Why Wales Never Was

The Failure of Welsh Nationalism

Simon Brooks

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786830142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

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.

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 through a looking-glass into a country which never existed. It was liberalism as political philosophy which held back the development of national consciousness in Wales. The misunderstanding is easy to make, for the Liberal Party was the home of not only Welsh radicalism, but also Cymru Fydd, the home rule ginger group where Welsh patriots coalesced. And so the history of ideas in Wales lends itself to misinterpretation. But Cymru Fydd failed, and its leaders, T. E. Ellis and David Lloyd George, were rewarded with jobs in the British government.

However it is not with the collapse of Cymru Fydd in the 1890s that the roots of the contemporary failure of Welsh nationalism are to be found. These can be unearthed in a study of the intellectual history of Welsh liberalism a generation before. As shown by the rather hysterical response to the 1847 Blue Books, a government report which blamed Nonconformist Welsh-language culture for the state of education in Wales, Welsh liberalism was opposed to nationalism from its inception. It is the great tragedy of Welsh culture that anti-nationalist liberalism arrived at such a pivotal moment, at a time so full of other possibilities.

The Wales of the Blue Books was Welsh-speaking. Welsh monoglots were in a majority. Welsh was the language of the countryside, and also of the industrialised north-east and the valleys of the south; it was the language used in the very furnaces of social change. Cardiff, the capital-to-be, was bilingual. As late as 1867, a national figure like the poet Islwyn could be appointed editor of a Welsh-language newspaper published in Newport, Monmouthshire, a border county many regarded as part of England.¹ So there was in Wales great potential for the growth of nationalism. If nineteenth-century Wales had experienced the sort of national political renaissance so typical of other parts of Europe, this would not have led of necessity to Welsh independence, nor indeed to home rule. The Conservative Party was dug-in in its opposition to Celtic nationalism, and the Liberal Party had a strong unionist wing. The British state was strong indeed, and prepared, as the history of Ireland shows, to use violence in order to defend its territorial integrity.

But there can be no doubt that the development of Welsh nationalism along European lines would have transformed the prospects of the Welsh language. A well-organised language movement could have ensured that the Education Acts of 1870 and 1889 would give Welsh its proper place as the medium of education in elementary and latterly county schools in Wales. Many smaller European nations did indeed win the right to educate their children through the mother tongue. If Welsh-medium education had come into being in the nineteenth century, the future of Welsh-speaking communities would have been built on rock rather than sand, and the children of English migrants in places like central and eastern Glamorgan, still Welsh-speaking at the moment of mass immigration in the 1890s and 1900s, successfully integrated. The linguistic disintegration of the coalfield was not inevitable: had there been a different political response, it could have remained Cambrophone. Comparative historiography and sociolinguistics suggest that Welsh might then have remained the majority language in Wales, the country similar in its linguistic make-up today to small nations like Finland and Estonia, or Bohemia before Nazism, with most using the native language, but a minority in border country, and here and there in the larger towns, holding tight to the vernacular of the old imperial power.

Despite the possibility that an alternative Wales might have come into being, the unexpected absence of ethnolinguistic nationalism in nineteenth-century Wales has provoked little interest. This is odd, for ‘it could be argued’, writes the political scientist, Richard Wyn Jones, ‘that this is the only historiographical question of general significance which is raised by the Welsh experience’.² But to probe the question would have brought little benefit to mainstream historiography. Historians with their roots in the labour movement emphasise the class struggle in a way that takes for granted the retreat of the Welsh-speaking community in ‘South Wales’. Nothing would be gained by asking why no popular language movement developed in the region before its non-Welsh-speaking identities were formed. Whig historiography (the dominant historical discourse of twentieth-century Wales) had an incumbent belief in Progress, and the liberal ‘awakening’ of the common people in the nineteenth century was the best possible outcome in the best of all possible worlds. A critical interpretation of the collapse of Welsh-language culture would have thrown this world view into total disarray.

Similarly, the question was unhelpful to Welsh nationalists. Popular Welsh nationalism, as eulogised in songs like folk singer Dafydd Iwan’s anthem of ethnolinguistic survival, ‘Yma o Hyd’ (‘We are still here’), celebrated the miraculous survival of the Welsh language against all the odds. It is a heroic story: the people of Wales fighting a fair fight to defend their language, and through their efforts the language is saved. But it is highly doubtful whether there was much heroism at all. The Welsh language was in a stronger position in the middle of the nineteenth century than many of the vernaculars which are today the sole official languages of member-states of the European Union. Very little action was taken in favour of Welsh by the Welsh themselves, an unpalatable truth not easy for nationalists to digest.

Despite this, nationalists cannot be accused of ignoring the question entirely. Nationalist scholars have provided incisive studies of the ‘slave’ mentality of the Victorian Welsh, condemning their love affairs with Britishness.³ But the only point of reference in these works is anglophone culture, and continental Europe is largely ignored. Yet without the European comparison, there is little opportunity to explain why the Welsh were so ready to abandon the Welsh language, and why no national movement developed.

Looked at within a comparative European context, not only should the Welsh language have held its own in the nineteenth century, it should have been greatly strengthened. Yet the opposite was true. In 1847, the language was omnipresent; by the 1951 census, a mere century later, the population in its entirety, with the exception of the very old and the very young, understood English and less than a third spoke Welsh. Linguistic decline on this scale, in a modern society without experience of ethnic cleansing, is unique in the recent history of Europe.

On all this, even the very best Welsh history is rather ambiguous, and Geraint H. Jenkins, editor of the flagship study of language use in nineteenth-century Wales, remarks:

Only the harshest historian would chastise Welsh-speaking progressives in the Victorian period for recognizing the necessity that their countrymen needed to learn to speak English fluently. There were strong, perhaps overwhelming, incentives to acquire English and it is an allusion to believe that, in a period when the economy of Wales was being altered beyond recognition, it would have been possible to sustain Welsh monoglottism on a large scale.⁴

Here the Welsh historian becomes an apologist, a matter of great frustration to those few historians of central and Eastern Europe who have taken an interest in Wales. ‘The question of language shift is a central one in modern Welsh history’, writes Robin Okey, himself a Welshman, but whose understanding of Welsh history is informed by his work as a historian of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.⁵ For the crucial question is this: if Welsh monolingualism was impossible to maintain in the absence of cultural self-determination, why were calls for self-determination not forthcoming?

In European historiography, the expectation is that Wales might have followed such a path. The German historian, Knut Diekmann, in his Die nationalistische Bewegung in Wales (The National Movement in Wales), argues that the possibility existed in nineteenth-century Wales ‘for the development of nationalism according to the formula, “one nation = one state”’, but this never took place because ‘the issue was of no significance to leaders of thought’.⁶

Or, to summarise the argument in rather more eloquent fashion, as Saunders Lewis does in 1962 in his milestone lecture, Tynged yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language), the founding text of modern Welsh-language activism:

There was a time, during the awakening of the common people between 1860 and 1890, when it would have been practical to establish Welsh as the language of education and of the University, the language of the new county councils, the language of industry. No such thought came to the Welsh.⁷

Lewis’s lecture is illuminated by an awareness of the European context. He portrays the national language as coming into its own in a number of small European countries. In ‘Switzerland, and Ghent and Louvain in Belgium’, it becomes the language of the academe itself.⁸ But Saunders Lewis, the dominant intellectual figurehead of twentieth-century Wales, was a rare beast, and a comparative approach was rarer still in Welsh historiography.

The Czech historian, Miroslav Hroch, provides the best analysis by an international historian of the ‘Welsh experience’. His comparative study of the nationalisms of the ‘non-historic’ nations of Europe, Die Vorkämpfer der Nationalen Bewegung bei den Kleinen Völkern Europas (available in English as Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe), surprises with its range. It includes interpretations of the sociology of nineteenth-century national movements from across the Continent, and includes the Czechs, the Finns, the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Slovaks, the Flemish and the Schleswig Danes.

For Hroch, Wales is the example par excellence of a failure to ‘build’ a nation. Wales contained all the ingredients essential for the growth of a national movement and nation-building, but despite this Wales never became a nation:

Let us give an extreme example … For Wales at the end of the 19^th century all the features of the ‘classical’ definition [of nationhood] were valid in their full extent: it had a compact area of settlement, an old-established and distinctive cultural unity, a modernized literary language, its territory even formed an economic whole, comparable with a national market – and despite all this we cannot speak at that time of a fully developed Welsh nation.⁹

The failure is barely understandable, although many have made attempts to excuse it. The Welsh belonged to a category of peoples in Europe who were ‘small but not tiny’.¹⁰ The category included nations-in-the-making such as the Slovaks and the Slovenes, the Baltic peoples, as well too as the Basques and the Bretons. Those in the east of the Continent proved more successful in their nationalist endeavours than those in the west, and some have concluded that insurmountable geo-political, economic and social differences constituted a sort of nineteenth-century iron curtain against national freedoms, erected perhaps on the Rhine.¹¹ However this is not the whole story, nor indeed the greater part of it.

In the French State, Brittany and Provence did indeed, like Wales, fail to become nations. However it was the French interpretation of civic identity rather than economic or social deficiencies which lay at the root of the failure. In France, republican ideology saw a link between citizenship and cultural egalitarianism. Territorially, culturally and in its use of a common language, the egalitarian state understood the civic to be indivisible. France was thus different to Britain, but not wholly different either. The chasm between French Jacobinism and British liberalism is not as wide as it seems: both are assimilatory modes of thought rooted in the Enlightenment. Indeed, the Welsh failure is more striking than that of the stateless nations of France. Wales had been modernised and industrialised (this was not true of Brittany, for example), and British liberalism claimed that the Welsh could choose their fate. The French state never entertained any such pretence.

There were failures on the Iberian peninsula as well. Catalonia possessed nearly all the essential attributes of nationhood. Like Scotland, it was a ‘historic’ nation; indeed ‘the virtual prototype of a nation-state’.¹² As late as the eighteenth century, Catalonia had seen armed insurrection in favour of self-government. By the nineteenth century, it had become a wealthy, modern society and Barcelona a prosperous, bourgeois city of some significance. Yet, until the 1850s, Catalan gradually lost ground to Castilian and Spanish values were promoted by the local elite.¹³ This was a mirror image of the situation in Wales, but from the mid-nineteenth century the atmosphere in Catalonia began to change. As the Anglicisation of Wales intensified, and indeed in the 1860s reached its apogee, a Catalan identity developed which rejected cultural assimilation. Ideas about the ‘spirit’ of the nation were imported from German Romanticism.¹⁴ There were calls for political autonomy, and for the use of Catalan in every aspect of life: later in the century, some argued for the use of Catalan as the nation’s only official language.¹⁵

How much of a failure was Catalonia in truth? The Catalan nineteenth century is an impressive backdrop to the mass-membership Catalan nationalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a form of politics entirely absent in Wales. It was events external to the nation itself which meant that a Catalan nation-state never came into being: Catalonia was unlucky. There was no crisis in Spain at the end of the First World War. Spain had been neutral and the state was unweakened. The country would be torn apart by the civil war of the 1930s, but it was the Spanish nationalist, Franco, who emerged victorious (had he lost, Catalonia would have kept its Statute of Autonomy gained in 1932). Linguistically, Catalonia did not fall. Catalonia is one of the few stateless nations in Western Europe in which the national language remains the language of the majority.

The history of the Basque Country tells a similar story. Basque nationalism was not in the same league as the more successful nationalisms of central and Eastern Europe, but it existed and the same can hardly be said of stand-alone nationalism in Wales before the First World War.¹⁶ If indeed the right-wing founder of Basque n...