winter 2003/04 upfront 24 barnett squeeze 44 backlash 65 culture versus r. ross macKay argues we simon brooks explains why commerce 2 a post national wales should measure need when 8,874 people in Ceredigion alun davies reports on the chris williams says it is time allocating spending across are demanding a mayor establishment of Ofcom to move on from irresolvable the UK problems of nationality to a 28 europe social policy more open, participatory greening the economy roger thomas society recommends practical steps to make 46 two cheers 67 physicians cure neil macCormick progress with sustainable reveals thyselves 6 news jon owen jones development what the European assesses the Convention is achieving for Assembly Government’s economy Wales response to the Wanless review politics and policy of health and social care 10 mind the gap 50 only connect jan royall dylan jones-evans puts the 30 peter’s question discusses the work 69 funding fog economic performance of for ivor of the European Commission’s david reynolds says education the richer and poorer regions alan trench says the Richard Office in Wales spending is losing out of Wales under the spotlight Commission should address 71 we bought a mountain constitutional principles not culture and catrin ellis jones reports on questions about service welsh by design special a venture that is breathing delivery communications 13 life into upland Wales i) water in a bottle 32 52 ross lovegrove describes leashed watchdogs cardiff, kairdiff, leighton jenkins the thought processes argues that caerdydd environment peter finch that led him to further the Assembly’s Committees probes the develop one of Wales’s lack the powers to do their job literary output from the 74 dislocated icon COVER STORY COVER capital’s clash of cultures most successful products 35 legal wales william wilkins suggests a way forward for the National 16 ii) Halen Môn keith bush reports on how Botanic Garden david lea-wilson argues Welsh incorporation into language special that successful marketing England is being reversed 55 i) turning the tide? 76 DNA database entails combining a local anthony campbell 37 virtual majority john aitchison and unveils a with a global image harold carter unravel project to survey the marine leighton andrews reports on linguistic messages from organisms of Pembrokeshire 18 iii) whisgi gymreig his first six months as an AM the 2001 census brian morgan on how a 78 sustainable futures 39 clear welsh water Welsh spirit has been 59 ii) belonging carys howell and sylvia nick bourne outlines new conjured out of Penderyn euros lewis reflects on davies examine proposals to directions for Welsh the heartland’s ‘invisible’ extend the role of the Conservatism identity crisis 21 flights on our doorstep National Parks madoc batcup says we 41 nation-building 62 iii) the world in welsh should take another look cynog dafis explores Plaid ned thomas argues that endpiece at Llanwern’s potential to Cymru’s future in the wake the time is ripe for a Welsh-language daily become a major of its May 2003 election 80 peter stead newspaper international airport setback harri webb’s budgies Cover Image – Portrait of Ross Lovegrove examining one of his product designs for a folding chair. upfront chris williams says it is time to move on from the irresolvable problems of nationality to a more open, participatory society a post national wales his is an important with our genes! If we look back to the nineteenth century, moment in the Friedrich Engels dismissed the Welsh, amongst others, as history of Wales. ‘non-historic’ peoples. Conventional thinking had it that there tToday, Wales matters more were those peoples who were called to national greatness (the politically than it has ever English, the French, the Germans), for whom the nation-state done. Today, Welsh represented the apotheosis of their ambition, and there were citizenship is a reality: those who, it was thought, could not hope to play a useful role there is a devolved political as independent states, largely on account of their small size. unit, called Wales, which For Wales, then, the logical trajectory to follow was one which has its own government. would see the Welsh people progressively more absorbed into True, that government has the British state and British Empire, both of which offered them limited powers. It cannot much in the way of opportunities and progress. The trade-off make laws, it cannot vary would be a steady diminution in their ‘difference’ as a people. taxes. It appears presently John Stuart Mill, writing in Utilitarianism, Liberty and to be confused about what Representative Government, explained that: it can and cannot do. In the four years since it came “Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial into being the National for a Breton or a Basque of French Navarre to be … a Assembly for Wales has not delivered effectively enough to be member of the French nationality, admitted on equal counted a success, yet. terms to all the privileges of French citizenship … than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of I hope very much that it does succeed, for government at this past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, level on many issues makes sense, and I am inclined to think without participation or interest in the general that the closer that government is brought to the people the movement of the world. The same remark applies to more democratic it is likely to be. I suspect that the current the Welshman or the Scottish highlander as members devolved constitution is not one that is ultimately tenable, and of the British nation.” in due course I would anticipate that Wales will gain law- making powers. There is some considerable distance to go, In actual fact, the Welsh reaction to such an opportunity was however, before one can predict that the people of Wales will highly ambivalent. On the one hand, most Welsh people embrace such an option. But whatever the short- and were prepared to reconcile themselves to the British state medium-term future for the governance of Wales, the and to an increasing English cultural dominance in many question of Welsh identity is as relevant now, at the beginning spheres of life. Yet, confounding the expectations of those of the twenty-first century, as it has ever been. And, as the who saw political and cultural uniformity as the inevitably sociologist Charlotte Williams has recently written: corollary of political association, the nineteenth century also saw the beginnings of what Kenneth O. Morgan has called “One of the clear implications of devolution is the the ‘Rebirth’ of the Welsh nation. This rebirth was not a opportunity to rework discourses of race and ethnicity, unilinear or smooth process: it embraced many to reconfigure discourses of nation and national contradictions. It could encompass the reinvention of the identity and to re-imagine Wales in deliberate and Welsh as a purely Nonconformist nation, of the Welsh as a 2 conscious ways …” musical nation, of the Welsh as a rugby-playing nation. None of these were ever fully accurate, but they did provide the The fact that Wales ‘exists’ at all in the twenty-first century Welsh with a multi-faceted identity that reasserted their might be considered remarkable. It must be something to do difference from the English. winter 2003/04 upfront These and other characteristics formed the basis for the Welsh Many will also be familiar with Denis Balsom’s ‘Three Wales’ version of what political scientists call ‘ethnic’ nationalism. model, which breaks Wales down into another triptych: ‘Y Fro ‘Ethnic’ nationalisms are those that stress certain essential criteria Gymraeg’ (roughly equivalent to Zimmern’s ‘Welsh Wales’), that peoples may be thought to have in common: race, language, ‘Welsh Wales’ (approximating to Zimmern’s ‘American religion, culture. Thus to belong to a specific national group you Wales’) and ‘British Wales’ (matching Zimmern’s ‘English have to possess certain characteristics: to share in a line of Wales’). I do not think it an exaggeration to suggest that most common descent, to speak a particular language, to adhere to Welsh historical writing has focused on (in Balsom’s one religious faith, to be part of a common culture. The Welsh, terminology) ‘Y Fro Gymraeg’ and ‘Welsh Wales’, and that it no less than any other national group in the nineteenth century, is the experience of those areas that stands at the centre of bought into the idea of an ‘ethnic’ nationalism: ‘Welshness’ is to competing understandings of historical and contemporary be ‘Celtic’, or it is to be Welsh-speaking, or it is to be ‘Welshness’, about which more in a moment. What this ‘Nonconformist’, or it is to be ‘naturally’ poetic or musical or to selective focus does, however, is marginalise those who are have been produced by Max Boyce’s fly-half factory. seen as irrelevant to the unfolding ‘national story’. Those in ‘English’ or ‘British’ Wales are considered ‘not really Welsh’, Many historians of Wales, most obviously Prys Morgan, Gwyn and are easily viewed either as labouring under a form of A. Williams, Dai Smith, and Gareth Williams have devoted false consciousness or as making a self-serving much of their careers to demystifying such notions, to locating accommodation with Wales’s more powerful neighbour. the roots of the invention of multiple traditions. They have, collectively, demonstrated that the nation is not a natural As a consequence, central, singular narratives of Welsh political unity but a contingent, historically limited condition. history and identity, that initially privileged the experiences The impact of their work has been to query the notion of a of Zimmern’s ‘Welsh Wales’, have been challenged by those holistic Welsh past, of unitary narratives of national progress.