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: 9781786830142
• Langue: English

Extrait

W HY W ALES N EVER W AS
Why Wales Never Was
The failure of Welsh Nationalism
Simon Brooks
© 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 978-1-78683-014-2
The right of Simon Brooks to be identified 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 first published in Welsh in 2015 by the University of Wales Press as Pam na fu Cymru: Methiant Cenedlaetholdeb Cymreig (ISBN 978-1-78316-233-8; e-ISBN 978-1-78316-234-5), in the series Safbwyntiau: Gwleidyddiaeth Diwylliant Cymdeithas.
The University of Wales Press acknowledges the financial support of Swansea University and the Welsh Books Council.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover design: Olwen Fowler
Cover image: John Thomas, Beirdd Llanrwst (The Poets of Llanrwst), c.1875. From the John Thomas Collection at the National Library of Wales, reproduced by permission.
I Richard Glyn Roberts a Daniel G. Williams
Dirmygaf finau Ryddfrydiaeth pob dyn sydd yn credu mewn goresgyniad.
(I truly despise the Liberalism of every man who believes in subjugation.)
Michael D. Jones
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgements and thanks
Preface to the English edition
Maps
1 An Unexpected Failure
2 The Nation of Language
3 Liberalism and the Welsh oppressed
4 Deconstructing Liberalism
5 When will Wales be?
6 Finis
Notes
Acknowledgements 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 Löffler, 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 development 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?’, undertaken with Daniel G. Williams in the summer of 2016, visiting Caernarfon, Aberystwyth, 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.
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 finance the publication of Pam na fu Cymru , and have done so again with Why Wales Never Was . Without their financial support, neither book would have seen the light of day. I thank them too.
Preface 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-finals of the Euro 2016 football competition – our first appearance at a finals since 1958 – having redefined Welsh popular culture for the better. Sitting with my son in the Parc Olympique Lyonnais during the semi-final was to be in the Wales in which I wish to live. Welsh culture defined 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-first century our nineteenth-century servitude? Save us indeed from incorporation into an England and Wales nation state, and the fight 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 English-speaking 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, confirms with horrible accuracy predictions made in Pam na fu Cymru in 2015. In retreating from the nation, from culture and from language, Welsh civic nationalism has not abolished ethnicity, culture and language. All it has done is allow Ukip to define 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 filled 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
Maps
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).

Ethnic groups of the Habsburg Empire

Language zones in Wales, c .1850
1
An unexpected Failure
Why isn’t Wales a Welsh-speaking country today? Why isn’t Wales independent? How could a country which in 1850 was to all extents and purposes monoglot Welsh over nearly the whole of its territory be within touching distance of losing its language completely within a hundred years? It is the failure to develop a Welsh national movement during the nineteenth century that bears responsibility for this, and when at last the first timid steps were taken in that direction in the 1880s and 1890s, the language was never central to its vision. In other parts of Europe a hundred linguistic nationalisms bloomed. This, after all, was the Age of Nationalism. But nationalism would wilt and wither away in Wales.
Central to the failure was the role of liberalism in the British Isles, and in Wales in particular. Those who see in the ascendancy of Welsh-speaking liberal Wales a victory for Welsh nationalism have climbed thro