Unionism and Nationalism in Welsh Political Life

An Essay by

David Melding AM

To Mark the 20th Anniversary of Devolution to Wales

This essay sets out the reasons to view unionism and nationalism as closely related political phenomena. They are not political antonyms and each contain seeds of the other. Welsh unionism has exhibited a deeply patriotic character which stresses the importance of nations in union. While nationalism in Wales and Scotland has at times at least been nuanced in its regard to Britishness. And both ideologies face a similar challenge in the face of Brexit. Unionists must come to terms with European unionism even if the UK’s secession is stable and successful.

The Celtic neo-nationalism that has emerged since the 1980s – having accommodated European unionism – still has to grapple with unionism in Britain.

Another challenge that neither unionism nor nationalism can avoid is how to deal with the concept of sovereignty. The brilliant Brexit slogan Take back control captured the heart of much of the Conservative Party and largely eviscerated its ‘unionist’ suffix. How could supposedly unionist Conservatives play fast and loose with Scotland having previously emphasised that independence should be rejected so that Scotland could remain in the EU? The abrupt change of direction can be seen as a turn to a sovereigntist position. Once more, it was emphasised, Parliament must uphold its full sovereign dignity. It was almost as if the pre-Union Westminster Parliament was reasserting itself in a commitment to English nationalism.

Many leading Celtic nationalists slip back easily to a sovereigntist position when rejecting British political institutions. The iron logic of pure nationalism is still retained by a small wing of the SNP who reject the institutions of the EU. Before the mid 1980s, of course, both Plaid Cymru and the SNP rejected EEC membership because of the loss of sovereignty it entailed.

Brexit has brought English nationalism to the stage. Many predicted 20 years ago that a consequence of Celtic devolution would be a rise in English national identity. No doubt devolution has played its part in the growth of English nationalism, but it is the EU that has had the greater influence – clearly seen in UKIP and now the Brexit party. There is a close comparison to be drawn between Scotland’s plight in the 1700s and England-cum-Britain’s today. Just as Scotland had to confront a rapidly changing and little controlled economic-political situation in the early 18th century, so too has Britain been severely buffeted by forces that sweep over its state-space and undermine the practical exercise of notional sovereignty.

In this essay unionism is taken to mean a commitment to a political entity bigger than a single national unit. This requires union and therefore common institutions. A union need not be a unitary state, and indeed multi-national states are often federal unions, whether or not they term themselves as such. Nationalism is taken to be at essence the belief that ideally at least nations and states should be coterminous. A desire for unity in wider cooperation between sovereign states sits more comfortably with traditional nationalists than concepts of union. However

these are ideal definitions and in the 21st century they have started to break down. Brexiteers tend to favour common institutions for Britain but not Europe. They go no further than schemes for European unity that do not require the surrender of sovereignty. Celtic nationalists have largely become unionists at the European scale (they believe in common institutions) but reject this principle for Britain. They sometimes acknowledge the need for unity however between the sovereign home nations once that status is achieved.

Britishness here is taken to be an acceptance of a geographic entity that extends a wide cultural, social and political projection. It creates a rich, democratic and inclusive political life as each generation makes coherent the matter of Britain. This does not require a commitment to full political union but it does demonstrate an understanding – at its fullest a celebration – of deep commonality. Because Britishness is frequently implied to mean deep political union, it is instinctively rejected by many nationalists. Yet in the rush and fury of political argument the essential character of Britishness is mistakenly denigrated – a fact sometimes conceded by nationalist thinkers when they grapple with the practical realities of the geo-political space we inhabit in these islands.

I

Will Scotland and Wales loosen the political bonds of Britishness? Could they emulate Australia and New Zealand and forge a political independence while holding on to the deeper sense of British heritage? And would this lead to Wales and Scotland turning away from London and looking towards Brussels rather like Australia and New Zealand have turned towards Asia? Is the Union a compromise or a cause, or indeed a bit of both? To unionists it is more often cause and to acquiescing nationalists a compromise now that it contains a high level of political autonomy for its member nations. But both interpretations agree that it is not absolute and self-sustaining. The search for ever closer union marks it a glorious cause for pure unionists. Scottish nationalists and some constitutional historians see the Union as foremost an event, a treaty in legal terms, a compromise politically, and at most a partnership. Above all it is a bargain whether cause or compromise, the common ancestor of federal unions in the Anglosphere. Unionism and nationalism have defined the character of the composite state that since 1707 has been the UK. Nationalism stands invigorated in all the Home Nations including England. A strong neo-nationalism has developed in Wales and Scotland that has embraced the search for European unity; while in England a more insular nationalism seeks to re-establish what many believe to be the full dignity of a sovereign parliamentary state. Membership of the European Union has had a profound impact on the theory of unionism. In the quest for European unity political and

economic exigencies have stimulated a more perfect union, reflecting unionist thought in the UK during the 18th and 19th centuries. This phenomenon largely inspired the generation of unionists who after the Second World War saw the UK’s destiny as one moving away from Empire and toward Europe. More recently many unionists have been discomforted by the process of European unification and see it as incompatible with British unionism and its highest expression in a sovereign parliament. Such anxiety has been made more acute by the accompanying trend to analyse the UK’s unionist constitution in response to the growth of Welsh and Scottish nationalism. When the UK entered the EEC in 1973 the received ‘banal’ unionism that had prevailed since the second half of the 18th century was at an end. Scotland, England and soon perhaps Wales have choices such as they never had before. This will result in either a new configuration of states or a reformed Union.

Identity lies at the heart of both unionism and nationalism in Wales and elsewhere. There is a sense that as political attachments become less instinctive people increasingly turn to identity. The essence of identity is so elusive that one might think it a numinous political phenomenon. But this does not silence the debate about its authenticity, that goes on and on but rarely with much resolution. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah warns us against embarking on the search for essentialism, for "identity is revealed as an activity, not a thing. And it’s the nature of activities to bring change”.1 Yet essentialism has marked modern Welsh thought: ‘When Was Wales?’ (Gwyn Alf Williams), ‘Wales! Wales?’ (Dai Smith) and most recently ‘Why Wales Never Was’ (Simon Brooks). What these works really grapple with is the truth that Wales is always in the making. The hesitant see mutability as loss rather than creative space to compose a strong and unifying identity. Unionism and nationalism are the dominant voices in this unending debate and tend to a purity that at times rejects the reality of their compatibility in the bargain that is democratic activity. In the near past religion and socialism deflected the search for Welshness in favour of a universal creed, but the faith needed to sustain such concepts weakened throughout the 20th century. A belief in progress and the communal enjoyment of sport helped Wales and Britain through the decline in traditional religious practice and even offered shelter in the triumph of democracy, social welfare and an increasingly rules based international order. By the end of the Victorian period English essentialism assisted by Welsh and Scottish acquiescence had created a sense of British exceptionalism strong enough to constitute a confident and coherent identity. But today the wonders of industrial enterprise are tarnished by the realisation of the environmental costs that produced them. We are not only unsure about whether future generations will be more prosperous, but whether the very world we bequeath will be sustainable. As for the achievements of British hegemony, in any event now long past, they seem to many ambiguous and ambivalent, perhaps just a shameful shadow. Now we are more likely

to agree with the lament of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa who wrote after the First World War:

“When my generation was born, it found the world devoid of supports for those who had both a mind and a heart. The destructive work of earlier generations caused the world for which we were born to have no assurances to give us of a religious order, no supports to give us of a moral order, no tranquillity to give us of a political order”2.

Of course each generation since the Reformation has been required to rigorously sift the past and question tradition, and this process was further aggravated by the Enlightenment and in our own times by epochal technological change. Without these forces humanity’s general desire for greater security and civility would have been frustrated. We are not collapsing into nihilism. However, as the American thinker John Lukacs has observed, it is doubtful whether democracy can flourish without a good measure of authority, where authority is defined as the ability to speak and guide clearly. With Burkean prescience he warned in 2005 that “A desire for authority will not vanish among men and women; but it may take unexpected and perhaps even shocking new forms”3. President Trump is seen by many as the fruit of such confusion. Those who possess a confident sense of identity are more likely to construct the bonds needed to keep a political association together. Those that don’t are tempted to make the mythical nation or union great again. The heart needs to make sense of the insights of the mind if it is to be generous and allow us to converse coherently about union and nation. But Pessoa’s yearning for a unity between heart and mind has proven frequently elusive and this is a source of spiritual unease in a secular world. Expressions of identity have too often become more assertive rather than calm and confident. Here, then, is the context in which the quest for identity should be viewed in Wales, Britain and Europe. As Hedd Wyn, a contemporary of Pessoa wrote,

Alas, this is an age so meanThat everyman is made a Lord,For all authority’s absurdWhen God himself fades from the scene4.

And for Pessoa, in communion with Hedd Wyn though they knew nothing of each other’s existence, a world dominated by “the grand gestures of the aristocracy of individuality”5 would be a challenging, even unsettling place.

II

Britain’s tortured relationship with the European Union became a conspicuous factor in British politics during the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s, predating the rise in populism in western democracies by about 20 years. Nevertheless the Brexit slogan take back control drew strength from the identity crisis that hit democracies after the financial crash. This anxiety has been accentuated by the technological change that is transforming human experience, especially in the sphere of communication, and is inadequately encapsulated in the word ‘globalisation’. In the 18th century unionism coped well with the industrial and commercial revolutions because these forces emphasised the need for a British union that created optimum conditions for a market, capital transfer and the efficient movement of labour. The sharp dissonances that frequently disturbed the operation of the Union in its early stages are now long forgotten but they were intense and very real. It should not surprise us that the European Union has faced discord and struggled to accommodate the mesmerising forces of technological change. The rush to construct a single currency has added to these tensions. Legitimisation of European institutions has been a particular problem as the EU is a very imperfect democracy and only the relatively weak European Parliament has direct contact with citizens (although it should be noted that the Treaty of Lisbon did strengthen the powers of the European Parliament considerably). The UK was formed when the need for democratic legitimisation was far less urgent and crucially the encroachment of the executive into public life was limited although growing. Right up until the arrival of the welfare state it remained open to British governments to meet public discontent by proposing more executive action (killing rebellion with kindness, as Balfour put it). Today such encroachment is far less viable because the space for more government is limited. Calls for the Euro crisis to be met with ‘more Europe’ have had less credibility than offering direct economic relief, as it amounts to little more than shifting existing regulatory control from the national to the European level. Attempts to renew the British union as Brexit becomes a reality will face similar difficulties. Indeed the dissonances can already be heard with some Brexiteers looking forward to a Singapore style free economy, while others want much more executive intervention in a strong commitment to fairness and equality so that new economic life can be breathed into communities from Sunderland to Blaenau Gwent. Even if those Brexiteers who favour such intervention win out, the scope for executive encroachment is far more limited today than it was when the UK was being forged in the 18th and 19th centuries. Unionism will not find an easy path to rejuvenation in post Brexit Britain.

Populism has created a much tougher climate for all unionists seeking a more expansive vision of nations co-operating to secure effective

decision-making. From the rubble left in Europe after WWII the US sought to promote co-operation between the nations of Europe in supra-national organisations. This overturned the concept favoured by the UK in the 19th century of the balance of power between competing states. While the US presence in Europe lingers it is no longer committed to multilateralism. Speaking in Brussels in December 2018 the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said that international bodies that constrain national sovereignty “must be reformed or eliminated”6. Remarkably and very ominously for free trading Brexiteers, the US now agrees with China that the World Trade Organisation’s independent arbitration process should be abrogated. Britain’s parliamentary culture largely constrained the populist movements that have from time to time swept countries like the USA. A strong trade union movement also provided a conduit for charismatic individuals to enter public life as citizen politicians. Less ambitious citizens could participate in political parties that had a strong social dimension, similar in many ways to membership of a church. There was an identity, a feeling of worth, or at least an acquiescence in such social-political participation. Faith in Parliament remained so high it almost amounted to a creedal affirmation that unionism meant parliamentary government. Parliament magnificently stood firm against Hitler in May 1940 when it repudiated one prime minister and endorsed another at a moment of supreme crisis. Alas, Brexit has undermined the viability of such parliamentary unionism. While it is just about possible to reconcile a belief in parliamentary sovereignty with the occasional use of referendums, the actual practice of such paradox takes remarkable skill. The way the referendum on EU membership was conceived and conducted failed to meet such a standard. Worse, having committed the Union’s destiny to a binary vote, Parliament was left confused about what sort of Brexit had been approved by a fairly small majority. Did Leave mean leave the EU or was it a plea for a new political settlement, a cry of frustration over immigration, and a demand for a fairer distribution of wealth and influence? Worse still, Parliament has not brought much post referendum clarity or consensus to the question. This has alienated both citizens who voted Leave and Remain. It ends a grim decade for parliamentary authority that started with the expenses scandal in 2009.

It is a mistake to equate the decision to leave the EU with some morbid populist howl. The EU is not without profound flaws and its membership does require a considerable commitment to common decision-making that has resulted in a big gap between citizens and much of their government. Voting to leave the EU was not an irrational act, although it may prove a poor choice. While care needs to be taken by the supporters of Remain not to equate Brexit with populism, it is the case that populist impulses now run more strongly through all western democracies including the UK. Some commentators see this as principally a problem of citizenship as western democracies mature and show the wear and tear of age. Others see more problematic signs of decay and decadence.

The anglophile and Churchill admirer John Lukacs considers these trends to be linked to questions of identity and nationalism. He argues that to make democracy safe (his phrase) it needs temperance through checks and balances on majority rule. ‘And when this temperance is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing more (or else) than populism. More precisely: then it is nationalist populism’7. Lukacs is a great admirer of Tocqueville and sees democracy as always open to populism because it must contain the possibility of disrupting the established order. He also laments the turn from patriotism towards nationalism, ‘patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive; patriotism is the love of a particular land with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a “people”, justifying everything, a political and ideological substitute for religion’8. Lukacs is no doubt severe in his assessment of nationalism and in the UK the neo-nationalism that has developed is patriotic, to use his terminology. However, the deeper point is that like religion, nationalism comes in good and bad varieties and this is something unionists and nationalists must guard against. There are critics of Brexit who have argued that aspects of the Leave rhetoric reflected an assertive English (perhaps in Wales, British) nationalism. Certainly some Brexiteers made histrionic statements about the dangers of uncontrolled immigration and the freedom of movement within the EU, and falsely stated that Turkey was soon to become a member of the EU. While wild and inaccurate statements abound in campaigns, this was a moment of low politics and one that Remainers failed to rebut effectively.

Identity involves soul-craft. Here its very ineffability can be seen as a virtue. Kwame Anthony Appiah calls convincingly for non-essentialist conceptions of identity, something that we may come to think vital post Brexit. Unionism is strongest when it harmonises the many into a common desire for a shared political life that can best advance the public good. It should not seek to create a British people but rather acknowledge that there is a people in Britain. Neo-nationalism emphasises the civic when it moves away from essentialism. Appiah offers further help in describing identity as a verb not a noun – an activity. Here he echoes Michael Oakeshott’s contention that much of political conduct is practice not belief – what is taken for belief in fact emanates from activity. Moving away from such essentialist definitions of identity is liberating. Who is properly Welsh in the following scenario: a unionist with a deep love of the Mabinogion or the nationalist with little interest in literature but committed to full political independence? Both, of course! And they both could live, talk, work, sing and vote together (but not for the same party) and share all sorts of active identities. While exclusivity has most frequently been ascribed fairly or not to nationalism in the UK, unionism is hardly free of the proclivity. During the imperial period unionism was highly exclusive, most notably in the maladroit handling of the Irish crisis. Alternatively, most Welsh and Scottish

nationalists have had little difficulty in accepting the rules of political conduct in the UK and hence the current legitimacy of a constitution they want to see fundamentally changed. Significantly, prominent nationalists like Gwynfor Evans and Alex Salmond have emphasised the need for ongoing British activity in a confederation of equals. While a populist is likely to have a simple answer to the question ‘what is Britishness?’ unionists should reply that it is too rich and active an identity to be simply described. Unionism should not seek refuge in an exclusive British nationalism. In truth such a thing would be merely English nationalism writ a little large. Only an expansive concept of unionism can hope to generate bonds of Britishness that are multi-national in character.

A move away from essentialist concepts of identity makes dual or multi-national identities viable. To be Welsh-British-European is not a hopeless mish-mash but a rich banquet to nourish the soul. To be properly balanced here, many Brexiteers sincerely hold to a European identity and emphasise that it is the political and administrative structure of the EU that they find unacceptable. For them Europeanness does not need a political expression. A similar view was once held by the vast majority of unionists towards calls for devolution to Wales and Scotland, although since its commencement in 1999 devolution has been absorbed into unionism in the younger generation to a surprising extent. In these shifting and varied identities we move a long way from that German giant of political thought Hegel who held that there was an essence to nationhood and that statehood was the mark of an authentic nation and the teleological destiny of its people. It is the father of nationalist thought, Johann Herder, who reads more comfortably in our rather perplexing times as he emphasised the importance of the individual flourishing in national experience that is contingent, inclusive and non-hierarchical.

Francis Fukuyama has also entered the debate on identity in a book appropriately subtitled Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. It returns us to the individual, the citizen, matters of soul-craft. Recognition or an acknowledgement of worth is for Fukuyama a key driver of identity. That one’s own work is not recognised by fellow (perhaps more privileged) citizens is highly corrosive and leads to what Fukuyama calls the problem of invisibility. This phenomenon is clearly related to growing or persistent economic inequality within states such as the USA and UK. It lays the groundwork for narrow nationalism as people so excluded seek ‘a common identity that will rebind the individual to a social group and re-establish a clear moral horizon’9. Like many others, Fukuyama believes that nationalism when not ethnically based or exclusive can be a creative force enabling collective action. But he is stark in his warning to politicians, ‘The challenge facing contemporary liberal democracies in the face of immigration and growing diversity is to … define an inclusive national identity that fits the society’s

diverse reality, and to assimilate newcomers to that identity. What is at stake in this task is the preservation of liberal democracy itself’10. We must be careful not to conclude that our identity is not to have an identity, there must be core values that sustain a common citizenship. Identity then needs to be considered as more like a sport, an activity not a description, but one with rules that allow its many styles of play to be expressed.

III

The yearning for identity can lead to closed concepts such as that only political independence allows nationhood to flourish or that unionism only survives if the supremacy of Parliament is protected by a unitary state and a programme of ever greater assimilation. In Wales these extremes have generally been avoided. The nationalist tradition refrains from a sterile attack on everything British and accepts that centuries of co-existence have produced many items of value. Saunders Lewis had a genuine respect for the Crown, and at times calls for independence have been attenuated by prominent figures such as Dafydd Wigley and Rhodri Glyn Thomas allowing them to promote the concept of free association. Plaid’s thinking on the British dimension was very much affected by the inaugural election to the National Assembly in 1999. The result achieved by Plaid was seemingly seismic and the party outperformed its nationalist cousin in Scotland. It was the big story of the 1999 election with several of Labour’s electoral bastions across the Valleys toppling. Presumably Plaid had some intimation of its prospects and this may explain Dafydd Wigley’s remarkable claim at the start of the campaign that “Plaid Cymru has never advocated independence – never, ever, on any occasion”11. This stretched credulity to breaking point, but it was accurate in pointing towards a more nuanced tradition that had not single-mindedly pushed for outright independence. It was probably key to Plaid’s year of wonder in 1999. Four years later Rhodri Glyn Thomas tried to move things on when he said “logically Wales is and will always be a part of the UK. But we need a more equal partnership based on free associations, which will give us sovereignty without separation”12. Quite what was meant by “sovereignty without separation” was left unclear but if nothing else it was an attempt to combine nationalism and a type of unionism. The idea held sway for many years and is still regularly referenced by leading Plaid figures. In 2017 Adam Price suggested a return to Plaid’s goal under Saunders Lewis in the 1920s and 1930s, Wales needs “An ante-room to independence … something like the Irish Free State 100 years ago, the Dominion states floated recently by Elystan Morgan within Labour and the ‘free association’ suggested a decade ago within Plaid by Rhodri Glyn Thomas”13. Some no doubt will see this as political gymnastics to vault the barrier of an unpopular cause, but it is also a pragmatic acknowledgement that Britishness remains in the material of our national being. This trend runs deep, passing through the Liberal

tradition and back to the likes of Iolo Morganwg. As Iolo Morganwg observed somewhat ironically, ‘Is not Wales conspicuously the least turbulent part of the British Dominion at this very day?’14. The love of London and a recognition that it is in a real sense part Welsh culturally and historically has run strongly through nationalist sentiment in Wales. Even if the British state and the Union dissolves, unionism would have laid down a thicker layer of British sediment in Wales than in any other part of the UK. Wales is now at an axial point as it marks 20 years of political devolution and turns towards the cultural horizon and half millennium anniversary in 2036 of the ‘first’ union. By then the influence that the Welsh government exerted in Britain’s post Brexit constitutional structure will be fully apparent. To aid this effort it may be appropriate to strengthen the public understanding of Welsh history and culture within the whole of the UK. It is remarkable that the Brythonic-Welsh aspect of the history of the British Isles is so poorly understood and inadequately represented in many institutions outside Wales. At least we can be thankful that, unlike in the 19th century, it is no longer necessary to travel to Germany to undertake rigorous Celtic studies. Simon Brooks asserts that ‘From its very beginning, Celtic studies was a form of Orientalism’15 to British intellectuals, not a present and living tradition. Today anxiety is caused by the lack of leverage Wales seems to possess in inter-governmental relations when compared to Scotland and N.I. The outcome of efforts to create strong inter-governmental structures in the UK is likely to affect attitudes towards Welsh independence. This has already been intimated in polling data that asked the question, given Brexit, and the increased likelihood of Scottish independence, could you see Welsh independence within the next 20 years?16

The process of nation-building through political institutions is quite apparent in the Welsh experience of devolution. The National Assembly has operated with alacrity as a form of constitutional convention aiming to strengthen the internal coherence of devolution. This is not faint praise. It has resulted in a string of impressive constitutional and fiscal commissions that have produced recommendations of real rigour. Without such constitutional development the 2011 referendum on primary law-making power would not have been successful. And the Assembly’s hard won legislative powers have led to some impressive law-making in contentious and innovative areas. The Human Tissue Act has inspired the other legislatives in the UK to address this issue; the Active Travel Act was similarly innovative and attracted major attention in the UK media; and the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act can claim to be world leading in its scope, relevance and ambition. On arguably the most distinctive aspect of Welsh nationhood, the Welsh language (for citizens who speak it and those who don’t) there has been only modest progress and less purpose. It has taken nearly 20 years for a Welsh government to publish a long-term target for the number of Welsh speakers it seeks to create to realise the aspiration of a truly bilingual Wales. We stumble on having secured a greater appreciation of the Welsh language certainly, but not yet the confidence to ask what we want to achieve. Planning law

offers little protection to the Welsh speaking heartlands, indeed the idea of a dual property market has not even been discussed as a serious option. It would be controversial, of course, and dual markets are potentially dysfunctional, but they operate in many parts of the world to protect and promote indigenous culture. (Look no further than the Channel Islands!) In fact, in terms of innovations that are likely to change the opportunity for the language to flourish, the pre-devolution period 1979-99 was markedly more impressive with the hard won establishment and generous funding of S4C and attendant growth of Welsh creative industries, the establishment of the right to Welsh medium education for all children whether or not from Welsh speaking homes, and the establishment of a powerful Welsh Language Board to monitor and promote the use of Welsh in public life. When the aspirations of nationalism are narrowly focused they highlight political goals such as becoming a state. This overriding political goal is then taken as the measure of true national feeling. Paradoxically, a more expansive and tolerant nationalism permits a range of outcomes and aspirations that might not emerge when political goals are so dominant. Here nationalism benefits from the unifying, rushing head-waters people once called patriotism. It is this force that will be required for any meaningful language recovery in Wales.

Unionism in Wales has rarely been opposed by a rigid nationalism that seeks to deny the reality of British identity. The real challenge facing unionism is whether it can remain the unifying force necessary to sustain Britishness as it moves out of the EUs orbit and by inference declares European unionism to be presently incompatible with the British state. The secession of the UK from the EU both gives credence to an act of secession and establishes a rival unionism. This will trouble unionists who believe adaptability has been key to its survival and renewal. Nation-building now has to cope with human conduct in a fast-moving society. Trends and norms that were once fashioned inter-generationally have become material for each generation to reshape radically. The Anglo-Welshness that reached full maturity in the late 20th century when it finally learned to love the Welsh language might be set for a new journey. Certainly Anglo-Welshness cannot be seen as inevitably unionist. It may in fact be as malleable as the force that has transformed the former Dominions into fully independent states. They moved from a dominant British identity to a far looser sense of British heritage which they value as being a tributary of their own sense of distinct identity.

The survival of Welsh as a living language is a matter of European significance, while the creation of a Welsh state is a domestic matter of little weight by comparison. In this age of flux the nature of the state is being transformed as extensively as it was in the 19th century. Then industrialised states came into being, now we see the first glimpses of the digital state. Moreover, in Canada and the USA there have been

radical shifts in the structure of government to recognise the prior sovereignty of indigenous peoples. All unions flourish when they advance the core interests of each member. And so it will always be legitimate to measure the success or otherwise of British unionism in relation to the Welsh language. In Wales the Union inadvertently enabled Welsh to develop quickly into a public language through the translation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Welsh became a language of religion in the 16th century when this was the most critical aspect of public life in terms of participation and communication. The government as well as God communicated through the weekly sermons of parish priests. This may have been done on sufferance – an active policy to promote English might have been followed had it been in any way practical, but thankfully it was not. By the 19th century bilingualism, immigration, and modern communication had made a language shift possible but not inevitable. Whether again inadvertent or not, the Union allowed the forces that favoured English monoglotism to flow freely. This is what marked the Blue Books controversy most clearly – together with the devastating implication that morally speaking Welsh and nonconformity were impediments to righteous living and fuller civic participation, by then concepts allied with economic and social advance. The Union did little to challenge the then contemporary assumption that Welsh was archaic and not capable of meeting the demands of a modern society. Scotland’s experience was very different because its membership of the Union was negotiated (some to this day argue that it was and remains a Treaty). In 1707 core Scottish institutions were preserved and then protected by the Union as Scottish society too was transformed by industrialisation and the modern processes of government.

Bilingualism as tired tolerance will not enable the Welsh language to flourish in a way that is surely fitting for one of Europe’s great cultural achievements. However, the more accomplished form of bilingualism that rather accidentally took hold in the education reforms of the 1980s, which extended the right of Welsh medium education to all, not just a section of the community, has kept Welsh in that game played worldwide by languages struggling to exist alongside English. A future generation may take another, albeit more calculated, step forward. Another source of optimism is the ability of Welsh cultural identity to absorb many of the ideas and aspirations of immigrants, especially from England, and turn them into an Anglo-Welsh projection of Welshness. Had these immigrants rejected such identity then Wales vis-à-vis England might have looked more like Brittany vis-à-vis France. Perhaps only the USA has more successfully assimilated immigrants into a national identity in this manner. It stands in sharp contrast to the earlier experiences of plantation colonies in Ireland or the colonial boroughs of late medieval Wales.

IV

Although nationalism in the British Isles has been steadfastly constitutional and hostile to the ‘blood and soil’ nature of some European national movements, it is difficult to term it simply civic. It focuses on institutions, yes, but to set people free in a national life that British institutions deny them and would always deny them however reformed. A strong federal model of government is therefore a unionist constitutional theory, although one open to reformed but not pure nationalism. Unionism has a more straightforward claim to a civic heartbeat because it has consistently affirmed Parliament as core to its identity. This explains why British identity is so nebulous save from this concept of loyalty to the Union Parliament which created the British state after the failure of the union of the crowns to achieve constitutional stability. European unionism has struggled at times because it lacks this parliamentary focus on which identities can form. Its driving force has always been the member governments meeting in Council, sometimes hyperactively assisted by the Commission. British parliamentarianism reached its apogee in the second half of the 19th century when the Westminster model of mixed government (executive, legislative and judiciary in a single parliament) gained great strength from accepting the legitimisation offered by representational democracy. The Chartists marched to reform Parliament not overthrow it. Nationalism, alternatively, looks to the sovereignty of the people rather than Parliament as the ultimate source of legitimacy. The concepts are not polar opposites and at times indeed look very similar. They have little difficulty co-existing in a stable political system. Unionists draw on Hobbes and Locke in stressing that individuals give up their notional sovereignty to construct collective political institutions that can exercise actual sovereignty. Nationalists argue that the critical step is taken when individuals discern that their common bonds make them a people. In reality there is not such a gap when unionists argue that the people are sovereign in Parliament and nationalists acknowledge that a popular will is rarely unanimous or clear but needs to be distilled through the institutions of government. It is when we see unionism as Britishness expressed through common institutions, most notably Parliament, that the current crisis hits home hard. While the decline in the power of Parliament has been much exaggerated (it has always been a weak legislature with the one stunning power to sack the executive) its dominance by the executive seems today more irksome. Its failure to have a ‘meaningful’ role in shaping the biggest constitutional challenge for a century strikes many as baffling. The greatest danger facing British unionism is that the traditional democratic values it has enshrined in Parliament may now be better preserved by a nationalist alternative in a creative confederation. While both the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament closely follow the Westminster model they do so with the use of proportional representation. This has ensured that the office of First

Minister in Wales and Scotland does not have the potential to dominate parliamentary processes quite to the extent of the Prime Minister. Arguably this has created a less binary political culture that is more attuned to the preferences generated and compromises required in a modern democratic society.

The interplay between unionism and nationalism can be seen in expressions of identity. On the Moreno scale respondents are asked what best describes them on a spectrum of descriptions. In Wales thus: Welsh not British; more Welsh than British; equally Welsh and British; more British than Welsh; and British not Welsh. Respondents across the UK pick a mixed identity (the three middle categories) in comfortably greater numbers than an exclusive one (say in Scotland choosing either wholly Scottish or wholly British). To look at figures compiled in 2018 in Wales 57% chose a mixed identity while 35% opted for an exclusive one (15% saying Welsh only; 20% British); in England 72% chose a mixed identity to describe themselves and 19% an exclusive one (11% English only); and in Scotland there was again a clear preference for a mixed description (65%) over an exclusive one - 29% (with 24% identifying as solely Scottish)17. It is true that although roughly two thirds of the UK’s population affirm some form of Britishness, this figure has been declining and in Scotland at least this has led to the strengthening of an exclusive Scottish identity. It must be remembered also that European identity was not included on the scale referred to here, so we cannot conclude that more and more Scots favour a self-sufficient identity but we can say they are moving away from Britishness. Nevertheless even in Scotland there is a clear preference for maintaining a sense of Britishness and this is something unionists can build upon.

Many commonalities, then, exist and it is notable that the political culture that has marked the first 20 years of devolution has been in the classic Westminster model. And the debate in London on how British identity sustains and renews itself as an inclusive, cosmopolitan entity is similar to conversations in Cardiff and Edinburgh on the modern nature of Welsh and Scottish identity. There are less harmonious voices – now as in the past - that speak of an existential collapse in British sentiment. The senior British diplomat Evelyn Shuckburgh argued in the 1950s that ‘international law and the temper of international opinion is all set against the things which made us a great nation, i.e. our activities outside our own territory’. This almost sounds like a piece of Brexit rhetoric, and he went on to warn ‘Bit by bit we shall be driven back into our island where we shall starve’18. This attitude was clearly shared by Mrs Thatcher in the 1970s when she saw British membership of the EEC as a means to keep the UK on the world stage as a major player in shaping international affairs. To be British here means to hold an expansive political mission, without it we’ll bicker and fragment. Many nationalists have found this rhetoric unconvincing. HWJ Edwards, that

prickly Tory ally of Saunders Lewis, stated bluntly ‘As so many of us know in our hearts, all the talk of being British means that there’ll always be an England’19. Perhaps most telling for unionists is the transformation of the Dominions into fully independent states with a British heritage but not nationality. Even in the 1960s it was possible to see Australia and New Zealand, and to an extent Canada, as British nations. Today such a claim would attract a mixture of ridicule, bemusement and exasperation. During the Scottish independence referendum Alex Salmond spoke elegantly about the importance of British heritage – the social union he called it – and how important it would be in a politically independent Scotland. This may explain to some extent the remarkably high percentage that voted for independence, 45% (about double the historic trend as recorded in opinion polls). In a sense, after the Scottish referendum, there was an opportunity to move towards a more robust Britishness because leading Scottish nationalists had to accommodate aspects of the British bond and the identity it represented. Contrast the Brexit referendum that fractured the Union fundamentally as Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain, England and Wales Leave. Few who advocated Brexit gave this possible outcome much thought, as if a vote on membership of the European Union had no relation to the Union that in Britain has endured for over 300 years. Britain’s global role was something discussed at length during the Brexit campaign, but calls to make Britain globally great again owed more to nostalgia than rational expectation. The stark fact that we must now face is if European politics remains salient in Britain, then in Scotland at least the Union will be in jeopardy. Should the EU reform and grow more responsive to citizens, while the UK fails to rejuvenate in Brexit, then the fracture will widen quickly. Unionism in Britain will be killed by the desire for a bigger and more perfect unionism in Europe.

V

Britishness was at the dawn of the 20th century an innovative amalgam of national feeling and a global vision even mission. Some leading Unionists saw the Irish crisis as a spur to create a global Empire federation. Long forgotten now, but the Imperial Federation League envisaged a form of supra-national government that was well ahead of its time. What was achieved eventually was a commonwealth not a federation, but it allowed unionism to adapt to the loss of Empire by preserving a sense of cultural and even economic unity between Britain and her former colonies. It was not enough for most of the generation of political leaders who had direct experience of the Second World War, and the attractions of the boldest experiment in supra-nationalism – the European Economic Community – became more alluring. It seemed to echo the British quest for unity after the religious wars of the 17th

century. Unionism transformed Britain into the United Kingdom in the 18th century because it made a virtue of the untidy composite monarchy that followed the Tudor era. James I argued passionately for union but it remained always beyond his grasp. Then soon followed the febrile half-century 1640-89 which saw an axial shift towards constitutionalism and parliamentary supremacy. This was true revolution, a turn that changed things utterly unlike the French, Russian and so many other revolutions later that replaced one autocracy with another. It created a parliamentary system that could constantly adapt without repudiating what had proven most useful in traditional practice. Until well after WWII this offered British statesmen a great source of confidence and stamina to get through a succession of crises and culminated in those remarkable 5 days in May 1940, the last time a British decision shaped world history. It was this internal constitutional coherence rather than the spoils offered by Britain’s growing global role – which only briefly attained the status of an imperial mission – that allowed the composite nature of the state to flourish. Those that see the end of the Empire as a precursor to the end of Britain miss the mark. Empire was the product of the commercialism and industrialisation that was made possible, not certain, by Britain’s constant constitutional innovations. This was set well before the Imperial age, determined in the 17th century when the tiny American colonies were largely an epi-phenomenon of struggles with Spain for control of the North Atlantic, or a refuge for religious zealots.

It is curious that such pragmatic and composite approaches to statecraft in Britain did not translate with any alacrity into a unionism that could comfortably accommodate the turn towards European unity. Instead unionism became engulfed by a rather nostalgic view of British exceptionalism that flourished briefly in Empire and world power status. Basing unionism on such a narrow strand of British experience has played into the hands of nationalist critics who have consistently argued that unionism was facilitated by Empire. Brexit is the flower of this flawed conception of unionism and as such a crushing failure of British statecraft. And Brexit might be only the start of such maladroit unionism as some Conservative nationalists insist that if necessary the loss of Scotland would be a price worth paying to restore unfettered legal sovereignty. And still more instability lurks in Scotland where people with only limited nationalist sympathies may conclude that as Britain refuses to lead in Europe, Scotland might at least participate in that greater union. While some Brexiteers have talked rather vaguely about reviving the Commonwealth, they cannot offer a replacement for the wider political influence that was secured by EU membership. Therefore, British identity will be heavily reliant on its domestic institutions as it ‘takes back control’. If these domestic institutions are seen to be dominated in practice by England then the multi-national character of Britishness will be difficult to sustain. Scotland and then perhaps Wales will move away from Britishness and follow the path of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In such a definitive shift Celtic nationalists would be

much assisted by the concept of a continuing British heritage, preventing the dissolution of the UK appearing wanton and spiteful. Sanders Lewis, after all, set out to make Wales akin to the Dominions in the 1920s.

Nationalists have to contend with unionism (at least the social union that would persist after political independence) and unionists must sustain the multi-national composition of Britishness. And the political parties face similar demands to deal with forces that are sometimes national and other times unionist, in their efforts to sustain British political life. In many ways the Labour Party has managed this balancing act with more skill than the Conservatives. Labour’s emphasis on a common citizenship enjoying equal social and economic rights has been combined with an ability to respond creatively to the demands of moderate nationalists for political change. Within its own ranks politicians have emerged with a convincing commitment to the nation through the Union, others have been more comfortable with the unitary tradition of British statecraft. The Conservative Party has had a brisk undercurrent of English nationalism throughout its history: sometimes benignly seeing Britishness as a common identity that colours the Union, or more troublingly viewing Britishness as what Englishness must be called in Wales and Scotland.

While the bonding needed to sustain all stable political communities generates nationalist impulses, the quest for greater unity also seems inevitable as modern communications create ever more intricate human linkages. Ever since the international campaign to abolish slavery, led by a repentant Britain, there has been some form of world community of conscience, stimulating the development of human rights law and global and continental institutions. This spirit of unity made unionism a resilient force in the British Isles throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Britain stood out because it realised very early the need for international co-operation and institution building.

The British impulse to examine modes of co-operation was clearly present in the late 1940s and 1950s when European unity was being forged. While Britain stood aside eventually, it recognised the constructive nature of the first European institutions and sought a relationship with them. Still focused on its Empire-cum-Commonwealth, the UK lost a chance to shape European institutions more fundamentally. Nevertheless, the trope that the UK’s awkward relationship with the EU can be traced back to the lost opportunity of the 1950s is not fully convincing. In fact the EU that the UK is leaving was profoundly shaped by Mrs Thatcher and John Major in the Conservative governments they led in the 1980s and 1990s. The Single Market was largely Mrs Thatcher’s initiative and she drove European leaders hard to accept the principle of majority voting - not exactly a policy of ‘take back control’.

Under heavy pressure from John Major the EU accepted the need to expand its membership to include the newly liberated states of central and eastern Europe – creating genuine European unity for the first time. The Maastricht Treaty created a flexible EU largely at the insistence of the UK government. Far from undermining the UK the EU’s transformation in the 1980s and 1990s was undertaken along British lines and using the resources and concepts of traditional unionism.

The Union’s end has been regularly predicted from its birth in 1707 but it has endured the sternest tests because of its adaptability and usefulness. Unions require a constant recommitment amongst members to keep the common cause alive. It is the very nature of unions that they require such bargaining as they are not a natural state of equilibrium in the way idealised nation-states are portrayed. Unions even at their strongest and most stable still appear contingent. From this potential vulnerability they must draw their strength. This is why it has been obdurate and unbending unionism that has done most damage to the UK – the loss of Ireland and the premature loss of the American colonies that so troubled Edmund Burke are surely warnings that Scotland cannot be taken for granted. After Brexit the Union will need to again adapt rapidly to take over the functions formerly left to European governance, and to do so in a way that seems equitable to all the Home Nations. It will require mind and heart to sustain a common identity in British institutions. The Union has come under forensic scrutiny since the 1970s and the skills developed in this process aid reflection but seem ill fitted to the task of transforming the institutions of the UK. Yet Britishness can only survive the current crisis caused by the near secession of Scotland from Britain and actual secession of Britain from Europe, if it is still seen as beneficial and complimentary to core national identities. Unionism amounts to what has been created together by the Home Nations in a British political order. Withdrawal from the EU is significant because membership represented an analogous project that impacted deeply on identity. If in its implementation Brexit pushes people in England to an increasingly exclusive concept of Englishness – or an Englishness masquerading as Britishness - at odds with any wider identity, grave dangers will lurk in the shallows and deep alike. It is a sombre but necessary conclusion to note that the energy and foresight that allowed British influence to rejuvenate the EEC in the 1980s and 1990s must now be revived if the UK has a chance to survive well beyond 2020.

Unionism is only plausible if the people of England remain committed to British institutions: those that exist today and those that will be needed to cope with Brexit. This now requires a foundation based on Britain’s parliaments not solely Parliament. It is a huge conceptual leap, but not one into the dark. To the majority of the people of Scotland, Brexit has perhaps looked like England declaring independence and asserting a narrow nationalist identity. The Conservative Party has reflected this

newly visible nationalism at least among its Brexiteers, as it has moved away from the overwhelmingly pro-European position that created the Single Market. It is a sense of coherence that binds together a political community not a drab uniformity. However the search for such coherence is a constant task and one now made more challenging by the need to accommodate a revived English identity and a somewhat uncertain British one. A British state without unionism is possible only on sufferance – the power of the cheque book to use a dated illustration! The Conservative Party in particular needs to reaffirm its unionist credentials and speak once again the language of unity. A barometer is the House of Lords, an institution lacking profound purpose since 1911 and interestingly the locus of our last great constitutional crisis. If the second chamber of Parliament cannot be transformed into the chamber of the Union, despite its screaming need for reform, unionism will lose its best prospect for revival. Many have made this observation since the commencement of devolution in 1999 and one can surely conclude that had this reform occurred then the constitutional horror of a clumsy binary referendum on EU membership would have been avoided. A House of the Union would have approached the UK’s membership of the EU from an intergenerational perspective, given full weight to the peace process in Northern Ireland, and attached any referendum to a parliamentary process.

VI

The future of Welsh nationalism is as open as that of unionism. Unlike Scotland, Wales never achieved statehood and there has consequently always been greater strain in making such a goal the overriding priority to secure the nation’s rightful status. It does not make the aim of independence inherently implausible but the force of the argument once a state always a potential state cannot flow through Welsh nationalism as it does Scottish. Inspiration comes, of course, from a sense of loss for what Wales never quite achieved in the medieval period – a coherent, steely independence similar to that which emerged in Scotland, Switzerland and Portugal. But the political potential that was lost did not obliterate most aspects of Welsh public life – the cultural flowering of Wales in the 14th century echoing the distinctive religious tradition of an earlier era is an accomplishment that we still admire today. The great events of our history are there as a matter of record – history is unchanging in this small respect - yet the way different generations interpret core experiences is subject to massive change. The weight that each generation puts on particular events also can shift fundamentally. Who today when speaking of Welsh patriotism immediately recalls the Battle of Bosworth? Until quite recently this was central to Anglo-Welsh myth making. The Reformation in Wales is now acknowledged to have

been an act of external coercion that inflicted a violent cultural rupture which attracted practically no popular support at the time in Wales. Such an analysis would have caused outrage to our non-conformist ancestors in the 19th century. It should not surprise us, then, that many nationalists today approach Welsh historiography from a political and contemporary standpoint and return time and again to the question why did our ancestors not strive for independence more resolutely?

In offering a discomforting interpretation of 19th century Welsh liberalism, Simon Brooks has emerged as the prophetic and conservative heir to Saunders Lewis – giving Welsh nationalist thought added intellectual heft by returning to fundamentals. He puts the survival of the Welsh language before the goal of creating a Welsh state. Brooks sees the cardinal error to have been a turn to the exclusively civic instead of securing language rights through community approaches in such matters as education reform. A deeper force was at play that explains this turn away from ethnic (language) rights. The religious goals of non-conformity – evangelism, disestablishment, and temperance - did not see language rights as essential (however desirable) and there was a distinct move towards assimilation in the British civic. English as the language of trade and employment added to this assimilation, not least when improvement to working conditions and the political reforms needed to secure them was progressed by an increasingly powerful trade union movement focusing on the universal value of workers’ rights rather than particular, ethnic concerns. Brooks observes severely that ‘Linguistic decline on this scale, in a modern society without experience of ethnic cleansing, is unique in the recent history of Europe’20 . This turn to the civic, Brooks believes, is still seen today in the activity of the National Assembly and he argues that only by prioritising the needs of Welsh speakers can a coherent bilingual Wales be created. Bilingualism is currently in the hands of the majority language group, a group that inevitably struggles to grasp the extent or nature of the challenge. Should Wales achieve statehood, Brooks believes, there is no guarantee that the language would receive the level of support it requires to regenerate, and he warns against establishing a centralised, civic focused, unitary state. One thing that would help the language survive is the creation of a specific consultative assembly elected by Welsh speakers. In placing the language front and centre Brooks is a powerful disciple of Saunders Lewis. Like Lewis, his voice is little heard in his own land of nationalist thought but it is surely a reminder that when future generations scrutinise our cardinal political choices, they will ask why more was not done to revive the language? Brooks is not reassuring when assessing past choices, from the time of the Blue Books to the arrival of political autonomy, ‘Wales offers undeniable proof of the damage that liberalism can do to a minority society. Indeed Wales shows, better than any other country in Europe, indeed in the world, what happens to a minority when it faces majoritarian liberalism undefended’21 . He concludes bitterly that by ‘the twenty-first century, Wales had become the most British part of Britain’22. Even committed unionists must, I think, acknowledge that

while the Union preserved Scottish institutions, it failed to preserve the cultural attribute most important to Wales.

In the often acid analysis offered by Brooks we find an important corrective, but just like Saunders Lewis he tends to offer the clarity of the prophet abstracted from the complexity of everyday life. The supposed failure of 19th century liberalism can be overdone even if we are unconvinced that non-conformist Wales was the most coherent projection of the nation yet achieved. The forces that surged through the 19th century were epoch making (we live in that epoch still) and the assimilationist trends present in industrialisation and its language of trade, English, are largely seen today in the forces we term globalisation. Many European states are now bilingual, creating challenges for smaller state languages in particular. Ireland suffered a language shift that was more destructive than that experienced in Wales, and swifter. The achievements secured within the Union attracted support in Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the 19th century. Let’s remember that Hegel, the greatest political philosopher of the modern period, saw Britain as an entirely new and exemplar state. Of course a different destiny could also be imagined and this eventually dominated nationalism in Ireland. The example of the Dutch, Portuguese and earlier the Swiss, small nation independence in the shadow of great neighbours, was always present. The benefits of union should not be disregarded or the costs exaggerated and mythologised if we are to properly address the question whether national flourishing is possible within a reformed UK. In terms of participation and latitude for asymmetric approaches, the Union has been an inclusive project when measured against the likely alternatives. But is this enough? It is a fair question, made more urgent by Brexit and the homogenising forces of globalisation. The view that Wales and Scotland somehow spurned the energy of 19th century European nationalism requires challenge just like received views on the benefits of Union. Actually few of the embedded nations freed themselves from the multi-national monarchies at that time and might never have done if it wasn’t for the cataclysm of World War One (Ireland included). The Ottoman Empire was the exception as it was already in an advanced state of decline and faced the challenge of ruling Christian lands in SE Europe. Bulgaria figured largely in Gladstone’s thinking, but not as an example for Wales. This can only go so far nevertheless. On the eve of the Great War, Wales was at the vanguard of the Futurist vision that saw man and machine making a new world order. But this confidence did not contain much appetite for devolution despite an Irish crisis that was opening up possibilities for federalism. When it eventually arrived, devolution emerged from the trauma and frustration of industrial decline. In this regard it is properly seen as an achievement of Welsh and Scottish nationalism rather than a further example of the ability of the Union to

regenerate itself, although it was that in part as attested by the number of Labour unionists who advocated and secured this important constitutional reform.

It is in the nature of a union of nations that nationalist and unionist sentiments mingle, separate and then combine in a constantly changing political kaleidoscope. If the Union really is a bargain between nations seeking to secure common values and interests, then nationalism is an entirely inherent force necessary for the health of the body politic. Bargains require adaptation and revision, and sometimes the outright rejection of a constitutional status quo that has become suffocating. Gwynfor Evans stated quite starkly that he thought the ‘chief importance of sending Nationalists to Westminster has been that they demonstrate the vigour of Welsh nationality. The British parties have made no contribution to the national awakening. Their most positive activities in Wales have been in reaction to the vitality of political Nationalism’23. There is no affection for the Union here but unionists can argue that national flourishing is enabled by the Union, that energy has been drawn too from nationalism to create the community of shared values that until recently at least made Britain a strong state. That devolution has not suddenly constrained nationalist sentiment should surprise no one – it is not the purpose of the Union to stop the process of bargaining that is the very sign of its political vitality. It is when this bargaining becomes a zero-sum game that a union is imperilled.

In having a regard for Britishness and even appreciating the possibilities offered by union in a British state, Welsh and Scottish nationalists have achieved much nation-building. As we have observed, in 1999 and regularly since, Plaid Cymru has emphasised that it believes in a free association with Britain, and at the height of the independence campaign the SNP avowed the value of a social union that would continue to form the bonds of Britishness. A similar stimulus has been drawn by nationalists from the search for European unity as most frequently seen in the activities of the European Union. This turn to embrace an institutional expression of Europeanness occurred in the mid 1980s and it has arguably saved Welsh and Scottish nationalism from the aspiration of a very brittle 19th century reproduction of statehood. In contrast English nationalism has created a distinct danger to concepts of union since its rapid re-emergence in the 1990s in response to the Maastricht Treaty and rising immigration. The rejection of institutional expressions of Europeanness by English nationalism risks catapulting Britain back to the world of 19th century British exceptionalism, only without the resources the Union then held. Being such an early experiment of union, Britain has contained these two often contradictory characteristics: exemplar and exception. The greatest British nationalist was Churchill

and he demonstrated this ambivalence vividly in his attitude to European unification after WWII. He welcomed the endeavour as it was the best way to secure the values and freedoms that had been exemplified in the British state, but he thought Britain too exceptional to join the quest.

It is surely likely that the political generation that will grapple with these questions in the years up to 2036 will evaluate the nature of the Union and the Welsh nation within it. Scotland might have seceded by then leaving a ramshackle union of England, Wales and Northern Ireland; more benignly the Union may have evolved into a federal state that has made its peace with Europe. And by 2036, assuming Scotland remains, the Union would have either evolved effective inter-governmental procedures or left Wales marginalised and exposed in a bilateral system where Whitehall sets the rules of the game but Scotland has formidable bargaining power. It could be the Barnett paradox writ large: a constitutional status that seems temporary but just can’t be reformed without changing profoundly the Scottish-English relationship. It is an awkward paradox that a move to a federal settlement could have the effect of reducing somewhat Scottish power in the Union, while increasing that of Wales. Consequently, unionism in Wales faces a testing time. Welsh nationalists cannot assume this will simply result in stronger support for independence because the financial costs are still likely to be considerable. Yet they were similarly considerable when 45% of the Scottish population voted for independence in 2014, and 53% of the English population voted to leave the EU in 2016. Welsh unionists need to recognise that change happens, sometimes quickly, sometimes steadily. And it is always likely to happen at some point if all that holds a state together is money not affection. The Union is in jeopardy; it creates more jeopardy not to acknowledge this truth.

VII

The two World Wars of the 20th century reshaped state conception as profoundly as the Reformation did in the 16th century. And just like its experience of the Reformation, the British Isles was left feeling exceptional and adrift of much continental experience. The hugely traumatic experience of total war – the First creating citizen-soldiers the Second masses of citizen-victims – continues to be the dominant influence on unionist and nationalist thought in Europe. It is impossible to overemphasise the importance of this experience now made more fearsome by the ever proximate threat of nuclear annihilation. The First World War demonstrated the failure of the great European states to replace the unifying ideal that so many had earlier sought in religion.

Even Europe’s social democrats largely backed the headlong plunge into conflict. Nothing, in Europe at least, was the same after the Great War. A belief in progress still lingered but it became vague and less focused on the state and instead projected onto something that has been called a vague internationalism. The inter-war years contained little of the effusive enthusiasm of the Futurists who dominated so much intellectual thought before the Great War with their vision of perfectibility through science and technology.

The British-Irish union stood on the brink of civil war in the spring of 1914. Ultra unionists in Ireland and Britain could not swallow the only practical recipe for unity which was some form of federal state. It is a grim observation but WWI bought time for the UK to rejuvenate the Union into one based on consent. A shorter conflict might have secured such a benign outcome, as the Irish National Party’s leaders clearly hoped. They largely backed the call to defend Europe from the aggression of the Axis powers, and some of them fell on the field of battle. It is often said that the conceit of nationalism is the belief that nations must be states if they are to flourish. However the conceit of unionism is more often overlooked despite being equally exclusive. In 1914 too many unionists were held in thrall by the belief that only a central and unfettered authority could properly exercise sovereignty. It made Home Rule for them unconscionable. British constitutional thought as it developed in the 19th century did not produce the insight necessary to save the union between Britain and Ireland. The brilliance of Bagehot was not enough to avoid the dead end of constitutional absolutism present in Dicey and made fierce by overwrought attempts to preserve an imperial Empire. This conceit is still heard today when extreme Brexiteers argue that the independence of Scotland would be a price worth paying if necessary to free Westminster from the shackles of the EU.

Irish nationalists were not allowed anywhere near the peace conference that convened at Versailles but this did little to stop the fracture in the Union that reached its conclusion in 1921. The defeated powers suffered amputations of an altogether more dire magnitude. With the imperial states of Europe extinguished, transformed into unstable republics or revolutionary societies, nationalist fervour swept much of Europe. While this was the action of war it was also accelerated by the thought of the American president, Woodrow Wilson, and his call for national self-determination to be the basis of international order. This spelt the end of the Austro-Hungarian state which in the dynasty of the Hapsburgs had seemingly stood for a thousand years. In his majestic novel The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth described the death of the hero of Solferino,

‘Now little was left of the dead man but this stone, a faded glory, and the portrait. That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring – and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed”24.

The new growth at first seemed miraculous in the creation of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states, Eire, and Poland (perhaps better termed resurrection). Czechoslovakia under the guidance of its philosopher-king Thomas Masaryk, inspired the likes of Saunders Lewis and later Gwynfor Evans. The most ancient of orders it seemed could succumb to the force of once subdued nationalism. Many believed that the transcendent could be found in the nation rather than the state. In Germany there was a feeling that the Wilhelmine state had failed to summon the full force of the nation and the seeds were sown for a bitter harvest. Ernst Jünger lamented in his war memoir The Storm of Steel ‘When once more it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country – and the time will come – then all is over with that faith also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead; and then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength’25. Turkey was the sole if striking example of national rebirth in the loss of empire and according to the historian Charles King the new republic was viewed as a part of the evolution of the Turkish nation after its 500 year detour of Islamic Imperialism. And this remarkable journey in Europe and the near east from God to State to Nation is captured by Naguib Mahfouz in Sugar Street, the final volume of his Cairo trilogy,

“For a long time I was politically engaged in a most emotional way” Kamal reflected “But now I don’t believe in anything. Not even politics is exempt from my insatiable doubt. Yet no matter what my intellect does, my heart pounds with nationalist fervor”26.

Since the Reformation political life has been caught up in the search for the transcendent that can unite the individual, the community, and wider political association. But purpose and progress were scant commodities in the 1920s as America headed for isolation in a sea of consumerism, and Europe grappled with the material consequences of the war. Thornton Wilder described this spirit of lassitude in his historical novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey when portraying the Marquesa de Montemayor, ‘Then on some street-corner she would stop, dizzy with despair and leaning against a wall would long to be taken from a world that had no plan in it’27. Modernism arrived at a time of great fragility in the international political and economic order. In Britain unionism recovered quickly from the shock of Eire’s secession, despite the economic dislocation that made Lloyd George’s dream of a land fit for heroes disappear in the cold light of industrial unrest. But an axial moment was reached when Saunders Lewis in Wales and Hugh MacDiarmid in Scotland established nationalist movements that appealed for a radically reconfigured political order in the British Isles. Compared to Irish nationalism this might have seemed but a murmur, yet it contained a pulse that was transformative: Britain not a union state but a community of nations. Of course by then the search for Welsh and Scottish autonomy could no longer be an epiphenomenon of the Irish

crisis and its aftermath. It had to become genuinely indigenous, a national awakening not a civic rearrangement to make constitutional changes in Ireland less exceptional. Given that Wales has been deeply embedded in union since the early 16th century (and before that had endured a highly irregular status strongly condemned by Edmund Burke), and Scotland had entered union by agreement, the significance of the emergence of Welsh and Scottish nationalism in the 1920s should not be overshadowed by more assertive nationalist movements in Europe. The authority of the British state and its unitary constitution would now be contested.

VIII

The birth of political nationalism in Wales had little impact on public life between the world wars – political metastasis was years away. The Great Depression that followed the near collapse of Western capitalism in 1929 and the increasingly threatening security situation in Europe ensured that the potential for Celtic nationalism to grow was limited. Idris Davies captured the common despair of the inter-war period and ‘the fury of the easy words’ in his poem ‘Consider famous men, Dai bach’,

Mabon was your champion once upon a timeAnd his portrait’s on the milk-jug yet.The world has bred no champions for a long time now,Except the boxing, tennis, golf and Fascist kind,And the kind that democracy breeds and feeds for Harringay,And perhaps the world has grown too bitter or too wiseTo breed a prophet or a poet ever again28.

The opportunity created by American foreign policy during and after the First World War for national self-determination was not repeated in the post 1945 order enshrined in the UN Charter. Many new states were created but largely as a result of decolonisation. Indeed national self-determination turned into a concept of non-interference in the domestic affairs of existing states, severely limiting the potential of stateless nations to secede. As the UN’s Secretary General, U Thant, stated in 1970 “The UN’s attitude is unequivocal. As an international organisation, the UN has never accepted and does not accept and I do not believe it will ever accept the principle of secession of a part of its member states”29. According to Joshua Keating in his book Invisible Countries, this dogma of non-interference gave full meaning to the ‘Westphalian’ settlement and made existing boundaries sacrosanct. This axiom is also a foundational principle of the EU.

Spain meanwhile has shaped the EU’s approach to the principle of secession. Essentially it reflects American rather than British practice. What affects all must be approved by all. So one part of a state cannot secede without the consent of the state as a whole. Not so in the UK. British prime ministers from John Major onwards, by acknowledging the venerable Claim of Right in the modern guise of a principle of popular consent, have upheld Scotland’s right to secede if the Scottish people (alone) so willed. They were supported in this policy by the whole political establishment and it formulated a principle that had already been tacitly accepted for many decades. There was however little thought given to the position of Wales and Northern Ireland in the Union should Scotland exercise her right to secede. This marked very clearly the nature of compositional unionism. It is the relationship between England and Scotland that is key to the Union rather than the overarching concept of Britishness. David Cameron’s response to the Scottish referendum result (where remember an astonishing 45% voted to quit the Union) is in this context understandable if not at all praiseworthy. He decided not to call for a renewed sense of Britishness but for greater English influence in the Union. This was stark non-unionism. In some respects the referendum on membership of the EU was an extension of David Cameron’s clumsy dance with English nationalism.

It is remarkable that Britain has paid little heed to international norms and in fact calmly accepts the principle of secession within the UK. While Unionism has remained a highly centralised concept with the sovereignty of Parliament at its core, there has been also the recognition that it is a union and while fundamental constitutional reform (most obviously federalism) is usually rejected by the vast majority of unionists, the right to leave is not. Dicey had made this point repeatedly during the Irish crisis, the secession of Ireland was less of a danger to the Union than the rejection of parliamentary sovereignty. We hear similar sentiments expressed today in relation to Scotland, and membership of the EU. In 2014 many unionists argued that continued union was necessary for Scotland to remain in the EU. Two years later many of the same protagonists argued that Scotland had no veto on even the most profound constitutional change when it related to the UK as a whole. Scotland’s chances of remaining in the EU if it had chosen to leave the UK in 2014 were highly uncertain; but it was in fact by remaining in the UK that Scottish membership of the EU became doomed. This deep constitutional fissure between Scotland and the rest of Britain creates a mortal danger for the Union.

While the boundaries of most existing states were guaranteed by the UN's rejection of the principle of secession, the place of the individual within all states would become ever more salient. This was an

understandable reaction to war and totalitarianism. In his monumental novel Life and Fate the Russian writer Vasily Grossman put it this way,

Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a state are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No. The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities30.

Unionism and nationalism exist now in a world where the individual is seen in many cultures as the supreme moral entity creating both barriers against state interference (most remarkably recently on matters of human sexuality) and a yearning for unity in diversity.

So how will the sovereignty of self, Pessoa’s aristocracy of individuality, affect the way in which unionism and nationalism are experienced? Kant’s most audacious contention was that the ‘autonomy of the will’ could produce universal values, and this belief became more and more powerful in the century and a half that followed, reaching its apogee in the creedal Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948. Whereas the Reformation declared that individuals did not need the mediation of priests to reach the Gospel, so Kant omitted God in reaching the golden rule. However, arguing that sovereign individuals can be relied upon to reach universal truth is problematic. As the feminist philosopher Gillian Rose wrote this thought fractures the concept of authority which is both a blessing and a curse. ‘There is no rationality without uncertain grounds, without relativism of authority. Relativism of authority does not establish the authority of relativism: it opens reason to new claimants’31. Individualism is a sharp and double edged sword. It frees the human spirit and allows individuals to flourish constrained only by the exclusion of behaviours that directly harm others. But authority and tradition come under intense scrutiny – although what is left after the inevitable cutting away of archaic practices may be of fuller value. Yet this is an excoriating process in which old myths are struck more frequently by far than the new myth-making that fills the void and sometimes fuels populism. Nationalism benefited from this democracy of the spirit because it challenged existing patterns of political association and promised popular involvement in new ones. It gave great power to charismatic leaders to cleave new political communities. Imagination became the engine of much nation-building, but it also had to cohere with popular

experience. Iolo Morganwg’s Eisteddfod revival was no less magnificent for being largely fabricated, but note it was not a case of anything goes. It reflected, enhanced and restored a long submerged memory and gave it new being. Invention values individual insight even though no invention can be abstract of common endeavour. The fusty multi-national monarchies struggled to accommodate this new force that, concomitant with democracy, was transforming subjects into citizens. Nationalism was initially resistant to the erosion of authority inevitable when personal consent is the dominant means of legitimisation because the foundation stones of people, language, land, culture and church were so firm. They were strong enough to contain and sublimate the forces of individualism. But the sword is double edged. It soon severed the bonds of folk religion (especially the Protestant variety) and cut deep into the idealised ‘Hegelian’ state that seemed to encapsulate European experience in the age of monarchy. Now we must ask whether national identity can survive the shift to base legitimisation on personal consent not collective experience. Are the pillars of Celtic national awakening any more secure in the digital world than the supposedly crumbling ones of British identity?

If the driving force of nationalism becomes a personal commitment to a political identity imagined rather than emanating from tradition and authority, it is likely to experience similar challenges to those that faced religious reformers in the 16th century. Reform begets further reform because there is never an acknowledged authority that can deem arrival at the promised land. There will be a tendency for identity politics to go micro as something analogous to nations emerge as communities of interest – city states of the digital world. Not geographical cities, but cities of like minds sharing a dominant identity: network-nations. Some thinkers see the emergence of the new nomads – people not tied to one geographic entity or citizenship. These new city states will nest in traditional states and nations as globalisation on the one hand and the sovereignty of self on the other take greater hold during the 21st century. Even those states like China that might attempt to restrict the sovereignty of self to matters outside the political realm will find this force a constant source of instability. Its early intimations are already visible in Hong Kong, the Uighur region and in the Falun Gong movement. Multi-national states, nation states and stateless nations face broadly similar existential questions. With the pillars of the British state removed, the idea of Wales is not simply left intact or made somehow more coherent. The cultural, economic and social affinities between Cardiff (voted more heavily for Remain than London) and Ebbw Vale (among the heaviest Leave votes in the UK) and Caernarfon (the capital of Welsh Wales) are already fainter than supposed and may never provide the sinews for a nationalism of the traditional kind.

Brexit poses a profound challenge to unionism. To argue that Wales and Scotland best flourish in the Union of the United Kingdom but Britain stood diminished in the European Union is awkward and inevitably raises questions of inconsistency. Celtic nationalism can now attempt to outflank British unionism by committing itself to the spirit of greater unity inherent in the EU. Unionism, ironically, risks losing control of its destiny because the expansive vision essential to its propagation can no longer be found in membership of the EU. Nationalists in Wales and Scotland started to craft a neo-nationalism in the 1980s which sought to create Welsh and Scottish Europeans committed to both national independence and European unity. Losing control of the high rhetoric of European unionism might prove costly to those committed to the constitutional integrity of the UK as the charge of separatism can hardly now stick to Celtic nationalists. And the challenges facing British unionism will not be merely rhetorical. The governance arrangements that once operated at the European level will now require an analogous UK system that allows the devolved governments and Whitehall to negotiate common policies. Should the UK government apply a heavy hand in the new inter-governmental arrangements, then the coherence of British unionism would be further weakened. In effect England would have separated itself from the shared governance that is the heart of unionism.

IX

Unionism and nationalism have been strongly challenged by devolution and the quest for European unity. Unionists have been divided on the European question with some effectively believing instead in English or British nationalism and a minority of these even hoping the EU might collapse once a radical Brexit demonstrates the absurdity of unionism in Europe. Nationalists have largely accommodated European unionism, even turning it into a resource for greater domestic autonomy, but have struggled to escape the gravitational pull of the UK with its own single market and bonds of social unity. The National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Parliament have demonstrated the practical reality of the bargain that is continuously being struck between unionism and nationalism. The devolved institutions point to the viability of independence. This is most directly so in Scotland; but also in Wales, as indicated by a string of successful constitutional and fiscal commissions and some insightful legislation. But the undoubted success of devolution (it could after all have been as chaotic as our current Brexit crisis) is also a reminder that the Union is capable of adaptation and even innovation. Neither vision has yet won out in the first 20 years of devolution, although the desire for independence has grown in Scotland. It is also true that independence was rejected in Scotland and remains at most a

nascent force in Wales. The economic costs of independence so far have proven a strong deterrent to separation while culture and geography have created strong bonds of affection in a resilient social union. Nevertheless the Union is not yet reformed and Brexit has created different versions of unionism. We live in a political society where some hold no allegiance to any unionism (Brexit ultras and a few old fashioned Celtic nationalists) others hold both unionist identities (unionist Remainers) and the rest only one unionism (neo-nationalists in Scotland and Wales, some Brexiteers).

The path to European secession was a narrow one. It has been taken because a minority of Conservative politicians became increasingly Eurosceptic in the 1990s. Other Conservative politicians, most notably David Cameron, sought to sup in moderation from this cup by quitting the European People’s Party and promising a referendum on the EU. The ultras were always in control of the well of Eurosceptism. As ultras have done throughout history, Eurosceptics lowered the perception of risk in autarky or increased the fear and loathing of the prevailing settlement, sometimes to devastating effect they did both. David Cameron fought such a listless campaign to remain in the EU largely because he found the idea of Brexit so patently absurd. After all, is the EU today not in large part the car that Mrs Thatcher built after she jump-started European integration with the Single Market? Like too many Conservatives Cameron’s occasional Eurosceptism was all about political deflection and parody rather than principle. But there was always a stronger group of actual believers and they saw the Party as the party of the nation – sometimes the English nation but always the sovereign parliamentary nation. In many ways the deeper tragedy here is not that they have forced Britain out of Europe (a future generation could reverse this, as the Brexiteers reversed the 1975 outcome) but that they have destroyed many of the foundations of unionism. Most paradoxically, a higher European unionist rhetoric is now available to nationalists in Wales and Scotland while a Brexit Britain struggles to reform the constitutional structures of the UK under the glare of English nationalism.

The UK is a complicated political association with the heavy history of a recently lapsed hegemonic power. Democracy and a longer tradition of constitutionalism allowed Britain a mostly dignified departure from Empire, masked also by the memory of moral triumph in the Second World War. The Union saw off the ultras of the League of Empire Loyalists but somehow failed to repudiate far less silence the Eurosceptics who sought to deny Britain rejuvenation in Europe. It is little wonder that many observers are at a loss to explain this failure other than by attributing it to the force of hitherto submerged English nationalism. Britain might not survive long past 2020 but it is as well to remember that its demise has been repeatedly predicted. Withdrawal

from the UK could be as difficult and tawdry for Scotland and Wales as the UK’s withdrawal has been from the EU. What is certain is that unionism and nationalism will always have to strike some bargain to manage and utilise the forces created by the geography, culture and economic needs of the British Isles. Whether that now requires a formal, political union is open to question. For if Brexiteers can be European without remaining in the EU, then neo-nationalists can acknowledge Britishness without remaining in the UK. It is appropriate to end with an 18th century reference generated by the final controversy that brought Scotland and England to the altar of union. Historical unionism, termed ‘banal’ by the constitutional historian Colin Kidd because of its long and instinctive acceptance, is now as dead as Queen Anne. Only a bold vision that combines unionist and nationalist principles in a new and federal Act of Union could stand as a coherent alternative to the confederation of independent states that might be fast approaching32.

References

1. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind, Profile Books (2018) p67.

2. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, (Boston) 1998, p140.3. John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism, Yale (2005) p174.4. Translation by Louis Flint Ceci, www.Igac.org.5. Pessoa, p126.6. Financial Times, 31 January 2019.7. Lukacs, P5.8. Ibid, pp 71-2.9. Francis Fukuyama, Identity, Profile Books (2018) p56.10. Ibid, p143.11. Dafydd Wigley quoted in Meic Stephens, A Pocket Guide:

Wales in Quotations, Univ. of Wales (1999) p135.

12. Daily Post, 19 June 2003, p5.13. Western Mail, 18 March 2017, p4.14. Quoted in Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty, (Univ. of

Wales) 2012, p193.15. Simon Brooks, Why Wales Never Was, (Univ. of Wales) 2017,

p83.16. Populus, Brexit/Independence Survey-Wales: ONLINE

Fieldwork: 8th to 10th January 2019, p10 table 10, Q11.17. YouGov/Future of England Survey Results, 9th October 2018,

for Cardiff University.18. Quoted in James Barr, The Lords of the Desert, (Simon &

Schuster) 2018, p159.19. HWJ Edwards, Sons of the Romans, (Christopher Davies)

1975, p157.20. Brooks, p4.21. Ibid, p144.22. Ibid.23. Gwynfor Evans, For the Sake of Wales (Welsh Academic

Press) 1996, p159.24. Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March, (Penguin) 2000, p18.25. Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel, (New York) 1996, p317.26. Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street, (Black Swan) 1994, p86.27. Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Penguin) 1941,

p37.28. The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English, 1977, p222.

29. Quoted in Joshua Keating, Invisible Countries, (Yale) 2017, p129.

30. Vassily Grossman, Life and Fate, (Harvill Press) 1995, p230.31. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work, (Chatto & Windus) 1995, pp129-

30.32. I acknowledge with the deepest gratitude the advice of Dr

Greg Walker in the writing of this essay.