Page 52 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

NATIONALISM AND CULTURE

producing self-consciously “provincial” as opposed to “metropolitan”
newspapers, powerfully shaped the development of national
consciousness; secondly, European popular nationalisms centred on
middle-class reading coalitions, which mobilized the popular masses
in opposition to the polyvernacular dynastic state; thirdly, the official
nationalism of those polyvernacular dynasties that sought, through
“Russification” or “Anglicization”, to impose a nationalism from
above; and lastly, those anti-imperialist nationalisms in which an
intelligentsia educated within the confines of the colonial educational
system came to imagine and later constitute the colony itself as a
nation. 76
Insofar as the former Soviet Union and the continuing United
Kingdom can each be construed as successors to the 19th century
polyvernacular dynastic state, then Ukrainian and Welsh nationalisms
can be understood as contemporary variants of 19th century European
popular nationalism. The more obviously communitarian and
solidaristic aspects of such radical nationalisms sit fairly comfortably
with equivalently communitarian and solidaristic elements in left
culturalist theory. As Raymond Williams himself told a 1977 Plaid
Cymru summer school, a “truly prospective”, as distinct from “merely
retrospective”, radical nationalist politics might produce “the kind
of complex liberation which genuine community…could be”. Williams
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knew, of course, that the building of nation-states had been “intrinsically
a ruling-class operation”; he knew too that, as late as the 1930s,
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Welsh nationalism had been “on the cultural Right… Wales was
offered…as the last noble fragment of a classical and catholic world”. 79
His own Welshness, however, was of a very different kind, democratic
and emancipatory, self-declaredly that of a “Welsh European”.
Whatever its emancipatory intent, however, radical nationalism seems
open to two fundamental objections: first, that in a world becoming
increasingly internationalized and culturally cosmopolitan it still
articulates a by now demonstrably “retrospective”, rather than
“prospective”, structure of feeling; and secondly, that it threatens to
repress cultural identities other than its own. The latter charge becomes
particularly telling, moreover, when linked to feminist critiques of
solidarism: Welsh community was sustained, after all, both in reality
and very often also as a normative ideal, by an obviously patriarchal
sexual division of labour. But a parallel argument might well be mounted
on either socialist or “multicultural” grounds.

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