The Archregimancy wrote:North Washington Republic wrote:Just out of curiosity, why is nationalism more popular in Scotland than it is in Wales?
That's a complex issue, and one difficult to summarise in a quick NSG post, but offering just a few rapid bullet points based on some of my own past published work on the issue:
Scotland was an independent state far more recently than Wales; it therefore has a more recent history of independence to fall back on.
While Wales has long had a distinct language, history, and culture, it has very little history of political unity. Up until Wales was fully legally annexed to England in the 1530s and 1540s, the only individual to rule all of Wales after the final collapse of Roman rule in the early 5th century was Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, who briefly united all of Wales from 1055–1063.
Even after the Acts of Union, Scotland maintained distinct national institutions (most notably its separate legal system) that formed a basis for the continuity of both de jure and de facto legal and cultural distinctiveness within the broader British state.
During the 19th-century Romantic period 'invention of tradition' that impacted so many European national identities, the ironically artificial tartan Highland version of Scotland's past was A) backed and promulgated by one of the most popular literary titans of the day, Sir Walter Scott (who also had a hand in developing English identity; see Ivanhoe); B) adopted by both Scottish and UK national elites - see Queen Victoria and Prince Albert adopting tartan at Balmoral; and C) therefore quickly gained cross-community appeal in Scotland on the basis of its fashionability.
Modern Welsh nationalist movements grew out of groups that advocated for protecting the Welsh language in a period where Welsh was no longer spoken by at least half the population of Wales (something which happened after 1901), and became closely tied to the language (it's no coincidence that there's significant overlap between Plaid Cymru seats and areas of Wales where Welsh is still a majority community language); this has traditionally limited appeal the appeal of Welsh nationalism. Scottish nationalism, in contrast, often embraces both Scots and Gaelic, but has always been primarily an English-language movement.
Precisely because Wales was overwhelmingly Welsh-speaking until c.1801, and still majority Welsh-speaking until c.1901, it tended to be more marginalised within the broader British body politic; its cultural distinctiveness was simply ignored by, rather than embraced by, British elites - even the Welsh ones. Compared to Scotland, there was far less intersection between the artificially created 19th-century vision of distinctive Welshness advanced by the minority of local elites prepared to embrace that vision (most notably Lady Llanover - the wife of Benjamin Hall, Lord Llanover, aka the original 'Big Ben' - who almost singlehandedly invented the red shawl and black stovepipe hat 'traditional dress' for women) and the actual Welsh-language cultural distinctiveness of the ordinary Welsh.
That's all an oversimplification, of course, but I think it addresses the main points.
Just building on this quickly, national dress in Scotland and Wales offers a microcosm of the contrast.
In Scotland, the modern close association between kilt and tartan is largely a 19th-century invention, one closely associated with George IV's (in)famous visit to Edinburgh in 1822. Sir Walter Scott decided the event should be a 'gathering of the Gael', and informed everyone attending the central banquet that they would have to wear their traditional clan dress - and never mind that most of the Scottish elite were Lowlanders who prior to 1822 had nothing but disdain for Highlanders, and no ancestral clan dress to speak of. Edinburgh's tailors were pressed into service, and started literally pulling plaid patterns off the shelf and claiming they were the 'traditional' tartans for a specific clan, and using a modified 18th-century version of the kilt rather than the traditional belted plaid. The process was subsequently accelerated by two English fraudsters known to history as the 'Sobieksi Stuarts' who claimed to be legitimate grandchildren of Charles Stuart (the Young Pretender) and published two books called the Vestiarium Scoticum and Costume of the Clans that claimed to be the authentic ancient record of traditional clan tartans, but were essentially works of Victorian fantasy (though they seem to have reused some of the existing associations from 1822) - deeply influential ones that still form the basis of much of the assumptions underlying the modern Scottish tartan industry. Once Victoria and Albert bought into this, it went mainstream across the UK and internationally.
But.... For all that Sir Walter Scott (unintentionally) and the Sobieski Stuarts (intentionally) are responsible the modern version of Highland Scotland, they didn't completely make it up, either. There had been some regional associations between specific plaid patterns before 1822; there had been a form of highland dress that was adapted into what we know as the kilt in the 18th century. What happened in the 19th century was that the relationship was narrowly defined and formalised into a relationship between families and specific tartans that was used for the more modern version of the kilt and extended throughout Scotland - even into the Lowlands, which was perhaps the silliest part of the process given traditional Lowland attitudes toward the Highlands.
The process in Wales was quite distinct from Scotland, though it shares some superficial similarities. In 1834, Lady Llanover won an Eisteddfod competition with an essay titled 'The Advantages resulting from the Preservation of the Welsh language and National Costume of Wales'. That no such national costume existed was no impediment to this resourceful woman, and she promptly set about inventing one loosely based on outfits worn by peasant women in South Wales. Just to demonstrate that Wikipedia isn't always reliable, the entry on Lady Llanover claims that 'there is very little evidence to show that she had any influence on the wearing of Welsh costume other than by her servants, family and friends, and there is no firm evidence to suggest that she influenced what was later adopted as the national costume of Wales'. This runs counter to current scholarship; indeed, the same Wiki article is illustrated by a painting of Lady Llanover wearing what we now consider as Welsh costume. Also, the main reason that there's no national costume for men in Wales is that her husband Benjamin flatly refused to wear the faintly ridiculous outfit she'd designed for him. While 'Welsh costume' had achieved some currency by the end of the 19th century (I have some 19th-century bone china cups and saucers made for tourists to Wales and featuring women in 'traditional' dress), it was never adopted by British royalty or by contemporary Welsh elites other than Lady Llanover's immediate friends. It therefore took much longer to become an accepted part of Welsh identity as opposed to a family curiosity based on pick and mix streamlining of a range of local peasant outfits for women.
For what it's worth, similar processes of the reification and formalisation of what we now consider to be national identities were taking place all over Europe (very much including in England) in the same period. There's a vast literature on the subject.
