| This study explores its central question---How do people imagine Wales and Welsh identity?---by examining three contexts: (1) the relationship between Wales and its neighbor England, frequently treated as definitive of the British state; (2) the often contentious relationship of the Welsh to one another over the meaning of the Welsh language for identity; and (3) the equally contentious relationship among the Welsh over regional economic inequalities and how to weigh economic need against political/cultural nationalism in the context of devolutionary politics.; National identity is treated here as an ongoing construction at the individual and collective levels, yet one that relies upon a "received" symbolic base of historical events, traditions, and other elements that, while constructions themselves, shape identity. The three contexts collectively reveal two common ways of imagining Welsh identity: (1) a sense of struggle against political, economic and cultural inequalities, whether directed against the British state/England, or against the many internal disparities of wealth, regional development or cultural power; and (2) an internal competition between competing views of identity that, in their polar forms, could be described as "romantic versus realistic." In the first, Wales is a nation of small communities, usually Welsh-speaking and highly tolerant. In the second, Wales is the modern nation, not exempt from the "sins" of modernism, and largely having lost its national language as a natural means of communication.; The study points to several valuable lines of inquiry for researchers of national and other kinds of identity. These include the need to explore: history and its artifacts and how people react to them; the existence of core-periphery type relationships within and between nations and the implications of their prevalence; conversations with people from the so-called "core" population living within the "periphery" for the insights they can give on national imaginings in the peripheral nation; people's own essentialist descriptions of identity and the reactions of their national fellows to those descriptions; and comparisons between how identity is imagined in relation to external and internal influences. |
