May 27, 2004, 11.59am • 17 comments » • 961 Views

Re-configuration for the nation

In the old days, it was easier. You supported the village or town you came from. Hundreds of little teams, a swathe of tribal allegiances set to detonate every weekend in an outpouring of national convention; security in community and competition.

Forget that; Wales’ cultural map is being redrawn through regionalism. The concentration of top-flight rugby amongst four or five teams not only moves the centre of Welsh gravity way southward. It also redfines the ontology of identity for tens of thousands.

The elevation of some elements to a prized new order, to which the old are asked to pledge themselves, re-boots the safe, simple epistemology of competing identities that, nevertheless, unite on international day.

Instead, the regionalism of Wales 2.0 suppresses the treasured community and expands and enforces broad, ill-fitting identity shapes on a set construct. Like fitting the round peg in the square hole, it’s a difficult concept to swallow.

But the Welsh Rugby Union is the latest in a strong bloodline of national ontological tinkerers. Local government reorganisation in 1974 revoked Wales’ 22 old counties and instead grouped, jammed and cajoled them into county shapes which echoed the country’s historical former kingdoms. In 1996, they were all changed back again.

Not that the country’s other institutions have paid any attention. The police force and ambulance service have been happily ignoring this continual re-moulding and reversing of of the local, regional and national for years, adopting their own borders which cut across and run over their corresponding governmental borders.

Even the mail network is prescribing citizens a different concept of what Wales constitutes - because the national post code database has not been updated, mail is still sent to occupants of homes in pre-96 counties.

Only the recent reorganisation of the health service to match the 22 local authority areas - and, indeed, the very existence of the national assembly which sanctioned it - bring common sense to the ideology of nation building.

All the while, Wales’ expanding and contorting has continued such that the country has effectively been incorporated - or co-opted by - England, through the absence of a national sporting venue in London. Because the WRU - yes, them again - needs all the money it can get, high-profile English events are now held at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.

On such occasions, the capital is reconfigured in the colours and conversations of Wigan or Liverpool or west London, in what is a strange new appropriation of Welsh turf by the old enemy. Has the territory of English identity expanded to incorporate Wales, or vica versa?

It’s a stuttered and strange start for Wales 2.0. With so many competing ideologies for the proper order of things, it all makes for a highly fractured and schizophrenic sense of national identity. No wonder we don’t know who we are anymore.