production industry. During the early 1990s Cymdeithas was at the forefront of protests about new Welsh language legislation and what it saw as the continued reluctance of government to grant Welsh full official status. Demographically, the decline in the number of Welsh speakers may have been arrested. Reflecting the impact of education and job opportunities, increasingly the future of the language appears to lie not in y fro Gymraeg, but in the industrialized and urbanized south-east (C.A. Davies 1990).

Although there is no room for an account of the gains and losses of Welsh nationalism (see C.A. Davies 1989), there are some things to add. First, not all nationalist actions have been non-violent, as discussed in Chapter 9. There is also the prospect of an anti-nationalist backlash. There have been – to date unsuccessful – cases in north Wales in which individuals have had recourse to the 1976 Race Relations Act in response to their rejection under local authority Welsh language hiring policies. In Dyfed, national legislation permitting schools to opt out of the state education system facilitated a campaign by English-speaking parents, many of whom were recent in-migrants, against the County Council’s Welsh language schooling policies. These kinds of conflict, and the undoubted existence of a strand of authoritarian and exclusionary linguistic-nationalist rhetoric, have inspired, and coloured, an academic debate about the relationship between Welsh nationalism and racism (Borland et al. 1992; Denney et al. 1991; C. Williams 1995, 1999; G. Williams 1994) that, in some respects, resembles debates about sectarianism and racism in Northern Ireland.

Hostility to nationalism is not, however, confined to ‘non-Welsh’ immigrants. Many Welsh people feel excluded, patronized and devalued by the language movement. This is compounded by class antagonisms: in the south-east, Welsh has become identified with middle-class speakers, often working in the public sector. As discussed in the previous chapter, there is a serious problem – for Welsh nationalists not least of all – with respect to the relationship between the language and

Nations and Nationalisms 155

authentic Welsh identity. Plaid Cymru consistently attempts to construct a vision of Welshness which while inclusive of English speakers is sufficiently exclusive to serve as a model of national identity (and attract votes). Local electoral alliances with the Green Party have provided examples of this in practice. Such a vision of the creative interplay that is possible between similarity and difference is vital, if only because a nationalism which is wholly identified with Welsh – and remember that it is with respect to the language that nationalism has had its greatest impact – is, in modern Wales, doomed to perpetual minority status:

The issue of language has … given rise from the early part of this century down to the present to a crisis in identity … English-speaking Welshmen spiritedly and justifiably counter that … they too are a distinctively ‘Welsh’ people. (Howell and Baber 1990: 354)

There is thus an everyday problem to do with ‘national identity’ and the ‘nation’. What qualifies people for membership in the nation and an authentic Welsh national identity? And who licenses authenticity? Howell and Baber go on to list the attributes, other than the Welsh language, which distinguish the Welsh:

their separate history, instinctive radicalism in religion and politics, contempt for social pretentiousness, personal warmth and exuberance, sociability, love of music and near obsession with rugby …

Leaving aside the gendered nature of this particular construction of Welshness, and its romantic partiality, only one item on the list has any analytic potential: the idea of a separate history. But this history is an ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), a ‘myth to live by’ (Samuel and Thompson 1990). That invention is still under way and still evolving.

Even as a social construct, a separate history is, for Wales, problematic. There cannot be one history (although see Davies 1993). And separate from what? The answer, of course, is England. But Wales has never been isolated. As discussed in Chapter 3, its history, even as a nationalist mythical charter, is one of engagement with its neighbours and participation in a variety of streams of tradition and universes of discourse. Wales is, and has probably always been, a ‘plural society’, characterized internally by diversity and, in its external relations, open and much-trampled cultural boundaries. The question for nationalism is how to integrate this plurality of voices into a Welsh national identity. The National Assembly, at least in principle, offers a powerful arena in which this process may be able to develop.

As I also argued in Chapter 3, to describe Wales as a plural society is not actually to say very much. Europe – like most of the rest of the world – has always been a tangled thicket of cultural pluralism. This is one of the things which nationalisms, in their imagination and invention of consistency, often seek to deny. The irony for Welsh nationalism is that such a denial is only possible at the cost of political success. The public articulation of a narrow Welsh identity, rooted in ancestry and language, is not just the pursuit of a chimera. It is also politically unwise. If, as a consequence, Plaid Cymru is attempting to define Welshness in terms of common territorial location, shared economic and social problems, a sense of difference that is not exclusively linguistic, and a ‘European future’,2 that need not disqualify it as nationalism.

156 Rethinking Ethnicity

Northern Ireland

Nationalism in Northern Ireland must, first, be seen within the all-Ireland framework. It claims that context for itself, and it is part of a longer history than the eighty-six year life of the six-county northern state. But the history of Ireland is also the history of its relations with England. Irish nationalism evolved as resistance to English rule, and was in the first instance inspired by an English political tradition (Boyce 1991: 388).

The relationship with ‘across the water’ has changed many times. From the twelfth to the early seventeenth centuries, Ireland was an insecurely possessed English colony, with large areas remaining under Irish control. Subsequently, Ireland in the seventeenth century was a frontier (part colony, part periphery), in the eighteenth century a separate kingdom within a federal polity, and in the nineteenth superficially integrated into the British state. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 partitioned the island into the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. The northern state was an uneasy product of the refusal of Ulster Protestants to accept government by a Catholic majority. In 1972 this state was, effectively, closed down and reopened under the direct control of Westminster. The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and the 1998 multi-party Belfast Agreement (the ‘Good Friday Agreement’) have further modified the picture: the former acknowledged and formalized the interest in the north’s affairs of the government of the Republic of Ireland, the latter established cross-border agencies in some fields and allowed the republican movement to begin to participate in the north’s administration. Northern Ireland’s membership of the United Kingdom remains insecure, contingent upon the consent of its electorate.

And as the relationship with Britain has changed, so too nationalism in Ireland has appeared in different guises: the ‘embryonic ethnic nationalism’ of Gaelic Ireland at the end of the Tudor period; an Anglo-Irish ‘national identity based on religion and love of the patria’, developing into ‘intimations of nationalism’ by the seventeenth century; nationalism as ‘a fully formed and articulated sentiment in the Ireland of the Protestant ascendancy in the last quarter of the eighteenth century’; the revived Catholic national identity of the nineteenth century, forged out of a ‘nationalism of the Catholic democracy’ and ‘the resurgence of Gaelic ethnic nationalism’ (Boyce 1991: 19). Although Boyce’s view might be contested by historians of a more nationalist bent, it supports my argument about the historical contingency of nationalisms. Apropos the modernity of nationalism, one can point to the late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century debate about the nature of the Irish nation – although the term found only rare use – and who belonged to it (Connolly 1992: 114–24). As significant as the contested identities to which this debate attests is the fact that, at a relatively early period, it took place at all.

The twentieth century saw more change. The Republic of Ireland won its independence by violence; the northern Protestants vetoed their inclusion in that independence by the same means. Republicans in the north made their way to the negotiating tables – not least at the 1998 multi-party talks – by using violence, in the first instance, and by promising to cease violence, in the second. In the south, nationalism is the political common ground: all politicians in the Republic are, in some sense, nationalists. Nationalism is also, however, something of an embarrassing irrelevance: there is little evidence that politicians or voters in the south want