Raymond Williams - The Centenary Edition Raymond Williams: Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity

RAYMOND
WILLIAMS

THE CENTENARY EDITION

RAYMOND
WILLIAMS

Who Speaks for Wales?

Nation, Culture, Identity

Edited by

Daniel G. Williams

W ho Speaks for Wales? first appeared in March 2003. It collected in one place the Welsh-related essays of Raymond Williams (192188) and was conceived and compiled in the years following the narrow vote for Welsh devolution in the referendum of 1997. If a distinctive Welsh political culture was to develop, and if devolution was indeed to be a process rather than an event as the then Secretary for Wales Ron Davies described it then, as several commentators noted, a sense of common aspiration and interest would need to be forged between the socialist and minority nationalist threads of Welsh political radicalism as embodied institutionally in the Labour party and Plaid Cymru. Raymond Williamss thought and writings offered resources for forging a rapprochement between these traditions, and that is what I was attempting to foster in my emphasis in the introduction (which I have deliberately not updated nor amended for this edition) on the pluralism of Williamss vision, on the questions asked as opposed to the answers offered, and on the ways in which Williamss self-defined Welsh-Europeanism could be seen as a manifestation of his call on socialists to engage in a project associated primarily with the minority nationalist parties of Europe of exploring new forms of variable societies, in which over the whole range of social purposes different sizes of society could be defined for different kinds of issue and decision.