Why Wales Never Was

Simon Brooks

Description

Written as an act of protest in a Welsh-speaking community in north-west Wales, Why Wales Never Was combines a devastating analysis of the historical failure of Welsh nationalism with an apocalyptic vision of a non-Welsh future. It is the ‘progressive’ nature of Welsh politics and the ‘empire of the civic’, which rejects both language and culture, that prevents the colonised from rising up against his colonial master. Wales will always be a subjugated nation until modes of thought, dominant since the nineteenth century, are overturned.

Originally a comment on Welsh acquiescence to Britishness at the time of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the book’s emphasis on the importance of European culture is a parable for Brexit times. Both deeply rooted in Welsh culture and European in scope, Why Wales Never Was brings together history, philosophy and politics in a way never tried before in Wales. First published in Welsh in 2015, Why Wales Never Was affirms the author’s reputation as one of the most radical writers in Wales today.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Idioma galés
• Never
• Was
• Nationalism
• Great Britain
• Why
• Welsh
• History
• Wales
• Failure
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786830135
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

Why Wales Never Was
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 1 17-May-17 9:34:05 AMWhy Wales Never Was
The failure of Welsh Nationalism
Simon Brooks
University of Wales Press
Cardiff
2017
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 3 17-May-17 9:34:05 AM© Simon Brooks, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material
form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic
means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of
this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner
except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written
permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be
addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk,
Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-7868-3012-8
eISBN 978-1-7868-3013-5
The right of Simon Brooks to be identifed as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book was frst published in Welsh in 2015 by the University of Wales
Press as Pam na fu Cymru: Methiant Cenedlaetholdeb Cymreig (ISBN
978-178316-233-8; e-ISBN 978-1-78316-234-5), in the series Safbwyntiau:
Gwleidyddiaeth Diwylliant Cymdeithas.
The University of Wales Press acknowledges the fnancial support of
Swansea University and the Welsh Books Council.
Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 4 17-May-17 9:34:06 AMI Richard Glyn Roberts a Daniel G. Williams
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 5 17-May-17 9:34:06 AMDirmygaf fnau Ryddfrydiaeth pob dyn sydd yn credu mewn
goresgyniad.
(I truly despise the Liberalism of every man who
believes in subjugation.)
Michael D. Jones
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 7 17-May-17 9:34:06 AMCoNteNts
Acknowledgements and thanks xi
Preface to the English edition xiii
Maps xv
1 An Unexpected Failure 1
2 The Nation of Language 27
3 Liberalism and the Welsh oppressed 49
4 Deconstructing Liberalism 87
5 When will Wales be? 109
6 Finis 141
Notes 145
Index187
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 9 17-May-17 9:34:06 AMAcknowledgements and thanks
Acknowledgements are noted, and thanks given, in Pam na fu Cymru,
and readers of this English edition who read Welsh are referred to
the original text of which Why Wales Never Was is an adaptation. I
am grateful nevertheless to Marion Löffer, Richard Glyn Roberts,
Daniel G. Williams, Shintaro Kono, Takashi Onuki, Huw Williams,
Dylan Foster Evans and Syd Morgan for their help at various times
with the develop ment of the English edition. Broadly speaking,
it follows the Welsh original, although some sections have been
expanded.
As ever, I am grateful to the staff of the University of Wales Press
for their professionalism and enthusiasm.
I am grateful too to Shintaro Kono and Takashi Onuki for their
willingness to translate a synopsis of Pam na fu Cymru into Japanese,
due to be published in 2018. I am also thankful to the Wales Literature
Exchange for sponsoring a discussion tour around Pam na fu Cymru
in Slovenia in April 2016, and for arranging the translation of a text
into Slovene. The visit followed on from a Welsh tour, entitled ‘Pryd
bydd Cymru?/When will Wales be?’, undert aken with Daniel G.
Williams in the summer of 2016, visit ing Caernarfon, Aber ystwyth,
Swansea, Montgomeryshire, the Rhondda and Cardiff.
Research was carried out in a number of academic and public
libraries in Wales, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and
Slovenia. I lived in Germany, on and off, for the best part of a year.
But by the time I came to write the book I was unemployed.
Pam na fu Cymru was written on the dole in Porthmadog. I wrote
it in cafes, I wrote it in pubs and I wrote it in the street.
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 11 17-May-17 9:34:06 AMAcknowledgements and thanks
In his autobiography, Bob Owen, from Croesor, a village near
Porthmadog, writes of going down ‘to Porthmadog to “sign on”
every week . . . in view of all who went by . . . the circumstances
were nearly enough to make me a Bolshevik’. The experience of
two years’ unemployment was a revelation for me too, and I am
hugely thankful to the people of Porthmadog for their support at
this time. Rural Welsh-speaking Gwynedd has been left behind
by both London and Cardiff; it is a disgrace.
As I wrote Pam na fu Cymru, the political winds changed in Wales.
Scotland seemed likely to claim independence, and Britain toyed
with the idea of leaving Europe. The book became a book about
crisis; the crisis of Britain, the crisis of Europe, and in the midst of
all this the absolute irrelevance of Wales.
Swansea University agreed to fnance the publication of Pam
na fu Cymru, and have done so again with Why Wales Never Was.
Without their fnancial support, neither book would have seen the
light of day. I thank them too.
xii
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 12 17-May-17 9:34:06 AMPreface to the English edition
I write these words on a warm, wet July day in Porthmadog,
Gwynedd. It has been a glorious June, the dazzling run of the
Welsh football team to the semi-fnals of the Euro 2016 football
competition – our frst appearance at a fnals since 1958 – having
redefned Welsh popular culture for the better. Sitting with my son
in the Parc Olympique Lyonnais during the semi-fnal was to be
in the Wales in which I wish to live. Welsh culture defned as Welsh,
embracing the Welsh language, open to ethnic diversity too; an
independent nation on the global stage, at one with our European
neighbours. Independence in Europe indeed.
Along the horizon, dark clouds: the absolute disaster of the Brexit
vote. Are we to be trapped on a wet archipelago reliving in the
twenty-frst century our nineteenth-century servitude? Save us
indeed from incorporation into an England and Wales nation state,
and the fght within between an English nationalism of the right,
led by Ukip and Brexiters, and an English nationalism of the left,
led by Billy Bragg and Owen Smith to the chorus of Jerusalem.
Here in Gwynedd, where some still believe in Welsh cultural
nationalism, we voted to remain in Europe. But Wales voted to
leave. The vote for Brexit was heaviest in those parts of
Englishspeaking Wales where the Welsh-born population forms the greatest
part of the population, and where cultural nationalism is at its
weakest.
The success of Ukip in securing seven seats at the 2016 assembly
elections, and in persuading the Welsh to vote to leave Europe,
confrms with horrible accuracy predictions made in Pam na fu
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 13 17-May-17 9:34:06 AMPreface to the English edition
Cymru in 2015. In retreating from the nation, from culture and from
language, Welsh civic nationalism has not abol ished ethnicity,
culture and language. All it has done is allow Ukip to defne these
on its own terms. In the 1960s and 1970s, the National Front and
other racist organisations could never gain a foothold in Wales.
The discursive space of ethnicity, identity and culture had been
flled by the anti-racist and anti-colonial politics of an assertive
Welsh language and Welsh national movement.
Since devolution, however, campaigning for the language, and
creating narratives of Welsh nationhood, have been eschewed by
Welsh nationalists in favour of raising buildings in Cardiff Bay.
Much of Wales has been abandoned as back country. The conditions
for the Brexit vote in Wales were created in part by the eclipse of
Welsh cultural nationalism. Civic nationalism in rejecting Welsh
identity led as one always knew it would to the unchallenged
arrivals of new British identities, besmirched with the most
horrendous xenophobia and racism.
The civic is compatible with the rise of Trump and Ukip, for the
civic is that which pertains to citizenship, and the citizen, as in the
European Union referendum when Welsh Europeans without a
British passport were denied the vote, always has his double, he
or she who is not a citizen. There is something oddly liberal about
Ukip politics too, which plays on the contradictions within
liberalism to gain an unfettered voice within Welsh democracy, and one
is informed that it would be ‘illiberal’ to resist, for Ukip Assembly
Members are ‘elected representatives’.
Is not the civic in Wales today precisely the type of politics
rejected by Michael D. Jones in the nineteenth century, a politics
that subjugates the Other, indigenous and ‘foreign’? Under both
its deceptively tolerant and xenophobic guises, the Welsh must
resist their subjugation. We must free ourselves from the empire
of the civic if Wales is to survive.
Simon Brooks
Porthmadog, 17 July 2016
xiv
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 14 17-May-17 9:34:06 AMMaps
Ethnic groups of the Habsburg Empire.
Map: based on Marian Henry Jones, Hanes Ewrop 1815–1871
(Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982).
Language zones in Wales, c.1850.
Map: based on Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), The Welsh Language
and its Social Domains, 1801–1911 (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 2000).
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 15 17-May-17 9:34:06 AMEthnic groups of the Habsburg Empire
xvi
00 Prelims Why Wales 2017_5_17.indd 16 17-May-17 9:34:09 AM
Drava
Sava
Maros
R USSIA
GERMANY
Elbe
GALICIA
Krakow
BOHEMIA
SILESIA
(Captured in 1846)
MORAVIA
LOWER
AUSTRIA
UPPER
BUKOVINA
AUSTRIA
Budapest
VORARLBERG
SALZBURG
STYRIA
HUNGAR Y
TYROL
SWIT ZERLAND
CARINTHIA
TRANSYLVANIA
CARNIOLA
VENEZIA
(LOST IN 1865)
LOMBARDIA
(LOST IN 1859)
Trieste
BANAT
CROATIA-SLAVONIA
ISTRIA Fiume
NATIONS OF THE
HABSBURG MONARCHY
SERBIA
GERM