Amid international jitters over Donald Trump’s America First sloganising, the title of this book raises an immediate frisson and pinpoints the challenge for nationalists in small countries. Putting America first is to prioritise the interests of a nation that is already the world’s most powerful; putting Wales first is closer to shouldering primary interests higher up a very crowded agenda, dominated by that next-door neighbour, England, where, the author pointedly assures us, “nationalism first developed”.
But is this difference simply one of scale? Is nationalism another word for something akin to fascism, a bullying assertion of nativist prejudice?
Plaid Cymru (The Party of Wales) has been navigating the choppy waters of nationalism since the 1920s. In part one of this book, Richard Wyn Jones, professor of Welsh politics at Cardiff University and director of its influential Wales Governance Centre, provides an excellent survey of the phenomenon of nationalism, within and beyond Wales. This (and the whole book) is written with an assured, sometimes provocative, verve.
Part two considers “the development of Plaid Cymru’s political thought from its beginnings until the establishment of the National Assembly for Wales in 1999″ via an analysis of the political beliefs of four party leaders: Saunders Lewis, Gwynfor Evans, Dafydd Wigley and Dafydd Elis-Thomas. Jones see these men as key “architects and advocates of their party’s worldview and policy programmes”.
This intellectual history, about the potential of ideas, and of historiography, to influence politics – and vice versa − proves an exciting read, as Plaid Cymru moves from the political margins to become an electoral machine capable of winning Westminster seats in the 1970s. The party then readjusts in response to the massive No vote in the 1979 devolution referendum and the rise of Thatcherism. Conceptions of what Wales is or could be, in constitutional and economic terms, shift under pressure and inspiration. And what does it mean to be Welsh? What is the proper weight to give to language, to culture? These are globally relevant issues.
The book is a translation of the Welsh-language original, published in 2007. Jones is right to leave engagement with subsequent literature to Volume 2. I look forward to an equally compelling analysis of Plaid Cymru’s role in the bedding-in of devolution in a changing Wales.
Angela Graham is a Welsh-speaking writer and broadcaster from Belfast.
