Welshness in ‘British Wales’: negotiating national identity at the margins

Popular interpretations of national identity often focus on the unifying qualities of nationhood. However, societies frequently draw hierarchical distinctions between the people and places who are ‘most national’, and those who are ‘least national’. Little attention is paid to these marginal places within the nation and the experiences of their inhabitants. This article helps to address this by analysing the ‘less Welsh’ British Wales region of Wales, a country that has traditionally possessed a hierarchical, regionally constituted nationhood. The article studies the British Wales region both ‘from above’ – considering how some areas develop as ‘less national’ – and ‘from below’, introducing empirical ethnographic work into ‘everyday Welshness’ in this area. Whilst previous work on hierarchical nationhood focuses on how hierarchies are institutionalized by the state, this article demonstrates how people at the margins of the nation actively negotiate their place in the nation. Whilst people in this area expressed a strong Welshness, they also struggled to place themselves in the nation because they had internalized their lowly place within the national hierarchy. The article demonstrates the importance of place and social class for national identity construction and draws attention to the role of power in the discursive construction of hierarchical nationhood.     

Spatial Analysis of Regional Inequalities in Turkey

In this paper, we examine regional inequalities in Turkey not only at the interprovincial level but for three different regional definitions as well. It has raised questions about inequalities not only between regions (interregional) but inequalities within each region. Hence, one contribution of this paper is to test the effects of aggregation and scale on the identification of regional inequalities using currently accepted spatial analytic methods. The results indicate that overall inequalities are decreasing; however spatial dependence is becoming more dominant. The Theil Index indicates that interregional inequalities are increasing while intraregional inequalities are declining for all spatial partitions from 1980 to 1997. Most developed provinces are enhancing overall inequalities, although there is some evidence of a spread effect on their neighbours.     

Revolution,Reaction, Restoration: The Meanings and Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Political Thinking of Benjamin Constant,c.1797–1830

Comparisons, juxtapositions or analogies between France's recent Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history and England's experiences of Revolution, Civil War and Restoration between the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were a common but controversial feature of political discourse dealing with France's contemporary situation in the decades following the Revolution of 1789. The present article probes this dimension of post-Revolutionary political debate, by tracking the shifting meanings and uses of seventeenth-century English history in the published and unpublished political writings of the leading liberal thinker and politician Benjamin Constant, from the 1790s through to his death in 1830. Such an analysis reveals the sometimes striking reversals and inconsistencies to which Constant was driven in his effort to adjust his historical readings to France's rapidly changing political conditions, but it also reveals underlying continuities in his historical and political thinking. The exemplarity of England's case lay, for Constant, less in the provision of a constitutional model that France might hope to appropriate than in the historical spectacle of a nation's struggle for liberty, and the value of this spectacle lay as much in its cautionary messages—focused on the sterile brutality of the Stuart Restoration—as in its eventually progressive outcomes.     

Reviews

THE MIND OF GERMANY. Hans Kohn. London, Macmillan & Co., 1961. Pp. xi + 370. Australian price 49/9d.

DOLLFUSS. Gordon Brook‐Shepherd. London, Macmillan & Co., 1961. Pp. xvii + 296. Australian price 41/6.

RELIGION IN THE SOVIET UNION. Walter Kolarz. London, Macmillan & Co., 1961. Pp. 3rii + 518. Australian price 72/‐.

THE KENYATTA ELECTION: KENYA 1960–1961. George Bennett and Cart Rosberg. On behalf of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Oxford. London, Oxford University Press, 1961. Pp. viii + 230. Australian price 49/9.

SOME NEWLY ESTABLISHED ASIAN STATES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTERNATIONAL LAW. J. J. Syatauw. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1961. Pp. xii + 249. 19 Guilders.

THE INDIAN MIDDLE CLASSES: THEIR GROWTH IN MODERN TIMES. B. B. Misra. For the Royal Institute of International Affairs. London, O.U.P., 1961. Pp. x + 438. Australian price 64/9d.

POLITICAL ADVANCEMENT IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC. Francis West. Melbourne, O.U.P., 1961. Pp. xii + 188. Australian price 35/‐.

AUSTRALIA IN THE ANTARCTIC. R. A. Swan. Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1961. Pp. xxiv + 432. Australian price 57/6d.

AUSTRALIA AND THE ANTARCTIC. Phillip Law. Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1962. Pp. 22. Australian price 3/6d.