toward an anthropology of government: democratic transformations and nation building in wales

Toward an Anthropology of Government

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Toward an Anthropology of Government

Democratic Transformations and Nation Building in Wales

William R. Schumann

TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF GOVERNMENT

Copyright © William R. Schumann, 2009.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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Sections of Chapter 5 are reprinted from:

William R. Schumann. 2007, “Transparency, governmentality, and negation: democratic practice and Open Government policy in the National Assembly for Wales.” Anthropological Quarterly. 80(3): 837–862.Transcripts of the record of the proceedings of the National Assembly for Wales are Crown copyright. Material from the record is reproduced under the terms of Crown copyright policy guidance issued by HMSO and the National Assembly for Wales. Mae Cofnod y Trafodion, Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru, yn ddeun-ydd hawlfraint y Goron. Atgynhyrchir deunydd o’r Cofnod o dan delerau canllaw polisi hawlfraint y Goron a gyhoeddir gan HMSO a’r Cynulliad Cenedlaethol.Cover photograph and photograph of National Assembly for Wales by William R. Schumann.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.

Schumann, William R. Toward an anthropology of government: democratic transformations and nation building in Wales / William R. Schumann. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-349-38049-7 (alk. paper) 1. Political anthropology–Wales. 2. Wales. National Assembly–History. 3. Nation-building–Wales. 4. Self-determination, National–Wales. 5. Legislative bodies–Wales. 6. Parliamentary practice–Wales. 7. Wales–Politics and government–21st century. I. Title.

GN585.G8S38 2009306.209429–dc22

2009005351

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions

First edition: September 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61745-2

ISBN 978-1-349-38049-7 ISBN 978-0-230-10053-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9780230100534

Dedicated to Bill Schumann, my father, who did not live to see the completion of my doctoral degree or this book.

Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

1 Introduction 12 Nationhood by Negation 293 Inside the Iron Cage 534 Speaking for the Nation 755 The Transparency of Democracy 1036 Ballots and Bombs 1237 Cross-Pollinated Sovereignties 1518 A Parliament for Wales 171

Notes 185

References 193

Index 215

List of Figures

1.1 Map of devolved UK territories and capitols 18

3.1 Photograph of Senedd exterior 56

Acknowledgments

Many people deserve thanks for contributing to this book in various ways. Most importantly, I thank my immediate family—Jessie, Garland, and Brecon, as well as my mother, father, and brother’s family—and all my extended family in North Carolina who have encouraged me along the way. I thank my dissertation committee—Brenda Chalfin, Kesha Fikes, Mike Heckenberger, Amie Kreppel, and Rob Humphries—for their sup-port and guidance during the formative stages of this project. Grateful recognition is due to the institutions and organizations that facilitated my research: Ohio University and Swansea University, cosponsors of the National Assembly for Wales internship program I participated in; the Welsh Liberal Democrats, who hosted me as an intern; and everyone in political and civil service posts at the National Assembly for Wales who provided a welcoming research environment. I appreciate the invaluable feedback of many manuscript readers who participated at various stages of its development: Jessica Blackburn, Kim Coles, Kesha Fikes, Carwyn Fowler, Ilana Gershon, Kendra Coulter, and Andrea Muhlenbach, as well as Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewer(s). I am also indebted to Thomas Wilson, a true expert on the anthropology of the British Isles, who volunteered his time to provide guidance about my work while we were attending a conference in Canada in 2007. I gratefully acknowledge the constructive feedback from two reading groups, the University of Kentucky’s Committee on Social Theory Faculty Paper Workshop and the University of Chicago’s Graduate Student Workshop on the Anthropology of Europe. Thanks are also in order to Delana Hollaway, who performed several formatting tasks leading to the book’s publication, and to Chris Bichler and Keith Harris, who offered technical advice about formatting the maps and images in the text.

1

Introduction

July 15, 2003, was a notable day in the short history of the National Assembly for Wales, yet for regrettable reasons. The Assembly had been

established in 1999 by Tony Blair’s Labour Government in London with the intention of solving Welsh problems with Welsh solutions through a uniquely open, inclusive, and modern style of democratic governance. The devolution of legislative authority to Wales was part of New Labour’s wider campaign of “political modernization” in the United Kingdom (UK), which included the creation of a Scottish Parliament and the reformation of a Northern Ireland Assembly, all of which emerged at a moment when the European Union (EU) had begun to formally recognize the importance of regional governance to its larger project of supranational integration. Not only timely, the National Assembly’s establishment was also late in coming: a parliament returned to Welsh soil for the first time in nearly 600 years, the most significant recognition of Welsh autonomy since Henry VIII declared Wales part of England through an Act of Union in 1536. Now, on July 15, the Assembly was set for a contentious vote on a govern-ment motion that could not have been less relevant to the lives of most citizens: approving a seating chart for its Assembly Members (AMs).

The Labour Party-led Assembly Government had put forth a nonde-batable motion to initiate a new seating arrangement for the debating (or “plenary”) chamber following elections that May. In response, the political opposition in Cardiff Bay—the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, and Plaid Cymru-The Party of Wales—tabled an unprecedented 801 amendments to the plan, most of which were patently absurd.1 Whatever the merits for or against a seating debate, it was not as if public support for Welsh democracy was strong enough to accept this odd spectacle. The public referendum of 1997 that created the National Assembly passed with a slim 50.3 percent margin in a vote that involved barely half of the electorate. Voter turnout through two subsequent elections was 46

2 TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF GOVERNMENT

percent and 38 percent, respectively. With the Assembly’s legitimacy before the public still unproven, the seating debacle now appeared to place the institution on the brink of total irrelevance to a nation at the economic margins of the UK, undergoing protracted postindustrial contraction, and facing a series of acute health, educational, and cultural problems.

The opposition was nonetheless hostile to the idea of not having a debate about how the Assembly’s four political parties should divide space in the chamber. Accusations flew back and forth about the need to protect against other parties spying on the computers located at each AM’s desk in the chamber. Others complained about sitting next to bitter political rivals. The unprecedented volume of amendments signaled that the opposition’s 30 AMs were prepared to stay in session all night and force all 30 of Labour’s AMs to do the same (or lose an amendment vote). This would be the first time that the Assembly’s statutory commitment to “family-friendly” working hours would be tested. In many ways, it was a typical instance of adversarial politics found in the House of Commons that the National Assembly was intended to avoid. Both sides in the debate took the actions of the other as indication of why the Welsh public had yet to embrace the Assembly, but it was the policy process itself that seemed less open and accountable than what the Government of Wales Act had promised in 1998.

Seating, however, was a surrogate of resistance to something more important to Welsh democracy: the Assembly Government’s postelection legislative agenda had yet to be announced for two and a half months after elections that May. In conjunction with the seating amendments, six AMs (two from each of three dissenting parties) submitted a motion to censure the Minister for Assembly Business for incompetence.2 It was a legisla-tive action that demanded the Assembly’s immediate attention under the institution’s Standing Orders. While the seating issue cast doubt on the very point of devolution, the opposition AMs had used the institution’s parliamentary protocols to demand immediate accountability from the executive on this day.

To my surprise, the seating debate had garnered the desired public atten-tion in the National Assembly that four years of policymaking had not. Many people I spoke to in Cardiff that week—both Assembly supporters and those who already saw it as “a useless talking shop”—seemed resigned to the institution’s futility but were at least talking about it. The Welsh media and even a few AMs seized on this bizarre moment to question the value of transferring legislative power to Wales. Why devolve power to Wales, after all, if the process merely created internal squabbling meaningless to the affairs of society? For whatever reason, the public was now interested in Welsh democracy, even if only to watch the proverbial train wreck.

INTRODUCTION 3

July 15, in fact, was one of the few days when I was unable to get a ticket for the plenary chamber’s public gallery right away. Instead, I found myself sitting in the Assembly’s milling area, that is, public lobby, just before two o’clock waiting for that day’s plenary session to begin. I planned to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television until someone exited so I could observe the seating debate firsthand. AMs were streaming across the milling area with folders under arm when the division bell signaled that the day’s session was beginning. One AM I had gotten to know while work-ing as an Assembly intern a few months earlier spotted me and stepped over to say “hi” on his way inside the chamber. “Should be an interesting day,” I offered in the form of a greeting. “It’s all off,” he responded with a smile, turning back toward the chamber’s entrance at the far end of the open hall. “The party leaders worked something out before the session.”

Word of the compromise had apparently reached the public inside the chamber. People began exiting the public gallery almost immediately after the session began as a testament to the deflated tension of the moment. The policy process in Cardiff Bay seemed to be returning to its normally anonymous path outside the view of the majority of Wales. Once inside, I watched the Business Minister announce her intention to form a spe-cial cross-party committee to decide on the new seating arrangements. Conceding to demands for executive accountability, she then agreed to consider changing an upcoming short statement on the government’s legislative agenda to a longer, full debate. Making explicit the connection between the two events, the sponsors of the censure motion withdrew their motion in the next order of business.3 The train wreck had been averted, perhaps, but the damage had nevertheless been done. To paraphrase one newspaper’s headline, why bother with Welsh democracy?

During his weekly press briefing a few days later, however, First Minister (i.e., government leader) and Welsh Labour Party leader Rhodri Morgan astounded the media by stating that it had been one of the greatest weeks in the history of the National Assembly for Wales. He explained that eight Assembly Government initiatives ranging from meeting job creation targets to bringing health and wellness programs on line had occurred that week, making it one of the Assembly’s best. Given these achievements, the First Minister was reported to have “pleaded” with the press to argue the case for more positive Assembly coverage with their editors. Undoubtedly, the gov-ernment’s optimism was disproportionate (if not Orwellian) in relation to the events in the Assembly that week.4 Yet the First Minister was attempting to negotiate another point: the Assembly’s legitimacy should not be judged by how the legislative process operates, but by what outputs the Welsh Assembly Government produces. At stake, therefore, was determining the criteria by which Welsh democracy would be validated as true to the cause of Wales.


If the meaning of the democratic process was uncertain in this moment, it is most striking that the issue did not just turn on deciding which posi-tion was more valid, that is, the government’s or the opposition’s, but on determining how to judge the Assembly’s very legitimacy: was it about institutional procedures and outcomes, or was it a matter of a represen-tational process of accountability before the public? The seating crisis suggests that, well beyond any questions of fair elections or the rule of law, the meaning of democratic legitimacy is a source of conflict within the very practices meant to enact it. This book explores the implications of this position.

Understanding the legitimacy of power at the dawn of the twenty-first century

There is currently no lack of effort in social science and social theory circles to define or refine the meaning of legitimacy. To reference only a few of these perspectives, legitimacy is variously examined in the contexts of history and political change (Bukovansky 2002; Zaller 2007), Western legal-institutional guidelines of accountability and representa-tion (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2007; Jebb, et al 2006; Rehfeld 2005; Bellamy and Castiglione 2003; Canache and Kulisheck 1998), civil par-ticipation (Smismans 2006; again Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2007), non-Western governance (Steinberg 2006; Schatzberg 2001; Akbarzadeh 2003; Farhi 2003), relations between international and state institu-tions (Wilson 2006; Auel and Benz 2007), and competing neopositivist, Marxian, Weberian, and postmodern theories (Coicaud 2002; Harrison 2006; Barker 2001; Beetham 1991; see Connolly 1984 for an overview). As this short list indicates, many of these arguments have heated up only in the last decade or so, which not only suggests academic relevance, but more profoundly indicates symptoms of an ongoing, oft-uncharted transformation in the postwar, postcolonial network of nation-states. Many of the orthodoxies that had served, in one way or another, to justify the power of the state—territorial and economic sovereignty, national identity and citizenship, and mass participation in elections, to name a few—have been significantly challenged in recent decades by countervail-ing events: globalization and supranationalism, migration and immigra-tion, the end of bipolar geopolitics and the rise of unilateralism, and burgeoning social movements posited against slumping civic participa-tion in standardized democratic processes such as elections. Now more than ever, the legitimacy of state power is contingent upon responding to a complex array of these institutional mandates, socioeconomic shifts,

INTRODUCTION 5

and cultural forces, many of which emanate from beyond the traditional boundaries of state sovereignty. The intervention that this book proposes is that anthropology—or, more accurately, an anthropology of govern-ment—is well suited to probe the “deep” meanings of legitimacy over and above “thin” interpretations found in cognate disciplines that focus on electoral results or institutional frameworks, that is, generally to the exclusion of analyzing the role that culture plays in shaping the contours of political power in Western-style democratic institutions.

Toward an Anthropology of Government analyzes legitimacy as a cultural-political practice through ethnographic research conducted in the National Assembly for Wales. As I will argue in greater detail later in this chapter, I propose that the theoretical and methodological bent of anthro-pology offers an important counterpoint to the study of how political power is justified, or legitimated, as found in other academic disciplines. Far from a rejection of nonanthropological approaches, this book is a call for a broader conversation in the social sciences about how we understand what it means for political institutions to act democratically on behalf of subnational, national, and supranational publics. I propose that legitimacy should be viewed as a diffuse and fluid set of cultural-political practices that produce multiple legitimacies (or claims of legitimacy) that do not by necessity parallel or overlap within a given political context. From an anthropological perspective, any discussion of government legitimacy must be couched in terms of the specific political practices, social histories, and institutional arrangements of a given political/parliamentary setting, which in Europe’s current political environment also requires attending to the multisited character of governance above, below, and at the level of the state. By extension, any generalizations about how political power is justi-fied should begin with these local assessments to achieve “global” veracity, and not the other way around. My objective, in short, is not to replace established metajustifications of political power with new ones, but to turn the very proposition of legitimacy on its head.

My argument is that we must problematize the meaning of legitimacy at the level of observing political action within governing bodies, as opposed to assuming a priori that legitimacy exists in the abstract and it is (a) the task of governments to conform to its ideal and (b) the role of aca-demics to judge the degree to which convergence occurs. By all means, I do not advocate the abandonment of efforts to make governance more open, equitable, and representative of diverse public interests. Instead, I believe it is important to first focus the analysis on how those who govern engage in the self-justification of their political power in the name of “democratic process” and/or “national representation.” Focusing on how political actors legitimate themselves, but without accepting (or claiming) these


practices as inherently legitimate, provides an opportunity to observe how political institutions premised on nation-state (supranational) homolo-gies of power in contemporary European politics are reproduced in the course of parliamentary activities that impact millions of lives. Wales and the National Assembly are ideal sites for this work.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of devolution to the UK state since it was set in motion over ten years ago. Once regarded as one of the more centralized states in Europe, the transfer of political power to the UK’s so-called Celtic periphery signaled a newfound acceptance of political multiculturalism amid wider campaigns of domestic and inter-national political reform. There were good reasons for change. Public confidence and participation in UK politics was at a six-decade ebb during the 1990s, to which some citizens in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland might add a longer-term perspective on a lack of representation. The economic profiles and problems of the UK’s periphery, moreover, also set the policy “needs” of these areas in contrast to a wealthier England (par-ticularly the southeast), which years of industrial contraction and more recent global economic integrations have only exacerbated. Devolution also more or less coincided with fundamental changes in the suprana-tional governance of Europe (i.e., post-Maastricht), whereby regionalism and “subsidiarity” became complementary concepts to the consolidation of power in Brussels. Just as the EU moved toward greater integration, in other words, several institutional mechanisms were put in place to balance the idea of a united Europe with a greater recognition of its cultural and political diversity.

In this context, the fundamental challenge is to articulate how elected institutions like the National Assembly attempt to meet the potentially contradictory demands of representing diverse public interests internally while adhering to the asymmetrical legislative-bureaucratic mandates of European integration/UK devolution. Devolution and integration may present new challenges to the legitimacy of state power, but it is an issue that is inherent to the traditional architecture of the nation-state itself. For many scholars, the study of the nation-state begins with the basic recognition that the “nation” and “state” are distinct cultural-institutional nodes wedded together for the purpose of justifying particular regimes of power (Engels 1978: 755; Poggi 1978: 90; Dyson 1980: 131; Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Billig 1995: 26–27; Giddens 1987: 219, 282). The nation, generally speaking, is a trope of cultural collectivity that provides common narratives of history, language, and/or ethnic experience to conceptually bind together geographically dispersed and culturally diverse populations. The state, in turn, cements these bonds through the institutionalization of shared laws, regulations, and rights and entitlements of membership.

INTRODUCTION 7

Legitimacy, in a sense, is symbolic of the degree to which the operations of the state overlap with the aspirations of its “nationalized” subjects, or, as Greenhouse (1999: 104) argues, of bringing “into proximity two incompa-rable subjects, the self and the state, and [representing] them as if they were two elements of a single entity, divided mainly by their obvious differences of scale” (see also Keating 2001: 265–266). To better analyze the tensions inherent to this relationship, I argue for making a distinction between institutional and representative legitimacies in democratic institutions, that is, between political practices that affirm institutional activities as democratic and practices that validate government officials as representing public interests. Distinguishing between institutional and representative legitimacies, I assert, helps to explain how contradictory forms of demo-cratic practice may coexist in a single legislative environment (Beetham 1991: 21; Barker 1990: 144; Bukovansky 2002: 225), or more generally, how legitimacy should be referenced in the plural (Bourricaud 1987; Schwartz, Turner, and Tuden 1966).

To elaborate this thesis, this book moves progressively from an inter-nally to an externally focused analysis of legitimation in the National Assembly for Wales, working along the way through three major contribu-tors to political theories of legitimacy: Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. I will discuss the contributions of these thinkers shortly, but my larger purpose is to address four analytic goals that, taken together, indicate how the meanings of democratic legitimacy in Wales can be ana-lyzed through parliamentary practices. Each of the chapters that follow is primarily focused on addressing one goal, though there is at times a con-siderable overlap of topical discussion within individual chapters.

The first goal is to set parliamentary practices of the National Assembly in cultural and historical contexts that help account for how the institu-tion is legitimated in the present. Welsh history and culture, it is argued, help to explain the intelligibility of legislative processes, party politics, and governing decisions made in Cardiff Bay. Whereas the concluding sections of the present chapter focus on the general dynamics of Welsh and UK devolution, Chapter 2 examines the development of party politics in Wales in the context of industrial and postindustrial changes from the nineteenth through the twentieth century, concluding with an examina-tion of the political maneuvering that ultimately led to the opening of the National Assembly in 1999. Working from Raymond Williams’ (1985) idea that Welsh identity is defined through a series of “negations and dis-continuities,” devolution is analyzed as a political and cultural response to the experience of Wales relative to England/Great Britain/the United Kingdom. More distant and recent historical events significant to Welsh devolution are addressed in this and other chapters: the rise, fall, and


continuing impacts of Thatcherism on Welsh politics and society, the long-term push for Welsh language education within a UK state-oriented public sphere, and the creation of specifically Welsh administrative institu-tions prior to devolution.

The second goal is to observe specific practices of institutional legitimacy, or to track how the procedural and legislative contexts of Welsh policymaking serve to justify parliamentary-institutional action as democratically legitimate. Chapter 3 compares how the support staff of political parties, the legislative civil service (or Presiding Office), and the Assembly Government prepare for policy debates in the National Assembly. Taking cues from Weber on bureaucratic power, it is argued that the political strategies of party workers are channeled through inter-personal and technological networks that, while consistently operating on the premise of institutional neutrality, enable the party in government to direct parliamentary deliberations toward its own ends. Chapter 5 later explores the ambiguities of implementing policies intended to legitimate Assembly parliamentary practices as open and democratic. Drawing from cross-disciplinary research on transparency, or discourses concerned with the legitimacy and accountability of institutional action, it examines the dialectic nature of Assembly-civil relations as they structure how AMs dis-close information under the gaze of the media and other forms of public observation tied to the parliamentary process. Based on numerous inter-views with AMs, civil servants, members of the press, and interest groups, it is argued that “gaps” between normalizing the appearance of transpar-ency and practicing democracy in secret are an accepted and necessary facet of Welsh devolution.

My third goal is to examine specific practices of representative legiti-macy, or analyzing how political actors utilize Wales’ institutional channels of legitimate action to validate expressly partisan viewpoints as represent-ing the general public interest. Chapter 4 observes how AMs legitimate their claims to represent civil society in the course of promoting party policies during political debates. Drawing from sociolinguistic analysis in particular, it is argued that institutional procedures may rationalize debate as a forum of democratic representation by creating a common frame for discussion, but these processes also necessitate the incommensurability of discussion in that “winning” arguments are shown to fundamentally require the deauthorization (or delegitimation) of “losing” ones. Setting this data in the context of long-term efforts to institutionalize Welsh lan-guage equality within the UK (particularly regarding education policy), a larger aim of this chapter is question the veracity of Habermas’ (1989) famed theory of the public sphere and its relation to parliamentary decision-making. Collectively, therefore, chapters 3, 4, and 5 sequentially

INTRODUCTION 9

examine how political officials prepare for policymaking, debate policy, and finally implement policy.

Chapter 6 brings the internal dynamics of representative legitimation into conversation with the wider social context of postdevolution democ-racy in Wales. It examines how AMs (and would-be AMs) created spaces of “political intimacy” within civil society during the Assembly elections of May 2003; simultaneously, it chronicles the mass social movement against the UK’s war in Iraq as a counterpoint to social participation in these elec-tions. I argue that comparing the relatively low public interest in the Welsh elections of 2003 to widespread public mobilization against war—events which occurred at the same time—indicates how national communities are not apathetic to politics, but (at least sometimes) to parliamentary pro-cesses. In taking this approach, this chapter questions how sovereignty is negotiated in the UK after devolution. Assembly debates about the war and the campaign manifestos of political parties are taken as examples of how the policy goals of parties and the sovereignty of the National Assembly are shaped by Wales’ devolution settlement and party-to-party relations between Cardiff Bay and London.

The fourth goal is to situate parliamentary action in Wales in the broader civil and institutional circumstances of public demand and multisited governance in the UK and EU. Although chapters 5 and 6 address some of the civil and UK dimensions of devolution, Chapter 7 fully integrates an analysis of the intersections of civil participation, UK and EU politics, and globalization on Assembly policy. Whereas earlier chapters treat the practices of institutional and representative legitima-tion separately, this chapter also illustrates how competing discourses of legitimacy can sometimes come into direct conflict. Specifically, it observes how the Assembly has resisted the lifting of an EU ban on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in response to public demand in Wales. The limitations of the Assembly’s power to influence state and supranational policy, as well as the significance of party-to-party relations between the UK’s devolved and central governments, are indicated by comparing the oppositional strategies of the Assembly Government to those of a public campaign against GMOs.

Chapter 8, finally, concludes the book by addressing an unresolved question of devolution: will increasing the Assembly’s legislative power relative to the UK state increase its effectiveness, and therefore its legiti-macy before the Welsh public? While acknowledging the challenges and ambivalences of devolution as a medium of democratic representation, I offer a defense for an increase of parliamentary power in Wales (again relative to the UK central government), though stop short of advocating for Welsh independence. To arrive at this point, however, it is first necessary


to elaborate the methodological and theoretical frameworks of my analysis and then describe the current circumstances of Welsh governance under devolution.

Toward an anthropology of government

Although there is a growing, if disparate, body of ethnographic work concerned with government, I argue that anthropologists should more consciously and collectively join in wider social science debates about governance. The essential issue ethnographers can uniquely address, I believe, is that “legitimacy” is uncritically equated with “democracy” in political studies, thus anchoring the justification (and reproduction) of political power to a Western, post-Enlightenment discourse of political right, yet without questioning the underlying meanings and constructions of these terms. Too often, associations between democracy and legitimacy are thinly grounded in notions popular representation, that is, articulated in reference to some combination of electoral competition, government accountability, legal-constitutional reform, or other institutional guide-posts (see Jebb, et al. 2006; Rehfeld 2005; Canache and Kulisheck 1998). By “thin” I do not mean weak or inconsequential. While I agree that the legiti-macy of government power should be analyzed (at least in part) in these terms, it also runs the risk of being narrowly ethnocentric: cross-cultural evidence more than suggests that the linkages between states and national publics are justified across a much broader array of indices.5 Equally, there is an inherent danger in taking the democracy-as-legitimacy homology as self-evident, which has been roundly challenged in a large body of anthro-pological literature concerned with the culturally specific meanings and historical contingencies of democracy as a form of political practice, both within and across national boundaries.6 As Coles’ (2004: 10) ethnography of democracy-building and elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina flatly states, it is a matter of treating democracy “as a cultural and political practice and as a form of social knowledge rather than as a dry set of institutions or a universal ideology” in which culture stands outside the political process to be manipulated by it.

While discussions about the legitimacy of political transformations in Europe have multiplied in recent years, much of it has sidelined (or even ignored) the cultural dynamics of governance in favor of technical and procedural debates about political change and integration (see Coles 2004). This is not to claim that culture is not taken seriously outside of anthropology, but that it is too-often treated as a “residual category” of information after politics and economics are sifted out of research

INTRODUCTION 11

designs (Donnan and MacFarlane 1997a: 1). In the absence of a “deep” approach to culture, the legitimacy (or again, justifiability) of European integration is often discussed in terms of legal-institutional mechanisms of accountability or civil participation, whether strictly within EU circles or vertically with respect to EU-member state relations (Kohler-Koch and Rittberger 2007; Auel and Benz 2007; Smismans 2006; Bellamy and Castiglione 2003; Weale and Nentwich 1998; Christiansen 1998; Beetham and Lord 1998). The same can generally be said about debates about the legitimacy of UK devolution. Explicit discussions about the legitimacy of UK politics have been historically rare (see Rootes 1996) even if more general studies of electoral and legislative representation are often rich in quantitative detail. The UK’s experience with devolution has since elevated legitimacy’s significance as a point of discussion about political power and cultural diversity in the UK (Keating 2005). For some scholars, the public referenda that created elected institutions in Wales and Scotland are taken as a sufficient indication of devolution’s legitimacy (Curtice 2005). Others view these events only as starting points for legitimate governance (Mitchell 2005: 29). Echoing some of the debates about EU legitimacy, the justifiability of devolution is assessed according to its functionality in the macropolitical contexts of UK and European policymaking (Greer 2007), the degree to which the institutional mechanics of devolution eschew the confrontational formalism of Westminster (Keating 2005), or the extent to which civil interests turn to Cardiff Bay and Edinburgh (and not London) to influence public policy (Mitchell 2005; Royles 2007: 153–154). Various elements of these discussions are also found in the literature on devolu-tion in Northern Ireland (Wilford and Wilson 2005), but with perhaps a stronger recognition of the implications of substate political autonomy in a sharply divided society (Gay and Mitchell 2007: 258). Collectively, these approaches to legitimacy provide an invaluable perspective on macrosocial trends, changing legal and administrative frameworks, and dynamic legis-lative processes that inform the practices of political officials empowered to govern at the UK margins. My goal, therefore, is not to dismiss the research of my colleagues in cognate disciplines.

As with much of the research on EU integration, however, very little of this work is concerned with observing how actual practices of legitimation shape the meanings of political belonging and power in government set-tings. But what if we were to rethink legitimacy as something more than a quantifiable accumulation of “legitimate” institutional functions and/or representative mechanisms, and thus resituate the discussion around the question of how political actors create and perform the criteria of their justification to govern others? Precisely because legitimacy is indeter-minate as a transcendent discourse for justifying political power, but is


inherently social and historical, it should be our work as social scientists to articulate the possibilities and constraints that governing practices pose to diverse societies witnessing profound social, economic, and political trans-formations. I do not claim anthropology has cornered the market on this work: informative research can be found in other disciplines where culture is treated as a fluid, contextual, and primary factor shaping the legitimacy of state politics (Harrison 2006; Steinberg 2006; Bukovansky 2002). What anthropology does offer, however, is a means of “producing knowledge of cultural and political-economic processes of intimate, grounded domains that are often ignored by theorists of large-scale political economic shifts” (Kingfisher and Maskovsky 2008: 120), or in the terms of Abélès (1991: 103), of providing a detailed analysis of how “political representation is created as it goes along.” That legitimacy is a relation of power, or a state of inequality between a government and its citizenry, is well established (Fried 1964: 146; Abrams 1988: 76): the question is how to study it?

Anthropology brings to the discussion particular methodological approaches to acquiring knowledge of how the ongoing transforma-tions of political power in Europe are justified through the actions of those empowered to act for the demos. Foremost, legitimacy can be ana-lyzed through ethnographic participant-observation, or long-term field research, emphasizing the gathering of data through detailed observation of and participation in people’s lives. Field research for this book was thus conducted throughout 2003 but supplemented by shorter research stints in 2001, 2005, and 2007. As a participant in the National Assembly from January until early April 2003, I served as an intern for the Welsh Liberal Democrats in Cardiff Bay. Thanks to excellent support for my research from the party, I was able to work as a member of the party’s policy research unit as well as interact with its government officials (again, the Liberals were in a governing coalition with Labour during my research). As Chapter 3 describes in more detail, I was involved in researching and writing policy briefings, attending the party’s organizational meetings, and assisting with constituent work of AMs. Beginning in March until May 1, 2003, I also volunteered in the electoral campaigns of the Assembly’s four politi-cal parties, which included working for a time in the Liberal Democrats’ central campaign headquarters in Cardiff. (On a more limited basis, I also participated in party campaigning for two parties during the UK General Election of 2001.) Beyond direct participation, I spent a good deal of time observing political and institutional events connected to the Assembly’s policy process. I attended several plenary sessions and committee meetings of the National Assembly, meetings of the Richard Commission (a govern-ment-sponsored panel researching the expansion of Assembly powers), the annual conference of Plaid Cymru, a Labour Party-sponsored public

INTRODUCTION 13

conference on GMOs in West Wales, and a few meetings of the House of Commons in London (usually while there for interviews anyway). Near the end of 2003, I moved to Brussels for a month to gather data about how the Assembly is linked to the EU policy process. Again, I attended a few EU events (such as a meeting of the Committee of the Regions), but spent most of my time interviewing Welsh, UK, and EU civil servants stationed in Brussels as well as three of Wales’ then-five members of European Parliament (MEPs).

In several chapters of this book, I also utilize discourse analysis to situate the legitimation practices of political officials in the contexts of parliamentary debates and government/political texts that reference and constitute the meanings of Welsh sovereignty and national identity within the National Assembly (see Foucault 1972, 1977). I further examine these discourses as reference points of power relations between the Assembly, UK/EU institutional and political networks, and Welsh society, each of which are bound to specific rules of intelligibility and subject to contes-tation and reformation. Admittedly, this “postmodern” approach is not always warmly greeted in the European and devolution studies communi-ties (Bell 2004: 141–150; Grillo 2007: 75), but I would counter that focus-ing on the discursive contexts of political action provides an important outlet to observe how the legitimacy of political institutions is premised on the efforts of political officials to define the “democratic” boundaries of devolution. Fortunately, high-level political institutions like the National Assembly make parliamentary transcripts available for this type of work. Unlike my interview data, I attribute statements from transcripts to spe-cific AMs as it is already a matter of public record. To clarify party affili-ations in the transcripts, I parenthetically insert the party membership of each speaker in the text (i.e., “C” for Conservative, “L” for Labour, “LD” for Liberal Democrat, and “P” for Plaid Cymru).

More common to social science methods in general, I also conducted document and interview research throughout 2003 (and with limited follow-up work in 2005 and 2007). Interview participants included AMs, party support staff, and civil servants in the Assembly, Welsh MPs based in London, Welsh/UK/EU officials in Brussels, and numerous interests that can be labeled under the heading of “Welsh civil society”: voluntary orga-nizations, lobbyists, unions, media interests, and smaller political parties not represented in the Assembly. A handful of formal interviews with citi-zens not connected to politics also complemented countless hours spent informally talking to ordinary people about Welsh politics.

All told, 89 formal interviews were conducted in 2003, including fol-low-up interviews, which ranged from 20 minutes to two hours in length. As much as possible, I tried to mirror the social and political demographics


of the Assembly in my interview sample.7 Typical of ethnographic writing, I have taken a strong interest in maintaining the anonymity of the consul-tants who participated in my research. I do not identify AMs, their party support staff, or civil servants by name, constituency (as applicable), or gender. In some cases, I also omit the party identification of AMs where I consider the information shared to be potentially damaging if used in a dif-ferent context. This procedure was disregarded in a few cases, such as when interviewees agreed to have their comments publicly attributed and there was little means of disguising their identities. With this methodological context laid out, I now turn to elaborate the theoretical commitments implied in my research.

Anthropology, legitimacy, and social theory

Anthropologists have long been interested in the study of politics (see Vincent 1994), even if ethnographic studies of governments and parlia-ments are relatively rare and recent (Feldman 2008; Crewe 2005; Shore 2000; Holmes 2000a; Chock 1998; Abélès 1991; Nugent 1994). Without attempting a grand synthesis of competing ideas, I turn to the critical theories of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas to explore various directions an anthropology of government might take. First, Weber offers an outline for observing practices of institutional legitimacy in elected institutions. The significance here is his focus on the internalized character of institutional legitimacy (see also Barker 1990), which Weber frames in the context of the state’s coercive power (see also Giddens 1987). The key to maintaining this “monopoly on violence” is the reproduction of rational authority, that is, the decision-making hierarchies, techni-cal training and specialization, and institutionally defined standards of discipline that define “modern” socio-political organizations. Critically, Weber highlights how the rational action of state actors is both histori-cally embedded and normative, meaning that institutional practices are objective only in the sense of being guided by conformity to sociopolitical rules of institutional neutrality.8 Stated slightly differently, legitimacy cannot be reduced to a reaction to the apparentness of political power but is instead constituted in part through institutional procedures and practices reflecting the logic of political order (Weber 1978: 953). Weber’s basic premise—that institutional power is reproduced through governing practices, which sits in reciprocal relation to, yet is distinct from, ideals of governance or the consent of the governed (see Beetham 1991)—speaks to the importance of an anthropological inquiry of government. Institutional legitimacy is not a macrotheoretical condition from this perspective,

INTRODUCTION 15

but a plural set of practices inexorably linked to microinstitutional and political codes of conduct (Swartz, Turner, and Tuden 1966:11; Barker 2001: 27, 28). Chapter 3 in particular applies this concept to observing different practices of preparation for parliamentary debate in the National Assembly. Even if Weber’s influence on current anthropology is not always obvious, a similar commitment to observing legitimacy as situational can be found in ethnographic research on the roles that political agents play in reproducing institutional hierarchies based on the issues and stakeholders involved (Lister 2003: 184); the time investments and strategies required to justify individual and institutional power (Hendricks 1988: 231); and the legitimation of government-driven, neoliberal transformations in national identities (Baker-Cristales 2008) or social practices of democracy (Greenberg 2006). If any commonality can be distilled from these dispa-rate research agendas, it is that the meanings of legitimacy (and legiti-mizing practices) are bound to, rather than outside of, cultural- political contexts.

Political anthropology might owe a greater debt to Weber than some-times acknowledged, but it is also fair to say that his work only offers a par-tial framework for ethnographically researching the legitimacy of political power. The contemporary orientation in anthropology toward political studies (such as in democracy studies, noted above) tends to focus on how culture is embedded in local-to-transnational networks and practices, or shaped in equal measure by detailed cultural contexts “on the ground” and by the global forces of neoliberalism (see Paley 2002; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Ong 1999). One of the central theoretical perspectives anthropologists have utilized to analyze the effects of political change is a heterogeneous, decentering approach to power notably adopted from the work of Michel Foucault (e.g., 1977, 1980). In particular, Foucault’s articulation of “governmentality,” that is, the institutional relations, pro-cedures, and analytical methods aimed at discerning knowledge of a sub-ject population and acting upon this knowledge/citizenry with authority (1991:102–103), has received a great deal of attention in North American anthropology circles. Far-removed from the institutional and legalistic dis-cussions of legitimacy and state power discussed above, power in this sense is a discourse of knowledge that acts on individual bodies, categorizes and divides subjects (and territories), and creates spaces of production, compli-ance, and resistance (see Ghosh 2006; Sharma 2006; Li 2005; Stoler 2002; Ferguson and Gupta 2002). At the risk of overgeneralization, such studies tend to either (a) be concerned with the impacts of state and institutional discourses on specific subject populations or (b) minutely describe state discourses without fully attending to the minute details of how state actors act. I consider both of these approaches vitally important to the analysis of


political power—indeed, it was this work that led me to consider the value of an anthropology of government—yet I propose that anthropologists should increasingly examine the legitimating practices of government offi-cials that create state policies that act on the social, even while recognizing that strict “top-down/bottom-up” dichotomies must be approached with skepticism (Li 2005). If ethnography has done well in using Foucault to explain how institutional discourses shape the meanings of citizenship, political subjectivity, and/or civil participation, in other words, it remains curious that anthropologists have not given greater attention to directly observing the practices of government that constitute the production and administration of state power over the social/individual.

Part of this deficiency can be explained in the simple terms of access. Even though anthropologists are bound to a code of ethics that demands a respect for the privacy of and disclosure to our research consultants about our research objectives, it does not follow that politicians and civil servants are keen to the intrusions ethnographic observation often entails. (I was very fortunate in this regard!) Another issue, I would argue, are limitations in the Foucauldian theory of governance to address questions about government. Foucault seemed uninterested in the study of the state precisely because it is a “reified myth” (Baker-Cristales 2008: 351). I do not question Foucault’s reading of the state’s artificial mythos, but the implica-tion that anthropologists and others cannot or should not interrogate the institutional practices of state mythmaking as primary sites where political power and the social intersect. With this in mind, Chapter 5 in particular applies Foucault to the study of institutional legitimacy in the National Assembly.

If institutional legitimacy is the regularized, largely internalized practice of reproducing state power, representative legitimacy is constituted through government practices that reify political actors as the embodiment of national interests. Jürgen Habermas, who more than any other social theorist has engaged with the problem of legitimacy in Western demo-cratic institutions (1975; 1989; 1996; 1998), provides a launching point for inquiry into the relationship between representation and the reproduc-tion of state power. His “solution” to the crisis of legitimacy is an indirect response to Weber in reference to Schmitt’s (2000, discussed in Chapter 4) authoritarian extension of the Weberian argument. To counter Schmitt’s legal-constitutional justification of fascism, Habermas argues in favor of institutionalizing deliberative equality in parliamentary settings. In this formulation, parliaments develop the capacity to reach rational consensus first and foremost through the free circulation and exchange of opinions in the public sphere (Habermas 1996: 386). Legitimate governance, or the justification of government power, is thus based on a discourse ethics that

INTRODUCTION 17

neutralizes social and economic inequalities across political communities via institutional mechanisms that facilitate rational exchange in parlia-ments (Habermas 1996: 71). In essence, Habermas hopes to recuperate a procedural democracy that recognizes difference and the equality of its expression by resolving any questions of meaning (i.e., mutual under-standing) prior to the moment of parliamentary deliberation. As he writes, “The proceduralist understanding of law thus privileges the communica-tive presuppositions and procedural conditions of democratic opinion- and will-formation as the sole source of legitimation” (Habermas 1996: 448–450). While the relationship between the parliamentary complex and the public sphere is crucial to this argument, it is arguably the latter con-cept that has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention, both positive and negative.9 Chapter 4 attempts to better balance the parliamentary and public aspects of this theory to question the stability of the parliamentary complex as a site of legitimation via the neutralization of difference. My initial goal, however, is not to critique Habermas but to identify a con-ceptual framework for analyzing representative legitimacy as constituted through the social, institutional, and discursive contexts of parliamentary practices.

In sum, Weber, Foucault, and Habermas anticipate possible avenues of research that can inform ethnographic studies of government. Drawing from each as appropriate to the research question at hand, I argue that the agents comprising political institutions must attend to both the insti-tutional and representative legitimacies implied in parliamentary democ-racy to justify their power. Centralizing legitimacy in the anthropological study of government thus opens a space to ask how and why particular discursive formations/functions of power are wedded together in specific institutional arrangements and historical instances. I do not claim or wish to imply this is the only means of going about developing an anthropology of government; however, as the following sections indicate, articulating differences between institutional and representative legitimacies is impor-tant to the task of observing the shifting contexts of political decentraliza-tion and supranational integration that shapes governance in the National Assembly for Wales.

Devolution in the United Kingdom

UK devolution is often said to be a process, not an event. Devolution is thus a lens through which anthropologists can observe changes in the European state as an “open field with multiple boundaries and no institu-tional fixity” (Trouillot 2003: 83; see also Kelly and Kaplan 2002: 423–424).


Foremost, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are not states but the National Assembly for Wales, the Scottish Parliament, and the Northern Ireland Assembly are state-sponsored sites of decentralized legislative authority operating within the orbits of the UK and EU (see fig. 1.1). Devolution, or the transfer of political power to democratically elected institutions, was established as part of UK prime minister Tony Blair’s program of “political modernization” in the late 1990s. The devolution of legislative power to Wales and Scotland (and Northern Ireland under dif-ferent circumstances) was an early centerpiece of modernization, and can

Figure 1.1 Map of devolved UK territories and capitols

INTRODUCTION 19

be read as a state-managed revolution in democratic representation for the UK’s ethnic minority regions. New Labour’s modernization agenda also included reforming the House of Lords, the Commons, and local govern-ment; adopting the European Convention on Human Rights; and passing a Freedom of Information Act that outlines rights of public access to gov-ernment information (see Crewe 2005; Pratchett 2000). The UK’s devolved institutions were conceived as spaces of explicit political difference from the Houses of Parliament or, put more bluntly, driven to various extents by the goal of creating nonconfrontational, cross-party collaboration and civic participation in policymaking (Keating 2005; Morgan and Mungham 2001). In the National Assembly for Wales, for example, the distinctive features of Welsh democracy are evident in simple changes in modes of parliamentary interaction (such as AMs referring to each other by first names), more complicated parliamentary procedures (such as the use of advanced information technologies in parliamentary activity), the incor-poration of Welsh as a language of governance, and the creation of gender parity among AMs through party-driven candidate selection processes. While devolution is clearly a cultural project that should be examined in cultural terms,10 the structural differences among the three institutions are also indicative of the circumstances under which the legitimacy of each has been posited.

The Scottish Parliament is made up of 129 members, primarily repre-sented by the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party, but also by the Green Party and inde-pendent members. By far the most empowered of the three devolved administrations, the government at Holyrood has considerable lawmak-ing powers (short of international treaties, defense, and macroeconomic policy, for example) in addition to limited taxation powers. Scotland’s comparative power can be explained in part by its relative lack of histori-cal violence (contra Northern Ireland) and its historical development and partial retention of civic and legal institutions (contra Wales) in the fields of law, banking, religion, and education after the Act of Union in 1707 (McCrone 1992). Under a mixed electoral system that allows for some proportional representation, the Scottish Executive has been led since 1999 by Labour/Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party/Liberal Democrat governing coalitions. Though it is sometimes argued that the impact of Scottish devolution has been more symbolic than substantive in some policy areas (Mitchell 2005: 27), the Scottish Parliament has utilized its powers to diverge from the market-oriented policies of New Labour in several instances. Public support for Scottish autonomy from London is higher than in Wales or Northern Ireland for their respective devolved institutions.


The 108-member Northern Ireland Assembly has been marked as much by inaction as action. Ireland, like Scotland, retained a separate legal system after the Act of Union of 1800 when parliamentary power was consolidated in London. Northern Ireland is the result of the partition-ing of Ireland in 1922 into an independent republic and a subordinate UK territory. After decades of direct rule (and anti-Catholic political bias), religious and social tensions between Protestants and Catholics were punctuated by a failed elected assembly in the early 1970s and an ensuing wave of paramilitary violence known as the Troubles. Given the steep challenges of creating compromise in this political environment, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 institutionalized a power-sharing agreement between Catholic/separatist (Sinn Fein, Social Democratic and Labour Party) and Protestant/unionist (Ulster Unionist Party, Democratic Unionist Party) political parties. The deep socioeconomic and cultural dif-ferences between Catholics and Protestants (see Wilson and Donnan 2006) were reflected in a devolution settlement that effectively institutionalized ethnic divisions and antagonisms in politics (Finlay 2008). Unlike Wales and Scotland, for instance, elections in Northern Ireland were designed around the single transferable vote (or “winner take all”) system. Even more telling about Northern Ireland’s cultural and political divisions was the creation of compartmentalized government ministries, which has at times meant ministers managing their portfolios as “petty fiefdoms” (Wilford 2007: 177). Reflecting this polarization, public opinion is sharply divided about the scope of devolution as well as the justification for devo-lution in general, particularly among Protestants (Wilford and Wilson 2005: 83). Given these tensions, it is not surprising that the government at Stormont has been suspended in several instances (in 2000, 2001, 2002), though the process was back on track after 2005 with a new round of elec-tions that witnessed the decline of more hard-line unionists.

The National Assembly for Wales, finally, is composed of 60 members (the smallest of the three elected bodies), represents three million citizens (larger than Northern Ireland), and operates on an annual budget of approximately £14 billion (reflecting a population-based funding system determined in London for all three devolved governments). Winning devolution for Wales was more difficult than for Scotland or Northern Ireland precisely because public interest and institutional competence were comparatively lagging, which is commonly attributed to a relative lack of historical development of Welsh civic institutions (Royles 2007: 5). (The absence of civic institutions can be traced in part to Wales’ early incorporation into the English kingdom with the Act of Union in 1536.) Whatever the direct or indirect effects of this institutional vacuum, Welsh public opinion about devolution has been lukewarm compared to

INTRODUCTION 21

Scotland, for example. Whereas the Welsh Assembly referendum of 1997 passed by a few thousand votes and involved barely half of the electorate, 60.4 percent of the electorate turned up for the Scottish referendum with 74.3 percent of voters in favor (Greer 2007: 90). The National Assembly’s current legislative powers are far less than those of the Scottish Parliament but greater than those of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and Wales is by far the most integrated into the political economy of England. With these opening comparisons in mind, I now turn to a more detailed discussion of the circumstances of Welsh devolution.

Balancing institutional membership and democratic representation

Building upon the thesis that legitimacy can be analyzed in terms of distinct institutional and representative spheres of political practice, the objective of this section is to sketch out the broad contours of multi-institutional power and civic participation that inform the legislative and procedural activities of officials working in the National Assembly for Wales. The complexities of Welsh devolution are evident in the dynamics of Welsh/UK and Welsh/EU governance, civil engagement with Welsh democracy, the diversity of Welsh political parties, and the legislative agenda of Wales’ Labour-controlled government.

Welsh-UK relations

The Assembly’s legislative portfolio was defined fairly narrowly by what it could legislate with the passage of the Government of Wales Act in 1998. (Contra Wales, for example, the Scottish Parliament’s power was widely defined in terms of what it could not legislate on.) Legislative power was transferred from London in policy areas such as health, educa-tion, environment, regional economic development, Welsh culture and language preservation, housing, social services, agriculture, transport, and local planning. Foremost, the institution has been an editor, not a writer, of Welsh legislation for most of its history. Until the passage of a second Government of Wales Act in 2006, which I discuss in Chapter 8, the Assembly passed only secondary legislation, meaning it had the ability to modify legislation passed on from London (or Brussels through London) within its proscribed policy remit. The situation is complicated by the fact that Wales lacks complete legislative discretion in many policy areas. A prime example comes from Welsh education. When the Assembly was founded it had the power to create a Welsh school curriculum but not the ability to control the cost of higher education in Wales. The


Scottish Parliament, in contrast, began operations with these powers and subsequently abolished up-front university tuition fees in favor of an after-graduation fee (Keating 2005: 156–157). Wales eventually won that right, yet the first eight years of Welsh-UK negotiations over legislative power were marked by several instances of the government in Cardiff Bay requesting more authority from London and coming up empty. Due to the added complexities of having Labour-controlled governments in both Cardiff Bay and London, the Welsh Labour Government has walked a fine line between claiming to promote a distinctly Welsh policy agenda without challenging the validity of contrary policies promoted by the New Labour leadership in Whitehall.

Welsh-EU relations

The National Assembly is tied to Brussels by numerous legislative, admin-istrative, and financial relations. Like Scotland and Northern Ireland, Wales has benefited from Europe’s Structural Funds Program, which adds to the regional budgets of Europe’s lagging socioeconomic areas over and above that supplied by the state. Given the EU’s stated commitment to social stability through economic harmonization, it is not surprising that regional policy ranks only behind agricultural policy in terms of total European expenditures (Ichijo 2004: 74). Before European accession, Wales ranked near the bottom of Europe’s regions in socioeconomic terms (e.g., per capita income), thus qualifying for development funding. To qualify for the maximum available funding—meaning billions of pounds into the Welsh budget over several years—the Assembly reconfigured the boundaries of its internal socioeconomic subregions so that two-thirds of Wales could meet the EU’s priority criteria.11

These financial links to Europe are observable all over Wales in the form of signs explaining that various development projects—from the refurbishment of urban shopping centers to the construction of community parks in rural areas—are the result of EU and Welsh Assembly Government support. The legislative connections to Europe are less visible but equally important. Wales participates in European policy through a field office in Brussels and memberships in several of the EU’s regional level associations, notably including the Committee of the Regions, the Regions with Legislative Power (RegLeg) group, and the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL), all of which also include Scotland and Northern Ireland as members. The Assembly’s EU field office also works under the umbrella of UKRep, the UK government’s permanent repre-sentative in Europe. Ultimately, the Assembly is required to adhere to any

INTRODUCTION 23

legislation created in Brussels that falls under its devolved policy portfolio, leading some observers to argue that the involvement of the UK’s devolved governments in Europe have been at times more symbolic than substan-tive (Jeffrey 2005: 189; Keating 2005: 219). EU membership, therefore, constrains as well as enables the Assembly’s legislative process.

Democracy and civil society

Whatever the exigencies of UK and EU authority over the National Assembly, garnering public support is equally crucial to the success or failure of devolution. Perhaps more than nation building per se, the Assembly is engaged in a protracted and difficult process of polity building as a primary function of its own legitimation. A large part of the chal-lenge, which is a common narrative of nation-state studies, is operation-alizing the meaning of a “national community”: as historian Dai Smith (1984:1) plainly states, “Wales is a singular noun but a plural experi-ence” (see also Balsom1985; Williams 2003; Fevre and Thompson 2002; Dunkerley and Thompson 1999; Bowie 1993; Davies and Bowie 1992). Nineteenth- century industrialization in Wales, in fact, reinforced existing geographic and social distinctions. Transport networks, for example, were created to run east-west, that is, out of Wales and into England, rather than north-south, thus reinforcing cultural perceptions about divisions in Welsh national experience. No major road connected the North and South of Wales until the 1940s (Gruffudd 1995: 233). And contrary to the established orthodoxy of building the imagined national community (Anderson 1983), different newspapers primarily circulate in different parts of Wales (which are multinational owned, moreover) and many living on the Welsh-English border watch television broadcasts emanat-ing from Liverpool or Bristol, England, not Wales. Anthropologists and other social scientists have responded by analyzing the contextual nature of Welsh identity through perspectives as varied as linguistic performance (Trosset 1993), quantitative assessments of macrosocial trends (Caulkins 2001; Trosset and Caulkins 2001), gendered experience (Rees 1999; John 1991; Aaron 1994), “race” (Williams, Evans, and O’Leary 2003; Williams 2002), and postcolonial studies (Aaron and Williams 2005).

Well more than an issue of academic relevance, however, the National Assembly is challenged to encourage public participation and foster public perceptions about its inclusivity. A 2004 survey by a North Wales newspaper, for example, found that more than 70 percent of respondents believed South Wales is favored by the National Assembly (Mugaseth 2004a: 43). Moreover, the UK 2001 census indicates that only 60 percent


of respondents in Wales identified themselves as Welsh, 7 percent as Welsh and another nationality, and 33 percent as “not Welsh” (UK National Statistics 2001). At an extreme, this binary is reduced to the following opposition in popular culture: North Wales = Welsh speaking “real” Wales/south Wales = Anglicized (if not de facto English), a dialectic that is also revealing about the symbolic exclusion of nonwhite minorities (making up about 2 percent of the population but highly concentrated in urban south Wales) in discourses of national belonging (Williams 2002: 169). Public support for devolution is no doubt growing (see Trench 2005: 16–17), but I have also participated in numerous informal conversations (spanning 2001–2007) that indicate public uncertainties about Welsh devolution. Even if the number of naysayers is dwindling, many outside of Cardiff ’s political bubble still see the Assembly as little more than a “use-less talking shop.”

The Assembly Government has no doubt worked diligently to erase these perceptions, and this book is not intended as a partisan critique of the government or any political party in Wales. Echoing Li’s (2007) assessment of development projects in Indonesia, I believe there is a genuine “will to improve” Wales within its political ranks even if policies do not always have their intended effect. Guided by the constitutional blueprint of Welsh devolution, the government in Wales has sought to create an interactive, participatory decision-making process that will revitalize civil society from the top down. Two prime examples are occasionally holding of regional assemblies away from Cardiff and the inclusion of civil and voluntary interests in legislative committees. Not only indicative of the challenges of electoral disinterest and institutional design, it is also an issue of represent-ing diverse public interests with a limited amount of legislative powers and financial resources. The challenge for the Assembly, in short, is to legitimate both its procedures of governance as democratic and its policy outputs as representing distinctly Welsh needs.

Political parties and policy goals

AMs are not only in office to represent constituencies of communities but also their parties. As mentioned, the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, and Plaid Cymru hold the majority of Assembly seats, though there have been a few instances of independent candidates becoming AMs as well. The following is an overview of trends characterizing each party, though it would be inaccurate to suggest that party members and par-ties are monolithic in their thinking. (I delve into the histories of these parties in Chapter 2.) The Labour Party, first of all, has been the party in

INTRODUCTION 25

power since the first elections of 1999. Although formally integrated in the UK Labour Party, there is a tangible difference between “Welsh Labour” (sometimes interchangeable with the term “Old Labour”) and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” project. Superficially, this comes down to a distinction between the party’s more traditional socialists and the neoliberal reform-ers led by Blair until 2007. In reality, the situation is much more complex, particularly in the context of defining the Welsh Labour Government’s policies against the goals of its parent party in London. Some Labour AMs I interviewed held firm to this distinction but others were adamant that the Old/Welsh Labour ideology was counterproductive to meeting the present needs of society. On the whole, however, the Labour Party in Wales is left of the UK Labour Party mainstream. Voting Labour is viable elec-toral option in almost every constituency in Wales, but the party’s strength lies in the former industrial valleys of the south. Historically, the party has been ambivalent about both devolution and European integration, but viewpoints can vary widely from AM to AM.

Plaid Cymru-The Party of Wales (a literal Welsh-to-English transla-tion), like the Labour Party, claim a socialist policy agenda but also carry a tradition of strongly promoting Welsh language preservation and (contra some of the goals of socialism) a more conservative set of rural values. As in Scotland, devolution has granted Welsh nationalists a bigger electoral showing as compared to their success in Westminster (Bohrer II and Krutz 2005). While typically holding onto only a few seats in London, Plaid has finished as the second largest party in the Assembly through three elections and is currently in a governing coalition with the Labour Party. Generally, the more conservative members of the party are elected from the rural areas of the west and north and the more socialist-minded mem-bers are found in the south, but this is not a strict pattern. While avowedly “nationalist,” Plaid Cymru as a whole has been ambivalent about the out-come of this stance. Seeking in the past to broaden its electoral appeal, the party has stopped short of demanding independence from the UK state until recently. Until independence is achieved, the party advocates a con-tinuous process of devolving more power to the Assembly as supported by public referenda. And despite some of the ideological differences among party members, Plaid Cymru has long-embraced a philosophy of “civic” or “inclusive” nationalism based on geographic (rather than ethnic) mem-bership, which is reflected in the party electing both English and Muslim AMs into its ranks. Owing in part to the realities of the Assembly’s limited powers within the UK governance system, Plaid is consistently supportive of Wales’ further integration into Europe.

The Conservative Party competes with Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats for rural votes but also has a solid foothold in the more affluent


urban areas of Wales. It has consistently been the third largest party in the Assembly. Like its UK parent party, the Welsh Conservatives are the most committed to the preservation of the union and its symbols (such as the pound). But whereas the UK Conservative Party has in the main been resistant to devolution, the Welsh Conservatives have steadily increased their support for the Assembly, including a few who now advocate for more Assembly powers. The Welsh Tories have championed some issues traditionally held by the political left (such as environmentalism) and are unquestionably left of the UK Conservative mainstream. Unlike Labour and Plaid, however, the party makes no pretense of supporting socialist policies and is quick to defend the legacy of Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) during regular attacks on her administra-tion in the Assembly’s plenary sessions. The party is the least interested in European integration among the four.

The Liberal Democrats are the smallest group in the National Assembly, holding six seats after each of the Assembly’s three elections. The Liberals (or “Lib Dems” as they are often referred to) are the most decentralized of the Assembly’s three UK-wide parties, a position premised on the party’s laissez-faire approach to individual freedoms and local choice (Laffin 2007). Owing to the party’s roots in Wales as a campaigner for education and agricultural policies, the Liberal’s base of support is divided between farming communities in Mid-Wales (i.e., along the Welsh-English border) and more urban areas with high concentrations of students and teachers. The party has been a consistent supporter of European integration and Welsh devolution, though it stops well short of advocating the full inde-pendence promoted by Plaid Cymru.

The welfare model in Wales

The overriding political debate among the Wales’ four main parties has been about defining the meanings of the Assembly’s original mission: creating policies that meet the distinctive needs of Welsh civil society. It is not an issue of identifying “needs,” however. Welsh per capita income is four-fifths of the UK average and was well below of European aver-ages prior to EU enlargement. Wales is more rural than England, with its two largest cities populated by roughly 300,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, respectively, thus presenting different challenges to policy development and administration. The economy is far less diversified than England or Scotland’s and has come out on the other side of a protracted period of post-1945 industrial contraction (predominantly coal) with an enlarged service base (predominantly tourism) and a shrinking manufacturing

INTRODUCTION 27

sector. Employment is much more concentrated in the public sector (versus England). Some public health problems are more acute and rampant per capita compared to UK averages. The Welsh language, finally, has been in near constant decline since Wales was industrialized in the nineteenth century: roughly one in five residents now speak Welsh, a small but by far more abundant proportion than found among other Celtic language groups in the UK.

As the party of government, Welsh Labour’s response to these and other issues has been promoting a greater commitment to the social wel-fare model than found in many parts of Europe, including the UK as a whole, and even as the salience and power of the welfare state’s traditional champion, the unions, has declined in the UK (Downey and Fenton 2007). Most significantly, Wales has resisted the tide of healthcare privatization introduced in England under New Labour. Within its narrowly defined legislative mandate, the Assembly has also passed legislation to provide free bus passes to the elderly and disabled, free drug prescriptions, free milk to younger school children, and free admission to public museums. This is not only about implementing a form of the social welfare state but also about Welsh identity politics. Welsh Labour leader Rhodri Morgan defines the policy divergence from London as one of putting “clear red water” between Wales and the UK, a symbolic claim of faith to Wales’ political and cultural roots.

In truth, some elements of Labour’s economic model are more clearly aligned to neoliberal restructuring than to socialism, such as a heavy reli-ance on multinational recruitment. And while many welfare policies are undoubtedly popular, the public debate about the purpose and usefulness of the National Assembly continues.

How do elected institutions respond to the competing pressures of answering to the local, the state, and the supranational? When are the activities of parliamentary actors truly in the interest of a national public? How are national publics defined for the purpose of justifying policies? The problems faced by the National Assembly in answering these ques-tions speak to larger challenges to the future of Western democracy only a short distance away from the birthplace of parliamentary politics. The remainder of this book is dedicated to analyzing how political officials in the National Assembly have responded.

2

Nationhood by Negation

Wales has entered the new millennium with a rediscovered pride in nationhood, self-confidence in its cultural identity, and the transforma-tion of its economy well underway. Against a backdrop of Celtic heritage, distinct culture and an ancient language, Wales is in a state of change from post-industrial region to an economically and technologically advanced nation. The establishment of the National Assembly has given legitimacy to Wales’ desire to set its own political agenda within the framework of Westminster and Brussels. With secondary legislative powers, the National Assembly is a significant step forward for those who have argued for the Welsh people to address political issues which require uniquely Welsh solutions. In a less direct way, the establishment of the first parliament on Welsh soil for 400 years is widely credited with fueling the growing sense of confidence among the people of Wales. This greater measure of self-confidence, it seems, has coincided with a more widespread increase in self-belief that Wales can be successful in its own right.

(Welsh Assembly Government, Wales. World Nation Press Packet [2001c: 1])

For if there is one thing to insist on in analysing Welsh culture it is the complex of forced and acquired discontinuities: a broken series of radical shifts, within which we have to mark not only certain social and linguistic continuities but many acts of self-definition by negation, by alternation and by contrast. Indeed it is this culture of Wales, pro-foundly and consciously problematic, which is the real as distinct from the ideological difference from a selective, dominant and hegemonic English culture.

(Raymond Williams, “Wales and England” [1985: 23])

The short introduction to the National Assembly’s press pack, Wales. World Nation, is striking for its uncertainty of meaning. The conflation

of “self-confident” changes in national consciousness, economic viability,


and political empowerment define Wales as a nation half-realized and half-anticipated and yet still in an “advanced” world. Virtually every ensuing statement adds to this tension: it jumps from an unspecified ethnic past to a present sharply defined as after industrialization (what constituted Wales in-between?); it proclaims self-determination within a framework of subordination (is this the popular will that legitimates the Assembly?); it tentatively asserts a causality between a “rediscovered” national pride and devolution (somehow “widely credited” yet in “a less direct way”). The text, in short, is telling about how the National Assembly (or the Assembly Government, at least) is attempting to manage Wales’ “state of change” and define modern Welsh nationhood as the positive valorization and nega-tion of the Welsh past. Claims of “newfound self-confidence” are common in Assembly Government discourse. But what, exactly, is the past from which Wales and the Assembly have emerged to discover it?

The cultural politics of Welsh identity suggested by Raymond Williams (above) offers one answer. Even if skeptical of Williams’ distinction between the real and ideological Wales—or the meaning of a “real” Welsh identity—he is instructive about how the uncertainties of Wales. World Nation, as well as those of devolution in general, can be interpreted through Welsh history. Unquestionably, Wales has known the “forced and acquired discontinuities” of invasion and contact, linguistic development and decline, political annexation and religious separation, and industrial explosion followed by postindustrial decay. But “the Welsh” can also be identified by a living Celtic language, oral folk traditions, and long histo-ries of community and class solidarity. Running through either narrative, one could argue, is a similar process of self-definition by alternation and contrast. This chapter explores how the negations of Welsh cultural and political history are reflected in the design of modern Welsh democracy and policymaking in the National Assembly for Wales. I track these nega-tions through civil and political acts of resistance to incorporation into the political and economic hegemony of a more powerful English/British/UK state, that is, not just “the English” as in Williams’ formulation. The point, however, is not to argue for a clear-cut discontinuity between Wales and the state, or an all-or-nothing division between co-optation and resistance. Rather, the objective is to identify appropriations and annexations of power that paralleled piecemeal extensions of voting rights and territo-rial representation in response to specific social and economic changes in Welsh society. In dialectical fashion, each transformation of the Welsh public sphere and its relation to the UK state can be read as a change in the legitimating conditions of state authority over the social.

I begin with a short review of Wales’ preindustrial history but focus on the eras of industrialization, demographic change, and deindustrialization

NATIONHOOD BY NEGATION 31

that encouraged important changes in Welsh cultural awareness and political activism from the nineteenth century onwards. I connect these histories to the push for political representation in Wales in the 1990s from which devolution emerged, which I argue radically extended the legitimating criteria of UK democracy in two important ways. First, devolu-tion broadened the meaning of democratic governance from the baseline indicator of electoral representation to include specific (read: procedural) modes of governing behavior. Second, the homogenization implied in elec-toral representation was inverted under devolution to regard cultural rep-resentation, or the recognition of difference in politics, as a co-constituting condition of the UK state’s legitimacy in the late twentieth century. Without claiming continuous lines of causality between devolution and longer-term social, economic, and political transformations in Wales, I propose that this work sets the stage for analyzing the legitimacy of Welsh democracy in reference to the parliamentary practices of Assembly officials, which is the focus of the remainder of this book.

Preindustrial Wales

Wales has almost always known some measure of diversity. Historically, this had as much to do with topography as anything: the valleys of South Wales are geographically distinct from the rolling hills of the Mid-Wales borderlands and more rugged terrain of the North Wales mountains, which further shield the northernmost point of the Isle of Anglesey (Ynys Môn) from the south. Poor or nonexistent transportation networks and the demands of agricultural subsistence ensured for many centuries that the overwhelming majority of Welsh experience was local in outlook. Obviously, if Welsh experience was highly localized it does not follow that it was also homogenous. Coastal Wales looked outward to sea as a point of contact with the world of Europe (which included contact by invasion) while Welsh-English border communities were much more integrated into the social and economic hierarchies of England. While many existed by virtue of subsistence farming, a smaller portion enjoyed relative luxury. While a majority lacked literacy, a few practiced in an ancient bardic tradition. For many centuries, one constant across these divides was a shared language.

Distinctly Welsh, Cornish, Scots Gaelic, and other Celtic language groups developed in the sixth century after the Brythonic-speaking peoples of the British Isles were physically separated by the Saxons. In the ninth century, King Offa of Mercia constructed a dyke running roughly along the entirety of the present Welsh-English border to reduce problems


of insurrection from the West. On the Welsh side of this border, Hwyel Dda (or “Hwyel the Good”) managed to unite the majority of the Welsh-speaking territories for a time during the tenth century and successfully codified a corpus of Welsh folk law. By the eleventh century, just prior to the coming of the Normans, all of Wales was ruled by one king (Gruffudd ap Llewelyn). After the Normans, Marcher Lordships were established inside the Welsh-English border to maintain order for the English crown and organize the Welsh nobility within the former’s hierarchy of rule. Alternately, due to cooperation or military limitations, the Welsh were only sporadically up to the task of challenging English rule. In 1284, a Statute of Rhuddlan formally declared English sovereignty over Wales. By 1303, Edward II of England invested his heir as the Prince of Wales in a challenge to the legitimacy of the remaining royal Welsh bloodlines, with numerous fortress-building projects used to reinforce his plan. Collectively and individually, these maneuvers set in sharp relief differences in the cul-tural and legal status of the Welsh and English in an English-dominated state.1 The last significant challenge to English rule came in 1404 when Owain Glyndwr claimed himself to be the rightful Prince of Wales and managed to unite much of the country’s nobility around him. Glyndwr invaded a sliver of England before being pushed back into the northern Welsh mountains where he eventually died; however, he did establish a Welsh parliament (or Senedd) for a short while and his cultural impact has long-outlasted his reign.2 The Acts of Union (1536 and 1542) passed under Henry VIII ended any pretense of Welsh independence from England: with the Act of Union in 1536, English law replaced Welsh law and the Welsh language was banned from official use; with the 1542 Act, English courts replaced Welsh courts. Though these structural transformations may have served to justify English hegemony in a technical sense, evidence suggests that Welsh continued to be spoken in minor courts as a means of resist-ing social and political Anglicization (Jenkins, Suggett, and White 2001). Ironically, the English king also opened the door to the survival of the Welsh language in the name of religious conversion.

Henry’s parliament decreed in 1567 that the New Testament be trans-lated into Welsh: an unintended effect was the institutionalization of language literacy within the folk culture. Though the Welsh aristocracy was now in the orbit of London, Welsh society held on to many of its tradi-tions. In particular, a movement for Nonconformist religion in Wales—a nonhierarchical Protestantism that was synonymous with Welsh language use—took shape by the mid-seventeenth century in defiance of the Church of England, which at the time was deeply invested in reproducing monarchal power (see Zaller 2007). While the legitimacy of incorporation was established within a legal and religious matrix of domination, in other


words, the deeper justification of English power was implicitly challenged by linguistic, religious, and geographic differences that set Wales apart from England on the eve of major changes in the political economy of the United Kingdom.

Industrialization and social transformation

Industrialization in Wales can be read as a major transformational period in the legitimation of the British/UK state during which Wales was simul-taneously drawn closer to English experience and defined as deviating from this metanarrative of socioeconomic and political transformation. Most important to this difference was that Wales lacked the economic diversification characterizing many parts of England even while Welsh industry contributed to the aggrandizement of English economic inter-ests. Industrialization did not begin in Wales quite as early as in places like Manchester, but the combination of demand for Welsh resources, major population shifts, and infrastructural developments soon put Wales at the center of the UK’s drive toward industrialization and Empire. Slate mining in North Wales was something of a precursor to these events, but whole-sale change primarily emanated from the south. Initially, the South Wales valleys had all the important ingredients for making iron: ore, coal, water, and wood. Some iron works date to the seventeenth century, but massive iron works of the eighteenth century in the southern valleys drew workers from all over Wales and beyond into the newly urbanized areas, anticipat-ing even greater demographic shifts in the mid-nineteenth century. The efforts of one Welsh iron baron in particular (William Crawshay) led to the construction of an elaborate system of canals leading from the valleys to emerging port towns in the south, which would provide a template for later developments in Wales’ industrial transport infrastructure.

As important as the Welsh iron industry was to UK industrialization, it was small in comparison to the gains ultimately yielded from the rich coal seams of the southern valleys. Welsh anthracite was widely recognized as a key source of high quality fuel for the engines of industry and the machinery of imperial expansion, but further changes were needed in the workforce, technology, and infrastructure of Wales to realize its potential. Socially, widespread poverty in the mid-nineteenth century encouraged the mass movement of people out of rural Welsh communities and into emerging industrial production centers in the south (Morgan 1982: 8). Technologically, the development of a mechanized railway system in the mid-nineteenth century created greater access to coal and the coal industry’s greatest client. While depopulating the rural countryside, industrialization produced larger,


tightly knit centers of shared working class experience, though that experience was undoubtedly plural in terms of gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Unlike the out-migrations characterizing other European histories of the period, Wales experienced a net gain in population. Large numbers of rural Welsh brought with them the values of community self-sufficiency, religious Nonconformity, and spoken and written Welsh language literacy. Thousands of Scottish, Irish, and English émigrés also poured in, some of whom would form the managerial classes in mining operations. Italians and Poles (re)introduced Catholic religion as well as distinct languages and cultural traditions from mainland Europe. A smaller but still sizable num-ber came from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to mainly settle in the coal shipping centers of the South Wales coast. The political implications of these transformations were just as important as their economic effects upon soci-ety. Industrialization, in short, helped to diminish the role of the monarch in politics and shifted nineteenth century political debates from questions of Church and State to the issues of society and economy.

Politics 1832–1918

Notwithstanding the famous declaration that the Great Reform Act of 1832 transformed parliament from an object of public opinion to the instrument of public opinion (Habermas 1989: 62–64), UK politics for most of the nineteenth century was essentially a power struggle between landed and aristocratic interests. This is not to suggest that the act’s electoral reforms did not significantly impact UK politics (see Caramani 2003), but that the development of the public sphere was far from straight-forward or uniform in terms of representing diverse public interests. At the start of the nineteenth century, 234 of 558 members of parliament (MPs) served due to their ties to the aristocracy and about one in four parliamen-tarians were married to the daughters of other MPs (Melton 2001: 23). For about two-thirds of this period, voting was reserved for property owning males in cities and excluded the majority of the working poor and all women. These circumstances gave rise to intense but unsuccessful riots in Newport, Wales as part of a UK-wide Chartist Movement. More important to Wales over the long-term, widespread economic turmoil and religious dissent across the UK encouraged the formation of the Conservative Party in the 1830s. The Conservatives stood as the party of the Union, the Crown, the Anglican Church, and middle-class consciousness. Laying claim to protect a vanishing social morality in British society, the “Tories” dominated UK politics for most of the century, including electoral dominance in Wales for several decades. Whatever the electoral advantages


enjoyed, however, it is difficult to see how Conservative ideology resonated with Welsh working-class experience.

Rapid urbanization in South Wales resulted in overcrowding and, at times, misplaced race riots similar to those occurring in Liverpool and other major shipping areas (Balfour 1970: 64). Poor urban planning led to tuber-culosis, cholera, typhoid, and other health crises in the industrial centers of Merthyr, Cardiff, and Swansea. A “sliding scale” wage system, moreover, pegged miners’ earnings to the rise and fall of coal prices on international markets between 1875 and 1903. At times the negative impacts of indus-trialization were felt more acutely in Wales than in England. An official report on children’s employment in British mines, for example, indicates that more young boys were employed in the South Wales coalfields than in any other mining area of the UK; from 1880 to 1900, 48 percent of all mine deaths (claiming 1,117 lives) occurred in Wales despite the fact that it accounted for only 18 percent of the UK’s total underground workforce (Davies 1993: 395, 442, 472). Ensuing public debates about the role of the state in an industrial economy came to define rights of citizenship in terms of worker security and job safety, nationality and ethnicity, education, health, individual freedoms of association, and democratic participation in politics (see Finer 1997: 1481; Dyson 1980: 120).

The Liberal Party emerged at midcentury to take up many of these causes. The Liberals, who splintered off from the Whigs (once the chief parliamentary adversary of the Conservatives), eventually proved to be major political players in Wales as well as in Scotland (McCrone 1992: 150). Liberal ideology was a fusion of laissez-faire individuality, sup-port for parliamentary power (over the Crown), and religious morality informed by rural experience, which in Wales found its expression in Nonconformist Methodism. Often drawing from the same rural and/or middle-class base of support as the Conservatives, the Liberal Party distin-guished itself by supporting Welsh religious tradition and calling for more working-class rights within the existing structure of industry. Equally, very local issues such as temperance, Welsh chapel-sponsored education, tithes, and rural land reform distinguished the Liberal agenda in Wales as politically radical. Changes in the UK electoral system granted the Liberals unprecedented opportunities to bring these causes to the attention of the parliament in London. The Reform Act of 1867 immediately doubled the size of the Welsh electorate; with the Ballot Act of the same year, all eligible persons were also guaranteed “free and equal voting.” The election of 1868 thus favored the Liberal Party in Wales, which for the first time took more seats than the Conservatives.

Although Liberal politics of the late nineteenth century were syn-onymous with iconic leaders such as William Gladstone at the UK


level, the party was led in Wales by figures like William Abraham (or “Mabon,” a name taken from Welsh folk legend) who, like other valleys MPs of the period, carried coalfield constituencies on a Liberal-Labour ticket. Navigating a fine line between representing rural Welsh values and advocating for a socially distinct industrial underclass, the Liberal Party no doubt tapped into a broad base of public support, which ampli-fied its electoral power with the passage of the Parliamentary Reform Act in 1884. The act enfranchised all male householders and a signifi-cant proportion of male lodgers found in all county constituencies of the UK. It spelled the end of aristocratic dominance in British politics (G. Williams 1985: 219). The party’s support surged across the UK; in Wales, the Liberals controlled 30 of 34 seats after the General Election of 1885 (the rest going Conservative) (Davies 1993: 448). The legitimacy of UK politics had thus shifted significantly in the narrow (but important) terms of electoral participation/representation. Yet this consolidating move also revealed fissures in the homogenization of a UK public sphere constructed along purely legalistic lines of citizenship. Cultural homogeni-zation was a deeper, much more problematic matter.

Liberalism and Welsh cultural politics

Liberalism was more than an alternative to Conservative policies in Wales near the end of the nineteenth century. The party became connected to an emergent nationalist movement intended to revive what was seen as a declining Welsh culture under industrialization. Wales was no doubt a very different place in 1900 when compared to 1800. Less than half the total pop-ulation spoke Welsh at the turn of the twentieth century, and one-third of all persons in Wales were born elsewhere,3 which inspired a variety of responses from Welsh society. Cultural campaigner Iolo Morganwg, for instance, revived the eisteddfod, an ancient poetic competition long out of practice, in 1861. Later, the Welsh flag—the red dragon on a field of green and white—was taken as a national icon from its origins as a regional adminis-trative symbol of the Middle Ages (Morgan 1983: 90). In 1886, Cymru Fydd formed as a political response to changes in Welsh society. Largely made up of an educated middle class (including many London-based expats), it was influenced by the artistic sensibilities of continental Romanticism and the burgeoning nationalist movements of Ireland and Scotland, the latter of which were manifestations of longer-term debates about national historiog-raphy in the “Celtic” UK (Gruffydd 2001: 366; Kidd 1993).

A political correlate of cultural campaigning was a push for Welsh Home Rule, which garnered substantial attention from the late 1800s until the early 1920s, though without producing significant results


(Keating 2001: 208). Along with Home Rule, Cymru Fydd advocated for the preservation of the Welsh language and the maintenance of self-defined cultural traditions, including traditionally defined gender roles. Cymru Fydd enjoyed close ties to Welsh Liberal MP and UK prime min-ister Lloyd George who was a consistent proponent for Wales in London. Nevertheless, the Liberals failed to deliver political autonomy for Wales in contrast to Ireland (which was split into a Republic and Northern Ireland province in 1922) and Scotland (which was awarded an admin-istrative Scottish Office in 1885). Despite these setbacks, the Liberal Party contributed to the founding of a national university, library, and museum, as well as a Welsh Department of Education and Welsh Board of Health during the height of its power. The party also fulfilled a long-term goal of the religious community in 1920: disesta blishing Welsh Nonconformist chapels from the Church of England. With these achievements, Liberal dominance was promoted as a working class and moral success against aristocratic interests from an undemocratic era. However, the party’s emphases on rurality and linguistic/religious tradition did not always keep pace with the concerns of an increasingly industrialized society gripped by economic instability at home and world war abroad. Mackintosh (1968: 145–146) writes that during this period there was

a consciousness of being Welsh but with a very different emphasis as between the rural, Welsh-speaking north and the industrial English-speaking valleys of the south. The experiences of the inter-war years deepened this divi-sion. The [world depression] had a devastating effect [on employment] … [which] confirmed the doctrine that the real problems were social and class problems. Language and culture were an irrelevance to starving men, the way out being clearly a victory for Labour in Westminster and progress towards social justice.

Given these gaps in the party’s capacity to represent Wales’ socioeconomic diversity, it is not surprising that the Liberals’ decline in Wales was no less spectacular than its ascension. To the party’s critics, a lack of full enfran-chisement in the UK effectively meant that “wealthy members of the landed class yielded their place to wealthy industrialists and professional men—that is, one elite was replacing another” (Davies 1993: 449). Most pointedly in Wales, the free trade ideology of Liberalism was at odds with the working-class consciousness developing in the south, even if a lack of electoral alternatives secured consistent Liberal support until the early twentieth century. To stem the tide of proletarianization, the Liberals relied on coalition voting with the Conservatives during elections to ensure seats


were not lost to the labor movement, but this eventually did not prove enough for the party to maintain its hegemony in Welsh politics.

Industrial unionization and the rise of Labour

Entering the twentieth century, the Liberal Party’s Nonconformist support faded as chapel leaders decided that Christianity was more compatible with an apolitical individualism than with political activism and collecti-vism (Pope 1998: 67). Socialist organizers in the coal valleys of Wales were more than willing to fill the void in the Liberals and Conservatives’ ability to represent working-class interests. The first trade unions appeared in Wales during the 1830s, but it was not until the 1870s that they were on a firm footing in working-class society. Out of an initial phase of riotous and disjointed responses to poor working and living conditions, Welsh unions by the end of the nineteenth century proved capable of organizing mining communities for strikes and other forms of nonviolent industrial resistance. In 1898, the South Wales Miner’s Federation (or “the Fed”) formed to become one of the best-organized unions in the UK, with a political outlook that was both local and international in posture.4 With over 160,000 members at its peak in the early twentieth century, the Fed carried out major strikes while providing the community services needed to sustain such events. Activism was also organized outside the immediacy of the mines: women were outlawed from working in the mines but played key roles in feeding neighborhoods in times of hardship, lobbying local authorities for improved health and education conditions, and publicly ridiculing scab labor during strikes (see Williams 1998; Evans and Jones 2001; John 1991). Union radicalism did not initially translate into direct participation in politics. A strong syndicalist movement (for example) questioned the merits of engaging in a political process that would ulti-mately support the UK’s capitalist system. Opinion was divided on key issues of ideology, organization, and strategy, but Home Rule for Wales, a key platform of the Liberals, was generally considered the antithesis of socialism’s goal of building international collectivism, an objective for which the miners of South Wales were most certainly dedicated. Class, not nationality, defined the struggle between capital and labor.

Eventually, a majority of miners saw value in organized political activ-ity and the Labour Party was formed at a meeting of the British Trades Union Congress in 1900.5 The party grew to dominate Welsh politics over the next few decades by organizing communities and building a local infrastructure of miner’s halls and education centers. With little exception, voting Labour became synonymous with living in the coalfields, a virtue passed down from one generation to the next for many generations


(see Morgan 1982: 272). It was not that the Liberal Party vanished the moment Labour arrived. Rather, it was a transitional period when mining communities changed in response to developments in civil society. Lewis writes (2002: 91–92) that

[T]he monopoly status the chapels enjoyed within most Welsh communities was being challenged by a range of forces by 1900. Some of these were social, such as the intrusion of non-Welsh in-migrants … or the spread of other sources of entertainment and diversion, such as the early cinema, spectator sport and the public house. The development of miner’ institutes outside the direct control of the Nonconformist churches created alternative venues for community events and informal education. But it is the emergence of the agencies of organized labour … its districts, lodges and officials, which is often cited as one of the key factors behind the relative loss in authority and status of the chapels within significant areas of Welsh society …. [T]he lodge did not replace the chapel; rather there was a relative loss of power, as an alternative leadership emerged …. At the same time, the chapel remained the single most important influence on the outlook and mentality of many active trade unionists in Wales well into this century. It inculcated a belief in some kind of objective truth, some view of the world and the processes which make it function that could be revealed by a book. It is neither trite nor fanciful to see the links between the close textual analysis employed in chapel Bible classes and the attempts to decipher and interpret the thoughts to Marx and Engels in the class of the Pleb’s League.

The UK Labour Party’s first independent (i.e., non-Liberal-Labour) MP, Keir Hardie, was elected in 1906 from Merthyr, Wales. Reflecting the con-tinuities of and tensions within Wales’ political past, Hardie was avowedly socialist but also a supporter of Welsh (and Scottish) Home Rule. The Labour movement gathered steam with this victory: by 1908, for example, the Fed broke ties with the Liberals to officially affiliate with Labour. The party matured into a major political power with full adult enfranchise-ment achieved in 1928. With the added context that Home Rule faded from political interest during the economic crisis of the interwar years, enfranchisement spelled the end of Liberal Party dominance in UK and Welsh politics. In Wales, it also meant the Conservatives would consis-tently finish third in elections throughout this period.

Labour’s strength, like that of the trade unions, was derived from its ability to organize communities. Practical issues of local service delivery—such as child and maternal welfare or housing—were just as important as promoting the ideology of socialism as mining communities struggled to adjust to changes in the postwar economy (Tanner 2002: 123). Key industries that were nationalized during the war were reprivatized with


resulting job losses. Global depression reinforced economic problems, resulting in hundreds of mine closures and higher unemployment: in 1932, for instance, 43 percent of insured men were unemployed (Davies 1993: 576). Whereas the population of Wales exploded in the mid- to late 1800s, it now imploded: mass migration out of the valleys during the 1920s and 1930s alone resulted in a net population loss of 500,000 people (Jones 1999). Outside the coalfields, Labour struggled to shake off public opinion that the party was antireligious, antirural, antinational and anti-Welsh (Tanner 2000: 115). With Labour as a whole unprepared to stray from the path of international collectivism, one unintended con-sequence of the Liberals’ demise was that now no party campaigned for distinctly Welsh policies in Westminster. Filling this void, political nation-alism reemerged with the founding of Plaid Cymru(The Party of Wales), then titled Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist Party).

The return of nationalism

Full enfranchisement may have homogenized UK citizenship as a legiti-mating condition of parliamentary power, but arguably not in an absolute sense. Plaid Cymru was founded in 1925 (i.e., just ahead of the Scottish National Party in 1928) as a political response to Anglicization, indus-trialization, and cultural-linguistic declines in Welsh society. The 1921 Census recorded the first absolute (as opposed to proportional) decline in the number of Welsh speakers, down by 50,000 to 929,000 persons, or 37.2 percent of the population (Morgan 1982: 197–198). Not unlike many continental nationalisms of the era, Plaid Cymru expressed concerns over the loss of cultural traditions centered on ideals of rural community (Sherrington 1980; Smith 1999: 144). Binaries of geographic, economic, and linguistic difference thus defined the limits of Welsh cultural inclusion and exclusion with the largely rural, more religious regions of north-ern and western Welsh-speaking Wales favorably posited in contrast to the industrialized/Anglicized southeast. As Smith (1999: 143) writes of Plaid’s ideology during this period, “South was the prime example of the destruction of Welsh civilization and history.” Yet, unlike the nationalist movement in Northern Ireland at the time, Plaid’s early aim was to realize “dominion status” within the UK, that is, well short of a full-blown push for Welsh independence (Osmond 1985: 225; Morgan 1982: 204). And in contrast to the electoral gains of Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland after 1922, Plaid (similar to the Scottish Nationalist Party) was not in an immediate position to win parliamentary seats. As a pressure group, how-ever, it was capable to mobilizing public interest in the defense of Welsh cultural and economic rights. Under the leadership of cofounder Saunders


Lewis, Plaid Cymru advocated for Welsh language protections, a return of religious morality in society, and the practice of radical protest to achieve these goals. The latter was achieved sensationally in 1935 when Lewis and two others were charged with burning down a Royal Air Force Bombing School in Wales in objection to the UK state’s military presence. Though Plaid’s membership only numbered a few hundred at the time, the public’s reaction is telling about the potential appeal of an avowedly Welsh political group: the first trial, held in Wales, ended in acquittal but the three were found guilty after a second trail in England. Though the party’s member-ship grew, its protest strategy did not translate into electoral success until after the Second World War.

Labour, the welfare state, and political nationalism

The Labour Party took power in Westminster in the immediate postwar period. Although the economic base of industrial support had been weakened in the interwar years, the calamitous state of the UK economy led many (such as William Beveridge) to support a stronger role for the state in protecting UK citizens from industrial capitalism’s worst effects. Winston Churchill’s Conservative Government was voted out in 1945, paving the way for Labour’s Clement Attlee to realize his party’s long-standing objective: building a socialist welfare state in the UK. Most important, perhaps, was the creation of a universal health care system in 1948, which was guided by iconic Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan. The govern-ment also nationalized the coal and steel industries, the Bank of England, communications facilities, and railroads, among other enterprises. The UK economy nonetheless slumped in the aftershock of war, particularly in single industry export zones like the Welsh coalfields. The UK economy as whole rebounded during the 1950s, including the economy of Wales, but the size of the coal industry and the strength of its unions were in significant decline. Though Labour support would hold strong in Wales for the next three decades, the Conservatives returned to power in the UK in 1951 (and held on until 1964) to denationalize several industries.

Despite UK-wide economic concerns, Welsh cultural and economic issues still managed a place at the parliamentary table after the war, which were aided in part by the campaigning of Welsh-issues advocates in the Labour Party like James Griffiths. Welsh society was well behind UK socioeconomic averages, and the contraction of coal and steel only served to reinforce this divide. Both Conservative and Labour Governments created a number of Welsh-only institutions and government positions and Cardiff, the largest city in Wales, was officially recognized as the first Welsh capitol in 1955.6 The idea of Home Rule for Wales was aided by a


Parliament for Wales petition campaign, which proved unsuccessful but in so doing raised public awareness about Wales’ minority status in London’s decision-making process. Even more significant, the city of Liverpool announced plans in 1956 to flood the Tryweryn Valley in northeast Wales to support its water needs, thus galvanizing support for Plaid Cymru after decades of relative inconsequence in UK and Welsh politics. In addition to these issues of autonomy, the continued decline of the Welsh language now spread into its rural strongholds.7 By the 1960s, comparatively low Welsh property values encouraged English retirees to begin settling in Wales’ western and northwestern regions, thereby threatening the cultural continuities in the remaining linguistic heartlands. Perhaps the most cul-turally significant response came in the form of a radio address, “The Fate of the Language,” delivered by Plaid cofounder Saunders Lewis in 1962: essentially, he argued that the survival of the Welsh language was the key to the future of Wales as a distinct culture and nation. The broadcast was partially responsible for inspiring the formation of a new political pressure group, Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society), which campaigned for Welsh language rights through nonviolent civil disobedi-ence. (I address this issue in Chapter 4.) With a growing base of support, Plaid transformed itself from a relatively miniscule (if vocal) pressure group in the 1950s to a political party with parliamentary aspirations in the 1960s. In 1966, the party broke through this barrier when its leader, Gwynfor Evans, was elected MP for Carmarthen.

The Welsh Office and devolution

The legitimacy of addressing Wales-specific issues within the UK political system gained ground even as Labour maintained its hegemony in Welsh electoral politics. After a period of relative indifference to Wales-only policies, more Labour Party members began to argue the case for some measure of Welsh devolution, owing in part to the acute and distinct nature of socioeconomic problems in Wales and also to the resurgence of Welsh nationalism. Some Welsh Labour MPs began campaigning within the House of Commons to establish a Welsh Office fully connected to the government cabinet. Despite resistance within the party, notably including National Health Service founder and Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan, Labour committed itself to the project during the General Election of 1959. Following a Labour victory in 1964, the Welsh Office and a Secretary of State for Wales were jointly realized. No doubt an advance upon the previ-ous structure of governance over Wales, the Welsh Office was ultimately responsible for carrying out whatever policies the ruling party in London


saw fit, even if governance did not always proceed in that manner. While this may have reduced nationalist aspirations, the Labour Party faced greater challenges in the ensuing decade.

The Conservative Government of Edward Heath was elected in 1970 on the promise of reducing the power of the unions and denationalizing industries to make the UK economy more responsive to changes in the global economy. When Labour returned to Whitehall in 1974, the party could no longer maintain its commitments to past goals and aspirations. Most notably, Labour prime minister Callaghan refused to increase wages in the remaining nationalized industries (which still included coal), thus creating tensions between the party’s leadership and its grassroots and contributing to the decline in the strength of UK’s unionized workforce. Although support for Labour remained relatively strong in South Wales, the party was deeply unpopular at the UK level, and nationalist parties in both Wales and Scotland made significant inroads during this period. Plaid Cymru controlled three parliamentary seats, and the Scottish National Party (SNP) held 11 seats after the General Election of 1974. Across the Irish Sea, the creation of a Northern Ireland Office (in 1972) and Northern Ireland Assembly (in 1973) reintroduced a modicum of democratic representation after decades of direct rule, though the ensuing sectarian violence (known as the Troubles) resulted in its abrupt suspension.

To address the growth of nationalism in Wales and Scotland, the Labour Party adopted a campaign pledge in 1974 to hold public referenda on creating an elected Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament. In 1979, Callaghan’s Labour Government fulfilled this pledge amid a tremendous backlash within his party, again including many high-profile Labour MPs from Wales. The reasons for opposition ranged from the technical to the ideological,8 but the end result was an uneven effort put forth by a fully committed Plaid Cymru and a lukewarm Labour Party. With an ineffec-tive campaign on the ground and broad public opposition to Labour in general, voters rejected the devolution referendum almost four to one in Wales, though the result was closer (but still unsuccessful) in Scotland. Both parties were faced with reassessing their political goals afterwards, which was punctuated by the Conservatives’ return to parliamentary power later that year. Plaid Cymru had to confront perceptions that it was narrowly focused on Welsh separatism and/or anti-English Welsh language protections. Labour, on the other hand, saw its economic model run aground and faced criticisms that it was “dominated by the unions and run by left-wingers antagonistic to the interests of the majority” (Fielding 2000: 369). The failure of the devolution referenda, in fact, brought the Labour Government under attack in Westminster, ultimately precipitating a General Election (on the back of an SNP-led vote of no confidence in the


government) that redrew the balance of political power in UK. Ironically, the next seventeen years of Conservative dominance would help deliver what neither Plaid nor Labour could in 1979.

Thatcherism and devolution

It is telling that Margaret Thatcher launched her bid to become Conservative prime minister in Cardiff, the Welsh capitol. If anything, she had learned a lesson from 1972 when the combination of an international oil crisis and a domestic miners’ strike helped to bring down Edward Heath’s Conservative Government. The formula was simple: control the trade unions or face elec-toral catastrophe. By bringing her message to Wales, Thatcher made clear her determination to take the unions and the British Left on directly as a first order of business. The Thatcher mantra (now known as neoliberalism) was straightforward, if controversial: privatization and deregulation frees the economy to grow in response to a flexible global market, which ulti-mately provides prosperity for employers and opportunity for employees alike. Structurally, this meant selling off nationalized industries like coal and encouraging overseas investment in the UK workforce.

Multinational investment policies in Wales can be traced back to the Labour governments of the 1960s, but Thatcher’s denationalization strategy connected Wales to the global economy on an unprecedented scale.9 Privatization was particularly hard on Wales where 43 percent of the working population was in the public sector (Balsom 1985: 10–11). A denationalized Welsh steel industry contracted from 70,000 to 18,000 workers. Over 100,000 jobs were lost in the coal valleys by 1982. The last major stand of the unions against Thatcherism came with a UK-wide miner’s strike in 1984–1985. Thatcher refused to give into union wage demands, and deep mining all but ended in Wales.10 The manufacturing and service industries that were substituted for heavy industry brought large numbers of Welsh women into the workplace. Not unlike other world regions undergoing economic reorganization, the shift to women’s employment resulted in conditions of lower pay, declining job skill development, and losses in local economic investment. Redevelopment efforts were concentrated on attracting multinational branch plants along the major roadways of the South Wales coast, thus exacerbating the pressures on valleys communities to survive.

Thatcher’s centralized approach to economic policy was paralleled by her approach to governing Wales, which, it should be noted, was never completely eschewed by Welsh voters.11 After an initial period in which Secretaries of State for Wales pursued their respective agendas relatively unfettered by central government control, the latter Thatcher


Governments utilized the administrative powers of the Welsh Office to implement reforms that were largely unwelcomed in Wales (Griffiths 1996), a pattern paralleled in the case of Scotland.12 Thatcher, for example, shifted decision-making power from Welsh local government authorities to central government in London, which encouraged the Welsh political community to develop a Wales European Centre in Brussels to represent its non-Conservative views in Europe. The Conservative Governments of Thatcher (1979–1990) and then John Major (1990–1997) grew increas-ingly unpopular in Wales and were accused of unaccountable governance in their running of the Welsh Office, particularly under the leadership of Secretary of State John Redwood. One consequence was that Thatcherism created spaces of common ground in the UK for nationalist, Liberal, and sympathetic Labour politicians to redevelop a case for devolution, which by 1992 was a stated electoral goal of the UK Labour Party under the lead-ership John Smith.

Plaid Cymru, meanwhile, shifted back and forth between a left-of-center pragmatism and a socialist-left politics under the leadership of Dafydd Wigley and then Dafydd Elis-Thomas, respectively, before moving back to the center with the return of Wigley as party president at the end of the 1980s. The party widened its appeal by promoting an “inclusive nationalism” as a viable option for social and interest groups at the margins of the political mainstream (McAllister 2001: 81–82). In doing so, Plaid positioned itself to compete in Labour-controlled valleys communities and the urban centers of South Wales, though without garnering electoral results.

The latter 1990s were Labour’s hour to return to the center stage of UK politics, and the party’s popularity should not be overlooked as a contributing factor to Welsh and Scottish devolution in 1997. Tony Blair’s New Labour project was heralded by it architects as the “Third Way” between traditional British socialism and economic conservatism. Accepting many aspects of Thatcher’s social and economic policies, the “Third Way” is concerned with restructuring the UK’s commitment to the welfare state by delineating a new set of citizenship rights around the concepts of individual responsibility and access to the market.13 Breaking from the now-unpopular Conservative legacy, however, Blair also called for a wide-ranging program of political modernization. Most important for Wales and Scotland, Blair (1996: 56) linked these democratic reforms to devolving power to three of the UK’s four nations, a policy he inherited after John Smith died unexpectedly, and which came in synch with changes in the UK’s local governance structure that were favorable to devolution.New Labour won in an historic landslide in 1997 and was set to realize its reform agenda. The Scotland and Wales Bill for devolution was the first to be introduced in the Commons after Labour took power.


Building Welsh democracy

The Government intends that the Assembly should be a modern, inclusive institution. It will gain the trust of the Welsh people if it conducts its affairs openly and properly. The Government will therefore ensure that the Assembly … is a modern democratic institution that reflects the diversity of Wales, promotes sustainable development, and provides equal opportuni-ties for all.

(UK Government’s White Paper on Devolution [Gay 1997: 11])

As the White Paper on Devolution attests, the legitimacy of devolution to Wales was predicated on a wholesale transformation in the insti-tutional mechanics and parliamentary culture of UK democracy. In addition to justifying devolution as a means of addressing the particular socioeconomic needs of Wales, in other words, the National Assembly was promoted as a negation of the Westminster model by virtue of a legislative style intended to both localize and broaden the meanings of political participation and compromise in Wales. The calls for inclu-sion, transparency, and modernity contained in the government’s White Paper on Devolution, in fact, extend well beyond a self-evident declara-tion of the Assembly’s legitimacy vis-à-vis democratic elections: they more fundamentally suggest that devolution would ultimately be judged and justified in reference to the institutional practices and procedures of Welsh governance. This stance was not entirely preordained, or merely reflecting wider patterns of change and reformation in gover-nance, but was rather the product of intense negotiations about what Welsh democracy should become (see Chaney and Fevre 2001). These discussions occurred among Welsh civil society, elite groups of planners, and parliamentarians in London.

The first step in creating an elected Assembly was winning public approval through a referendum. In concert with a legislative review pro-cess (described below), a “Yes” campaign committee formed in late 1996 to create a cross-party assemblage of high-level politicians to deliver a refer-endum vote scheduled for May 1997. This included participation from the Labour Party, Plaid Cymru, and the Liberal Democrats, a reborn but still small remnant of the old Liberal Party. With the Labour Party’s uneven commitments to the 1979 campaign still in memory, Plaid Cymru vowed to only play a supporting role in order to encourage Labour’s full partici-pation (McAllister 2001: 86). A Yes Campaign Steering Committee initially met in secret to minimize coordinated resistance to devolution, but the message was clear by early 1997: “Wales deserves a voice” (Yes Campaign Steering Committee 1997). There were also important differences in


the campaign strategies of each party involved: whereas Plaid Cymru pushed for legislative parity with Scotland as part of its overall strategy, for instance, Labour argued only for devolution’s general relevance, not the specific balance of power that would be achieved. Labour distributed materials claiming that a “no” vote would “leave Wales stuck in the past, losing out and lagging behind the rest of Britain” (Labour Party 1997). Devolution was thus promoted within Wales’ civil and political arenas as a natural and necessary transformation of UK politics. At stake, so the argu-ment went, was the legitimacy of UK democracy itself.

Daily press conferences, door-to-door leafleting, advertising, and tele-phone campaigning were carried out to win votes. Yes Campaign constitu-ency branches were formed and numerous interest groups (e.g., Artists Say Yes, Lawyers Say Yes, etc.) were established. A few members of the Conservative Party also came out in favor of devolution, but this was an exception. The Yes Campaign had to compete with a smaller Conservative Party-led “No” Campaign that was spearheaded by Nicolas Bourne, who would eventually become the leader of the Conservative Party in the Assembly. While media coverage was generally supportive of devolution, the Yes campaign also had to respond to press allegations that it was domi-nated by a Labour elite more concerned with spin than reaching voters.15 In the end, the referendum vote could not have been closer, nor could have public interest been more ambivalent: it passed with 50.3 percent of the vote, that is, by a 6,721 vote margin out of 1.1 million votes cast, which involved only half of the Welsh electorate. But with devolution supported by a majority of voters, the next step became creating a legislative frame-work that could win parliamentary approval.

The Legislative process

Tony Blair placed Secretary of State for Wales Ron Davies in charge of coordinating the details of devolution and developing a strategy to pass the Government of Wales Bill. The challenge was now selling the idea of devolution (again) and determining its content. Three discourses defined Welsh democratic difference in this context: modernity, transparency, and inclusion. “Inclusion” took on several meanings in the process. Initially, it was about political parity. The Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru were supportive of devolution in principle but were wary of the potential for Labour to dominate the Assembly in a winner-take-all electoral system (Chaney and Fevre 2001; Chaney, Hall, and Pithouse 2001). In response, a hybrid system was designed to elect 40 AMs from constituency seats (cor-responding to MPs’ electoral districts) and 20 through a system of propor-tional representation that selects four AMs each in five different electoral


regions. Inclusion, however, also came to signify public participation in the political process: women, ethnic minorities, and different regions of Wales were to be specifically represented.

The UK government sponsored several public consultations across Wales involving elected officials, civil servants, and civil interests to help determine the shape of Welsh democracy. A National Assembly Advisory Group and a subsequent Standing Orders Commission were created to develop a consensus about how the institution should operate. Many of the recommendations that were implemented implicitly challenged the legitimacy of the political process in Westminster, including: the promo-tion of “family-friendly” working patterns (Tuesday through Thursday sessions, ending promptly in the afternoon); more informal parliamentary procedures (circular seating; AMs addressing each other by first names as opposed to “Right Honorable Member/Gentleman/Lady”); fully bilingual institutional operations (from parliamentary translation services to Welsh language elevators); and the use of information technologies in the policy process (such as electronic voting and use of the Internet during plenary sessions).

In Westminster, the Labour Government set out to secure the required votes by convincing MPs that devolution was both in Wales’ economic interests and an inevitability of UK political modernization. Knowing that public support was much greater in Scotland than in Wales, the parliamentary vote on Welsh devolution was placed behind the vote on a Scottish Parliament to build momentum in Westminster, just as the Welsh referendum had been scheduled to follow a more certain referendum in Scotland. Former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies reinforced to me during an interview that the Scottish experience under Thatcher was an important influence on the process:

If there was one single issue that determined the Scots were pro-devolution it was the fact that Mrs. Thatcher had used their separate legislative status to introduce the poll tax … [and] literally use them as an experiment. The Scots went off the wall. They were determined they were going to have devo-lution. And, in a sense, you can’t argue that we are going to have devolution for Scotland and not for Wales. It was an inconsistency.

(Interview September 9, 2003)

The Government of Wales Act was passed in 1998 by narrowly defining the Assembly’s legislative competence. Foremost, the act did not cleanly divide the executive and legislative spheres of parliamentary activity. The Assembly, moreover, could only pass “secondary” legislation, that is, legislation created in and passed on from London (or Brussels through


London). Assembly legislation could be modified to suit Welsh policy goals but only within the scope of the original UK legislation. Moreover, the Assembly lacked (and still lacks) taxation powers (unlike Scotland) and the Assembly budget was (and remains) set entirely by Whitehall. On the other hand, the Government of Wales Act institutionalized the discourses of modernity, inclusion, and transparency by creating a policy committee structure that brought together government ministers, bureau-crats, opposition and backbench AMs, and civil society to discuss policy. Not only were these interests to (literally) have seats at the table, but civil servants would now give evidence before AMs and the media, a sea change in UK bureaucratic behavior. At the purely symbolic level of institutional change, the Welsh Office was renamed the Wales Office. Having defined Welsh democracy in these terms, the remaining task was electing the first members of the National Assembly for Wales.

Labour won the most seats (28 of 60) in the inaugural elections of 1999. Plaid Cymru surpassed its own expectations by taking 17, including seats in Labour strongholds of the Rhondda and Islwyn. The Conservative Party, largely existing on the electoral margins of Wales for a century, polled third with nine seats, eight of which were won through proportional represen-tation. The Liberal Democrats placed fourth with the remaining six seats. Turnout, however, was relatively low (46 percent) and many AMs were new to high-level politics and working within a new variation in parlia-mentary democracy.

Representing Wales in the National Assembly

The majority of the Assembly’s first candidates were recruited from out-side the highest political ranks, which helped set Welsh democracy apart from the pattern of Westminster politics. A few did come in with experi-ence as MPs or civil servants and one AM, former Plaid president Dafydd Elis-Thomas, represented Wales in the House of Lords. A few also had experience working as staff for other Welsh MPs. In contrast, most AMs had worked outside of the UK’s inner political circles: some had served as local councilors while others were teachers and academics, doctors, journalists, farmers, lawyers, or interest group members. While the gender parity policies of three of the Assembly’s four political parties established equal or near-equal numbers of female and male AMs over three electoral cycles, the first minority AM, a Muslim of Pakistani descent, was elected to represent Plaid Cymru only in 2007.

I was able to speak to several AMs about their respective decisions to serve, which collectively revealed commonalities as well as differences across the political spectrum. Many cited specific events that inspired them


to get involved, and to get involved with specific political parties. For more than a few Labour, Liberal, and Plaid AMs, this event was the UK General Election of 1979 that saw Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives rise to power in Westminster. (As Chapter 4 demonstrates, the Thatcher legacy still looms in the everyday deliberations of the Assembly.) However, a Conservative AM gave a similar account for his politicization, but in this case as a result of New Labour’s ascendance in 1997. Other AMs situated their decision in the more general context of growing up in Wales. A Plaid Cymru AM from the valleys of South Wales explained that the Labour Party’s management of local service delivery (or mismanagement, as it was perceived by the AM) encouraged political activism from a young age. The same type of story was described to me by more than one Labour AM describing community life in the valleys under the Conservative Governments of the 1980s and 1990s. Still others were more personal in their explanations. One Conservative AM described a primary school experience under (what the AM regarded as) a pro-Labour teacher as inspiration for seeking alternative political perspectives to explain social problems in Wales. A Liberal Democrat AM linked political participation to personal tragedies that inspired a dedication to public service. A Labour minister nonchalantly but sincerely told me that the political activism that characterized a working class upbringing is “just what you do” and serving in the Assembly was just another step in that direction. In general, many AMs cited growing up in politically and party-minded households as their inspiration. The majority of political life stories, in fact, were told in this context; any variation typically reflected differences in the age and politi-cal outlook of AMs, but rarely strayed from a general narrative of political socialization under the circumstances of community-based socioeco-nomic trauma. Of course, there is always an element of well-rehearsed nar-ration in responses to this line of questioning, but the answers I received reveal how AMs see themselves as representing distinct social histories that define the present goals of Welsh democracy.

A shared emphasis on “community,” in turn, is also found in the eth-nographic literature on Wales (Rees 1950; Emmett 1964; Jenkins 1971; Davies and Rees 1960; Frankenburg 1990 [1957]), even if the precise meaning of community remains problematic (Day 1998; Davies and Jones 2003; Charles and Davies 1997). Not surprisingly, the National Assembly has organized several of its policy programs through the lens of com-munity (e.g., the Communities First development program, the All Wales Community Cohesion Project, etc.), and the term is a common trope of debate in plenary sessions. The challenge to the National Assembly now is not only defining community as an operational conduit of representative democracy, but also doing so in a way that conforms to the strictures of


the Government of Wales Act and subordinate membership in UK and EU policy circles.

Summary

There is some irony in the fact that, at the start of the twentieth century, Wales had one Labour MP and over 500 deep mines, but by its close, one such mine remained while Labour all but dominated Welsh politics (Smith 1999: 62). Perhaps this is just one example of the discontinuities Raymond Williams saw in his status as a citizen of the UK state and a member of a distinct Welsh culture. As this chapter has argued, the idea of Wales has recurrently formed in relation to the material and conceptual contra-dictions of subordinated empowerment. Whether in terms of electoral representation, institutional developments, or eventual devolution, the political meaning of Welsh nationhood has been shaped by encounters with difference, both internally and with respect to the UK. Distinctly Welsh civic participation and resistance was alternately economic, cultural, and political in nature, but commonly bound in reference to a larger process of British nation-building (see Cinnirella 2000). The impacts of incorporation found political expression in four political parties holding to very different goals for the future of Wales and claiming to represent very different constituencies.

Even if there is not a direct, causal connection between the deep history of Welsh politics and devolution—the latter is also the product of more recent legislative maneuvering, for example—the National Assembly is still doing the work of definition by alternation and contrast. As a structural blueprint for a more democratic future in Wales, devolution has perhaps negated the least accountable and nonparticipatory aspects of centra-lized government in the UK, yet only to the extent that significant social and economic problems, mild electoral interest, and the complexities of governing in a multisited political framework must still be addressed. Arguably, in other words, the principle of devolution’s legitimacy had been established between 1997 and 1999 by a referendum, legislation, and an election, but the greater task of justifying a new network of political power through parliamentary action in Wales, for Wales remained undone. This book now turns to examine the political practices that have ensued in the name of Welsh democracy.

3

Inside the Iron Cage

In late February 2003, the AM I worked for won a random, computerized draw (which we referred to as “the lottery”) to name the topic for debate

for an upcoming short plenary debate in the National Assembly. “The status of Owain Glyndwr’s legacy” was chosen in recognition of the upcoming 600th anniversary of Glyndwr convening a Welsh parliament (or Senedd) in Machynlleth, Wales, in opposition to English rule. About ten days prior to the plenary debate, our office received two phone calls directly from the government’s civil service unit regarding the content of the debate. My colleagues were initially unsure about how to respond. Such a call would normally be considered intrusive (if not entirely inappropriate) under the established procedures governing interactions between the government (represented by the civil service) and legislature (represented in this case by my office’s AM). According to the Assembly’s Standing Orders, which along with the Government of Wales Act lays out the rules of executive-legislative contact, the Members’ Research Service and the Assembly’s Presiding Office must serve as buffers between these parliamentary spheres. Direct contact, in short, was deemed illegitimate; however, the civil service did have an institutionally valid question about the content of the debate under the Assembly’s policymaking procedures.

Specifically, if the opening statement made by the AM was to be about Glyndwr’s cultural legacy, then a range of responses would be prepared for the Minister of Culture, Sport, and the Welsh Language by the cor-responding civil service unit. If the statement was going to be political, or potentially celebrating Glyndwr’s goal of Welsh independence, a different briefing would be prepared for the Minister for Assembly Business and Open Government. Belying the importance of the code of noncontact, the Minister of Culture did not contact us directly despite being another Liberal AM. The government clearly wanted to be prepared for a topic of extreme political potency, even if only in the sense that Glyndwr is a


symbol of Welsh distinctiveness from England, if not nationalism and/or anti-UK sentiment. The request was complied with that afternoon (it was explained that it was, in fact, about Welsh cultural heritage) but the event led some of the staff to question the limits of ministerial rights of prepa-ration for plenary debates. Direct contact did not meet with the letter of Assembly procedure, but it was consistent with a primary (if abstract) goal of devolution: institutionalizing a democratic process of executive-legislative preparation for parliamentary events, to the benefit of Wales as a whole. Paradoxically, the phone calls were a means of improving the quality of debate and a graphic example of the government’s greater ability to shape the process of making policy.

This anecdote may represent an extreme instance of executive power (and I have no way of knowing), yet it indicates that there is a decided difference between meeting the strictures of institutional legitimacy and formalizing institutional equality through the policymaking channels of the National Assembly for Wales. This chapter explores these ambiguities, which I assert are of central importance to nation building in Cardiff Bay. By observing the formal, informal, and technological practices of parlia-mentary behavior as collectively constituting the Assembly’s institutional legitimacy, including overt affirmations and more subtle resistances to hierarchies embedded in the parliamentary process, I build my case that the study of government must begin with the analysis of practices, not assumptions about the ideal workings of institutions. If there is a phrase to describe this phenomenon, it is that there are elites, and then there are elites.

It is well understood that policymaking is an exercise in elite power (Shore and Wright 1997; Shore and Nugent 2002), but what, exactly, is exercised? And how? If the legitimacy of power is tied to the domination of the state over the social, as Weber would have it—of not just military/police force (Weber 1978; Giddens 1987), but (increasingly) of the power of governments to declare states of exception to legislative oversight (Agamben 2005)—then how is executive dominance justified within the arc of parliamentary action? That some parties and political interests enjoy greater influence than others in making policy needs no documentation: this is an obvious consequence of majority-minority party relations within elected institutions. What do demand explanation are the specific pro-cesses and particular forms of expertise that legitimate the distribution of power within spaces of democratic governance (Bennett 2003: 54). Weber was certainly aware of—even emphasized—the importance of hierarchy to the rationalization of modern politics, which he posited as a procedural cornerstone of institutional legitimacy as well as an internal logic of the iron cage of bureaucracy.

INSIDE THE IRON CAGE 55

Here, my objective is to illustrate some of the ways that patterns of hierarchy and ceremony legitimate the Assembly’s parliamentary-institutional process. I propose that these codes are important not only to the legitimation of the National Assembly as a site of democracy, but also to the reproduction of executive power over the legislature. The basic premise of this position—that the legal-constitutional framework of parliamentary democracy essentially favors governments—is clearly anticipated in Carl Schmitt’s (2004; 2000) writings on constitutionalism and parliamentary power; however, I mobilize his distinction to analyze, not justify as Schmitt does, how imbalances of parliamentary power are reproduced. By way of response to Weber, Schmitt asserts that parliaments “appear essentially democratic” by virtue of representing a committee of the people, and upon which governments become committees of the parliament. Yet he concludes that “parliamentarism is not democracy” insofar as it is a simulacrum of public debate “without taking democracy into account” (Schmitt 2000: 34–35). Apart from the fascist conclusions he comes to, Schmitt makes the crucial point that parliamentary actors, not constitu-tions, must ultimately do the work of legitimating the distribution of executive-legislative power that the parliamentary process is predicated on. To analyze parliamentary governance as a negotiated practice of “appearing essentially democratic,” I begin with a discussion of the informal activities of AMs and their staff members working in Cardiff Bay. I then compare the parliamentary preparations of the legislature to those of the government, followed by a closer analysis of how legislative and executive preparations intersect during structured ministerial question and answer sessions of the National Assembly.

Informal practices in formal Space

The purpose-built Assembly Senedd, or parliamentary building, overlooks Cardiff Bay from the center of a major regeneration project occupying the city’s former docklands. Roughly four stories high, the structure’s curving, wave-like roof (symbolizing waves on the waterfront) and glass-walled exterior are a highly visible landmark from virtually any spot along the bay. [See fig 3.1.] Designed by Lord Richard Rogers, architect of the Pompidou Center in Paris, it is meant to symbolize both the national experience of Wales and the “modern, open, and inclusive” democratic process envi-sioned by the Government of Wales Act, which is one way of saying that it looks nothing like Westminster. Its broad outer steps, cut from Welsh slate, rise up from the waterfront to form a plateau at the building’s entrance that extends across the lobby inside. This continuity is meant to signify the connection between the people of Wales and their elected representatives.


The connection is made (literally) clear by the large glass panels that make up three of the Senedd’s four exterior walls, thus exposing the wide, open space of the Assembly’s reception area and a public balcony above it. In the center of the balcony area is a large cedar funnel that serves as a skylight for the plenary chamber below. Both the glass walls and the open interior space they reveal are intended to represent the Assembly’s commitments to transparent democracy and environmental sustainability.1 Since its completion in 2006, the impressive Senedd building has been a major tourist attraction in South Wales.

The Senedd is connected to Crickhowell House, the Assembly’s office complex (and home to the plenary chamber before 2006), by way of two upper-story breezeways. It is the full-time office space of all AM support

Figure 3.1 Photograph of Senedd exterior


staff stationed in Cardiff Bay and a place for AMs to work when the National Assembly is in session Tuesdays through Thursdays. It was there that I worked as a political intern in 2003. While I was there, numerous paintings and photographs by Welsh artists lined the halls, stairwells, and committee rooms of Crickhowell House’s lower two floors, which provided a visual narrative of Wales composed of brushstrokes and still images. The content varied widely, but collectively the spatial and social diversity rep-resented a sequence of landscapes, buildings, and human bodies that drew Wales symbolically closer to its policymakers in a complex jigsaw puzzle of young and old, female and male, ethnic minority and majority, and pristine and (post)industrialized life. Most paintings impressionistically or realistically portrayed famous people or slices of ordinary life, but a few were completely abstract. Black and white photographs of small villages, natural landscapes, and coal mining facilities were mounted alongside still images ranging from children waiting at a bus stop to a Hindu wedding ceremony. Figuratively, these representations of life outside the Assembly indicate some of the challenges AMs face in making policy for all of Wales from the inside. To that end, large sections of the second and third floors of Crickhowell House are reserved for party office space. During my time there, the Labour Party and Plaid Cymru shared the second floor, while part of the third floor was used to house the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and an overflow of Labour AMs who did not have office space on the floor below. Apart from civil servants, however, members of each party’s support staff are the most regular inhabitants of these spaces.

Staff members are vital to the political operations of the National Assembly. These party workers are responsible for managing AMs’ sched-ules, developing policy briefs for use in plenary debates, and maintaining contacts between AMs and their constituents, the press, constituency offices, and party members in general. With some exceptions, party staff members are generally young and Welsh. Many have their first postcolle-giate work experience in Cardiff Bay, often based on working as a party vol-unteer in their home constituencies along the way. Turnover is fairly high among this group. When I began with the Liberals, for instance, there were eight junior and three senior party support staff working in six offices but only two remained when I visited again in 2005. I met many staffers across the party spectrum that also left for other employment during my time at the Assembly, though it was clear that some party groups were more stable than others. Staff work is ideal for launching a career, including moving up in politics or into the public sector; for younger staff in particular, it is a means of quickly improving one’s professional credentials. Among five of the original staff I worked with, one became a lobbyist in London, one was elected to the nearby Cardiff County Council during local elections,


one left for law school, and two went to work for Assembly-sponsored government agencies. One of the two remaining junior staffers had worked his way up into a senior position in the party’s hierarchy since my initial departure. Outside of the Liberal Democrat group, two Plaid Cymru support staff had made the even bigger jump to AM following the 2007 elections.

Each party’s staff tended to stay together in political groups in the day-to-day operations of each office as well as during lunch breaks and other public gatherings. Party groups serve as a social support network for the many staff members stationed far from their home constituencies. The Liberal Democrat group I was a part of, for instance, made a regular habit of going out for lunch together and occasionally meeting up in Cardiff ’s many pubs after work. Belying the informal codes of conduct intended to symbolize Wales’ break from the Westminster model, football and rugby jerseys and other forms of casual dress were commonly worn by the support staff of all parties when the Assembly was not in session, on Mondays and Fridays. Party loyalty is important, but this does not necessarily translate into cross-party animosity among the political staff-ers. Individual staff members build informal contacts (and sometimes friendships) with the staff from other parties for various reasons. With good interparty relations, staff can call on each other for favors, lay the groundwork for AM-to-AM discussions, or relay information (or even gossip) about policy developments and important events inside the Assembly.

Informality and AMs

Not unlike the party support staff in Crickhowell House, AMs represent-ing different political parties can be regularly observed interacting cor-dially with each other. When all four parties are called on to speak at public events in the Assembly, their representatives usually interact comfortably. The tone of the Assembly’s policy committees is also generally amiable: AMs sit in close proximity around oval tables in smaller committee rooms, usually with a few members of the public and the press looking on from close distance. Coffee and tea breaks during these sessions bring all of the participants even closer together in the hallways outside the committee rooms. Though policy debates can become quite heated, many AMs man-age to shelve their differences in these settings. I became aware of these informal codes of interaction early in my internship at a meeting of the European Affairs Committee. There I watched the leaders of Plaid Cymru and the Conservatives sit next to each other to share a private laugh shortly after their parties had traded political insults in the plenary chamber.


Likewise, a government minister recalled running into a Plaid Cymru AM after he challenged the minister in the plenary chamber:

Afterwards, I walked out [of the plenary chamber] and I saw [the Plaid AM] in the milling area and I said, “You enjoyed that, did you?” And he said, “Aw, its only good sport.” [I replied,] “Whatever keeps you happy,” and kept walking [laughs].

(Interview June 4, 2003)

The sheer size of membership in the Houses of Parliament in London precludes the necessity of these interactions. The size of the Assembly, which is much smaller than many local government councils or the Northern Ireland Assembly, means that AMs are brought into contact on a regular basis and civility is at a premium. As one Labour AM put it to me, “We are only a group of 60. We have to see each other all the time and work closely together, so there is less of an adversarial environment here [compared to Westminster]” (Interview March 24, 2003). There are formal protocols in place to guide interactions as well, as in any par-liamentary body (Moore 1984), but one can argue that the Assembly’s relatively weak powers amplify the need to symbolically demonstrate democratic difference in Wales vis-à-vis these informal practices of cordiality.

Plenary preparations on the third floor

The formal organization of Wales’ political tribes is another matter. Every party organizes its staff differently, which is determined in part by the number of AMs each has in the Assembly. With the smallest num-ber of AMs (six), the Liberal Democrats occupied a corner of the third floor of Crickhowell House between the Conservative group and the spillover of Labour AMs from the second floor. A pro-Liberal Democrat / European integration poster hung on the door of one office was the only exterior feature marking party territory in these anonymous hallways. Due to our small numbers, all Liberal Democrat AMs and staff came into regular contact, which was not always the case with the larger par-ties. (There was not a regular meeting space in the building to house all Labour AMs and their support staff together, for example, though it could be arranged for special occasions). The organization and interac-tions of support staff are also shaped by the policymaking strategies of each party. Some, like Plaid Cymru, assign policy research areas to individual staff on a permanent basis; Labour also maintained a distinc-tion between staff working for individual AMs and staff assigned to do


policy-related research for the Assembly’s plenary sessions. The Liberal Democrats, in contrast, delegated research duties on a weekly, somewhat ad hoc basis, though we did have a separate policy research unit that worked on behalf of all the party’s AMs. Because of this system, it was vital that our group met collectively to ensure that no upcoming plenary topics fell through the cracks of our preparations. A few members of staff worked on constituency issues almost exclusively (which certainly fills a day), as did many support staff in the larger parties, but many of us divided time between working for our respective AMs and contributing research briefs to the party’s policy research unit (described below).

Monday morning meetings of the Liberal Democrat support staff were organized to plan for the week ahead. They were usually attended by the party’s chief of staff, at least one of the party’s two ministerial Special Advisors, the party press officer, members of a separate policy development unit located in nearby Butetown, AMs’ Personal Assistants, and the research staff of which I was a part. Everyone (myself included) was encouraged to speak in these meetings, but the most senior staffers organized and directed group discussions. Although the work was taken seriously, our meetings were never dull: group meetings were social oppor-tunities to laugh about or bemoan recent political and personal events, particularly those experienced by other parties.

Staff meetings allowed the members of research staff to brief the rest of the Liberal group about the content of the week’s plenary sessions and committee meetings. Each item tabled for plenary attention, including debatable and nondebatable motions, was discussed to coordinate party activity in the Assembly. As a researcher, I was called upon to summarize the likely themes for debate on issues I had been assigned to investigate the week before. Usually included in these discussions were evaluations of Labour’s, Plaid’s, and the Tories’ likely argumentative strategies. The Liberal Democrat “line to take” for AMs voting that week was then opened for discussion but then agreed upon by the most senior staff members. In many cases the line to take was obvious enough (i.e., relating voting on motions to established party positions), and there was little or no discussion on the topic. When the line was less straightforward, strategic decisions were often couched in terms of compromising party ideology resulting from the party’s agreement to govern with Labour. The guide for action on these issues was the party’s election manifesto, which serves as a policy pledge AMs are expected to abide by if elected, and the details of the agreement that established the coalition government’s policy platform. We would then review the questions submitted by AMs to ministers for the weekly Question Time in plenary. For each such question, an AM’s support staffer would take responsibility on their AM’s behalf to pose a


supplemental question to the government minister’s initial response. It was important that a Liberal Democrat was prepared to ask a supplemen-tal question for each question posed, which meant at least a couple of AMs were inevitably expected to ask more than one question if given the opportunity to do so.

Later in the week, I met with a smaller research unit to discuss the “forward look” for upcoming debates and votes. Each member of this group was expected to write anywhere from three to six policy briefings each week. This was typically an informal process: individual staff mem-bers would sometimes take on a briefing based on their AM’s experience in that policy area, but we were also free to volunteer to write specific briefs. The party’s press officer also attended these meetings to develop press releases on issues considered the most important or attention grabbing for that upcoming week. Policy briefs are scripted to enable party AMs to maximize the limited speaking time they are afforded for interventions during plenary sessions. For each policy brief, we were required to summarize the language and substance of the legislative motions and topics of debate chosen for plenary by the Assembly’s Business Committee.

Briefs typically begin with a review of the background legislation passed on from London to be modified in Wales. Each party’s position on the subject is then summarized by drawing information from party Web sites and election manifestos, AMs’ personal Web sites, UK or Assembly government documents, statistical publications, and AMs’ public state-ments found in plenary transcripts or in the press. As a junior partner in government, we prepared positive points of intervention to highlight government policy and defensive points to highlight inconsistencies or problems within the opposition’s respective policy positions. The majority of the plenary briefs produced over the course of my internship were understandably supportive of the Assembly Government; however, with elections on the horizon that May, we tried to emphasize the contributions the Liberals had made to the government’s overall policy agenda. The challenge of providing all of this information—in other words, anticipating all the possible permutations a debate may take as different AMs and parties add to the texture of discussion—is to do so concisely. Briefs are usually no more than six or seven pages in length. (This point was reinforced in my early days as an intern when I had written over ten pages on an assigned topic and was then told to quickly rewrite it before the next plenary session began.) Points of intervention are formatted into “bullet points” for quick and easy reference during plenary debate. The format and content of all briefs is checked by the party’s senior policy researcher before handing it over to AMs.


Policymaking technologies

Technology is essential to this process. The Assembly’s intranet site pro-vides AMs, their staff, and the civil service with access to upcoming and ongoing activities within the Assembly. Background documents are posted prior to plenary sessions to allow all parties to prepare for policy debates. Legislative motions appearing before the Assembly are made available on the Web to allow opposition parties to develop and submit amendments to motions sponsored by the government or other parties. Transcripts of past plenary sessions, documents laid before the Assembly or its commit-tees, legislative measures passed down from London and Brussels, and civil service reports are also posted in this manner. Each political party also has a restricted access account on the intranet, which allows AMs and party support staff to share policy briefs and other documents internally. AMs have additional access to videoconferencing and other technologies to facilitate exchanges beyond the confines of Cardiff Bay.

Information technologies contributed to a fairly regular pattern of brief writing. Many topics of debate had been discussed in numerous plenary sessions (albeit under different political circumstances each time) that facilitated both a briefing style and briefing database for research over time. While always necessary to update briefs to maintain their relevance, the archive of Liberal Democrat briefs provided summations of party ide-ology and policy already predisposed to the temporal and interpersonal demands of plenary sessions. Adding to this information or creating a new brief also required outside research, usually by Internet to keep to dead-lines. It was also important to connect the points of intervention to some tangible fact or event that AMs could easily relay in plenary sessions. With limited time and media coverage during plenary, an important means of trying to make Liberal interventions stand out was personalizing the message.

The constituency office

Constituency offices serve many functions as the local face of AMs and their parties. Not only a distribution center for party literature, the con-stituency office provides a space to hold “surgeries” for AMs to meet their constituents and discuss their concerns. The Assembly work schedule allows AMs to do constituency work on Mondays and Fridays, though travel distances and train schedules make this difficult for some AMs. The constituency work of AMs and their field staff is an important means for developing lines of inquiry and debate in the Assembly. Constituency


workers—usually made up of two or three paid staff and a rotation of party volunteers—are responsible for taking phone calls and receiving office vis-its from constituents. The information collected from such encounters is logged and then passed on to the AM and/or senior staff. The most com-mon reasons for calls and visits are problems constituents encounter with businesses or some aspect of public service delivery. Depending on the severity of the complaint, the AM may personally make a phone call or write a letter to an agency or company, but many issues are delegated to the AM’s support staff, such as letter writing or making phone calls on an AM’s behalf. Not only establishing one’s credentials for the next election, the perspectives gained from these interactions provided a focus for emphasiz-ing the local impacts of larger political issues in plenary debates.

When utilized as a political weapon, local knowledge can serve to either augment or counterpoint government claims about social problems and policy effectiveness. For example, my office took several calls from residents of my AM’s rural constituency about problems in the Welsh agricultural industry, which helped him focus his approach to questioning ministers dur-ing plenary sessions. The content of some of the phone calls we fielded also reflected public confusion over the extent of the Assembly’s powers: at least once a week, it seemed, a caller would ask for assistance in a nondevolved area and was referred to the constituency offices of their local MP. My office also kept in regular contact with our AM’s constituency staff in order to coordinate his schedule and respond to constituent requests. In sum, these internal and external networks of communication between AMs and others were invalu-able to the development of parliamentary politics. Whatever the benefits of these networks, however, our ability to prepare for plenary debates in Cardiff Bay paled in comparison to the capacities of the government to do the same.

Plenary preparations on the fifth floor

The fifth floor, home to the offices of the Assembly Government and the Office of the Permanent Secretary (i.e., Wales’ senior-most civil servant), is the most restricted space within Crickhowell House. Not only protected by a physical security barrier, there is a working code of separation between ministerial and nonministerial AMs regardless of party, which was the source of confusion in this chapter’s opening example. As an ethnographer, I was fortunate to work for a party both supportive of my research and in coalition government with Labour: while the majority of my support staff colleagues had never even seen the fifth floor, I was granted a limited number of visits to interact with the party’s two Special Advisors and, on occasion, its two (of nine total) government ministers.


Foremost, the government defines the norms of parliamentary discourse: its policy message is already institutionalized as legitimate as a result of the electoral process. The opposition’s task is to undermine that legitimacy by working according to the shared rules of parliamentary debate. Government ministers, however, have access to the information gathering resources of the Assembly’s 3,000-strong civil service and formal links to the UK government in London. The civil service works through numerous government-sponsored agencies to gather information about Welsh society and the effects of government policy interventions, which helps to set the executive apart from the legislature. Although a Freedom of Information Act, for example, entitles anyone to review a wide range of government information, it is impossible for any party or individual to have knowledge of every available government document for request. The civil service, meanwhile, has access to the full range of statistical information available, which is not to say access to complete information. “It’s a bit of an ad-hoc thing, really,” a ranking civil servant explained to me and added:

Of course we are working alongside a whole range of economic and social development agencies like the [Welsh Development Agency]. And of course we also work in close partnership with local authorities. Much of the infor-mation about development on the ground we get through these sorts … However, we have recognized that it doesn’t provide an adequate base in particular in the economic field. We recently established an economic research advisory panel which is developing a program of work for eco-nomic analysis in Wales … to identify particular areas where we can make an impact through intervention …. We are still putting into place a suf-ficient framework for information and data gathering … which we simply never found necessary under the old non-devolved system …. I think it is probably right to say we haven’t collected data to the necessary extent to enable us to have properly edited spatial policy interventions. It has tended to be more intuitive and based on our personal understanding of Wales rather than a quantitative analysis of the kind. We are beginning to give some thought to the development, for example, of Geographic Information Systems to support policy.

(Interview March 28, 2003)

Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of civil service information gathering, the purpose is to legitimate the expressly political agenda of the majority political party through processes of directed research and bureaucratic administration. Thus, there is something of a duality in the way the civil service works. On the one hand, it is organized according the UK’s Code of Conduct for Civil Servants and operates on the premise


of institutional neutrality and organizational hierarchy (Weber 1978). All of the civil servants interviewed, many of whom were Welsh, expressed a deep commitment to these principles but also to making devolution work for Wales. On the other hand, therefore, the constitutional status of Assembly civil servants renders their allegiances somewhat unclear as a matter of institutional principle. Civil servants in Wales technically owe their allegiance to the larger UK system of bureaucracy but work on behalf of a non-UK/devolved government. Potentially, the latter could pursue a policy agenda contrary to the official UK government line and put the Welsh civil service in the position of researching and administering a policy agenda in direct contradistinction to the goals of its UK counter-part. Chapter 7 explores this dilemma in more detail, but it is most likely that this arrangement will meet its greatest test when different political parties hold power in Cardiff and London, respectively. Under the present arrangement of interactions between two Labour governments the politi-cal and bureaucratic links between Cardiff and Whitehall are critical to the work of the Assembly Government, even if these relations are not always straightforward. This is not just a Welsh issue. Keating (2000: 125) writes about a similar set of circumstances with the Scottish Parliament: “There is a recurrent tendency in Whitehall to forget about Scotland, to issue state-ments of policies purporting to apply to the UK or Britain as a whole, or to neglect to consult the devolved administrations.”

Similarly, more than one civil servant interviewed in Wales explained to me that the UK civil service is not always forthcoming with informa-tion when deemed “too sensitive.” These barriers are not only institutional but also interpersonal: some of it comes down to building effective lines of communication between Welsh and UK officials, not just between bureaucratic departments, which raises the stakes of intraparty com-munications between Cardiff Bay and London. A journalist assigned to the Welsh politics beat in London explained, “Generally, relations vary from Whitehall department to Whitehall department. It is sometimes due to the personalities involved” (Interview November 5, 2003). And in the view of a member of the Assembly Government, keeping channels open with London is essential because “backdoor work … has to be done with Whitehall [and] Westminster to achieve some of our purposes” (Interview March 27, 2003).

Special advisors

Some of the “backdoor work” in Wales is done by Special Advisors to the government. They act as conduits between ministers and the civil service in


specified policy fields and draw their expertise from a range of professional backgrounds. Technically, they are civil servants assigned to a political post but may be chosen by the governing party from outside of the civil service ranks. Unlike most civil servants, they face unemployment if their party does not win back a majority in the next election. Special Advisors are chosen for their policy knowledge, their ability to handle media relations (i.e., “spin doctors”), or their experience in politics, industry, or academia. It is their ability to navigate these arenas and bring specialized knowledge to the government’s policy process that sets their roles apart.

I was able to observe how the Special Advisors apply their skills on sev-eral occasions, but a moment during one of my first visits to the fifth floor stands out. That morning, I was talking to one of the Liberal Democrats’ two advisors when the other hurriedly entered their small office space and turned on the television. Labour’s Secretary of Education in Westminster was about to make a statement in the House of Commons about raising the cost of higher education in the UK. The night before, a story was leaked to the press indicating that the UK government was prepared to devolve this decision-making power to the National Assembly. Giving the Assembly Government the ability to withhold on a fee increase had major implica-tions for higher education in Wales, at the very least because it would enhance the government’s social welfare credentials in that policy area. However, the secretary made no mention of enhancing Wales’ education powers. The UK government was apparently not prepared to support or deny the press reports. The Special Advisor in Cardiff saw an opportunity to act as cross-examinations began in London. A text message was quickly sent to Westminster. Within minutes, we watched a Liberal Democrat MP stand to ask the minister to clarify the media reports about devolving these powers to Wales. The minister, now on the spot to respond, put the issue off for later consideration, but his nonstatement became a source of debate in the Assembly that afternoon about the ideal power-sharing arrange-ment between Wales and the UK. That discussion, like all others in the Senedd, was mediated by the Assembly’s Presiding Office.

Managing parliamentary activity

The Presiding Office organizes the parliamentary activities of the National Assembly. It is charged with running the day-to-day affairs of the Senedd, including the management of plenary sessions, a diversity of Web-based operations, and Assembly interactions with the general public. The office is composed of a small number of civil servants directed by a Presiding Officer and Deputy Presiding Officer, both of whom are AMs elected


by their peers to serve in these posts after each election cycle. Unlike the majority of civil servants, staff members of the Presiding Office act inde-pendently from the government. Outside of information management and presiding over plenary sessions (discussed below), the most important task of the Presiding Office is setting a three-month legislative agenda in conjunction with a cross-party Business Committee. The Presiding Office schedules government policy statements, opposition party-sponsored debates, nondebatable motions, and ministerial question-answer sessions. The specific content of discussion is then determined two or three weeks prior to the scheduled event to give other AMs and parties the opportunity to submit amendments to statements and motions. Topics for longer debates are usually delegated to parties and shorter debates and ministerial questions are typically chosen by individual AMs through a computerized lottery system.

The Presiding Office is also the official go-between for nongovernmental AMs and the Assembly Government, as discussed at the opening of this chapter. The primary means for AMs to request government information (to prepare for plenary, etc.) is through the Members’ Library and Research Service, which provides an on-site collection of newspapers, political magazines, scholarly journals, and documents detailing the insti-tutional capacities and powers of the Assembly. In addition, one can also (for instance) read summaries of civil service relations under devolution or the impact of the euro on Wales to become educated on-site about the Assembly’s sovereign capabilities. Short of the easy access to local news-paper coverage across Wales provided by the library, however, many in the Liberal Democrat group considered this service an inadequate source of timely information in our day-to-day operations.

The Table Office, a subunit of the Presiding Office, is the institutional hub through which the executive and legislative branches submit informa-tion for plenary sessions. An important case in point can be drawn from ministerial “question times,” which regularize the parliamentary process of government scrutiny. Question Time is a weekly activity in which the Assembly First Minister (each week) and different cabinet ministers (depending on the week) respond to questions submitted by AMs. The Table Office randomly selects by computerized draw fifteen questions from a pool submitted two weeks prior to the scheduled plenary event. Up to 75 questions are submitted per minister per Question Time. Questions must conform to the Assembly’s Standing Orders as interpreted by the Presiding Office: they must specify a policy portfolio, place/space, and issue relevant to Assembly debate. For instance, the question “Does the First Minister have plans to visit North Wales?” is inadmissible, but “Does the First Minister have plans to address policy/issue X on his visit to North


Wales?” is allowable. I learned that the Table Office spends a good deal of time helping to rewrite submitted questions to make them conform to these rules, after which they are formally resubmitted to the office (Interview March 23, 2003), thus raising the office’s profile as an actor in, rather than a conduit of, the parliamentary process. The revised questions selected for plenary are then posted on the Assembly intranet (and on the Web for the public) about one week later. Perhaps belying the above-mentioned perception that the Members’ Research Service was ineffective, support staff workers from more than one party revealed a strategy of occasionally submitting questions to the Table Office for the sole purpose of forcing the government to provide information (statistical, etc.) they could not obtain through the regular channels. In principle, plenary ses-sions are intended to provide backbench AMs and opposition parties the opportunity to question the veracity of government policy. Based on my research experience, however, I argue that there is a need to distinguish between the institutional legitimacy of this process and the institutional equality it engenders.

Government preparations

After the Table Office announces the winners of the weekly lottery, govern-ment civil servants prepare an initial response to the questions submitted. Ministers are briefed with “positive” and “defensive” “bull points” to refer to depending on the nature of the question (or supplemental question) and the speaker’s political background. Positive points generally add context to or elaborate initial ministerial responses, as in cases where the question is supportive of the Assembly Government. Defensive points are arranged in question-answer format to help direct ministerial responses toward a framework of debate anticipated by the civil service. Ministers are equipped with background information about institutional decision-making arrange-ments and legislative precedent (Welsh, UK, or EU) that help to justify the government’s policy position. Briefs also identify “What lies behind the question?” and the “Member’s interest” in the topic. Collectively, this infor-mation is intended to destabilize potential criticisms that might follow in supplemental questions posed after the initial ministerial response. Each brief is cleared for use up the civil service chain of command and subjected to legal review before being passed on to ministers.

Briefings do not circumvent heated attacks on Assembly Government policy, and success in political debate also demands strong oratory skills and a working knowledge of the political landscape. Ministerial responses have to be specific to the question—whether regarding a particular region, population, or policy subtopic—or risk appearing to


expose a weakness in the government’s policy agenda. More often than not, however, briefs enable ministers to greatly shape the substance of debate after deliberations begin. A question about government failings in meeting the needs of Town X in West Wales can be turned into an oratory of government achievements in Town X in West Wales. The idea as it was explained to me by a senior civil servant is that the quality of the response, and therefore policymaking, is improved when the execu-tive has prior knowledge of the questions. This is undoubtedly true in one sense, but in another it has the effect of rationalizing the range of political expression in the image of the government and its bureaucratic information service.

Rationalization is achieved in part through the temporal regulation of deliberations. Events in the plenary chamber are sequenced by four clocks located around the chamber. Each clock has two time counters: one counts the hours, minutes, and seconds of the day and the other counts the min-utes and seconds allotted for answering a ministerial question or, in the case of longer debates, the time designated for specific debates. The Presiding Officer reserves the right to turn off an AM’s microphone if she/he will not give way after her/his designated speaking time has elapsed. Because the chamber’s four mobile-operated television cameras automatically focus on the microphone turned on by the Presiding Officer, AMs who continue to speak do so without sound and out of the view of the virtual public.

Question Time

Question Time provides a good example of how the technical and interper-sonal dynamics of the policy process play out. The First Minister is allotted 30 minutes each week for Question Time with a maximum of three min-utes designated for discussion and supplemental questions for each ques-tion. This usually means that only 10 of the 15 questions selected by the lottery are answered orally; a shorter Question Time period for other min-isters means that they typically answer six orally. The remaining questions are responded to in writing, but some of the AMs I spoke to about this process explained that they preferred oral responses for two reasons. First, asking questions of the government on television is a good way to promote one’s credentials to the electorate. Second, written responses were thought to lack the substance of oral responses, in part because no supplemental questions could be posed to the government. One Conservative AM, for example, complained that “answers to written questions are lacking. You would expect a degree of honesty, but sometimes you get party political claptrap. Written answers at Westminster are taken far more seriously


than here. [In the Assembly] it’s claptrap and ‘let’s try to avoid the issue’” (Interview October 9, 2003). While this can be fairly interpreted as a partisan perspective, I can say that, having read many written responses in my capacity as a party researcher and ethnographer, these documents were usually little more than overviews of government policies that could be otherwise gleaned from a review of relevant Web sites. Apart from these technical aspects of the scrutiny process, the Presiding Officer and Deputy Presiding Officer also influence the direction of debate through their choices to call on AMs to speak. AMs may signal to the Presiding Officer by hand or by computer to request such an opportunity, but choos-ing a speaker is also a matter of personal judgment. The Presiding Officer through three election cycles, Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas of Plaid Cymru, explained in an interview that

[t]here’s always in any moment when you select someone to speak on a question, there’s about 5 or 6 judgments that come into that decision you make. It’s not just about which party, but which region [of Wales the speaker represents], which gender, what day, what point of view, has that person been called before that day, et cetera, et cetera. Is that person a chair of a committee or minister or a [party’s policy-specific] spokesperson, or not? I think all of those issues come into play. My only answer to any complaints or queries about that is to say, “It’s an open door policy here, come in.”

(Interview February 25, 2003)

These comments are another indication of how institutional legitimacy is reproduced through the combination of procedural and interpersonal norms of parliamentary behavior (see also Crewe 2005 on the House of Lords). A transcript excerpt of a question posed to the First Minister from March 25, 2003, on Accountability and Transparency, helps to illustrate how political skill and institutional knowledge are marshaled in these moments:

William Graham (C): Will the First Minister make a statement concern-ing the guidance given to Assembly Ministers to ensure accountability and transparency within their departmental responsibilities?

The First Minister (L): The Ministerial Code clearly sets out Ministers’ responsibilities in these and related areas. The current version of the code was approved by the Assembly in December 2001.

William Graham: You will obviously conduct an investigation into the failure of the Assembly’s education and training department regarding [an accounting scandal in a government-sponsored education agency]. What lessons can be learned from that as to how accountability can be further enhanced?


The First Minister: I wondered what your supplementary question would be …. Whereas Ministers are responsible for ensuring in their remit letters what the policy guidance is to Assembly sponsored public bodies [ASPBs], they are not responsible for individual acts by officers of those ASPBs that may or may not fall outside the compliance rules. Those are matters to be picked up by the ASPB’s own internal audit mechanisms. If we hear of such acts, then we will refer them to internal audit.

Richard Edwards (L): A recognition that accountability and transpar-ency are important in government is implicit in William Graham’s question. Do you, like me, welcome this turnaround in Conservative Party thinking about the governance of Wales?

The First Minister: The purpose of Plenary and Committee meetings is to correct the democratic deficit that existed in Wales before 1999 …. However, it would be a mess if we were to allocate responsibility to an accounting officer, appoint a board, and then say to that board that Ministers, and not the board, were responsible for what it did. Ministers are responsible for policy, but not for infractions of the compliance culture, which we, and the Assembly’s Permanent Secretary as chief accounting officer, must inculcate into staff and the chief executives of the Assembly sponsored public bodies.

(Record of Proceedings March 25, 2008)

In this passage, the initial question by the Conservative AM is suf-ficiently vague to avoid government anticipation, which is evidenced in the First Minister’s generic response as well as in his opening reply to the supplementary question. The minister is nevertheless prepared once the rationale for the question becomes apparent. The answer supplied is essen-tially a “defensive points” review of Assembly accountability protocols, but one that locates responsibility for the scandal away from the government. Plenary meetings, he first explains, are a negation of Wales’ predevolution “democracy deficit”; by extension, the government can either take respon-sibility by ignoring bureaucratic protocols of functional competency and be undemocratic or not accept responsibility by following protocols to be democratic. While this response is somewhat perplexing, three elements of the parliamentary process enable the argument. The first is procedural: the First Minister was able to shift from “defensive points” to “positive points” by the introduction of a sympathetic supplemental question, for which the responsibility to ask was likely assigned to the Labour AM prior to the plenary session. The second is interpersonal and informal: aided by his own rhetorical skill and the sequential give-and-take with a politi-cal adversary and supporter, the First Minister negotiated his way from a close look at a serious departmental controversy to a general gloss on the institutional philosophy of devolution. The third, related to the first two, is


purely institutional: though the political opposition might (and did) argue for government accountability, the First Minister countered that the very legitimacy of both the government and the institutional design of devolu-tion would be at stake if it were held directly accountable.

Summary

The evidence presented in this chapter—legislative and executive versions of plenary preparations; party-specific and institutional procedures of standardizing plenary preparations and plenary debates; and the inter-play of formal and informal codes of action, technology, and social/party networks—reveals the centrality of political practice and hierarchy to the National Assembly’s democratic legitimacy. While the sheer institutional and legal protocols of parliamentary activity may be a precondition of the Assembly’s legitimation (i.e., a “thin” but important justification of power), I have argued that it is the combination of formal, technical, and informal/interpersonal practices that ultimately constitute the legiti-mate field of parliamentary activity in Wales, or a threshold of appropriate action all AMs, party support staff, and civil servants must cross for their behaviors to be considered democratic. These symbols, ceremonies, and practices of ritual political enactment (Abélès 1997) are reinforced by the Senedd’s open spaces of governance and the technologies of preparation and deliberation therein: the regulation of time and speakers, the creation and dissemination of policy documents, and the mechanisms governing executive-legislative interactions are precursors of and tools for the Assembly’s legitimation. In turn, many of the preparations and interac-tions that surround formalized parliamentary protocols/events are crucial to this larger process. Conceptually, performative distinctions between animosity in plenary and collegiality outside it enable AMs, civil servants, and political staff to embody devolution’s promise of collaborative, demo-cratic inclusion; practically, it facilitates cross- and intraparty exchanges in a small legislative environment.

Given the government’s power to influence, though never fully direct, the plenary process, this account leaves open the question: are parlia-mentary democracies of this and similar sorts simultaneously legitimate and disproportionately hierarchical? By virtue of being in government, the political party constituting the majority in Cardiff Bay enjoys greater information management powers and the greater ability to influence the flow and content of deliberation in the plenary chamber. To be fair, no one I interviewed in the Assembly ever raised questions about the process; it is the accepted routine of parliamentary democracy in Wales. As Weber (1978: 31) writes of legitimacy, it is perhaps “the belief in the existence


of a legitimate order” that is on display in these individual and collective interactions, the violation of which “would be abhorrent to [political actors’] sense of duty.” The hierarchical and technocratic structure of these practices, after all, is in the political DNA of UK democracy. Yet the passive and active forms of resistance to the parliamentary routine observed in this chapter—privately questioning the limits of civil service intrusion into legislative plenary preparations, posing ministerial questions with the clandestine objective of obtaining “hidden” information, publicly challeng-ing the government during Question Time, et cetera—also suggest that an additional distinction must be made between political actors accepting the institutional norms of parliamentary behavior and their supporting government policies. Indeed, a distinction must be made between the col-lective reproduction of institutional power and more fragmented strategies of claiming the authority to represent public interests. These latter prac-tices of representative legitimacy are the topic of the next chapter.

4

Speaking for the Nation

What is at stake is always the construction of a “national identity” that will win out over all the others and arrive at a point where national belonging intersects with and integrates all other forms of belonging. But this, by definition, is precisely what nationalism is.

(Balibar 2004: 23; emphasis in original)

In May 2007, a minor row developed over one of two National Assembly-commissioned portraits that were mounted on the glass façade of the

Senedd, both of which were intended to situate devolution in the longer context of Welsh political history. The material used for the large artworks, tinplate, appropriately recognized Wales’ industrial past and one portrait, of mid-twentieth century Welsh MP and United Kingdom (UK) NHS founder Aneurin Bevan, offered a reminder of the power of the labor/Labour movement in Wales and its impact on UK politics and society. The other portrait, however, recognized the person perhaps most responsible for reversing many of these gains and reshaping Welsh life near the end of the century, former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. It would be difficult to argue against Thatcher’s impact on Wales, even if some AMs were correct in asserting that she was responsible for disrupting, rather than continuing, a socioindustrial trajectory that began in the early nine-teenth century. Yet Thatcherism undoubtedly influenced devolution. Its economic aftershocks arguably still resonate in the policy challenges the Assembly currently faces, even if her supporters might claim they were necessary or inevitable. What I found curious about this hostility was that it was relatively one-sided: though UK citizens still enjoy the benefits of the universal health care system initially guided by Bevan, he was also one of the most ardent opponents of Welsh devolution. Just like Thatcher, in other words, Bevan was part of an “antimovement” to define the national interest in the all-or-nothing terms of Britishness (over Welshness, etc.)


suggested by Balibar (above). Bevan and Thatcher, in other words, were equally influential in restricting the scope of Welsh nationhood to a cul-tural, rather than political, project. Though Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat supporters might bristle at the idea, one can argue that any effort to define the boundaries of representation through the legisla-tive process, whether UK-wide or specific to the UK’s subnations, is an act of nationalism in Balibar’s usage. Always “at stake,” to now extend this thesis, is the legitimacy to define the nation through parliamentary means. Whereas the previous chapter examined legitimacy through a Weberian lens of institutional routine, this chapter analyzes how political parties uti-lize the Assembly’s deliberative process to legitimate themselves as public representatives “that will win out over all the others.”

My purpose in this chapter is to analyze the complexities of repre-sentative legitimacy as articulated in Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere and parliamentary complex, particularly his defense of rational(ized) communication as the cornerstone of parliamentary democracy. I am here interested in two aspects of Habermas’ thesis in the context of Welsh devolution. I first examine the historical development of the UK public sphere (i.e., Habermas’ famed 1989 study) from the Welsh margins to observe how the parliamentary recognition of public interests is accompanied by processes of marginalization and resistance. In this case, I focus on the long history of struggle in Wales for the recognition of Welsh linguistic difference within the UK educational and governmental systems. Second, I analyze empirical evidence from plenary debates of the National Assembly—as opposed to the largely theoretical character of Habermas’ work—to gauge the extent to which Habermas’ “rules of discourse” create parliamentary spaces of open exchange and compromise that “neutralize imbalances of power and provide for equal opportuni-ties to realize one’s interests” (Habermas 1995: 71). With Balibar’s con-ceptualization of nationalism as a zero-sum game in mind, I pose and respond to the following research question: what if the communicative presuppositions that national publics and politicians bring to debate are not shared, not the least including their respective understandings of the national/public interest? To paraphrase the ethnographic research of Alonso (1994: 389), my goal is to highlight the role that political discourse plays in giving politicians the appearance of representing public interests, thus locating the study of parliamentary democracy in an analysis of how meaning is negotiated in political communication (see Woolward and Schieffelin 1994: 55–56). Given the importance of Habermas’ work to the study of democratic legitimacy, in other words, it is necessary to explore what it means for parliamentary institutions and elected officials to rep-resent public interests and exactly how this is done by agents empowered

SPEAKING FOR THE NATION 77

to act as the state. My argument is that the public sphere–parliamentary complex does not inherently establish the circumstances for democratic representation, but is more fundamentally a site for the eradication (rather than the incorporation) of difference in politics.

I substantiate this argument primarily by way of sociolinguistic research in anthropology. By analyzing parliamentary discourse as a form of semiotic negotiation and not just as a descriptive vehicle for making policy, linguistic anthropology has the value of highlighting how language constitutes and reproduces power relations within and beyond the imme-diacy of communication (Hill and Mannheim 2002: 392; Verschueren 2001: 61; Duranti and Goodwin 1997; Foucault 1972: 49), an insight that can be applied to both the Assembly’s bilingual operations and the general content of parliamentary speech itself (Gal 1987; Zentella 1997). Political discourse, in short, provides a point of reference for examining the repro-duction of hierarchy, status, and inequality within and across societies (Irvine 1985; Ochs 1997; Gal 2001; Wodak 1989; Fairclough 1995: 209; Bourdieu 1999). I assert that parliamentary speech can be read as symp-tomatic of the difficulties of categorically naming the national interest in Wales and of the tensions inherent in parliamentary democracy’s dual mandate to make culture and policy congruent while representing social diversity through the same networks of power. In Wales and elsewhere, the fault lines of democratic representation are often shaped by the politics of linguistic difference (Wright 2000) in that language policies “help to rein-force a sense of national distinctiveness that provides legitimacy to claims of national self-government” (Kymlicka 2007: 511). Though self-government has never been a common feature or goal of Welsh political interests, it is nonetheless the case that the formation of a parallel Welsh linguistic public sphere has for centuries been a key element of Welsh national distinctive-ness, which allows me to connect the historical politics of speaking Welsh to the politics of speaking for Wales in the National Assembly.

Public spheres of incorporation and resistance

At a basic level, Habermas (1989) posits the public sphere as a social (i.e., nongovernmental) space in which public opinion is formulated and channeled toward influencing parliamentary action. There are many poi-gnant critiques of this argument (e.g., Fraser 1994), but my interest is in pointing out how the development of a national political culture requires the domination over, if not the eradication of, local cultures and linguistic traditions (Keating 2001: 34). While acknowledging the role that political accommodation plays in the stabilization of civil-parliamentary networks, this section examines the history of Welsh language education policy to


question, contra Habermas, the salience of foregrounding incorporation over resistance in the development of the UK public sphere. In a sense I am retracing my discussion of nationhood by negation in Chapter 2, but now with a greater focus on one particularly important nexus of contesta-tion, language.

The Welsh language (or Cymraeg) has long been a source of political contention between Wales and the English/British/UK state. In some respects, the survival of a reasonably large Welsh-speaking community (today around half a million persons) is a testament to the intensity of this conflict and its significance to Welsh notions of cultural belonging: of the other Celtic languages found in the UK and Ireland, two have died out or all-but died out (Manx and Cornish) and speakers of two others (Scots Gaelic and Irish) only number in the tens of thousands (Price 2000). For centuries, undoubtedly, Welsh survived as a marker of divergence from and subordination within the norms of an English-language state. Recall first that Welsh was banned as an official language of state with the Act of Union in the sixteenth century. Welsh initially survived through the folk culture and a Welsh language translation of the Bible later that century, which was an outcome of government decision making in London, but also through the continuation of a Welsh poetic tradition that heaped praise on those gentry who maintained preexisting cultural and linguistic practices. As a necessary adjunct of participation in the affairs of the court, however, government business was predominantly an English language domain by the seventeenth century. As the Welsh gentry moved toward linguistic assimilation with England, it was the folk culture, and women in particular (i.e., those excluded from education), who buoyed the language (Thomas 1995: 172).

The linguistic divide was increasingly marked by wealth differences between Welsh and English speakers by the eighteenth century, with rural parishes and lower courts generally keeping to spoken Welsh and the well-to-do actively distancing themselves from the language and culture of Wales, even to the point of advocating Cymraeg’s extinction (Jones 1997: 205). It was the push to educate the Welsh about the Protestant religion that stabilized the language under these conditions. White (1997: 317) writes, “Education was regarded in this period as the means by which the Welsh would be freed from the shackles of popery, superstition and magic.” Schooling and religious conversion thus came hand-in-hand as instruments of incorporation into the English state, though with uneven impacts. The successes and failures of various initiatives rose and fell in part according to changes in the political winds of the day: an initial batch of Welsh-medium schools established in 1650 were disbanded after the Restoration in 1660; a second, English-medium attempt (the Welsh Trust)


ended in 1681 in no small part due to criticisms about the appropriateness of teaching in English to monolingual Welsh speakers; a Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) came to educate the Welsh (again in English) in 1699 but withered amid England’s sectarian power struggles of the early eighteenth century. Griffith Jones, a onetime SPCK instructor, emerged as a major catalyst for promoting literacy in Welsh during eighteenth century though a system of mobile (or “circulating”) instruction. However, his interest was not purely one of cultural preserva-tion so much as the expediency of saving souls through a language more-readily learned by monolingual speakers and believed to be insulated from “Catholic influences” found in other languages (White 1997: 325–326). Whatever his motivations and strategies, the larger impact was that, even after the movement petered out in the 1780s, Welsh language literacy was widespread at the conclusion of the eighteenth century. With nineteenth-century industrialization, however, came an accelerated decline in the number of Welsh speakers (though it also had the effect of limiting Welsh out-migration), which was related in part to the structure of industrial ownership. Whereas earlier ironworks were generally Welsh-owned and of a small-enough scale to predominantly rely on Welsh labor, the Welsh-speaking population’s participation in the coalfield labor force more often than not meant linguistic assimilation into the norms of English-speaking managers and migratory coworkers. Knowledge of English was undoubt-edly important to career advancement, for instance, as bilingual speakers were prized for their ability to translate information between the manage-ment and the workforce (Williams 1998).

As with earlier periods of political and legal assimilation, education was a key area of dispute related to the reorganization of Welsh communi-ties during the Industrial Revolution, which now intersected with the poli-tics of class, religion, and ethnicity. Though the UK education system as a whole faced problems of student participation and teacher preparation in the first half of the nineteenth century, in Wales there was the additional issue of mixed (and uneven) instruction in Welsh in some places and English in others, thus creating a linguistic confusion among students. The case of Montgomeryshire, a Welsh county on the English border, is instructive on this point. While this was a primary area of English- language encroachment (in effect occupying the territory of the Marcher lordships dating back to the Norman conquest), a great many layper-sons had little or no command of English, which became a problem in the schools. Of the 120 schools in the county, 115 were English-only (and the other five were bilingual), yet the dearth of capable English speakers was so great that this skill became the only criteria for hiring teachers: only 7 of 130 teachers, in fact, possessed any discernable teacher training,


and with few exceptions, the majority were unable to fully explain English spelling and syntax (Jones 1998: 68). Social and economic considerations only amplified the problem. Socially, some parents were reported to have switched to teaching English in the home, which created bilingual- speaking children without an adequate command of either language; economically, children worked either in wool factories or on farms to the extent that less than 20 percent actually attended school at all (Jones 1998: 69).

The problems of the education system were probably exacerbated by debates over the role of the official church in UK education. When a pro-Anglican church education bill was introduced in Westminster in 1843, many religious Nonconformists in Wales opposed the measure on the grounds that it would produce a pro-Anglican church-learning environ-ment, thus upending the voluntary, chapel-sponsored system of Welsh medium education. A report sponsored by the UK state in 1847 categori-cally attacked the Welsh system, claiming not only that Welsh schools were inadequate and working-class children uneducated, but that the Welsh religious culture promoted laxness and sexual immorality (Davies 1993: 389–391). (This “treachery of the blue books” proved to be a major inspi-ration to Welsh nationalism in the next century.) These criticisms were not merely pedagogical but were more fundamentally linguistic and tied to the social and economic transformations of Welsh society, particularly in the southern coalfields. Writing on the pressures faced by rural, Welsh-speaking communities of the late nineteenth century to adopt the conven-tions of an Anglicized Wales, Jenkins (1998: 19–20) argues that “it became increasingly fashionable to believe that English was the language of prog-ress and economic growth,” which was materially substantiated through the development of skills-based day schools that prepared young men for industrial work through the medium of English (Williams 1998: 216).

An uneven network of Anglican and Welsh Nonconformist schools dotted the landscape of Wales by the time Gladstone’s Liberal Government passed the Education Act of 1870 in Westminster. This class-based educa-tion policy implemented different standards of education for working- versus middle and upper class children, denying the former education past the age of 13, though paying for poor children’s education up to that point (Davies 1993: 435–436). The act set the UK on the path of system-atized oversight of education but was also perceived by some in Wales as an affront to Welsh rights of self-determination, particularly in light of Scotland winning a separate education bill which vested curricular power in a Scottish Department of Education (Keating 2001: 204). In this context, disestablishment from the Anglican church became a primary, but initially unsuccessful, goal of religious campaigners. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Cymru Fydd formed in 1886 as an early nationalist response,


but died out by 1896 after it was unable to cultivate a Wales-wide coalition of Liberal Party support. Running counter to these setbacks, the National Eisteddfod (a Welsh language competition and festival) was relaunched at this time and two important educational institutions, the National Library of Wales and the University of Wales, were established. Belying the complexities of accommodation and resistance in the Welsh public sphere of this period, the Education Act of 1889 also recognized Welsh as a special subject of study within the UK education system, which later language campaigners used to leverage local authorities for bilingual education.

Into the twentieth century, another education act (1902) brought addi-tional criticisms from Welsh Nonconformists about favoritism toward official church schools, which was reflected in overwhelming Welsh support for Liberal opponents of the act during the elections of 1904. Numerous Welsh language societies—for youth groups, for literary groups, etc.—sprang up at this time. Though many interest groups and bilin-gual education programs came and went, others were quite effective and enduring: the Welsh Language Society, for example, trained hundreds of teachers in Welsh through a summer school program between 1904–1939 (Löffler 2000: 197). Initially a response to the Liberals’ decline and later to linguistic Anglicization, Plaid Cymru formed in 1925 to reverse the cultural impacts of urbanization and industrialization on Welsh society. Rurality was elevated by early party activists as an alternative in which the linguistic and cultural values of Wales could be exalted (Gruffudd 2000). Contrary to the UK state, Plaid viewed modernization as an indigenous infrastructure-building program that could unite Wales and protect the stability of Welsh-speaking communities. While support for avowedly political language campaigning was slight at the time, language activists were aided in this regard by the continued marginalization of Welsh by the government in London. A government report of 1926, for instance, flatly argued that bilingual speakers in Wales were less intelligent than mono-lingual English speakers (Evans 2000: 349). Yet this was also an important period for creating new institutional spaces of Welsh language education, such as the Welsh Department of the Board of Education (1914) and the National Council for Education in Wales (1920). These advances stand out all the more in comparison to the fate of the Irish language in Northern Ireland, which (unlike Wales) had an elected assembly (established 1922) that instituted severe restrictions on minority language and cultural sup-port while under Ulster Unionist control.

Outside the political fold in Wales, a movement for the acceptance of Welsh as a formally recognized medium of education gathered momen-tum, led by individual education campaigners and organizations such as


the Welsh Language Society, the National Union of Welsh Societies, and the Union of Welsh Teachers. Though the impacts of the movement varied from one area to another, bilingual education was widespread in several Welsh counties by the early 1930s. The momentum of these successes was carried forward during and after the Second World War, reflecting a broader trend in minority language rights activism in other nation-states at that time (Kymlicka 2007: 509). In 1942, and after much campaigning in the public sphere, parliament repealed the “anti-Welsh language” clauses of the Act of Union. The Education Act of 1944 had the primary purposes of standardizing the British curriculum and making school compulsory, but it also empowered local education authorities to develop Welsh lan-guage curricula as (and if) they saw fit (Rees and Delamont 1999: 244; Jones 1995: 3–5). Following a successful experiment in Welsh-language private education in Aberystwyth, the first public Welsh-medium primary schools opened in 1950 with nearly 1,000 students across seven school districts (Evans 2000: 363). The problem for many language activists with these and other postwar transformations in UK society was just that: these programs were geared toward British nation building, not Welsh nation building (Gruffydd 2000: 129), and Cymraeg was still in serious decline. The census of 1961 reported that the number of Welsh speakers numbered barely more than 656,000 (26 percent of the total population), a drop of nearly 275,000 speakers from the census of 1901 (then accounting for just over half the total population). It also indicated that fewer than 23,000 persons, or less than 1 percent of the Welsh speaking population, were monolingual speakers (Phillips 2000: 463).

Recognizing the deficiencies of previous (mainstream) strategies of lan-guage preservation under these circumstances, a committed core of activists emerged to move the struggle in new directions. None was more resilient or committed to linguistic preservation through any (nonviolent) means necessary than Cymdeithas yr Iaith (the Welsh Language Society), which represented some of the younger and more radical elements of Plaid Cymru. Formed in 1962 (and not to be confused with the Welsh Language Society described above), the society placed protest and civil disobedience at the forefront of its revitalization strategy. The group’s main target was the struc-ture of governance itself: intentionally committing minor public offenses, its members refused to answer court summonses written in English, a direct violation of the Act of Union. By the end of the 1960s the total number of court cases dealing with these incidents approached 200 (Phillips 2000: 474). The society then turned to doggedly questioning post offices and other local institutions of government about administering services in Welsh. Mass pro-tests and some stints of imprisonment ensued until the Labour government took action in 1967.


The Welsh Language Act of 1967 introduced the dialectical standardization of Welsh as a goal of the state, initially facilitated through the Welsh-medium education system developed in the 1950s. An important gain for the language movement, the act still did not return the language to an official status as politically legitimate. Cymdeithas yr Iaith continued its efforts by initiating a spray- painting campaign aimed at English language signs. In the 1970s, the group turned to push for the establishment of Welsh language media. Following the launch of Radio Cymru in 1977 under a Labour govern-ment, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party pledged support for Welsh language television in its election manifesto of 1979, but backed away from its promise after winning the General Election that year. In response, Gwynfor Evans, Plaid’s first MP (1966), informed the government and public in 1980 of his intention to go on a hunger strike until death or the establishment of Welsh language television. Thatcher gave in and Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C) was created in 1982, which along with Radio Cymru, greatly contributed to the standardization of Welsh through mass media (Jones 1994: 244–246, 261). While there is some irony that Welsh was elevated as a popular linguistic medium by an “imposed” institution, the British Broadcasting Corporation (Howell 1992: 238), S4C nevertheless had the impact of broadening the popular appeal of the language, as well as cementing the language as a key component of Welsh national identity (Jones 1993: 4). More significant to my larger analysis, however, is that these government interventions were important steps toward the rationalization of Welsh as a legitimate, if subordinate, linguistic medium of state activity. The Education Reform Act of 1988 was the next important change in this regard: it made Welsh a compulsory subject in primary educa-tion (whether as a subject or the medium of education). The Welsh Language Act of 1993, finally, created a Welsh Language Board and reintroduced Welsh as a language of state in principle. For the first time since the Act of Union, Welsh became a language for conducting offi-cial and public business in Wales and, if a Welsh speaker so demanded, in the halls of Westminster. English language road signs were replaced with bilingual ones, and other banal symbols of the state (Billig 1995) were reproduced in both languages. In sum, the language movement in Wales had the effect of legitimizing the use of Welsh in UK governance and institutionalizing bilingual education as a socializing instrument of nationhood (Williams 2000: 670–671). In this narrow but significant regard one can argue that activism and resistance in the public sphere secured parliamentary representation of Welsh language interests in London, which lends support to Habermas’ thesis.


Devolution and language policy

Given these changes in the status of Cymraeg, that is, from officially banned to officially administered, two elements remained “missing” from a revitalization movement that arguably began as soon as Henry VIII first sought to curtail the use of Welsh. First, Welsh in the 1990s was still in decline, spoken by less than one-fifth of the population. Second, the UK lacked an institutional environment where Welsh was not an exception, but a norm of political conduct. Many language activists thereby came to see their movement as “no less than an attempt to create democracy in Wales” by challenging the secondary status of the language (Phillips 2000: 486). Devolution in 1999 created the institutional circumstances through which the Welsh language was no longer in opposition to the state and subject to its power; it was now a medium through which the architecture of the state could be reconfigured in the name of democracy.

With the opening of the National Assembly in 1999, the Assembly Government has taken language revitalization to be a primary political goal whereby “‘the principle of equality’ means that the citizen shall have the same of similar right to do through the medium of the minority language what that citizen can do through the medium of English” (Roddick 2007: 265). In terms of national governance, this means all documents and legislation pro-duced by the National Assembly are drafted in Welsh and English with either medium having the same legislative force. Extranationally, the UK court system now operates bilingually within the borders of Wales; in Europe, Assembly officials actively network with other minority language groups, though Welsh does not enjoy any special legal or practical status in Brussels. In terms of making a social impact, Iaith Pawb (Everybody’s Language) is the government’s £28.3 million Welsh language revitalization strategy, which intends that everyone in Wales should have an equal opportunity to use the Welsh language as part of everyday life. Administered through Welsh Language Board, Iaith Pawb encourages the approval and adoption of Welsh language use within public bodies, advises the voluntary and private sectors on the use of Welsh, and makes grants to local authorities and organiza-tions supporting bilingual education. Most importantly, the Assembly can be credited with overseeing the first proportional increase in the number of Welsh speakers in Wales for roughly 150 years, up from 18.7 percent of the population on the eve of devolution to 20.8 percent following the publica-tion of the 2003 census.

The areas showing the largest increases in Welsh speakers have been in the urban south of Wales, particularly in Cardiff where the political gravity of the Assembly has drawn together a cadre of Welsh speakers (and their chil-dren, who are the fastest growing group of speakers across Wales) to coalesce


around devolution’s intentionally bilingual experiment in democracy. There are, of course, language activists who have been critical of the Assembly’s approach. One group in particular, Cymuned, has argued for a policy of language acquisition for nonspeakers living in Wales as part of a program to rebuild traditionally Welsh-speaking communities. The Assembly Government has also been criticized for not making bilingualism compulsory in the private sector, which the government has consistently argued against on the grounds that it would raise the cost of doing business in Wales. And in a nation where the vast majority does not speak Welsh, fears are occasionally voiced about the Assembly creating a sociolinguistic hierarchy that would somehow privilege Welsh speakers over nonspeak-ers. “For a long time,” Assembly First Minister Rhodri Morgan (2007: 46) writes in response, “Welsh has been considered as something which could separate us. I am confident that this old fault line has decreased—it is important that we create respect for diversity and use the language to bring people together.” Speaking Welsh is an important symbol of and vehicle for representing Welsh interests in Cardiff Bay, after all.

AMs have served as a model of the bilingual society many in the Assembly envision Wales becoming. Welsh language training is offered to AMs and Assembly staff to encourage its use, and many have learned the language through this method. When I began research in the Assembly in 2003, roughly one in three AMs spoke Welsh; by the time of my second return visit in 2007, the proportion had grown to half. Welsh is visible and audible throughout the Assembly: in political speeches and debates, in casual conversation, in the recorded voice in elevators, and on signs, Assembly documents, logos, and web sites. During plenary sessions, the overwhelming majority of times that questions and statements are posed in Welsh they are posed by members of Plaid Cymru, though other parties’ AMs also do so. Typically, if a question is posed in Welsh, it is answered in Welsh, provided the respondent speaks Welsh. Communication com-monly shifts to English at some point during exchanges but can just as easily switch back again, particularly during longer debates.

Speaking Welsh in the Assembly is an important means for staking out a claim to represent national interests, if not implicitly claiming a “real” Welsh identity (Trosset 1993). The institutionalization of Welsh nonethe-less produces a certain artificiality, or a distinction between representing a political identity and embodying that identity. Despite the proportionally small number of Welsh speakers in Welsh society, in other words, Welsh language use in the Assembly paradoxically legitimates the speech of AMs as representative of Wales, thus creating a somewhat skewed representation of the Welsh national community (Crowley 2006). Whether monolingual English-speaking or bilingual, for example, AMs overwhelming refer to


the Presiding Officer by his Welsh title, Llwydd, which one Welsh-speaking AM referred to as an annoying “tokenism” during an interview. Other AMs interviewed expressed an opposition to these norms. “I’ve now adopted a policy,” said a Plaid Cymru AM,

that I only speak Welsh in plenary and [speak Welsh and English] in commit-tee. Previously some idioms [of Assembly activity] worked better in English, but I found the press covered me in English and not in Welsh …. After some thinking I decided to do nothing in English and force them to cover me in Welsh. But this goes against the grain of [developing Assembly] bilingualism. I wish it wasn’t that way because Welsh language use loses its spontaneity in the Assembly … it’s not naturally bilingual. It is also interesting about the use of Welsh in committee. The key is how the Welsh language is used: if the committee chair or two-thirds of the committee can speak Welsh, then making statements in Welsh is less intrusive. But if I am the only person speaking in Welsh, then every time I say something it becomes a political point in itself.

(Interview October 9, 2003)

I heard similar views expressed by other Plaid Cymru AMs during my research, but the issue cannot be reduced to a “nationalist” one. To dif-fering degrees, both the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives entered the Assembly in 1999 needing to improve their Welsh language creden-tials. (Labour had a fair number of Welsh speakers from the institution’s inception and boasts a cross-institutional caucus of Welsh speakers.) The Welsh language media had few of these AMs to turn to for reporting, thus rendering certain Liberal and Conservative AMs de facto representatives of the language for their respective political parties. A Welsh-speaking Conservative AM explained that he was

almost exclusively on Welsh television on a regular basis. A week wouldn’t pass when I wasn’t on Welsh language television. I needed to gain a profile through the English medium. That’s why I [now] tend to focus my contri-bution through the English medium to try to redress the balance …. Now I’m a lot more relaxed about it. It was certainly a concern of mine when I was first elected because I didn’t want to be seen exclusively as a spokesman for the Welsh language.


Speaking Welsh was therefore an inherently political issue in Cardiff Bay when I conducted my research, notwithstanding the viewpoint of the Plaid AM quoted above, and Welsh-speaking credentials were an impor-tant element of any political party’s claims to represent Welsh interests.1


A prime example comes from survey work the Liberal Democrats con-ducted in the months leading up to the Assembly elections of 2003, some of the results of which I was asked to summarize while working for the party. In this case, citizens were asked a battery of questions to determine the party’s electability in different areas of Wales, which was a means for the Liberals to help determine where to focus their campaign spending and grassroots activities. Though in the minority, the most passionate responses I read were written by Welsh speakers who exclaimed that they would never vote for the party because the questionnaire was not written bilingually!

This event, like the longer history of Welsh language education, speaks to both the productivity and limits of minority (i.e., Welsh) participation in a UK public sphere. First and foremost, Welsh was explicitly framed as a public, nongovernmental language by the Act of Union in 1536; its relegation as a social language officially politicized it. Even if accepting that, in line with Habermas, social action within the Welsh public sphere had the eventual effect of rehabilitating Welsh language use as a legiti-mate subject/object of governance, the political nature of speaking Welsh in the National Assembly indicates that his theory of the public sphere/parliamentary complex cannot be judged purely in terms of structural transformation, but also in terms of the content of parliamentary delib-erations intended to represent Welsh national interests.

What rational consensus?

Contra Habermas, I argue that empirical evidence from the National Assembly suggests that the legitimacy of parliamentary deliberations are not a reflection of rational consensus-making, but intense, winner- take-all contestations over the meanings of Welsh national interests (see also Navaro-Yashin 2002: 138; Derrida 1990: 54–55). It is not only a question of if state institutions rationalize communication, which is a key to legiti-macy for Habermas, but of what viewpoints are being rationalized and excluded and how this work is accomplished. The sociolinguistic research of Susan Gal on language ideologies and power is instructive on this point, particularly her questioning of the public/private dichotomy central to Habermas’ articulation of rational consensus (Gal 2005).

Whereas Habermas (according to Gal 2005: 25–26) claims that the ano-nymity of the public sphere helps to guarantee “the legitimacy of the dem-ocratic process” by virtue of providing venues of open, rational debate, Gal points out that the public/private distinction is not as free from historical contingency as he argues (see Habermas 1998: 449). Building on her earlier work with Judith Irvine (Irvine and Gal 2000), she emphasizes that the Habermasian public/private distinction fails to reflect culturally specific


processes of fractal recursion and erasure that are fundamental to speech. Fractal recursions, to be brief, are semiotic strategies of making claims of differentiation (e.g., left/right, east/west) across multiple scales of compar-ison. The value of this analytic strategy lies in its ability to distinguish the speech claims of one speaker against another through subtle or overt shifts in meaning or significance.2 Recursion, in turn, “invites erasures”, that is, “forms of forgetting, denying, ignoring, or forcibly eliminating those dis-tinctions or social facts that fail to fit the picture of the world presented by an ideology” (Gal 2005: 27). While noting the widespread use of recursive discourse across social contexts, Gal demonstrates the contingency of these distinctions by comparing constructions of the public/private dichotomy in the United States and Hungary. Whereas in the United States speakers utilize spatial metaphors to divide the public from the private, such as the use of “spheres” and “realms” as descriptors of difference, Gal finds that Hungarians personify these distinctions in speech, as in indexical shifts between “I/here” and “them/there.” These recursions are then mobilized up or down scales of comparison (e.g., “I” versus “we”) for the purpose of conveying solidarity, difference, and meaning between interlocutors.

I add to this work by focusing on linguistic strategies of erasure and recursion within the formalized discursive arenas of politics (Murphy 1990). It is widely understood that political speech is loaded with multiple meanings, no less so than with other forms of communication (Fairclough 2000; Crewe 2005: 183; Holly 1989; Moosmüller 1989; Edelman 1985). Equally important, I would add, are the implicitly ontological functions of parliamentary speech, in other words, deliberations that establish and redefine political subjectivities, which are premised on the antagonistic nature of political debate itself. I argue that parliamentary speech acts are successful on the condition that they challenge the legitimacy, or socio-ontological validity, of dissident claims of truth posited within legislative institutions, thus problematizing the “consensus” of Habermas’ rational consensus. To substantiate my claim, I employ the term displacement to analyze how the processes of fractal recursion and erasure intersect in and redirect the meaning of policy debates in the National Assembly for Wales. Parliamentary truths, in my view, are only produced in relation to the “untruths” they displace in countervailing arguments, a position which echoes the work of Judith Butler (1997: 40): “[W]ithin political discourse, the very terms of resistance and insurgency are spawned in part by the powers they oppose … The political possibility of reworking the force of the speech act against the force of injury consists in misappropriating the force of speech from those prior contexts.”

In sociolinguistics, displacement typically refers to the human capacity to communicate spatial or temporal abstractions (i.e., nonimmediate


events and objects), but here I extend this concept to include the strategies of recursion and erasure that enable AMs to claim the legitimacy to rep-resent Wales by shifting the scale and scope of political debate beyond the immediacy of deliberation. Again returning to and extending Balibar’s argument (quoted at the start of this chapter), I propose that each political party (in the National Assembly or elsewhere) pursues a quasi-nationalist agenda through these discursive “games” of representation insofar as the legislative-deliberative process has the effect of defining the extent to which “national” policies represent an abstract public interest. Now building on Gal’s analytic framework, the following section analyzes the displacements I observed during an Assembly plenary debate held on March 18, 2003, which was marked by negotiations over three ontological discourses of representation: temporal (historical), epistemological (statistical), and experiential (personal/local) arguments about the state of economic devel-opment in Wales.

Political economy, party ideology, and representation

The Assembly debate in question focused on the Assembly Government’s handling of its Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) program. RSA is a business development grant limited to the poorest Welsh communities, which overlap with the EU’s Structural Funds regions in Wales. Just prior to this debate, some Plaid Cymru AMs were critical in the media about the amounts of RSA funding going to indigenous businesses, which undoubt-edly aided the Assembly Government’s plenary preparations. At stake was announcing or denouncing the government’s legitimacy to pursue a par-ticular economic development path as representative of Welsh interests. The economic challenges Wales faces certainly validate the importance of this work: per capita income in Wales is four-fifths of that in England, economic diversification has been limited while high profile industrial losses (i.e., steel and manufacturing) have occurred postdevolution, and many employment gains (mainly in the public sector) are the result of short-term European funding.

Since winning and maintaining a majority of Assembly seats since 1999, the Welsh Labour Party leadership has sought to keep to the appearance of adhering to its socialist roots in Wales (i.e., the “clear red water” of Welsh Labour as compared to New Labour), which has had its successes. Simultaneously, the Assembly Government has been more than cautious about breaking from the multinational recruitment strategies characteristic of New Labour and Conservative policies dating back to Thatcher. More than a point of ideological contradiction, the Assembly Government’s economic model has drawn criticism about its


impacts on indigenous economic sustainability, and there is little doubt that multinational recruitment has been a hallmark of the Assembly Government policy (see Phelps and Tewdwr-Jones 2001). As a representa-tive of the UK’s Permanent Representation in Europe (UKRep) suggested during an interview in Brussels:

UKRep: Wales has taken an inward investment policy and has not been successful in attracting jobs on a long-term basis. I think you minimize competition by concentrating on a policy that encourages indigenous devel-opment. [With multinational recruitment] you are inevitably in competi-tion with other regions and other countries for such investments. There is no guarantee that they will stay around.

WS: So do you think the foreign direct investment strategy is misplaced in Wales?

UKRep: I don’t think you should over-rely on it. I think that there’s been an over-reliance on it in certain UK regions, including Wales. A concentra-tion on developing small business probably would be more successful in the longer term.

(Interview November 11, 2003)

My purpose here is not to confirm or dispute the value of multina-tional recruitment to the Welsh economy. Rather, it is to highlight how the contemporary circumstances of devolution intersect with Welsh political histories to frame the possibilities for expressing the future-oriented goals of nation building in the Assembly. In this important sense, the RSA debate can be analyzed as a referendum on the way that the Welsh Labour Party had adapted the welfare state model to the exigencies of devolu-tion, global economic integration, and political integration with Europe. The RSA debate of 2003 commenced with a statement from the Minister for Economic Development, Andrew Davies (L). He opened by reading the government’s motion regarding RSA (in italics, below), which was to be voted on for approval at the end of the debate. Davies proposed that

the National Assembly for Wales notes the continuing strong support offered by regional selective assistance and the Assembly investment grant to investment by companies, and welcomes the impact on improving the Welsh economy.

Since the Assembly was established in 1999, take-up of regional selective assistance has gone from strength to strength, bringing enormous benefits to the Welsh economy. The figures for the period between July 1999 and the end of February this year make impressive reading. No fewer than 750 grant offers, worth £405 million, have been accepted, and these should lever in a massive £1.7 billion of private sector investment, creating 31,000 jobs


and safeguarding nearly 13,000 further jobs …. Independent reviews of the [RSA] scheme have repeatedly shown that it is instrumental in winning new investment projects and new jobs to areas of high economic need. The scheme has been applied particularly successful in Wales, facilitating the development of indigenous business and the winning of many good-quality inward investment projects. Our record speaks for itself.

(Record of Proceedings March 18, 2003; emphasis in original)

Here the minister stakes his initial claim to success on statistics, a mode of representation that is emblematic of and fundamental to the reproduc-tion of the state (Giddens 1987: 179–180; Foucault 1977: 187–192; Scott 1998: 90–93). Most notable in the above passage are the displacements that enable the minister to frame the boundaries for legitimately evaluating the RSA program. The first is a temporal displacement whereby government policy now will improve Wales in the future: the term “should” in particu-lar indexes unfinished business in the present and displaces accountability (or results) beyond the immediacy of the debate. Adding to this claim, “independent reviews” are invoked as a parliamentary displacement: the expertise to assess the veracity of government claims are located outside the political arena and (by implication) beyond the reproach of Cardiff Bay’s political opposition. The minister’s extraparliamentary claims are then reinforced by the statement that “[o]ur record speaks for itself”: again, truth is located as self-evidently beyond political debate in the Assembly. It is through these relations that the statistics presented to the Assembly are utilized to legitimate government policy. Statistical knowledge in the National Assembly, therefore, is not only a background resource for jus-tifying state interventions into society, but also a foreground where the meanings of nationhood and the legitimacy of national policies are nego-tiated. After these opening remarks, for instance, Conservative and Plaid Cymru AMs questioned the minister on the government’s commitment to indigenous businesses and the quality of its reinvestment projects, citing high numbers of jobs in the public sector and declines in the manufacturing sector. The minister’s response shifts the temporal frame from present-to-future to past-to-present:

Andrew Davies (L): I am on record as accepting that there have been losses in manufacturing, which, in the last year, outweighed the job gain. I have said consistently that that has been the case. However, that is not specific to Wales. Scotland, England and most European Union economies have been affected. However, the rate of decline and loss of manufacturing jobs was much higher—and I have said this publicly—after Geoffrey Howe’s deflationary budget in 1981, which decimated Welsh manufacturing. I will not, therefore, take lessons on job losses in manufacturing from the Conservatives. In the


first four years of the previous [UK] Conservative Government, the annual decrease was 22 percent, which is a phenomenal decrease


Davies initially responds with an epistemological displacement: the validity of opposition speech in the present is challenged by arguing that manufacturing issues had already entered into formal recognition within the Assembly’s institutional arena, in other words as already apparent and thus irrelevant to the present discussion. The problems of the Assembly Government are then diffused through a global displacement: job losses are not specific to Wales, but reflect an international economic restruc-turing beyond government control. More important are the historical displacements that ensue. Like statistical discourses, historical revisionism is a common strategy for legitimating particular arrangements of political power (Aguilar 2003: 148; Holmes 2000a: 191). In this instance, which is a reference to the Conservative Party’s “deflationary budget” under Thatcher, Conservative criticisms of Assembly policy are delegitimated by analogous displacement: the (implicitly negative) record of Tory policy is held to pre-clude Conservative Party participation in the current political debate.

As reflected in this chapter’s opening account, Thatcherism is an unresolved (and irresolvable) issue intimately bound to the affairs of the National Assembly. It is widely understood that the impacts of Conservative policy on Wales between 1979 and 1997—mine closures, reductions in social services, privatization, et cetera—significantly helped to garner Welsh Labour Party support for devolution. With Thatcherism, statistical and historical discourses intersect to both localize and generalize the legitimating claims of actors. In observing and/or reading numerous transcripts of the Assembly’s plenary sessions, I have found that if the Thatcher legacy is not invoked in the opening speeches of AMs or minis-ters, it is routinely referenced immediately after a Conservative AM inter-venes. As evidence, a search for the words “Thatcher” and “Thatcherism” in the official transcripts of all plenary meetings convened between May 1999 and early December 2008 yielded 195 results spanning 99 of 564 possible plenary sessions, or 17.5 percent of all meetings. While substan-tial in its own right, this figure does not account for discussions about the Conservative legacy in Wales where Thatcher’s name was not mentioned, which suggests that the number of instances is quite higher and her con-tinued significance in Welsh politics is far greater than these numbers indicate. Though Thatcherism is mobilized in debate for a variety of purposes, in general it can be said that governmental success or failure and individual/party responsibility in the present is often legitimated in reference to this past. The key here is that these opposing viewpoints on


Thatcherism do not stem from different histories or statistical indices, but are fundamentally interconnected as part of plenary deliberations. In a similar account of Puerto Rican nationalism, Pérez (2002: 312) describes U.S. Congressional hearings as

a setting where participants deploy various discursive strategies in their attempts to further their definitions [of nationhood]. The irony of this is that, in order for this to work, all of the actors involved in these perfor-mances need to borrow from each other, since in the context of congressio-nal hearings competing discourses about the Puerto Rican nation, culture, history and peoplehood revealed, and at the same time fueled, discourses about ambiguity. In other words, each ideological formulation is used to define the other.

The indeterminacy of Thatcherism as a discursive resource can, on the one hand, authenticate Welsh Labour interventionist strategies in social welfare policy where the welfare state model is read as a necessity in a nation still reeling from Tory neoliberalism. On the other hand, Thatcherism is utilized to mark the absence of the Assembly Government’s engagement in the contemporary realities of global economics. From the Tory per-spective, Labour’s welfare state model diminishes the Assembly’s ability to build on the reforms of Thatcher. (Alternately, Plaid Cymru argues that Welsh Labour’s policies are meek variations from the neoliberalism of New Labour, i.e., are not socialist enough to meet Welsh social needs.) The Conservatives have grown accustomed to defending Thatcherism as a nec-essary means of promoting their policy objectives in the Assembly. What is telling about these recurring exchanges is that neither history nor statistics is an absolute foundation upon which party ideology can be promoted as representing Welsh interests: both are resources for defining the rationale of Welsh devolution only in reference to the discourses they discount.

Localized, personal experience is a third resource used by AMs to advance their claims of representing the Welsh public. The following transcripts from the same RSA debate indicate these interpersonal and interparty strategies for displacing the statistical and historical claims of the opposition in plenary sessions. I return to the debate transcripts with the Conservatives’ response to the minister’s refutation of the Tories’ legiti-macy to speak about the decline of Welsh manufacturing.

Alun Cairns (C): There is no doubt that Assembly Government spin is aimed at fooling the electorate with regard to our economic position. The Minister’s desperation is demonstrated by his reference to the UK Government of 23 years ago, which had a better record in manufacturing than he has …. The reality is that we have never been so poor in comparison


to England. The GDP per capita, or wealth gap, is at its widest since records began—it is now down to 80 percent of the UK average ….

David Davies (C): Does the Member believe that the situation would have been better during the 1980s had we nationalised every business in sight, pulled out of the European Union and joined some kind of confedera-tion with the Soviet Union, which was the Labour Party’s policy in 1983?

Alun Cairns: I am grateful for that question, David, because it highlights that the Assembly Government has made some progress in recognising the success of Conservative economic policies. It is a shame that the Assembly Government does not follow them with the same enthusiasm as the UK Government in Westminster ….The Government’s plan was to create 7,000 jobs from inward investment every year since 1998. It is again 10,000 jobs short of the net additional jobs that it should have created ….That is the progress on the promises made in the many strategic documents launched when the Assembly was established four years ago …. Who would have thought that Ynys Môn, Merthyr Tydfil and Ceredigion would be at the bot-tom of the league table of RSA applications and offers made? They are some of our poorest communities and the businesses in those communities need to be stimulated to generate employment.


In this passage, the two Conservative AMs (Cairns and Davies) play off of each other to challenge the authority of the government’s interpretation of economic change in Wales. Cairns, in his first intervention, doubly shifts the framework of evaluation. First, he reverses the minister’s temporal dis-placement of Tory speech by questioning the value and accuracy of com-paring Assembly policy in the present to the previous Conservative record in manufacturing. Second, he invokes a statistical and spatial displacement by criticizing the government’s record in reference to English and UK statistical averages that situate Wales’ economic status as relational, rather than internal and historical. Cairns then gives way to his Conservative col-league, Davies, and the scope of critique widens. Davies’ rhetorical ques-tion turns history against the Labour Party to reinforce the notion that Thatcherism is a source of progress, not an impediment to economic reju-venation in Wales. The style of intervention, which amounts to a series of loose inferences (“every business in sight,” “some kind of confederation”), allows his Conservative colleague to then shift the question of market libe-ralization back against the Labour Party in the subsequent response while glossing over his own party’s historical resistance to European integration. (It is also worth noting that Davies, who later moved on to the House of Commons, refers to his colleague in the formal style of Westminster, while Cairns thanks him with an informal address consistent with the ideology of creating a different form of democracy in Wales.)


To reinforce Davies’ point, Cairns responds with an ideological displacement of Welsh Labour policy: New Labour’s “success” at the UK level is linked to the party’s appropriation of Conservative policies; by extension, Assembly “failures” are defined as the absence of neoliberal pol-icies in Wales. Reinforcing his critique, Cairns briefly returns to statistics to question the legitimacy of the government’s economic interpretations but also to broaden the framework of argumentation downward (i.e., a fractal shift) from the national to the community level.

“Community,” as numerous Assembly documents attest, is an important signifier of Welsh experience and a primary unit of policy intervention and analysis. Cairns’ use of “our communities” is also an indexical d isplacement that allows the Tories to claim the right of critique, particularly in light of the fact that the constituencies mentioned were held by Labour and Plaid Cymru at the time of the debate. These counterattacks inevitably invite a full-blown response from all non-Conservative parties. In this case, the invocation of community opens another level of debate about Thatcherism’s impact, which is of extreme sensitivity as many in Wales (political and nonpolitical) speak of this impact in terms of lived, community-centered experiences. A Labour AM is the first to respond:

Peter Law (L): As you Tories are so concerned about these poor commu-nities, would you like to reflect on what you did to poor communities in the 1980s when you closed all the collieries, and thousands of people were thrown out of work because of Tory policy? Would you like to reflect on the devastation that you caused, which we are still trying to get over? That is what the Minister is working on every day.

The Deputy Presiding Officer: Alun Cairns, you will have an extra minute.Alun Cairns (C): I am grateful, Deputy Presiding Officer. I could not

have timed that intervention any better if I had planned it. If Peter Law looked at the amount of RSA that was paid to Blaenau Gwent [i.e., Law’s constituency] for the seven years before 1997 and for the six years since 1997 the additional funding that the Conservative Party pumped into Blaenau Gwent through RSA payments is quite staggering. It would be useful if he looked back at the record instead of making a rhetorical point.


Law, the Labour AM, first relies on a temporal displacement to challenge the authority of the Conservatives to speak on behalf of Wales, which is reinforced by the implication that any contemporary problems of the Assembly Government’s economic policies can be reduced to Thatcherism’s impact on Wales. The statement is followed by a refutation of Cairns’ earlier indexical displacement : “you” first situates the present generation of Tories as Thatcherites and “we” separates them as not Welsh. (The Deputy


Presiding Officer then awards Cairns additional speaking time, which is highly regulated by the Assembly’s procedural commitment to maintain-ing “family friendly” working hours.) The Conservatives appear to have prepared for such an intervention. Cairns responds with statistics specific to Law’s home constituency to substantiate a rhetorical displacement of the Labour AM’s expertise: Law’s lack of statistical data is used to delegitimate his speech as less relevant to the plenary proceedings.

The only consensus reached between parliamentary opponents, there-fore, is that the discussion is about RSA; indeed, all else is about defining the ultimate causes of economic problems and the impacts of the program under devolution. In shifting the terms of debate from the statistical to the historical to the local/experiential, moreover, individual speakers were not seeking a common frame of understanding, but an additional perspective from which to invalidate dissent. By this point in the debate, in other words, discussions were now centered on determining the meaning of the Conservative legacy in Wales and much less so on evaluating current government policy. Near the conclusion of the RSA debate, however, Plaid Cymru delivered a final rebuke of government policy by returning to the issue of statistical veracity and legitimacy.

Rhodri Glyn Thomas (P): Mae’n ddiddorol clywed yr holl ystadegau sy’n cael eu taflu yn ôl ac ymlaen yn y drafodaeth. Tybiaf ein bod oll yn def-nyddio ystadegau’r Swyddfa Ystadegau Gwladol; er bod Andrew Davies yn sôn am lwyddiant Llywodraeth y Cynulliad er 1999, mae eraill ohonom yn gweld y diffygion yn glir gan ddefnyddio’r un ystadegau ….

Pa ystadegau bynnag y mae Andrew yn dewis eu defnyddio, aeth dwy rhan o dair o’r cymorth rhanbarthol dewisol i gwmnïau y tu allan i Gymru. Pwysleisiaf hynny. Mae hefyd yn wir bod cwmnïau o Gymru yn fwy llw-yddiannus wrth ddefnyddio’r arian—maent 50 y cant yn fwy cost effeithiol. Fodd bynnag, mae’r grantiau y maent yn eu derbyn ar gyfartaledd yn llai na’r rhai a gaiff cwmnïau o’r tu allan i Gymru … Mae pentwr o ystadegau y gallwn eu taflu atoch, Andrew. Fodd bynnag, pe baech yn siarad â chwmnïau ledled Cymru, fe ddywedant eu bod yn ei chael yn anodd cael arian RSA a’i fod yn llai nag y bu.

[It is interesting to hear all the statistics being thrown back and forth in the debate. I suspect that we are all using statistics from the Office for National Statistics; although [minister] Andrew Davies spoke of the Assembly Government’s success since 1999, others can clearly identify defi-ciencies using the very same statistics ….

Whichever statistics Andrew chooses to use, two thirds of the RSA has gone to companies outside Wales. I emphasise that. It is also true that Welsh companies are more successful in their use of the funding—they are 50 percent more cost effective. However, the grants that they receive are, on average, less than those paid to companies from outside Wales … I could


throw a mountain of statistics at you, Andrew. However, if you spoke to companies across Wales, they would tell you that they are finding it difficult to obtain RSA funding and that it is less than it used to be.]


Thomas’ speech is notable for the ambiguity he attributes to statistical knowledge. In the initial statement, he throws into question the value of statistics as an indicator of policy effectiveness, thus implying an episte-mological displacement that impacts all political parties in the Assembly equally. In the next breath, however, he cites “irrefutable” statistics and falls back on personal experience to challenge the government, with the under-lying assertion that the government lacks the legitimacy to speak favorably about RSA policy. The Minister for Economic Development, who had been sitting in the front row of desks in the plenary chamber throughout the debate, responded with a heated refutation of the political opposition that challenged their assertions on several fronts.

Andrew Davies (L): On this hoary old chestnut of supporting indigenous companies, it is a “little-Wales” approach—y parti bach. It is Wales for the Welsh. Are you serious that we should not give grants and other support to overseas investors, such as Ford Motor Company, General Dynamics UK Ltd, and British Aerospace in Broughton? Are we saying that we do not want to help companies that support us through direct employment as well as via their impact on the supply chain? Over 70 percent of the grants offered so far this year have been to Welsh-based companies. Their value was lower, because Welsh-based companies tend to be smaller, but the number of offers made to them was far greater. It is up to companies to decide how much funding to apply for; we do not dictate that—we respond to grant applications. Clearly, the forces of conservatism on both sides of the Chamber do not understand how the system works …. We are committed to making Wales a better and more prosperous place in which to live and work, and the Assembly’s record on busi-ness support speaks for itself. Unemployment, interest rates and inflation are at record lows in Wales, and those are stable conditions for economic growth.

(Record of Proceedings March 18, 2003) [Debate ends.]

Davies here hits at Plaid Cymru in a double sense over their criticism of the Assembly’s business development policy. The linguistic displacement, “y parti bach,” translated as “the little party,” is a phrase that plays on pejorative stereotypes of the party as narrowly preoccupied with isola-tionist nationalism and pro-Welsh language policies. In setting Plaid’s stance in the either/or terms of supporting/not supporting multinational investment, he further displaces the context of the opposition’s claims: that too much funding has gone to multinational corporations. Explicit


in his statement, moreover, is the claim that the globalization of the Welsh economy is inevitable and desirable, citing a string of international investors as evidence. The minister returns to statistical interpretation to further displace oppositional claims on quantifiable grounds, but also by (again) displacing accountability: “we do not dictate [funding requests]—we respond to grant applications.” He then performs an ideological displacement by conflating the political views of the socialist-oriented nationalists and the Conservatives—with the conservatism of the latter already prefigured as undesirable—and anchoring his argument in the physical seating arrangements of parties in the plenary chamber (literally on the left and right of Labour, respectively). In conclusion, Davies ends where he began by displacing the relevance of the debate itself against a record of achievement that “speaks for itself.”

The minister’s party seemed to agree in advance. At the end of the allot-ted time for the debate, a number of Labour AMs and the majority of gov-ernment ministers who had been absent from the chamber for most of the debate entered the plenary chamber to vote on the motion to legitimate the government’s RSA policy. Despite the political posturing on display in plenary, the off-and-on attendance of AMs during parliamentary meet-ings (which can also be observed in Westminster debates, for that matter) suggests the importance of public performance over and above the goal of persuasion during democratic debates in Cardiff Bay. Abélès (1991: 132) makes a similar point in observing local government meetings in France, wherein speakers “do not significantly change the decisions taken by the president and the board, but they provide the councilors with a platform on which to display their talents as representatives” before the press and the public. Given the informality and relative collegiality of AM interac-tions observed in the previous chapter, moreover, parliamentary delibera-tions would fall under the rubric of what Geertz (1974) terms “deep play,” a symbolic and ritualized conflict that encompasses broader social hierar-chies without substantively changing them.

As the government ministers took their seats, the Presiding Officer called a vote on five amendments introduced during the debate to change the language of the initial motion, all of which criticized the government’s handling of RSA. All five were defeated. A simple review of the Official Voting Record would indicate a split in opinion over the motion but would not fully capture the dynamics of partisan division and political exchange within the National Assembly that afternoon. The antagonistic context of discussion was glossed over in the operation of democracy by majority vote. The government’s nonpresence may have ultimately spoken louder than any speaker in attendance that day. The procedures of debate and record of voting might give the impression of a democratic exchange


premised on reaching rational consensus, but in reality the outcome was already determined before the first speaker rose to address the chamber. The Assembly’s institutional legitimacy was already secured by virtue of having the debate yet the representative legitimacy of its content came down to a zero-sum game distanced from any notion of reaching political agreement.

Summary

This chapter has utilized Habermas’ articulation of the public sphere/parliamentary complex to simultaneously analyze how the legitimacy of parliamentary power is rationalized through deliberative strategies of representation in Wales and critique the extent to which his theorization conforms to the empirical evidence of democratic practices at the cultural and political margins of the UK. Drawing from historical and discursive sources of data, I have argued that Habermas’ thesis is confirmed from an institutional-legislative reading of how representation is structured, yet is problematic when parliamentary practices and outcomes are viewed as negotiations about the construction of shared meaning.

The first half of this chapter reviewed the institutionalization of Welsh language education and the incorporation of Welsh language rights in UK politics, arguing that the accommodation of linguistic-cultural difference through UK parliamentary-administrative processes does, to an extent, confirm the relevance of the public sphere thesis. Language activists in Wales were observed to have encouraged sympathetic parliamentarians to gradually undo the damage done by the Act of Union and subsequent prej-udices against the language, with a trail of legislative and administrative changes in the status of Welsh cited as evidence. The larger development of bilingual governance under devolution also appears to corroborate Habermas regarding the public sphere’s role as a sending mechanism or “warning system” for directing parliaments (1998: 359). However, it can equally be argued that this reading of legitimacy is thin insofar as the stakes of resistance to linguistic Anglicization—civil disobedience, threats of hunger strikes, imprisonments, et cetera—were at times considerably outside the formal boundaries of dissent from the state and did not carry institutional guarantees of recognition. Habermas acknowledges the role that these forms of resistance play in shaping public representation through legislative action, but the UK state’s accommodation of Welsh difference can be argued to be first and foremost about the solidification of centralized power, or a means of legitimating existing power structures above and beyond empowering difference. The problem, as the second half of this chapter has illustrated, is that there is a marked difference between


the rationalization of accommodation and the representation of difference in a legislative environment where competing opinions about national interests are not by necessity valued as democratically equal.

AMs’ comments about language practices in the National Assembly, for instance, indicated that the institutionalization of Welsh in the business of Welsh governance must be evaluated against deeper meanings of legitimacy also suggested by Habermas: it is not only a matter of legislative outputs, nor just the rationalization of civil-parliamentary interactions, that sig-nal the democratic representation of public opinion. More fundamental to Habermas’ thesis, legitimacy is premised on a condition of mutual understanding in political communication that must rely on the neutral-ization of difference in the parliamentary setting. All actors conformed to institutional procedures to participate in parliamentary activities, which collectively posited the democratic legitimacy of the institution, or as an arena where shared rules of argumentation guided deliberations, including basic rules of attacking opponents politically, not personally, even when exchanges became quite heated. During the RSA debate of March 18, 2003, for example, the structure of deliberations allowed for the introduction of several motions of dissent, the participation of speakers across the party spectrum, and a formal process for determining the winners and losers of deliberation. Collectively, the speakers in the debate implicitly agreed on three central tropes of negotiation—statistical, historical, and local knowledge—to evaluate government policy.

These same points of deliberation also indicated problems in the legitimacy of the parliamentary process if defined according to the build-ing of rational consensus through debate. In particular, the discourses of expertise utilized during the RSA debate of March 18, 2003 indicated how recursive speech acts and linguistic strategies of erasure are mobilized by parliamentarians in Wales to legitimate the claims of one speaker/party by displacing the relevance of all others. RSA was a vehicle for arguing about the meanings and causalities of Welsh history under Conservative rule more than a referendum about government policy per se. Even if debate was premised on creating a better Welsh future, the meaning of Welsh nationhood was more fundamentally shaped by negotiations about the past that, while relevant, hardly determined the validity of govern-ment policy in the present. The structuring of deliberation took center stage at the expense of creating consensus in this context: AMs expressed competing visions of national experience through displacements that only achieved finality by virtue of the Assembly’s strict rules of time manage-ment. Only a select number of AMs, moreover, could claim the legitimacy of representing the dominant opinion of society once votes were cast. The fact that many government representatives were absent from (much of)


the proceedings suggests that the institutional legitimacy of the process was ultimately more important to the reproduction of parliamentary power than was the creation of mutual understanding. Of course, no one can (or should) be forced to agree with majority opinions, but the implica-tion is that representative legitimacy is a necessary but secondary feature of parliamentary democracy. In sum, Habermas has constructed an elabo-rate system for determining the legitimacy of parliaments, but one that privileges the structure of democratic practice over its outcomes. Building on this notion, the next chapter returns to the question of institutional legitimacy by focusing on one of the National Assembly’s central practices of self-justification, transparent governance.

5

The Transparency of Democracy

We have made the transition from a nation that was governed, in the main, by an unelected old-boy network, drawn from a narrow band of people, where the vast majority of the public had no real idea of what was going on, to a far more open and democratic system of governance. Long may it continue.

(Carwyn Jones, then Minister for Open Government, Record of Proceedings, January 21, 2003)

Perhaps it is no surprise that when interviewing AMs, their staff, and civil servants about the National Assembly’s stated commitment to

transparent governance, the consistent response to my question, “What is your opinion of the Assembly’s Open Government Policy?,” was one in favor of openness in government. Who could question the value of transparency in politics, after all? Nonetheless, this question encouraged a variety of interpretations about what transparency means that further informed discussions about its limits. Some described openness as a new procedure of “stakeholder involvement” in policymaking (i.e., including civil society in decision-making processes initiated by the Welsh Assembly Government), which set politics in Wales apart from politics in the UK as a whole (see Egan and James 2002). Others took it to mean a practice of cross-party collaboration in policy development, another design feature of devolution. A few dismissed openness as a consequence of the National Assembly’s lack of power relative to the House of Commons and the European Commission: as one political staffer put it to me, “It’s easy to have open government when you’re not debating anything [of importance]” (Interview March 29, 2003). Interviewees were also divided between taking “openness” to mean the transparency of parliamentary activity before the public at large or the transparency of government activity before


nonministerial AMs. It is understandable that the meaning of transparency was contested in an expressly political environment: defining its limits, after all, also meant defining the legitimacy of political practices in Cardiff Bay. Far more informative to my research was the widespread recognition that transparency is good thing only to a point.

The mantra of open governance, or democracy-as-openness, was writ-ten into the institutional design of the National Assembly via informa-tion and communication technologies, bureaucratic codes of conduct, and procedures of civil-governmental interaction. This chapter observes how the Assembly’s Open Government Policy is implemented as a form of parliamentary self-regulation, thus extending the progression of this book’s analysis from rational authority (Weber) and rational consensus (Habermas) to focus on governing practices as a discourse of power outlined in the work of Michel Foucault. For Foucault (1991: 102–103), “governmentality” is both a condition and operational network of insti-tutional relations, procedures, and analytical methods aimed at discerning knowledge of a subject population and acting upon it with authority. In anthropology, this concept is typically applied to studies of power and resistance in relation to, but distinct from, the state. Foucault’s appeal from this perspective lies in his focus on power’s locality and diffusion: power is not singular in this sense, thus enabling certain ways of thinking and writing about the role of human agency in the making of subjec-tivities. Regrettably, very little of this work incorporates the perspective of the governors to analyze what is means to be governed, even if there is a growing body of research concerned with elite cultures of transpar-ency and accountability (Strathern 2000b; Sanders and West 2003; Levine 2004; Morris 2001; Power 1997; see also Crowley 2002). Though varied in content, this literature bears the widespread recognition that, no matter how well defined or implemented, there are always limits to openness, which helps to indicate how and where institutional power intersects with social experience.

In general, transparency is theorized as a response to a specific moment or state of nontransparency, for example: transparency/ conspiracy (Sanders and West 2003), transparency/corruption (Ku 1998), transparency/secrecy (Florini 2000: 13), or transparency/evil (Baudrillard 2003: 33–36). In anthropology specifically, a great deal of attention is given to analyzing how particular regimes of transparency create “a political technology of the self: a means through which individuals actively and freely regulate their own conduct and thereby contribute to the government’s model of social order” (Shore and Wright in Strathern 2000: 62). In a similar vein, and drawing from the work of Appadurai (1996), Sanders and West define transparency as an ideoscape, or a chain

THE TRANSPARENCY OF DEMOCRACY 105

of “ideas, terms, and images that can be condensed into key words … and exported to new contexts” to reproduce “the operative logic of globalizing economic and political institutions” (2003: 10). A provocative section of this text raises several questions that are relevant to the study of the Assembly’s Open Government Policy as well as cross-cultural research on transparency and power:

What, after all, is claimed when the operation of power is described as trans-parent? What is seen through, and what, then, is seen? Transparency, as it is used in contemporary global-speak, presumes a surface to power that can be seen through and an interior that can, as a result, be seen. If the processes through which power functions constitute its interior, what, then, consti-tutes its surface? Its (ideological) representations? If so, can such surfaces ever be rendered transparent; can they ever be completely stripped away? Or, can they only be transformed/replaced/covered over? And by whom?

(Sanders and West 2003: 16)

Whereas the statement opening this chapter, made by a high-ranking elected official in the National Assembly for Wales, suggests a necessary, if not mutually constituting, relationship between transparency and democ-racy, Sanders and West indicate the fundamental incompleteness of trans-parency reforms, thus underscoring the importance of observing practices of democratic management that both reform and reproduce existing rela-tions of governing power. In Foucault’s terminology, this means attending to “the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not,” which he argues is “internal and external” to the practice of gover-nance (Foucault 1991: 103). But what does it mean for those persons who wield political power to submit to the disciplinary techniques they enact as a means of reproducing that power? If Assembly officials recognize that openness is only good to a point, then are the practices that transcend the transparency of governance a form of resistance as well as a means of solidifying parliamentary power? In short, mobilizing governmentality to analyze what it means to govern raises important questions about poten-tial limitations to Foucauldian theories of power.

This chapter analyzes three, interrelated research problems in response to the paradox of Foucault’s theory of governmentality. The first challenge is to question how Open Government operates as an intelligible discourse of power within the political and historical contexts of Welsh democracy. The first section of this chapter therefore analyzes how the structural logic of democratic transparency in Wales was shaped by recent political events in the UK and EU and a longer history of Welsh underrepresentation in


UK politics. The second challenge is to understand how the institutional boundaries of legitimacy are negotiated through practices of transparency in the National Assembly (i.e., an issue of internal discursive context). The second section draws from interview data to contrast the ideals of openness outlined by the Assembly’s technological and procedural codes of conduct with AMs’ more pragmatic engagement with transparency as a limiting and necessarily partial form of democratic practice. The third challenge is to examine Open Government in the wider context of the social produc-tion of institutional legitimacy in the National Assembly. The third and final section thereby analyzes how the meaning and scope of openness is interpreted by media and civil interest groups operating in the Welsh public sphere established by devolution. I will argue in conclusion that the ambiguities of transparent democracy in Wales are not scandalous, but merely reflect inherent tensions between ideals and practices of legitimacy circulating in the hyperpublic political environs of Cardiff Bay.

Negating secrecy in Welsh governance

The political impetus for emphasizing transparency in the design of Welsh democracy has two sets of historical roots: one that speaks to perceived deficiencies in UK democracy and the project of European governance generally and a second that is specific to the circumstances of past gover-nance in Wales. In the first case, and almost hand-in-hand, creating trans-parency in UK government and devolving political power across the UK were cornerstones of “political modernization” that fueled the UK Labour Party’s revival under Tony Blair in the mid-1990s (Fairclough 2000: 74–75). “Politics,” wrote Blair (1996: 55) less than a year before Labour’s electoral revival,

becomes less respected, less accountable, more remote from people’s lives. That is bad for Britain and bad for democracy …. Changing the way we govern, and not just changing our government, is no longer an optional extra for Britain. So low is popular esteem for politicians and the system we operate that there is now little authority for us to use unless and until we first succeed in regaining it. For three decades the standing of Britain’s constitution has been declining. Barely a third of the people now declare themselves satisfied with their system of government. Parliament’s very raison d’etre is to express and redress popular grievances. When it has itself become the focus of those grievances, it is obliged to act.

Transparency, in other words, functioned as a more general gloss on reversing popular distrust of government and slumping electoral


participation in the UK. The creation of regional assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland and a Scottish Parliament became a logical extension of this argument by rendering UK government more accountable and accessible at the social margins of UK political and economic power (Jennings 1998). The same can be said of the EU during the 1990s where transparency reforms were heralded as critical to the long-term stability of the integration project (Aziz 1999) and to addressing public perceptions about its “democracy deficit” (Rohrschneider 2002). Several measures were instituted during this period to bolster the EU’s legitimacy in this sense, such as: public rights of documentary access (in 1993), a code of practice for the Council of Europe (in 1995), and rights of public access to explanations of council votes, meeting minutes, and statements on the legislative process (in 2001). Similar to the connection between devolution and transparency in the UK, post-Maastricht Europe also came to associate transparency with its governing principle of subsidiarity, or the transfer of decision-making authority to the lowest possible level of governance (Neuwahl 1995). Then EC president Romano Prodi, for example, stated during a meeting of the presidents of the regions of Europe in 2002:

[F]ive principles: openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence … effectively serve to “apply better the fundamental principles of subsidiarity and proportionality that underlie our Treaties” and they concern all EU institutions. Which is why we are seeking to: achieve more transparency in the day-to-day application of EU policies and greater participation by organised civil society and the representa-tives of municipalities, towns and regions … Leaders of regional, urban and local communities have a specific responsibility because they are directly involved in the application of a whole series of Community rules and programmes. Such “grassroots democracy” can teach the European Union much in the way of improving communication and political practice.

(Prodi 2002)

Collectively, the political rhetoric about democratic transparency and decentralization emanating from London and Brussels no doubt influenced the organizational shape and procedural outlook of the National Assembly for Wales, at the very least in terms of initiating a common lexicon of “modern democratic practice.” Yet the drive to devolve open, democratic power to Wales was shaped equally, if not more, by the historical precedents of UK governance in Wales, particularly during the period of Conservative Party rule spanning 1979–1997.


Anti-democratic histories

No political party in the UK (or elsewhere) can claim an unblemished relationship with the electorate, but the administration of the Welsh Office under Thatcher and then John Major was particularly susceptible to claims of secrecy and corruption. Essentially, as Thatcher’s neolib-eral agenda progressed, decision making and accountability became more removed from Welsh political interests. Save for one instance, for example, the Conservatives appointed non-Welsh MPs as Secretaries of State for Wales between 1979 and 1997. Likewise, the executive boards of Welsh quasi-governmental agencies (or “quangos”) run by the Welsh Office were appointed by a secret nomination system (until 1995) and “consisted mainly of ‘white’ middle class businessmen with Conservative leanings” (Deacon 2002: 168). The legitimacy of Welsh Office activi-ties was most uncertain by the time John Redwood was appointed by Major to head the department in 1993. Although not his fault, previous scandals within the Welsh Office machinery took on a public character and thereby became defined as problematic, or existent, under Redwood. Leaders of Conservative quangos were cited with unauthorized spend-ing, making questionable payments, and issuing irregular retirement packages; in one case, a convicted fraudster was appointed to run one of Wales’ most powerful quangos, the Welsh Development Agency (Deacon 2002: 34). In a separate incident, Redwood returned £100 million of the Welsh budget to London rather than disperse it to projects or agencies in Wales. Though some resistance remained, these events encouraged the Labour Party in Wales to push for devolution. (Some argue that devolu-tion had no champion as influential, or unlikely, as John Redwood.) The Major government initiated something of a corrective in its white paper on government openness in 1994, but the document did “not concede the principle that rights [of access] should be the rule and restrictions the exception,” focusing instead on a general right of access to request information without a parallel right of access to specific government documents (Raab 1994: 340).

The 1990s were thus ripe for Labour to exploit the Conservatives’ ambivalence about transparency and decentralization as part of a broader critique of declining public participation in and support for UK democ-racy. In Europe, reforms were already being implemented in the name of democratization and Labour’s opponents had yet to follow suit. In Wales, the actions of the Conservative Party were deeply unpopular and distrusted: not only were neoliberal reforms most challenging to the UK’s economic margins, but governance was carried out with little pretence of popular participation or representation. Both Scottish and Welsh


nationalist parties began to reassert their respective cases for political recognition. Plaid Cymru’s Dafydd Elis Thomas in 1990, for instance, said in the context of the Soviet Union’s demise: “[s]oon what is right for Sofia and for Riga may begin to make sense in Cardiff. And the top-heavy bureaucracy of the Welsh Office will collapse under its own weight into a form of new democracy even in Wales” (in Stephens 1992: 168).

Transparency and decentralization had thus emerged under different circumstances as coempowering concepts of democratic reform in Wales, the UK, and Europe. Even if only in rhetorical terms, opening the UK government up to public scrutiny and minority representation became paramount to modernizing UK politics. The government’s White Paper on Devolution thus asserted that the Assembly would only “gain the trust of the Welsh people if it conducts its affairs openly and properly”; more bluntly, then-Welsh Secretary Ron Davies argued that “no longer will our key public services lie in the hands of political appointees operating in secret and accountable to no one in Wales” (Gay 1997: 11, 7). On the eve of the devolution referendum of 1997, a Welsh broadsheet offered a similar editorial opinion:

The first impact an Assembly will have is on democracy. The case for greater accountability of public bodies is not a dramatic issue with obvious mass appeal, but it is unanswerable. It is simply wrong that the 1,400 appointees to the main [government agencies] should spend nearly £2.5bn [annually] with little or no public scrutiny.

(Western Mail September 18, 1997: 1)

Given the weight of these arguments to the push for devolution, many principles of transparent government were subsequently outlined in the Government of Wales Act. The act mandates that the Assembly’s “business is conducted with due regard to the principle that there should be equality of opportunity for all people” (HM Government 1998). It requires the Assembly to hold its meetings publicly, publish and archive its proceed-ings, and provide a forum for public complaint. AMs are required to reg-ister financial interests and stand down from debates and other Assembly business when a conflict of interest exists. Looking proactively to define Welsh democracy as distinctively open compared to central government, the Assembly Government later implemented (in 2001) the UK Freedom of Information Act ahead of the UK as a whole (2005). Collectively, the combination of public consultation, legislative design, and institutional leadership furthered the ideal of transparent democracy in Wales beyond what any one of these policies might have. What remained to be seen was how it would work.


Surveillance technologies

The Assembly’s plenary chamber and its technologies form a powerful panopticon of transparent governance, setting it apart from the anti-technological formalism of the Houses of Parliament (Crewe 2005: 194). Inside the circular plenary chamber, each AM is equipped with a com-puter, microphone, and voting buttons at her/his seat. Four flat screen TVs are mounted on the walls of the circular room mainly to display voting results but also for occasional videoconferencing. Each AM has a headset wired to the plenary chamber’s translation booth. Two translators work from the booth during plenary sessions and committee meetings, turning Welsh into English for AMs, gallery visitors, and television/web viewers. AMs have full access to all data on their office computers and to party-specific shared-access files stored on the Assembly’s server. Equally significant, technology creates virtual connections between AMs and the Welsh public, thereby symbolizing and extending the institution’s mandate to deliver open, modern government to Wales by blurring the boundaries between the public sphere and parliamentary complex.

On the Internet, plenary sessions are Webcasted and archived online, ministerial meeting minutes are published along with transcripts of plenary sessions and committee meetings, and policy proposals, items of debate, and (sometimes) background documents (e.g., UK legislation, government reports) are made available. Inside the chamber, email access allows AMs to quietly converse, strategize, and arrange impromptu intra- and cross-party meetings outside the chamber during sessions. It is not uncommon to see AMs checking and writing e-mails during these meetings. E-mail is also a means of contacting support staff to request information or assign tasks while in session. Between 1999 and 2007, this was a particularly important function as AMs could only send and receive messages generated within the building. There were times, for instance, when I or other members of my office would e-mail my office’s AM just-finished speech materials after plenary had already begun. AMs now possess full access to the Internet. As a result, AMs are now perform-ing fact-checks and other forms of real-time research as part of their participation in plenary, as well as connecting the parliamentary process to the Welsh public sphere. Constituents viewing plenary sessions online or on television, in fact, have begun e-mailing AMs during these meetings. According to an Assembly staff member I have known since 2003, there has even been an instance in which a doctor watching a plenary session on television e-mailed an opposition AM with information that refuted a government statement on health care that had been made moments earlier.1


These technologies of surveillance and virtual participation are complemented by the material dimensions of the parliamentary pro-cess. Media coverage is encouraged through regular ministerial press briefings, numerous public relations events in the Assembly lobby, and the allocation of office space in the National Assembly building to the press. The upper walls of the Senedd’s circular plenary chamber are made of glass panels that allow the public and press to observe Assembly proceedings from overhead. The chamber is also visible via glass flooring/ceiling panels on the second floor of the building’s public lobby: one can literally look down over the shoulders of AMs while they work in plenary. Meetings of the Assembly’s policy committees are also open to the public and, equally if not more symbolic of the open gov-ernment ideal, include the participation of civil servants, which greatly alters the practice of policymaking relative to the UK as a whole. Unlike government operations in London, civil servants give public evidence before these committees, a sea change in UK civil service practice and bureaucratic principles of secrecy in general (Weber 1978: 992–993). A long-time civil servant described this practice as the biggest difference between working for the old Welsh Office and working for the Assembly Government:

I suppose the most significant change has been more accountability and appearance at subject committees. So, we’re there to accompany the min-isters, answering questions, contributing to the discussion which gives us much more exposure. I think it makes us more vulnerable as a consequence of that because no longer are we faceless civil servants supporting the minister. Now we’re sitting around the table in public sessions which are broadcast on the TV. That, initially, took some getting used to. After the first five minutes you forget the cameras are there in the informal nature of the proceedings.

(Interview May 21, 2003)

From a structural perspective, openness is thus rationalized through working codes of practice, observation technologies, and uses of space that define the Assembly as a distinct institutional entity and the antithesis of the Welsh Office. There are, of course, limits to openness that reflect the asymmetrical nature of Wales’ devolution settlement: restrictions prohibit divulging UK-level governmental information or data that jeopardizes the commercial confidentiality of the private sector. More important to the operation of Welsh democracy, this instrumentalist view of governance fails to fully capture how ideals of transparency are translated into political practices.


Dialectics of transparency and secrecy

Transparency is a rapidly spreading phenomenon that may be transform-ing world politics as we know it. This phenomenon—caused by the spread of democracy, the information revolution, the rise of the global media, international institutions, and international norms—is often portrayed as a boon for international cooperation, a solution to numerous global prob-lems, and, indeed, morally desirable.

(Finel and Lord 2000a: 339)

One might question the causality of this statement found in a study of transparency in international institutions. The statement suggests that transparency is exterior to politics insomuch as information revolutions, the media, and international norms by definition exist apart from political institutions. It may very well be accurate in a descriptive sense, but it also fails to acknowledge (contra the ethnographic literature) the role that institutional actors play in shaping the meanings and boundaries of transparency through institutional practices. By extension, it is an agentless account of how transparency reforms are implemented and reproduced. In contrast, many of those interviewed in the National Assembly expressed a bifurcated view of openness that emphasized prac-tice alongside structure.

Transparency, on the one hand, is considered a democratic principle and lauded as an ideal practice of good governance. On the other, open government is interpreted much more pragmatically in the National Assembly’s politically charged environment. “There is a tendency to cre-ate a hidden government within open government,” a Plaid Cymru AM explained to me in the open space of the Assembly Members’ Tea Room one afternoon. The Assembly Government, in this view, will “just not minute something” if it is of a politically sensitive nature. “I agree with the need for transparency,” said the AM, “but I’m pragmatic enough to realize discussions of ministers and officials that must be kept within government [circles] wouldn’t work otherwise” (Interview October 9, 2003). A mid-level civil servant corroborated this viewpoint:

If somebody knows that a document is going to be open and accessible they will write that document to take account of that. If they know that the policy papers leading up to that document are going to open and accessible, then they will write those accordingly. And, if as a result of all that, they still need to keep something secret they will find other ways of doing it, whether by conversations or doing things informally in some way, or what have you. So the idea that you can ever have complete openness in government or in fact that it’s even desirable is a bit of a myth. But I do think that the Assembly


is a more open—it has to be a more open and accessible organization than the Welsh Office—because the opportunities for questioning ministers and holding them accountable are far, far greater. I think from that point of view a big light has been shown on some of the ways government works in Wales.

(Interview April 2, 2003; speaker’s emphasis)

Rather than praising the media and similar instruments of transparency, however, many of those interviewed suggested that the media actually constrains openness in Cardiff Bay (see also Finel and Lord 2000: 347–348). In the estimation of one Labour Party AM, transparency works against itself as an ideal practice of democracy. The AM explained that if the com-mittee work of the Assembly was

held off camera, in private, you can actually be honest about what you think and members of different parties can come to an agreement …. If you were always in with public access, with the cameras there, then you’d tend to be a bit more, not intransigent, but you would stand on your position and you would insist on votes in order to show that you put on a fight until the end … Let me give you [a hypothetical] example. If we were talking about the pros and cons of making a change to the pay structure or the [AMs’] allowance structure, um, I guarantee to you that there are certain newspapers here that would present that in the worst possible light. [Laughs.] As if there was a gravy train and we should all be sacked and sacked immediately. It’s very difficult to argue openly one way or another if you know that that is likely to happen to you. I’m not saying make these decisions secret, but sometimes the discussion should be confidential.


Open government, in other words, reduces the chances of political compromise however much it might illuminate the process by which compromise is forestalled. Several AMs interviewed implicitly recognized the performative element that is foregrounded into the process of openly making policy in the Assembly. Paradoxically, the political truth of com-promise or “deal making” is erased in this performance and relocated in unseen networks of informal political exchange. New spaces of secrecy have simply replaced older ones under devolution because fulfilling one’s political-ideological role means that the formal channels of deliberation do not readily provide spaces for consensus. “Very occasionally,” said another Labour AM interviewed,

we have [committee] meetings in private when we are discussing quite a sensitive report we are just putting together. I feel we are entitled to have


a private meeting occasionally because that’s when you can sort of thrash things out openly and you don’t feel constrained. There are some things that some of us want to say, but the Western Mail headline the next day … [will] throw it up out of all proportion. So, I’m not bothered by [not having] open cabinet meetings because I think what would happen, regardless of what party you’re in, you’d have your open cabinet meetings and you’d have your closed cabinet meetings afterwards or before. To an extent, it would just be playing to the gallery, playing to the cameras. You wouldn’t say what you really wanted to say …. [However,] I think we are leading the way in the UK [in open government practice].


Rather than seen as a conspiracy, therefore, secrecy is tacitly accepted by many AMs as an operation of democratic governance. Transparency must encounter its alterity to name its presence in reference to an absence, or a deferment, of itself. The dissemination of truth is not a necessary conse-quence of openness: quite the contrary, it is adherence to the Assembly’s codes of practice on Open Government that enables deliberation and parliamentary action to reproduce the appearance of transparency. A heu-ristic analogy might be the “transparencies” laid onto overhead projectors in academic classrooms. On the one hand, they illuminate information; on the other, they prevent the full illumination of the projector screen by drawing our attention to that information. In the context of parliamentary activity, one is left to wonder whether it is the darkness or the light exposed that should rightly be the focus of attention. This is not just an internal issue but also one connected to civil society and the media.

The very networks of publicity ensconced in the blueprint for modern Welsh democracy simultaneously demand the public performance of openness and the toleration of secrecy (by some AMs and bureaucrats at least) as a necessary operation of politics. Both are practices of good government if judged in terms of producing parliamentary results. An interview with another AM, whose party affiliation I have omitted (with some irony, I admit) due to the potential sensitivity of information shared, illustrates the contradictions AMs must negotiate when moving policy forward in a hyperpublic political environment.

You know, for me, there are two issues here. One is the general belief and my belief in justice and fairness that it is best achieved by letting everybody see everything that happens. So, I believe you govern in the sunshine and not the shadows. Now, as a principle, that is fine. There’s absolutely noth-ing wrong with that. The one thing I’ve realized from experience is that, from being open, the interpretation of your openness can lead to excessive media intrusion. You cannot avoid the principle, but it means that you have


to manage the information. The big area about open government is how you manage information … [For example,] you’ve got an outcome. Now, if the outcome is openness and transparency in our day-to-day dealings so that everything is recorded, is on the internet, that’s fine. It’s very easy to be transparent about certain actions. So, whatever is said, whatever is recorded, it’s a simple process. Then you start to look at the implications of what was said and how you achieve [policies] and it maybe that people don’t like underpinnings of that process. So, in achieving, let’s say, well, just from my end, I got [a large sum of money] for a regeneration project [in my elec-toral area]. The money was available [to all AMs], but I went and sat with a minister very early on in the Assembly and persuaded the minister [that the project] is the best thing since sliced bread. And nobody knows that. It’s not recorded. Now, you see, so long as you have transparency, you have to be mature enough to understand that people’s interactions to achieve their goals cannot always be transparent.

(Interview April 2, 2003)

Given the pragmatic context in which Open Government operates, these rather honest assessments about the usefulness of political secrecy reflect fundamental contradictions between ideals of Western democracy and its actual operation. As an ideoscape (again, Sanders and West 2003), transparency recuperates the rationality of the objective gaze (Foucault 1977) located within the Enlightenment project at a moment when the body public is moving away from confidence and participation in Western democracy. It is an ideological corrective that must ultimately take shape in the surveillance practices of institutions, not in the institutional guide-lines of openness. As a discursive practice, transparency disrupts demo-cratic governance in the experience of elected officials, thus revealing the incongruity and necessity of enacting representative democracy through clandestine political compromise.

Whereas compromise is heralded as a keystone of democratic pluralism, openness demands more political performance and ideological position-ing, not less, from AMs who must ultimately seek consensus in the spaces untouched by transparency. As an alter-referent to a less transparent past, the Open Government Policy dispels the contradictions of “secrecy within openness” in favor of pragmatic engagement with a more open policy-making process. To paraphrase the comments of one of the civil servants quoted above, it has to be more open than the Welsh Office. So, at one level of analysis, the bifurcation of transparency practices—a performed surface and practiced depth—undermines the legitimacy of the institu-tion; at another level, it is vital to democratic governance in Wales. Its exact meaning is shaped by defining exactly what it is not, that is, the National Assembly is not the Welsh Office and the Welsh Office was not democratic


or open, and thereby presumes anchorage to a spatial and temporal specificity that precedes its visibility, further implicating social interaction in its production, and returning the discussion to one of analyzing the rela-tions between the public sphere and parliamentary complex in Wales.

The media, civil society, and openness

Show me a politician where there is no spin involved and I will fly to the moon …. Spin is essential. There is nothing wrong with spin. Spin has been there forever. You’ve read Machiavelli I take it. Machiavelli knew what spin was, whatever it may have been called in those days. I’m not sure any politi-cian in a liberal democracy can do what they do effectively without it.

(Media interview November 23, 2003)

Given AMs’ sometimes-ambivalent position on the role of the media in facilitating political disclosure in the policy process, it is worth reviewing how the press and others who interact with the Assembly view the policy of open government. Though not the main focus of this book, I conducted dozens of formal interviews with members of Welsh civil society, including voluntary organizations, lobbyists, unions, media interests, smaller political parties not represented in the Assembly, and a handful of people completely disconnected from politics. Of that group, the six (print and televised) media representatives I interviewed were generally skeptical about transpar-ency, even if acknowledging the greater level of access to politicians they enjoy compared to their colleagues in London. Said a television journalist, for example,

It is groundbreaking in some ways and I believe Rhodri Morgan is sincere in his desire for it to be a truly open government. Things like the publication of cabinet minutes don’t happen everywhere …. But there’s always the ques-tion of trust and the reality of politics. You just know they’ve got to draw certain lines. We can’t know everything. I think they want it to be seen as an open government. But we don’t really know, do we? [Laughs.] What’s open is what they’ve decided to tell us.

(Interview July 12, 2003)

Here the press acknowledges the changes in openness under Welsh devo-lution, even if maintaining the assumption that some aspects of governance will remain secret. Another journalist interviewed gave a specific example:

I think the policy as it is enunciated is a good policy. For instance, the right to get access to background papers. The reality is that there is a certain


reluctance on the part of individuals and individual employees in the Assembly and individual politicians. I think that there is culture that exists in Britain, and particularly in the civil service, of secrecy. Getting away from that culture is not easy. For example, a week ago I was at a meeting that was addressed by Peter Hain [i.e., the then Secretary of State for Wales] and he was talking about the European Constitution. And at this meeting, which was an invited meeting at the European Commission office in Cardiff, there was a representative of the Assembly Government from the legal department who asked a technical question about a particular part of the proposed constitution as it related to regional government. And Peter Hain said, “I take you point, but there is an ambiguity in the way this is drafted. If you get Rhodri Morgan to make representations to me, we will take that seriously.” Subsequently, I rang the Assembly Government Press Office [after the meeting]. The press officer on the phone [put me on hold] to ask his boss. When he came back, he said, “He probably wouldn’t have asked that question if he’d known a journalist was there and he will not be speaking to you at all and there is no further information we can give you.” That struck me as ludicrous but ultimately I wasn’t surprised about it. Typically, officials do not think that they have any kind of obligation to explain what they’re doing

(Interview July 4, 2003)

Media skepticism about transparency is perhaps no surprise, particularly when considering civic interests generally play the role of outsider look-ing in on the policy process. When asking about transparency among the voluntary organizations and lobby groups I met, for example, I found that those groups who were formally invited to the table of policy dis-cussions (i.e., through the committee process) or had regular access to policymakers expressed the most satisfaction with Open Government. In many instances, these groups emphasized the value of government or AM contacts predating devolution, which were facilitated in part by the previ-ous careers of AMs. A commonly cited shorthand for these relationships was that interest group members “just have to pick up the phone” to gain access. If anything, the occasional complaint was that participating in policy scrutiny through the official channels demanded more labor from these organizations to prepare for such events. Opinions about transpar-ency generally deteriorated as one moved away from these “inner circles” of contact, an observation that is also found in Royles’ (2007) study of the experiences of two Welsh language organizations involved in attempts to influence the Assembly’s initial Welsh language policy review.

Long-time language campaigner Cymdeithas yr Iaith (described in chapters 2 and 4) and newcomer Cymuned each sought to shape gov-ernment policy on the language as relative outsiders looking in on the


policy process. In pushing for a new, more robust Welsh Language Act, the former submitted oral and written evidence to several Assembly commit-tees, lobbied AMs by email and in person, and (in a parallel direct action campaign) broke into the offices of the Minister for Culture, Language, and Sport to highlight perceived deficiencies in the Assembly’s policy posi-tion. Cymuned’s main goal was to protect predominantly Welsh-speaking communities from linguistic decline through such means as compulsory language training for newcomers and regulating the housing market to favor local, Welsh-speaking buyers. Though Cymuned did not have the same invitation to contribute to the policy review enjoyed by Cymdeithas yr Iaith, its controversial policy platform brought media attention to its campaign; in fact, Cymuned made headlines after two Labour AMs’ refused to meet with the group based on the perception that their poli-cies were in breach of race-hate laws (Royles 2007: 91). Cymuned sought to influence the debate by directly contacting AMs (with mixed success) and submitting a written policy brief specific to housing issues. Neither organization fully achieved its desired goals, even if each was successful in at least broadening the Assembly’s language policy review in the direc-tions each intended. Finance, or the costs of lobbying, limited the efforts of each group and their access was largely confined to the legislature, as opposed to the government. In contrast to these limited gains, other Welsh language organizations formally linked to the executive are said to have had “more meaningful contacts with the Welsh Assembly Government … and they received greater Assembly Government funding” (Royles 2007: 96). Crucially, Royles notes that the spectacle of press coverage had to substitute for access for both organizations.

From my own research, I recall the differing accounts of openness by representatives from two environmental lobby groups. The first main-tained very regular contacts with Assembly officials and contributed policy information to AMs inside and outside of government, including via the committee process. Not unlike the views of many AMs (above), he stated,

We have something that’s spectacular and new in that what was set out to be open is now a very open government in terms of accessibility both to Assembly Members and Ministers. The medium of the media has made this establishment very accessible and open. All governments have closed-door sessions and we accept that … but the access [in Wales] is tremendous.


Secrecy in this instance is again accepted as a consequence of governance, and a clear line is drawn between transparency and access. In this case (and as with some other civil organizations interviewed), the principle of


openness is held to define democratic difference in Wales even if it was only considered to be manifested through greater opportunities to interact with pubic officials. In contrast, another environmental organization rep-resentative whose group took a more adversarial role in trying to influence policy flatly stated,

My experience of the Assembly’s Open Government policy is that it’s a bit of a sham. Being in government in this country is reasonably open in global terms. Compared to the rhetoric and aspirations for open government, the Assembly is actually pretty bad. The regular [problem] is political embar-rassment. There are documents that are suppressed because politicians don’t want them to get out. I think there is still a civil service attitude that “this is our information. We run this county and this nation.” We’ve had instances of just being refused information point blank that we were quite clearly legally entitled to …. Civil service reticence is very much there and many feel that the information is there and we don’t have a right to it, or if we do, that we have to clearly demonstrate why we have a right to this specific bit of information.

(Interview August 11, 2003)

In this latter case, the gap between the ideal and practice of transparency is not accepted even if the Assembly’s policy is recognized as significant “in global terms.” Like others interviewed, this organization applauded the differences devolution has made to government openness in Wales without accepting that the actual conditions of Welsh transparency represent an absolute threshold of disclosure. The paradox of this position is that trans-parency is only possible within these circuits of civil access and skepticism: some degree of publicity must be presupposed to name transparency’s absence or presence even if neither can be measured objectively. The fun-damental problem is that, as a self-policing epistemology of democratic practice, the internal mechanics required of open government call into question the foundational legitimacy of democracy’s ideological premise, government of/by the people. Transparency policy, in short, specifies the impossibility of fully realizing the promise of political modernity.

Summary

By focusing on how the producers of policies create and resist the forces of self-regulation, rather than observing the social effects of this pro-cess, this chapter has added a twist to orthodox applications of Foucault found in anthropology. A Foucauldian reading of Open Government in the National Assembly first helps to indicate how the legitimacy of


Welsh devolution is not grounded in some essential Welsh political ontology, but in reference to contemporary UK/EU transparency reforms and the historical circumstances of Welsh Office administration under Conservative Party control, 1979–1997. The self-regulatory practices of Open Government emerge as a rational policy intervention under these circumstances. Second, viewing Open Government through the lens of governmentality highlights the ambiguities between implementing insti-tutional mechanisms of transparency—an instrumentalist legitimation of Welsh democracy—and practicing transparent governance in relation to this organizational ideal. As a bifurcated practice of government that is publicly performed and secretly stabilized, transparency and its negation must share the same space of democratic governance: neither is definable as public or private without implicit reference to the other. Transparency and its absence, in other words, are the mutually constituting surface and depth of legitimacy in Welsh politics. Given the need to find new spaces of secrecy to make Welsh democracy work, absolute transparency will always be deferred by the potential of extending institutional surveillance further along this self-regulated axis of justifiable political power. New technolo-gies and codes of practice may very well outline the future boundaries of transparency, but is only through observing practices of governmentality that we can analyze how power, history, and procedure intersect in the making of legitimate parliamentary subjects.

Perhaps more important to the advancement of an anthropology of government, however, the case of Open Government raises an interesting question about the limitations of governmentality as a heuristic of elite political behavior and power. Exactly what do we call it when those who possess power resist their own rationalization—a self-induced discipline, no less—as a strategy for consolidating that power? It may be that this paradox would not hold when analyzing other practices of governance/self-discipline, but it is difficult to see how we can situate the clandestine underside of transparency as a form of resistance in Foucault’s usage when it is clear that secrecy is simultaneously the dialectical other of openness (i.e., potentially denying the legitimacy of democratic/parlia-mentary power) and a necessary practice of Welsh democracy. If secrecy renders parliamentary power productive, in other words, then AMs are not resisting Open Government as acts of subversion so much as they are fulfilling devolution’s promise to bring a functioning democracy to Wales. Foucault, no doubt, remains useful to the study of governance and power, but this chapter has highlighted the need for further inquiry into how governmentality applies to the elites responsible for the production of institutional discourses intended to create and regulate democratic subjects.


In taking transparency as a detailed case study in the application of Welsh devolution’s ethos—openness, inclusion, and modernity—this chapter has also advanced the movement of this book from an internalized look at legitimation practices to one focused on parliamentary-civil inter-actions that legitimate the institutional dynamics of Welsh governance as democratic. In this case, Open Government entails a series of formal and informal understandings about the limits of transparency that may be internal to the National Assembly but are always practiced with some recognition of the presence of literal and virtual networks of social over-sight. These practices constitute the deeper meanings of legitimacy that are informed by, but stand in contrast to, the thin legitimacy of codified trans-parent procedure. It is in reference to these deeper meanings that the civil agents interviewed for this chapter judged the self-evidence of openness under devolution, a determination that is clearly entangled in questions of access and functionality among interest groups and the media. In contrast, the distinctiveness of Open Government as a Welsh democratic practice was more commonly viewed (by virtually all of my interview consultants) at the surface of institutional procedures of transparency. Transparency practices in Cardiff Bay are democratic in that they strive toward open-ness and government accountability. Openness marks the distinctiveness of Welsh democracy under devolution, in turn, by virtue of technological and procedural differences with Westminster. But which of these readings should stand as a benchmark of devolution’s legitimacy, particularly when many interviewed considered both to forward the democratic-parliamentary process in Wales? At a practical level, this question is answered every four years when the National Assembly holds elections, which is the subject of the next chapter.

This is not an official view of [my trade union]. I think [low turnout is] part of a pattern of voting in the Western world. I think it’s all about how people look on political parties and they say, “What’s it got to do with me really?” I don’t think political parties have spent too much time looking at themselves [or] looking at how they are perceived by other people. They often assume it’s all about young people and that they’re not inter-ested. I think that’s rubbish. Look at people campaigning against the Iraq war. Not all, but by and large, young people want to have a voice …. I think that’s why people are more likely to join the Stop the War cam-paign, which I don’t know the veracity of that campaign, whether it’s left, right, or center. I don’t know who runs that campaign. But if it speaks for people on their issues and political parties won’t, unions won’t, then why should be people surprised when people don’t come out and vote?

(Interview with a trade union representative in Cardiff [October 13, 2003])

I finished my work at the National Assembly early on March 21, 2003, the day after the United States and UK invaded Iraq, to meet my fam-

ily at a park in Grangetown, a city ward adjacent to Cardiff Bay and also home to one of the largest Muslim and Asian communities in Wales. After an hour or so, we left the park to get some food from a familiar takeaway shop across the street. We stepped inside and took our place at the back of the long queue near the shop entrance. A television mounted high on a wall behind the counter was tuned to the BBC, and the volume was set well above the level of sparse conversation inside. I could see and hear the telecast clearly from across the room. The BBC was broadcasting real-time coverage of the bombing of Baghdad. Eventually we made it to the front of the line to order.

“Cod and chips and a chicken kebab, please.”“You’re from America?”

6

Ballots and Bombs


Pause.“Yes, but not very proud of it at the moment.” It immediately felt like a

stupid thing to say but was all I could muster. My disgust about the war prevented me from even mentioning the word “Iraq,” as if it would somehow go away.

Another silence. “You’re for the war, or against the war?”“Antiwar.”“No war?”“Yeah. There are people in the US against it, many of us, but we aren’t being

heard.” Despite my stated opposition to war, I felt shame wash over me as an adrenaline rush hit my stomach. He looked me over for another moment before responding.

“Bush and Blair: the real dictators. Their populations don’t want war. They’re the dictators.”

“Yeah.”“I’m Iraqi. He’s from Iran,” he said, glancing towards a coworker behind the

counter. “My family is in Baghdad.”“I’m sorry,” I replied, temporarily lowering my eyes. I looked back up to

him.Another silence.

He smiled slightly. Our food was ready. We thanked each other for the transaction as I paid. My family and I strolled back onto the street listen-ing to the blaring sounds of Baghdad’s destruction, and perhaps his family with it.

Whereas this moment was meaningful to me because of the intensity of the shopkeeper’s personal and political interest, a few weeks later I had another encounter that was equally memorable due to the intensity of per-sonal disinterest. On the morning of April 12, 2003, I had an opportunity to listen to an extended critique of devolution as I waited for a bus route to begin from Cardiff ’s central bus terminal. Talking to bus and taxi drivers while in Wales was an interesting (if unscientific) way of gauging popular opinion about the Assembly. Typically, I was first asked what an American was doing in Wales, which was usually met with the explanation that I was there to study the National Assembly. Taxi and bus drivers always had a quick opinion to offer up, but extra time with the driver, an older white male, encouraged him to freely offer to “Let me tell you what‘s wrong with the Assembly.” To paraphrase his explanation: the quality of life was no bet-ter than before, but more red tape had been created, and all the parties in Cardiff Bay are alike in pursuing the self-interested goal of reelection as an end in itself. He proceeded to cite specific examples of public service delivery problems, unemployment problems, industry closures, and a host of other issues impacting Cardiff and Wales in general. Had this viewpoint not been

BALLOTS AND BOMBS 125

repeated in numerous conversations I had with other people in Wales, it might not be important to recall it here. But the driver’s elaborate and impassioned response reflected how many in Wales are not apathetic to political issues or social needs, only to the political process itself. Even if contradictory in their commitments, the shopkeeper’s and bus driver’s political engagements each suggest the importance of exploring what participation and representation mean in democratic societies of the twenty-first century.

Elections, popular participation, and representative legitimacy

If opposition to the Iraq war in 2003 represented a zenith of public partici-pation in UK politics—from mass public demonstrations to short political discussions in takeaway shops—the National Assembly elections of the same year were its low point. Four years on from the Assembly’s establish-ment, the Welsh electorate had to date shown marginal interest in affirm-ing devolution by voting, whether in terms of the referendum that created it (i.e., involving barely half of the electorate) or in its inaugural elections of 1999 (i.e., 46 percent voter turnout). Now possessing a track record for voters to evaluate, the overwhelming concern of politicians when I arrived in Cardiff in January 2003 was getting them to do so in the voting booth. This chapter sets the simultaneous events of electoral and antiwar cam-paigning in comparative tension to analyze the complexities of sovereignty and democratic representation established by the political and institutional hierarchies of devolution. In doing so, I return to the question of repre-sentative legitimacy first addressed in Chapter 4 but extend the analysis from the internal to the social context of Welsh politics. While following a progression from observing policy debate preparations to policy debates to policy implementations—and thereby presenting a series of responses to three major contributors to theories of legitimacy—I now turn to a more self-conscious (or reflexive) ethnographic analysis of the “ritualized socio-dramas” of politics (McLeod 1999) characterizing elections. Specifically, I draw upon my dual experiences of observing/participating in antiwar and electoral activities during 2003 to argue that, under the asymme-tries of devolution, electoral campaigning paradoxically legitimates AMs as Welsh representatives but also underscores the limitations of Welsh autonomy to act in the public interest. At the center of this paradox are the different meanings AMs and civil interests implicitly attach to participa-tion and representation under devolution.

The two events described at the opening of this chapter (as well as the opening quote) are instructive about the contested meanings of demo-cratic participation in Welsh society, yet the cross-cultural relevance of this discussion is obvious. In the first encounter, interconnections between the


“global” and “local” were reflected in simultaneous acts of purchasing food and discussing nationality and political allegiance, which were further linked to distant spaces of abject violence by technology. The frustrations I shared with the shopkeeper were merely a personalized index of a much broader backlash felt across the UK and around the world in response to invasion and occupation. About five weeks earlier, on February 15, my family and I marched in London against the looming war with an esti-mated one million coparticipants. We traveled there on 1 of the 18 buses leaving Cardiff that morning to be a part of a beautiful, anxious mix of outcry and hope. The streets of central London were filled to capacity with posters and banners expressing different forms of grievance and solidar-ity ranging from specific to indirect to frankly humorous statements of opposition: “Blair. Bush. Oil.”; “Not in my name”; “UN mandates”; “Free Palestine”; “Whistle if you think Hans Blix is sexy.” Banners claiming geo-graphic and political allegiance to Wales streamed by all afternoon, though these images were probably easier for me to spot than they were numer-ous: “Plaid Cymru against the war”; “Welsh Liberal Democrats against the war”; “Welsh Labour against the war”; “Swansea against the war”; “Aberystwyth against the war,” et cetera.

The complexity and diversity of opinion on display powerfully dem-onstrated that public participation in UK democracy was well more than an infrequent voting ritual of convenience.1 Whereas polls across the West indicate a general decline of voter participation in electoral democ-racy (Abramson, Diskin, and Felsenthal 2007), the antiwar movement was a potent reminder that an alternative political engagement was pos-sible in UK. The second event describe above, coming a few weeks after my experience in a chips shop, was an anecdotal but important reminder of how devolution has not fully provided such an alternative to voter dis-engagement at the margins of UK politics. All political parties, of course, were faced with the challenge of increasing their electoral shares in 2003, yet the May elections also represented a vote of confidence about the devolution process itself. Had the Labour-led Assembly Government, or any party for that matter, fulfilled devolution’s promise to “solve Welsh problems with Welsh solutions”? Was the National Assembly a legitimate response to public demands for a broader representation of diversity in UK politics? The stakes, in short, were very high and the coming of war only amplified the discontinuity between the goal of building an active, committed Welsh polity and the reality of public support for Welsh democracy.

The data presented in this chapter engages with these entanglements. Organized into four sections, it is held together by a common analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and representative legitimacy in


the National Assembly. The first section tracks how dissent over the Iraq war entered into the parliamentary debates of the Assembly despite the efforts of the Assembly Government to limit such incursions: for its part, the government was adamant that war, a nondevolved issue, was not a legitimate topic of discussion in Cardiff Bay. The next section examines the election manifestos of each of the Assembly’s four parties to analyze how cultural ideals of Welsh community are fused with party policies on the issue of devolving additional power to Wales, thus challenging the established boundaries of the Assembly’s institutional competence and autonomy. The third section focuses squarely on the campaign process to observe how the localization of campaigning creates civil-parliamentary intimacies that substantiate the claims of candidates to legitimately represent Welsh society. The final section observes the outcomes of the election process, which coincided with the “end” of war (i.e., according to U.S. president George Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” speech), to discuss the apparent gaps between informal (i.e., antiwar) and formal (i.e., Assembly elections) public participation in politics.

Make legislation, not war

The elections of May 2003 were already on the minds of AMs in Cardiff when I arrived to work at the National Assembly in January of that year. Calls of “we will let the voters decide who is right in May” had punctu-ated a number of plenary speeches I observed (or read via transcripts) and were usually made as quick rejoinders when the allotted time for a particular debate or Question Time session was expiring. Increasingly over this period, the potentiality and eventuality of war also brought Iraq into the National Assembly’s focus, culminating in a full plenary debate on the legitimacy of invasion less than 24 hours before the first missiles would strike inside Iraqi territory. It is fair to say that the war against Iraq not only overshadowed the second-ever elections of the National Assembly for Wales, but also indicated the limits of Welsh authority within the parallel asymmetries of institutional and political power characterizing London/New Labour and Cardiff Bay/Welsh Labour relations.

UK prime minister Tony Blair’s pledge of moral and military support to the coalition of the willing sent shock waves throughout Labour’s sup-port base and UK society in general. Unlike Bush, Blair was bound to a greater degree of accountability about war before the Commons and the public at large. As arguments for and against war intensified in early 2003, mass public opposition took shape in a Coalition to Stop the War Movement that brought together diverse social and economic interests in the name of popular opposition. The issue was a daily feature in the


media and a common topic of conversation in Welsh pubs and homes I visited. Coverage of the Assembly and the coming elections, in contrast, was buried several pages deep in the Welsh press up until Baghdad was overrun (in mid-April) and usually mentioned with disdain (if at all) in public houses I frequented. Amid concern over the international legiti-macy of supporting U.S. unilateralism, the reliability of intelligence infor-mation concerning weapons of mass destruction and terrorist links, and, after March 20, the grim impacts of war on human beings, the National Assembly wrapped up its first four-year term and began an election campaign.

Elections occurred all over the UK that May: for the National Assembly in Wales, for the Scottish Parliament, and for local authorities in England. The Welsh Labour Party, already defending its policy record against the political opposition, also inherited the role of proxy to Whitehall to defend the coming invasion. Labour had joined forces with the Liberal Democrats in Wales to create a governing majority between March 2000 and April 2003. Two seats short of a working majority, the Welsh Labour Party’s goal for May 1 was to secure enough votes to govern without the intrusion of the opposition. Labour leader Rhodri Morgan set the tone of electoral debate in late 2002 while promoting the idea that his government’s poli-cies had established “clear red water” between New and Welsh Labour. If the traditional Labour vote was the target, the shaky nature of Blair’s war dossier heightened Morgan’s difficulty in convincing voters that tradition was still represented by the party.

Although far less intense or visible than the signs of war and opposi-tion in London—such as the aforementioned march, a tent city of antiwar campaigners outside of Westminster (which remains in place at the date of this writing), et cetera—there were several incidents and events in Wales that brought the invasion in proximity to the activities of the National Assembly. The largest antiwar demonstration I witnessed in Cardiff Bay was probably no greater than two hundred people who had marched across the city to the Assembly’s main entrance. In another incident, the Assembly’s Presiding Officer sent back a St. David’s Day (i.e., Welsh national day) greeting from U.S. president Bush because it contained the additional message that “Today we are united in the war against terror-ism and tyranny and for our shared values of democracy, freedom and justice.” Explaining his actions to the press, the Presiding Officer said “I do not accept St. David’s Day messages when they are not sent in the spirit of St. David” (Western Mail March 7, 2003: 1). Yet another event brought the build up to war literally to the edge of the National Assembly. On March 7, the HMS Manchester, a Royal Navy destroyer armed with surface to air missiles, came to dock within a few hundred feet of Crickhowell House.


Its presence was observable from at least half of the building until it sailed for the Persian Gulf a few days later.

Most dramatic, however, was an act of civil disobedience I witnessed from inside the Assembly on March 18. While walking through an open area of the third floor hallway that overlooks the building’s main entrance, I heard a loud commotion below and looked over the rail in time to watch plain-clothed and uniformed police officers pin a young man down spread eagle on the floor. Apparently, the antiwar protestor had just attempted to jump the partition separating the plenary chamber’s public gallery from the AMs’ seating area during that day’s plenary session. I watched the police strip him of his belt, empty his pockets, and then carry him off. It was the second such occurrence in the span of a week: earlier, war protes-tors had boldly attempted to chain themselves to AMs’ desks in the plenary chamber. The entire building went on lock down after both instances and the next I time visited the building after the elections a glass wall had been mounted to separate and insulate AMs from the public.

Two war debates

The protestor’s actions came a day after what was arguably the most important parliamentary debate of Tony Blair’s political career. March 17 witnessed a historically unprecedented vote in the Commons to decide if Blair was to take the UK into war against Iraq. It was a day seemingly all of Britain had been waiting for and many UK citizens had demanded. Media coverage and analysis flooded the television and newspapers in a deluge of reportage. From the Assembly, we watched live broadcasts all morning and afternoon as war supporters and opponents made impassioned public pleas in the Commons, a few members of Blair’s government cabinet resigned in protest, and reporters spoke of backroom negotiations that would deter-mine the outcome. While the Labour Government could count on the Conservatives for unwavering support during military crisis, and equally expect that the small Liberal Democrat group in Westminster would vote no without UN support, the Labour Party itself would make or break this moment for Tony Blair. The well rehearsed and numerous justifications for and against war—weapons of mass destruction, humanitarianism, democratic nation building, international illegality, unreliable information, American neo-imperialism—were all on display. In the end, Blair carried the vote at considerable political cost: no fewer than 139 Labour MPs rebelled, as did 22 of 40 Welsh MPs representing Labour (included in the 139), the Liberals, and Plaid Cymru. Looking back now, it seems that this vote was the opening of the final act of Tony Blair’s dominance over UK politics.


Though the Commons had now spoken, the Assembly repeated the process of debate two days later. Antiwar protestors had reserved all avail-able tickets to the public gallery. Save for the seating debate of July 2003 described in Chapter 1, it was the only other time I was unable to choose to watch the Assembly’s plenary activities firsthand. For the second day in a row, protesters disrupted the plenary proceedings by demanding their elected officials reject the “immoral and illegal” war on Iraq, resulting in five women being removed from the public gallery (Brindley March 20, 2003: 4). The First Minister opened the debate when things settled back down. For months, he had been under public and political pressure to state his position on the war. Repeatedly, he avoided answering on the grounds that it was not a devolved matter. The First Minister’s dilemma was obvious: he had to simultaneously appease a Welsh Labour Party and public generally against the war without revealing (as a government leader) dissent within the Labour Party as a whole. Though the govern-ment tried to avoid a formal debate on the subject, the opposition pushed it through for the plenary session of March 19, 2003. One and a half hours were scheduled for discussion and a higher-than-average 30 of 60 AMs requested to speak. After the First Minister’s opening statement, which strangely covered topics such as comparing Welsh devolution to a poten-tial Kurdish devolution in northern Iraq, the Conservative Party was the first to put it to him to make his position known. He responded that

[t]his obsessive interest in my position is silly. Obviously, you have not been listening. The die is cast, because Parliament, which is the proper place for this matter to be discussed, has given its approval to the Prime Minister. Our views are irrelevant. It is not as if we can rerun yesterday’s debate in the House of Commons. The House of Lords did not take a vote on this yesterday. We are having a discussion on exactly the same basis as the House of Lords. Even though it is part of the British Parliament, it did not have a vote. Therefore, this obsessive interest in my position is irrelevant.


Needless to say, “our views are irrelevant” did not go over well. While Plaid Cymru and the Conservatives continued to goad the First Minister about expressing his position, and the Liberal Democrats (in line with the party in Westminster) pegged their support for invasion to UN backing, some Labour AMs voiced their opposition. Said Labour AM Richard Edwards, for instance, during a speech that won him a standing ovation from Plaid Cymru:

“Might is right” is the message being trumpeted across the globe in the name of disarmament by the world’s two leading arms exporters. It is a message


enshrined in the doctrine of pre-emptive strike. You fight to keep the peace, you save lives by killing people, you spread western values by holding great swathes of the globe in thrall to the dictates of greedy oil conglomerates and those merchants of death, the arms consortia …. [I]t is pretty threadbare morality that seeks to hide dubious political decisions behind the service-men and women whose safety is now threatened by them.


Other Labour backbenchers struck back that the whole debate was self-indulgent, if not insulting to the UK’s armed forces deployed in Iraq. Ultimately, it was a coalition of Conservative and Labour AMs who defended the First Minister’s right to avoid stating an opinion about UK foreign policy. In the debate’s final statement, the First Minister took the opportunity to spell out not his opinion of the war, but his interpretation of the limits of the Assembly’s rights to express an opinion:

In my opening speech I threw out a challenge to speakers today to explain the relevance of their views, given the Assembly and devolved government in Wales, to the Iraq crisis and vice versa. After all, we are not a student debating society. We have heard too many pretend House of Commons speeches today. [My emphasis.] Those Members perhaps wish that they were in another place and had the right to vote there or to intervene during the speeches of the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary. It is fine for them to express a view, but it is not relevant to our proceedings.


He continued that a parliamentary vote on war 24 hours earlier was “a major constitutional innovation … However, at the same time as the Prime Minister is conceding that right to Parliament, I cannot say that he should concede the same right to the Assembly” (Record of Proceedings March 19, 2003). For many Labour insiders I interviewed, the First Minister’s obfuscation on Iraq was the only means to avoid showing divisions within the Welsh Labour Party and between the Welsh and UK Labour parties (the latter potentially drawing Blair’s ire). Whereas many of AMs sought to debate the UK’s legitimacy to invade Iraq, the First Minister challenged the Assembly’s legitimacy to represent public opinion through debate, even to the point of ridiculing the notion of free debate as a form of schoolyard pretending. Many of those participating in the debate clearly thought otherwise. The viewpoints expressed, even if inconsequential to the UK Government’s decision making, had legiti-mated Welsh public opinion in an official forum and marked the National Assembly as a space for representing opinions outside the UK government


mainstream. In contrast, the Assembly Government defended its silence as a matter of institutional legitimacy: if Wales does not set foreign policy, why debate foreign policy in Wales? The legitimacy of war and the sover-eignty of the National Assembly were coextensively up for debate in this moment. Implicitly, it seemed, the message was that backbench rumblings may be occasionally tolerated or accepted, but it is party-before-person and UK-before-Wales on nondevolved matters. Despite the reaction in the chamber and the ensuing criticisms voiced from outside the Assembly,2 the First Minister’s political talents enabled him to survive the afternoon. Nonetheless, his nonstatement was stunning about how the government interpreted the Assembly’s sovereignty to merely speak.

War begins where devolution ends

I awoke the next day to news that the invasion of Iraq had begun with air strikes. I followed the coverage of the war as I walked down the long hall to my office in the National Assembly building for work that morning. The sound of the broadcast emanated from every office. My colleagues were watching a live air raid in my shared office space when I arrived. We watched nervously as a journalist at the Iraq border scrambled to put on a chemical protection suit after an air raid siren sounded in the background. The uncertainty of it all, including the potential impacts of Donald Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” warfare, kept us transfixed on the television for most of the morning. Although faced with the weekly routine of pre-paring for Assembly business, coverage of the war became a near-constant background of office work for the remaining weeks prior to the elections break. Later that morning, I joined a group of about 50 people and three television crews on the edge of Cardiff Bay where Plaid Cymru had orga-nized a silent vigil to protest the war. Several of its AMs were joined by a number of its support staff, staff members of the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats I recognized (which is to say some Conservative staff may have attended), and a few members of the general public. After five minutes of silence, two of Plaid’s senior AMs spoke out against the invasion, urging people to oppose the UK’s involvement.

The ongoing war and the upcoming election vied for supremacy in Assembly debate prior to the official start of the election period (April 2). (Outside the National Assembly it was no contest.) The tone of cross-party discussion had clearly deteriorated since I arrived in early January. The working coalition between the Liberal Democrats and Labour Party publicly unraveled as each party began staking out its own electoral interests. Plaid Cymru and the Conservative Party had called the


“Lib-Lab” partnership to account on several previous occasions but were now aided by the governing parties. Without need to advocate policies, all four parties turned against each other to score political points before the election formally began. There were also some light moments dur-ing this period but the hostility was more evident than not. Accusations of disseminating propaganda and undermining (or misunderstanding) the democratic process in Wales flew back and forth. Off camera and microphone, other exchanges I observed in the plenary chamber were much more vulgar.

The issue of war also preoccupied a fair amount of the Assembly’s time despite the upcoming elections. During the First Minister’s final Question Time, for instance, three questions (of 15) were tabled on Iraq and a fourth asked about the government’s preparations for war-related terrorist attacks. In the final response of his last Question Time before the elections, Morgan reiterated, “Once Parliament had voted, there was no need for anyone else to express an opinion or take a vote” (Record of Proceedings April 1, 2003). When the campaign period officially opened two days later, however, all four parties set out to convince Welsh citizens of the need to express an opinion about devolution by voting.

Marketing democracy to the “apathetic”

Across how many breakfast tables in Wales has the Assembly election been discussed? … How many families have even spent a couple of minutes debating the issues? Indeed, what are the issues in this election? That is the problem. All of the parities have issued manifestos. They are pretty dull affairs, making worthy points about the future of health, education, social justice and other issues …. [T]he electorate and the politicians seem alarm-ingly detached from each other.

(Western Mail editorial: April 16, 2003: 1)

My first opportunity to directly observe elections in the UK came in 2001 while conducting preliminary research for my fieldwork of 2003. Because UK General Elections can be called at any time (unlike the Assembly elections which are set on a strict four-year cycle), I was fortunate to wit-ness this event and participate in a limited amount of campaigning with Labour and Plaid Cymru candidates in South and Mid-Wales. At least a few (and sometimes many) political party posters were visible in the front windows and front gardens of homes on virtually every street I walked that summer. A memorable and ubiquitous billboard featured the balding head of William Hague (then Conservative Party leader in the Commons) adorned with Margaret Thatcher’s iconic hairdo. The message urged


voters not to let “her” in again. It seemed a galvanizing image in the Welsh communities I visited.

Off-year elections in the UK and elsewhere are typically characterized by lower voter turnout, but with far fewer symbols of political allegiance on display in 2003 compared to 2001, the message for the National Assembly’s second-ever election was “Just vote.” Antiwar graffiti, in fact, was more prevalent than political posters in the central Cardiff neighborhood I lived in beginning in late April. As common as party paraphernalia, it seemed, were election notices sponsored by the nonpartisan Electoral Commission in Wales. I started noticing these announcements of the upcoming election while riding buses around the city to campaign with the Assembly’s four political parties. One poster mounted on many bus stops featured a caption entitled “Education?” in large letters across the top. Two boxes to “tick” (like ballots) were set in smaller font below. The first box was marked “Don’t Care” and the second “Care”. The message was clear enough: vote if you care about education in Wales. Television ads were no different. One Electoral Commission commercial that caught my attention featured several actors addressing the camera (and by implication, Welsh voters) directly. The first actor asked, “Should I vote?,” only for a second actor to exaggerate, “Nah! Health care isn’t important!” he exclaimed. This question-response was then repeated for a different issue. The point had been made by the time the question-response was repeated on a third issue by a third set of actors: vote to support the election goals of political parties, vote to affirm Welsh democracy, or vote for the sake of voting, but please vote. The point the bus driver described at the opening of this chapter and others like him were making, however, was that he did not see how voting would change the sys-tem. The Electoral Commission could not draw such a distinction between apathy to Welsh political issues and apathy to Welsh devolution. One of the primary means each political party sought to convince voters to care was the election manifesto.

Election manifestos are political texts that seek to justify avowedly ideological goals as legitimate public policies. Just as with the policy posi-tions staked out in the plenary debates described in Chapter 4, manifestos contain fundamentally cultural discourses that name relevant sites (and populations) for government intervention and the “logical” methods for carrying out such activities. The election manifestos produced by the major parties of Wales can thus be read as competing assertions about the future of Welsh nationhood grounded in implicit or explicit determina-tions about the present status of Welsh society. Underlying these causal relationships are concomitant assumptions that party ideologies are legiti-mated through the electoral process, thus binding and enabling electoral winners to pursue their manifestos’ goals.


It is relevant to note how manifestos can bridge the differences between institutional and representative legitimacies as expressed in party discourses about Welsh communities and Assembly sovereignty. Plaid Cymru-The Party of Wales was the most radical on the issue of autonomy and community stability. The party’s manifesto (simply titled Manifesto) makes an explicit link between Wales’ lack of self-government and economic/community deterioration. Several campaign pledges are based on the further transfer of powers from Westminster, which is matched by a call for Wales to play a greater role in European and world politics. One aim, for example, is to renegotiate Wales’ obligations to the UK’s interna-tional agreements. Another, more specific goal is to establish a “Scottish style parliament” by 2007 with a National Convention to outline and secure a consensus on additional powers. Critically, the Iraq war is cited as a rationale for greater autonomy, a view that was reinforced at the party’s annual conference that spring (Plaid Cymru-The Party of Wales 2003: 46; Lyons March 17, 2003: 2). Full independence from the UK state, however, is pegged to winning popular support: “The Party of Wales’s aspiration is for our country to achieve the status of member state within the European Union. However, we recognize that such a momentous change would have to be subject to the approval of the people in a referendum” (Plaid Cymru-The Party of Wales 2003: 47).

The Welsh Liberal Democrats also advocated for Scottish Parliament-style powers for the National Assembly, but stopped well short of calling for the breakup of the United Kingdom. Their party manifesto calls for the creation of a Welsh Senedd of 80 AMs, as well as a fully separate Welsh civil service and legal system, the latter absent from Wales since the Act of Union of 1542. Like Plaid, the Liberals envision the Assembly assuming a stronger role in Europe on issues directly affecting Wales as well as gaining increased financial support from London. And like Plaid, the party links the further devolution of power to the stability of the communities:

If we are to tackle poverty effectively, Wales needs the power to make its own decisions. Wales needs the power to raise additional investment. Wales should be funded according to its needs … If we are to devolve more power to local communities so they can tackle their own problems with their own solutions, we must first secure additional power for Wales as a whole.

(Welsh Liberal Democrats 2003: 32)

The Welsh Conservative Party was the only one of the four parties actively opposed to devolution during the time of the Assembly referendum in 1997. It is predictable that its manifesto, Fighting for the Vulnerable, does not advocate for the additional devolution of power, even if some


Conservative AMs do in fact support such a power transfer. The document does not dispute many policy objectives of the opposition, only how these goals should be achieved. The Tories, for example, call for better hospitals and schools under the assumption that more privatization, not less, is the solution to health and education problems. Reflecting this ideological dif-ference about the role of the state in society, the party describes commu-nity regeneration in the neoliberal terms of economic individualism: “The individual can only flourish if society is strong and stable. Thriving com-munities are naturally enterprising and encourage people to reach their full potential. Local communities are the foundation on which national life is built” (Welsh Conservative Party 2003: 55). Given the party’s disinterest in further devolution, the Conservatives curiously add a statement calling for a reduction of UK asylum seekers in a section titled, “A Safer Wales.” Asylum policy is not devolved to the Assembly, but the Conservatives I spoke to consistently explained that it was an important “doorstep” issue that could be used to garner public support for the party. With this unusual (and institutionally untenable) call to change UK policy by elect-ing Conservative AMs to Cardiff Bay, the Welsh Labour Party manifesto emerges as the most cautious about devolution.

Labour’s manifesto, Working Together for Wales, is carefully crafted to promote the Assembly Government’s extension of social welfare rights in Wales (as compared to England) without using the word “socialism” in the text. Not unlike New Labour’s Third Way rhetoric, Welsh Labour promotes a mix of welfare and individualist policy pledges titled “Labour’s New Deal.” Throughout the text, a vision of “equality of access” is framed around the analytic and cultural category of ‘Welsh communities’ as a site of intervention. “Stronger communities,” reads the manifesto, “underpin a world class Wales” (Welsh Labour Party 2003:10). In contrast to Plaid and the Liberals, Labour rejects the idea that additional powers will aid this effort. “Our Assembly is there to effect real change in real people’s lives,” it states, “it will never be a Nationalist project of dragging Wales out of the UK, against the people’s will.” The manifesto avoids taking a position about further devolution on the grounds that an independent commission studying the powers and electoral system of the Assembly is already underway (discussed in Chapter 8). Avoiding any commitment to its findings, it reads, “We will consider carefully the recommendations of the commission” (Welsh Labour Party 2003: 21).

Despite the differences between the parties on issues such as devolving power, these manifestos suggest that there is some truth to the popular notion in Wales that all the parties in the Assembly are alike. With regard to nonconstitutional policy in particular, for example education or local government policies, the cross-party similarities are a consequence of the


National Assembly’s limited legislative remit. In simple terms, there is only so much one can do with the same, limited powers; it becomes a contest of convincing the public one’s party can administer, rather than legislate, pol-icies better the others can. When policy initiatives appear (or are assumed to be) too similar to the general public, moreover, there seems to be a greater incentive to construct and exploit ideological differences between political adversaries. The Labour manifesto, for example, promotes several of its election policies in comparison with the Conservative record of gov-ernment in Wales during the 1980s and 1990s. Labour has placed six times more police on the street since 1999 than the Tories did over 18 years, reads one section. While true, this “fact” also relegates modern Conservative pol-icies to a historical determination few voters would fail to notice. Without attacking the Tories on history and Plaid on separatism, in fact, Welsh Labour might be faced with an unwelcome alternative: the odd silence of cross-party agreement. Ultimately, the task of marketing party difference is done in the face-to-face encounters of electoral campaigning.

The intimacy of political campaigning

Anthropologists have analyzed the “intimate” relations created between the state and national publics from a number of perspectives, such as marriage, colonization, gender/work roles, and bureaucratic behavior (Friedman 2005; Stoler 2002; Wilson 2004; Herzfeld 1997). I would add to this conversation that election campaigning establishes a symbolic intimacy between candidates and citizens that reinforces notions that politicians are representatives and members of local publics. These rituals of interaction and common experience—marked by party colors, signs, buttons, ribbons, and leaflets—signify personal allegiances to parties, candidates, and ideologies. While mass advertising and party manifestos extol broad party goals, it is through constituency-based, often face-to-face campaign techniques that these generalized messages resonate locally (Abélès 1997: 324; Abélès 1991: 147, 173–174). This section examines how the legitimacy of candidates’ claims of representation is asserted through social networks of political action that are based on an intimate knowledge of the local. Three types of activities—leafleting, multisited office work, and canvassing—are discussed to analyze how intimate knowledge of the political shapes the campaign techniques of parties and candidates.

My participant observation of elections began on March 22 with campaign volunteering and concluded on May 1 when I served as an elec-tion observer in Cardiff City Hall. Along the way, I volunteered with the Labour Party and Plaid Cymru in the Cardiff South electoral district, the Conservative Party in Cardiff North, and the Liberal Democrats in Cardiff


Central. My participation varied according to the needs of the party on any given day. I also completed my internship with the Liberals by working at the party’s campaign headquarters in Cardiff Bay until April 13,3 which provided additional insights about campaign strategy as well as the paral-lels between the way I worked as a party researcher in the Assembly and the way the party worked during the election period. Only with Plaid Cymru did I volunteer for a candidate who was not an incumbent; of the three incumbents, only the Conservative candidate was elected via pro-portional representation. I tried to give an equal amount of time to each party—totaling a dozen sessions working directly with party volunteers and candidates—to avoid contributing disproportionately to the electoral success of any one group. I also conducted interviews with smaller parties to the left (the Socialist Party) and right (the UK Independence Party) of the political spectrum represented in the Assembly, which I discuss briefly in this chapter’s conclusion.

The majority of people I volunteered alongside were men. About half were in their 20s or early 30s and half were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. The Plaid group was the youngest by far. All but a couple of volunteers I met were white. All had some campaign experience, but Labour was the most seasoned group and brought the largest number of volunteers to campaign on a consistent basis. The Conservative groups I interacted with were by far the smallest. Only among the Plaid group were the majority of participants that I interacted with Welsh speakers. Across the party spectrum, I spent the majority of my time leafleting for candidates.

Leafleting

“Leafleting” is simply the practice of distributing printed political infor-mation to neighborhoods and communities through door-to-door and street corner operations. Depending on party strategy and financial con-siderations, leaflets may be distributed en masse or selectively to persons known for their political affiliations (i.e., according to a household’s party membership or independent/undeclared status). Many of the leaflets I distributed combined party/nationwide information with a discussion of local issues but others were purely national in focus. Successful leafleting demands an intimate knowledge of the spatial and political landscape of specific constituencies. Likewise, it requires a strong network of volunteers connecting the party apparatus to local civil society.

Passing leaflets through anonymous doors creates interactions between volunteers and potential voters, particularly when residents are outside their homes when volunteers pass through. Leafleting is political in con-tent but cultural in form, relying on the social norms of polite conduct


in British society to mediate the spontaneity of unsolicited contact. What was most striking about these exchanges was the patience of volunteers and candidates I observed when they were dealing with people opposed to their party. I watched candidates, for example, endure unexpected verbal attacks from the public with humility. They would listen carefully, offer explanations of why their party could meet their needs, and thank them for their time before moving on. I was equally surprised at the willingness of passersby to pause and accept the literature with a “thank you” when I passed out leaflets on street corners. I often worried about how I would respond if a resident asked me why she/he should vote for a party or why the party had not addressed a particular issue. Fortunately, I was never faced with this dilemma as my fellow volunteers were often within earshot in moments when someone met me to receive campaign literature and wanted specific questions answered.

Leafleting is a social as well as political occasion. Usually working in teams of two along individual streets (either one on each side of the street or working every other door up one side and then down the other side of the street), leafleting allows for intermittent conversation to pass the time. The topics of conversation ranged widely. On many occasions my covolunteers took the time to educate me about community history and the significance (or insignificance) of particular issues to local residents. I was also taught practical things like how to slide leaflets through letter-box openings without getting my fingers bit by dogs on the other side of the door, the unexpected presence of which usually added humor to the work. We also talked about our families, the state of the weather (always a concern in South Wales), or football, including the fortunes of local side Cardiff City FC. Some issues discussed were specific to parties, such as the Conservative volunteers’ passionate opposition to asylum seekers “over-crowding” the UK (which, again, they considered an important “doorstep” issue, even if the “problem” is unsupported by empirical evidence4), the impositions of EU integration, and the merits of devolution.

Inevitably, conversations across the board turned to the Iraq war, even if visible signs of public opposition were waning by that time.5 The opinions of campaign volunteers typically matched those of the parties they sup-ported. The Liberal Democrats disapproved of war without a UN man-date, as did the Conservatives, though with the additional caveat that the UK and US authorities responsible for invasion deserved more respect and support given ongoing military action. Plaid’s volunteers were absolutely opposed. Only with the Labour group did I observe much intraparty vari-ation: at one point in a leafleting session when several of us were together a senior campaign coordinator abruptly cut short a discussion about the legitimacy of war by exclaiming that Saddam Hussein was a dictator that


needed to be removed from power and there was nothing more to discuss. His position was more than understandable. Many of the party faithful I met during the campaign recognized the importance of playing up the differences the Labour-led Assembly Government had made for the people of Wales while minimizing any points of conflict between the party and the electorate.

Office work and electoral space

Observing the social production and use of political space during the Assembly election period provided an index of power relations within and between Cardiff ’s many neighborhoods (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Participating in leafleting across the city, for example, was revealing about differences in public service delivery: some districts, frankly, were kept much cleaner than others, which corresponded to the size of homes and yards, the presence or absence of driveways for parking cars, and the vari-ety of retail shops present on the main commercial streets. Having walked so much of the city in this manner, I can say there were some exceptions to this pattern, but the ratio of low wealth-to-low services was unques-tionably the norm. To a lesser extent, this also paralleled differences in the electoral strength of parties across Cardiff. The Conservatives, for instance, were strongest in Cardiff North, by far the wealthiest area I visited and also home to the party’s national headquarters. There the contest was between the Tories and Labour. The Liberal Democrats were particularly strong in Cardiff Central, which is home to many students as well as Cardiff University; again, Labour was the primary competition. Labour had long held Cardiff South, which was by far the most working class and ethnically diverse area I campaigned in, with Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats the closest challengers. Each party had at least a token presence in every district and sometimes an electoral foothold, which is evidenced by the fact that parties not representing constituencies in the Assembly or Parliament sometimes controlled at least a few seats on local councils.

An experienced campaigner will know the best way to organize a group of volunteers to cover sections of a larger electoral ward, including min-ute details such as how to most efficiently move up and down particular streets. I met campaign volunteers and coordinators in homes, pubs, and campaign offices to organize leafleting activities before embarking, which usually involved folding campaign leaflets into shapes that would fit through front door letterboxes, studying maps and assigning streets to individual groups, and chatting over a cup of tea or pint of beer about election news. In observing and speaking to the leaders of these activities, it


was clear that experience is derived from a combination of understanding broad party goals and local political issues, the people in those areas who can contribute to campaign efforts in different contexts, and the physical layout of neighborhoods resulting from long-time residence in the area. These forms of intimate knowledge not only indicate organizational capacity but also the extent of trust shared between parties and potential voters. Plaid Cymru’s presence in Butetown was a case in point.

Plaid Cymru has long-avowed a policy of civic (or “inclusive”) nation-alism and had established a strong minority party presence in Cardiff South by 2003. In previous local elections, the party had won a council seat in Butetown, an overwhelmingly nonwhite and largely Muslim ward that was (and remains) the poorest area in Wales and a long-time Labour stronghold. With the added context of the Iraq war, local party organiz-ers were optimistic about the Plaid’s chances here and had worked hard to coordinate a campaign strategy to highlight the party’s local presence as an alternative to Labour. Thus, it was not the war per se but the local intimacies community political activists had cultivated over time that they thought boded well for them in the May elections. One organizer explained it in the following terms: Cardiff is widely perceived as getting the lion’s share of National Assembly attention and money (a common perception in Wales), but it depends on what part of Cardiff one is talk-ing about as to whether the perception is true or false. (Again, my own walking survey of Cardiff neighborhoods more than confirmed this about uneven service delivery.) To that end, party coordinators developed their leaflets to include discussion of local service needs in conjunction with more general party campaign messages. Connecting the strategies of the national office to the local party headquarters in Cardiff South, we leaf-leted Butetown heavily on the eve of party leader Ieuan Wyn Jones’ visit to a local mosque. The volunteers knew the area well, which was evidenced by several instances of local residents stopping to chat about political and nonpolitical matters. At the end of our leafleting session, which was also attended by paid staff from the central party headquarters in Cardiff, one volunteer reflected that Iraq would be the last straw for Labour in this Muslim community. Although truly impressed by his dedication and local knowledge, I privately wondered if Butetown’s turning out to vote against Labour might be another matter.

The organizing spaces used to coordinate these local campaigns varied from party to party. The Conservative candidate’s headquarters were located in a back alley office off a commercial street in the affluent Whitchurch neighborhood. Plaid’s campaign headquarters were located in the front room of a volunteer’s flat in Grangetown; street maps detailing which areas had been leafleted covered his wall and boxes of campaign


literature more than filled a corner of his front room. The Labour candidate in Cardiff South had the support of a local union office where she could store campaign literature and host party volunteers. The Liberal candidate worked from her constituency office on a Cardiff high street.

Constituency offices, for those candidates fortunate enough to be both incumbents and constituency-based AMs, serve as critical centers of exchange between parties and the public at large. A candidate is truly embedded in the electoral district in this way. One important function of these spaces is hosting “surgeries” whereby AMs meet local residents to listen to their political concerns, which can be converted into leaflet material to convince the public that the party/candidate is working on an issue. Beyond these practices of proximate representation, a well- organized network of party volunteers is needed to carry out regular political work.

The Liberal Democrat headquarters in Cardiff Central, which was prominently located on a commercial street near a bus stop, is one example of an effective creation of political space. The large glass win-dows of the office were covered in campaign literature and voter infor-mation printed in English, Welsh, Urdu, and Arabic. Cardiff Central was one of the party’s strongest electoral districts in Wales and relied on approximately 300 volunteers to “get its word out” on a year-round basis. While a core of volunteers could be counted on to regularly help distribute party information in the constituency throughout the year, the majority contributed the odd hour here and there when labor needs increased during election periods. (Leaflets in Cardiff Central, I learned, typically go out every six weeks during noncampaign periods, while the party distributed 14 different leaflets over four weeks dur-ing the election period.) Things were never frantic, but the work was always steady, when I visited the headquarters before and after going out to leaflet the surrounding area. Unopened boxes of election leaflets surrounded a rectangular table waiting for processing in the back of the main room. I typically assisted other volunteers in labeling (with names/addresses), sorting, and bundling leaflets for particular neigh-borhoods; this proved to be an important task as other party volunteers would stream in and out to pick up these pre-packaged bundles and quickly leave to deliver them. Others in the office answered phones and greeted visitors at the front desk, freeing up paid staff to review election data and coordinate with the party’s national election headquarters in Cardiff Bay. Another group worked additional phones in a back corner of the room to call registered party members and remind them to vote. These efforts were facilitated by the coordination of local and national campaign activities.


As mentioned, I worked at the Liberal Democrat’s national campaign headquarters until the end of my internship in mid-April. Their head-quarters were located in the party’s policy research offices on the edge of the Butetown and Cardiff Bay wards. Our primary activity was to monitor election reports in the press and (in turn) develop and dissemi-nate positive information about the Liberals to the media. Candidates from all over Wales regularly stopped by; many more were in regular contact by telephone seeking information. Party officials, AMs, and MPs would meet to strategize public appearances and media responses, or just to stop in en route to somewhere else. The “research and rebut-tal team” I was assigned to worked similarly to the research unit I was a part of in the National Assembly. The sum of this work was intended to inform and prepare candidates for speeches and questions encountered in the process of campaigning. In particular, our goal was to quickly respond to and refute charges made against the party by other candi-dates. To do so, we began by comparing the party’s manifesto pledges to those of the other parties to highlight policy differences, factual and budgetary discrepancies, and inconsistencies between what the others pledged now compared to the past. We collected this information in a database for use in press releases and information packets designed for candidates.

The media more than any other factor shaped the way we worked. Someone had to be responsible for obtaining early morning copies of all print media to gauge coverage of Liberal Democrat candidates against all others. All election content was usually analyzed and summarized for the senior campaign officials to read and react to by the time I arrived to work at nine each morning. This information would inform the content of press releases and candidate speeches that day. Another person would work a late shift beginning in the afternoon to follow up on the day’s events around Wales. The group gathered around a small television at lunchtime everyday to see if the party’s candidates made the news. After a few days of operation, a Liberal Democrat press officer from Westminster was brought in to help organize the party’s media relations. Although unfamiliar with Wales, his professional experience and negotiation savvy enabled him to convince the press on several occasions that they needed to cover Liberal Democrat candidates. Without coverage, the string of appearances and campaign events the party’s main candidates were involved in meant little in the way of garnering broad-based attention. It also usually meant someone else was getting covered. While based in Cardiff, therefore, our activities were intended to bridge the geographic distances across Wales to create a shared set of national election data that set localized campaigning in a broader context.


Canvassing

I was invited to participate in a Labour Party canvassing project on April 22 in an eastern section of the Cardiff South district. Canvassing, unlike leafleting, involves active door-knocking to directly solicit votes. On this occasion, First Minister/Labour AM Rhodri Morgan joined the local Labour candidate and nine or ten party volunteers. All were well dressed and adorned with red Labour ribbons or red roses (the party’s flower) on their lapels. Short of areas of Cardiff North I leafleted, it was probably the wealthiest neighborhood I worked as a campaign volunteer. When we arrived at our destination that evening the Labour group put on an enthu-siastic and well-organized display of grassroots politicking. The numerous streets and tucked-away residences of the neighborhood were all old hat to this group. Each knew how to effectively cover the complete territory in a shortest amount of time.

The group was in high spirits that evening. Running jokes were passed from volunteer to volunteer as they jumped several doors at a time to get to the front of the procession. We worked in sets of two to knock on each door, asking residents, “Can [the Labour candidate] count on your support on the first of May?” The question was followed up by, “Would you like to ask [the candidate or First Minister, both identified by their first names] any questions, because they are right across the street?” The First Minister’s and candidate’s responses were polished when they were called on to speak and Morgan’s political experience was particularly evi-dent. While no doubt a routine exchange—in fact, he was concluding a two-week whistle-stop tour of every electoral constituency in Wales—he still managed to engage each resident with enthusiasm about the Labour campaign, urging people to choose Labour as the best choice for Wales. We met several who vowed to vote Labour, including a few were well known by the group. In other cases, residents said Labour wouldn’t get their vote or that they had not yet decided. Rather than walking away or arguing, the candidates and volunteers patiently listened to residents’ explanations about Labour’s shortcomings before investing several more minutes in trying to convince them otherwise.

By taking this approach, canvassing offers politicians the opportunity to position themselves locally as people meeting people. Unlike the con-stituency office operations that bring politicians and civilians into contact, campaign canvassing places elected officials in a foreign space to commu-nicate political ideas with people on a personal level. Through handshakes and eye contact, the political is practiced in most its intimate form, though volunteers from all the parties I worked with would comment that phone banks and other less direct forms of campaigning were taking the place


of this longstanding feature of British politics. (E-mail and phones, it was explained, had increased the breadth of constituency work without captur-ing the intimacy of the campaign ritual.) As a ritualistic exercise for win-ning electoral legitimacy, the door-to-door work of campaigning spatially locates the uncertainty of democratic transition; candidates must justify themselves as public representatives through the immediacy of face-to-face persuasion. The significance of this ritual was made evident late in the canvassing session.

After the First Minister had left and the group was working its way back to its starting point, I accompanied the Labour candidate to the doorstep of a house. A man came out who she had met six months before. Incredibly (to me), the candidate remembered his name and some of the issues he had raised during their previous meeting, which were about the quality of neighborhood services. Writing down his comments as he spoke, she vowed to follow up on “actions already initiated.” On the way back to the car it was explained to me that direct engagement with a few members of the public could turn some voters to Labour and create a ripple effect through word of mouth about the visit. Supporting this idea, we met a woman shortly thereafter who explained that she would vote Labour simply because the party was the first and only to have visited her doorstep.

Prologue to Election Day

Though occurring in a short timeframe, the election process in Wales was quite intense. It was reported that each party leader had driven between 3,000 and 4,000 miles over the course of the campaign (Buchanan April 24, 2003: 12). Mass mailings, leafleting and canvassing efforts, and numer-ous press appearances had marked the campaign period, bringing local politics to national attention in some instances and (more often) setting the national in the local contexts of constituency politics in others. Above and beyond the aspirations of individual parties and candidates, the real question was if any of it had managed to persuade those like the bus driver described at the opening of this chapter to embrace devolution in the same way the public mobilized against the Iraq war. May 1, 2003 now loomed as a public referendum on the very legitimacy of Welsh democracy.

The Labour Government in London went on the offensive in the final days of the Welsh election campaign. Prime Minister Blair, Welsh Secretary Peter Hain, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown all made visits to Wales and appeared in the Welsh press with the unified mes-sage that Plaid Cymru, Labour’s closest rival in terms of Assembly seats, would push Wales to independence and economic ruin if given power


(Western Mail April 24, 2003: 12; Starling April 24, 2003a: 1). By April 19, the press began to speculate about the effect of the war on the elections. With the war declared “over” a discursive space was opened to consider if the “Baghdad bounce” would mean Labour victory (Buchanan April 19, 2003: 5). Commentators of all stripes were nevertheless hesitant to predict exactly how it might impact the outcome.

On my final day working with the Tories in Cardiff North, the party’s candidate explained his intention to “knock” every door in the constitu-ency over the four-year period of his term if elected to a constituency seat. (This would have meant about 200 doors a week, which he assured me was possible.) The purpose was to personally meet constituents and learn about their concerns and needs on a face-to-face level. This, like the efforts of other candidates I observed, was intended to bring the National Assembly out of its faceless perch on Cardiff Bay, as well as a strategy for securing his political survival. At the same time, the candidate and the other volunteers at hand admitted that a low turnout could only help the party, particularly among disgruntled Labour voters. Equally, forecasts of bad weather meant a smaller showing at the polls, which tends to reduce participation to the party’s base of voters. None suggested this was good for democracy in Wales, but pragmatically accepted it was their best hope they had for winning Cardiff North from Labour.

The Liberal Democrats had fair hopes of increasing its numbers in the Assembly by one seat, at least according to precampaign polling data. Though the smallest party in the Assembly, it had outspent all but the Labour Party on the campaign. The question that remained was if its deci-sion to go into a governing partnership with Labour a few years before demonstrated its ability to take the lead in Welsh politics, or if it had failed to show the difference the coalition had made in the lives of the citizenry. On my last day leafleting with the party, the Cardiff Central candidate and I went out alone to cover a few adjacent streets before returning to organize leaflet bundles for another group. She expressed her worry over turnout—volunteers had been reporting that many people did not even know there was an election—but explained that the intimacy of neighbor-hood work was the best part of being a politician.

On the evening before the elections, April 30, I joined the Plaid Cymru volunteer group in Cardiff South for a final canvassing effort. Spirits were high: everyone was enthusiastic, laughing, and speaking a mix of (mainly) Welsh and English. We covered a vast territory in less than two hours before we stopped because the stacks of leaflets we started with were gone. As dusk descended there was a sense of relief that the campaign was finally over. We headed off in separate directions to get some sleep before the day.


Election Day

I was invited by the Labour candidate from Cardiff South to serve as an election observer at Cardiff City Hall for the vote count on May 1. City Hall is a stately Victorian-era building in the center of the city’s civic quar-ter, with statues of centuries-gone Welsh heroes lining the railings above the main stairway. I arrived around nine o’clock in the evening after stop-ping by a polling station, which was forebodingly empty.

TV crews were set up on the second floor lobby outside one of two great halls designated for the count. As Cardiff is the Welsh capitol, the Welsh Secretary of State was in attendance as were the media’s lead TV and newspaper reporters. BBC Wales was also broadcasting live from its studios and from each constituency. Both of the halls (the other hosting the Cardiff Central count) were filled by tables set up in a ring around each room with official counters on the inside. The invitees watching from the outside (myself included) were there to observe the credibility of the count. Candidates and their guests were keeping running tallies of votes from different polling stations to estimate how things were coming along.

Many of the party volunteers I had worked with over the last month were in attendance. All of those present were well dressed and wearing party ribbons. People filtered in and out of the counting halls to a pub in the building where a television was tuned to the BBC’s election coverage. With no more campaigning left to do, many watched the broadcast or spoke qui-etly in party groups, most notably the veteran Labour group who had been through many campaigns. A few attendees were more visibility nervous and remained fixated on the counting process. Disrupting the pageantry and officialdom of the event, however, was Captain Beanie. Representing his Bean Party of one, the Captain is a self-styled super hero adorned in an orange outfit replete with an orange cape and orange makeup covering his skin. He had run on an “eat more beans” platform. It was going to be a long night, I thought to myself. I ordered coffee instead of bitter.

The early results were all Labour. Plaid lost two seats it had unexpect-edly won in 1999 in the Labour heartlands of the Rhondda and Islwyn. Labour’s volunteers and elected officials in attendance were elated. Shortly thereafter, the Conservative candidate I volunteered for lost the Cardiff North constituency by less than 600 votes to Labour, still a major swing of several thousand votes to the Tories since the last election. (Because it was allowable to have candidates stand for constituency and regional seats, he was eventually reelected through the latter method.) Soon it was apparent that the Labour Party machine was well tuned to contest the elections all over Wales. Plaid’s volunteers and party workers watched stoically from a table near the TV. Labour claimed 12 seats before Plaid Cymru took


one. A stunned Plaid Cymru commentator on BBC Wales sat virtually speechless.

The Cardiff South vote was finally announced some time after 11p.m. I ran into the lobby to watch the Labour candidate introduced as the return-ing constituency AM. The Plaid candidate vowed to fight again in his speech of resignation (as did most other candidates), but it was clear that the party was devastated. Despite the gravity of the situation, the moment hovered on the edge of the absurd by the spectacle of Captain Beanie on stage. I returned to the pub to watch the rest of the returns. The Liberal Democrat I had campaigned for in Cardiff Central was reelected in the party’s strongest showing in all of Wales. Far less expected, however, were results indicating that the Conservatives were not only retaining seats, but also increasing their share of them. I caught a ride home with some Labour volunteers around 1a.m. to watch the rest of the results on television, but fell asleep before the count was finished.

When the final results were announced on May 3, Labour had taken 30 Assembly seats (up from 28), none of which were derived from pro-portional representation. Because two AMs serve in a nonvoting capac-ity as Presiding Officer and Deputy Presiding Officer (neither of which were Labour AMs), the party was in the position to forego a governing partnership and solely implement the agenda outlined in its manifesto. The Conservatives increased their share of seats to 11 (from nine), all but one coming from the regional list system. The Liberal Democrats, despite their heavy spending, remained at six seats. Plaid Cymru, the biggest loser among those parties who won seats, saw its base of 17 AMs dwindle to 12. Wales also elected its first independent AM. Gender representation in the Assembly shifted to a perfect balance of 30 women and 30 men, claimed to be the first such instance in the history of Western democracy. More significant, perhaps, was another statistic: Wales’ second-ever democratic elections witnessed a 38.2 percent voter turnout. Wrote the Western Mail in response:

It is hard to read anything else into these results except that the people of Wales have demonstrated a profound sense of apathy about their Assembly. The harder question to answer is exactly why this is …. Thursday’s turn-out demonstrates that five years into the devolution venture its credibility remains at stake …. [N]o one should assume an average turnout a shade over 38% signals that we have reached rock bottom yet.

(Western Mail May 3, 2003: 14)

An unscientific poll taken after the election by the generally antidevo-lution South Wales Echo asked, “Is the National Assembly really worth it?”


and, “If there was a referendum on a National Assembly tomorrow, how would you vote?” Of 2,065 respondents, 1,991 answered “No” to each ques-tion (Nifield and Harris May 3, 2003: 3). Reports from the more reliable Electoral Commission of Wales indicated that younger voters were the least interested in Assembly elections: 16 percent of persons under age 25 voted as did 21 percent of those 25–34. The First Minister responded that “young people voting is very low in all countries” and stated (incredibly, from my perspective as an American) his intention to ask US Congressional officials how to reduce voter apathy (Shipton July 8, 2003: 6). To be fair, this was not a purely Welsh problem. Although better than the Welsh turnout, Scottish and UK-wide parliamentary elections had dropped during the same period: participation in 2003 was 49 percent for the former and 59 percent in 2001 for the latter (i.e., the lowest General Election showing since 1918) (Bromley 2006: 71).

It is understandable that Welsh Labour was happy with the overall result. A victory is a victory, after all. Yet the First Minister’s dismissal of low turnout raises important questions about the meaning of electoral democracy under devolution. How do political parties inspire interest in the political process if traditional methods of claiming intimacy with the electorate, even when coupled with new multimedia strategies, are ineffec-tive? What does “apathy” actually mean given that mobilization against the Iraq war demonstrates the UK and Welsh public is, in fact, quite passionate about what the government does? How can politicians claim to represent the public through policymaking when a fraction of the electorate actually endorses a party’s policies? How far does turnout have to drop for election results to no longer be considered democratically legitimate?

Summary

Despite the hard work and effort of candidates, party staff, and volunteers, the May 2003 elections indicate that devolution has no more modernized the democratic process in the UK than the general public believed Tony Blair had made a case for war against Iraq. The simple act of holding elec-tions does not confer legitimacy upon elected institutions. Though I admit I did not conduct a systematic survey of voter opinions after the election, the polarized public reactions to elections and war in the first half of 2003 suggest that elected officials and potential voters may hold contrasting viewpoints on the meanings of “voter apathy” and “democratic representa-tion.” The intimacy of the campaign ritual may bring the political to the level of the personal, in other words, but the election results also reveal a divide between the performance of representation and public beliefs in its embodiment.


I spoke about this issue with Wales-based representatives of the Socialist Party and UK Independence Party after the elections, each of which only received a fraction of available votes on election night. Each had a different take on the Assembly elections. For the former, Labour had drifted too far from the socialist roots that once drove Welsh politics, an estrangement that the war only amplified (in his opinion). Even if in the minority, it was explained, the traditional Labour vote was still a sizeable minority that could not bring itself to endorse a policy agenda it could not personally identity with. In this view New Labour had won the middle ground of the UK at the expense of the left. The UK Independence Party (UKIP), known across the UK for its opposition to immigration, is also the most outspoken opponent of UK devolution. (The party ran a full-page newspaper ad the day before the election that exclaimed, “ABOLISH THE ASSEMBLY!”) UKIP, however small in terms of its electoral share, unquestionably reflects the antidevolution opinions of many people I have met in Wales. The party’s representative interpreted the election turnout as a vindication of this perspective. People don’t want a powerless Assembly or any institution that dissolves the UK state, he explained, but a government that meets their needs.

One could argue that devolution is precisely intended to meet those needs, but the larger implication is that many in Wales just did not see it that way. What both the Socialist Party and UKIP lacked that the four elected to the National Assembly possessed, however, was a viable network of volunteers and party workers capable of making their positions widely known in the intimate spaces of street corners and doorsteps across Wales. The established networks of political intimacy do produce results, but perhaps not representative legitimacy. That some (i.e., 38.2 percent) did turn up to vote indicates that the parties with seats in Cardiff Bay pro-moted a message that resonated with a large number of voters, just not a majority of potential voters. The challenge for the Assembly, as with any other democratic institution, is to find the means to overlap its institu-tional and representative practices of legitimation in such a way that the policy process, its outcomes, and its rituals of reproduction converge to meet the demands of a majority, yet without recourse to doing so at the expense of those who disagree. This book has examined the difficulty of this proposition by contrasting the complexities of preparing for policy, debating policy, practicing policy, and now ratifying the legitimacy of policy through elections. In the process, it has widened the scope from an interior analysis to one presently focused on the external validation of the interior. It now widens the scope of analysis further to consider how the institutional and representative legitimacies of Welsh democracy can conflict within the vertical hierarchies of UK devolution, European gover-nance, and economic globalization.

If the National Assembly for Wales—which has a settled view on the need for Wales to be GM free—can’t make such a decision, what is the point of devolution?

(Plaid Cymru AM Rhodri Glyn Thomas [in Dubé July 30, 2003: 1])

Something unique is afoot in Europe, in what is still called Europe even if we no longer know very well what or who goes by this name. Indeed, to what concept, to what real individual, to what singular entity should this name be assigned today? Who will draw up its borders?

(Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading [1990: 5])

In 2005, the challenge of achieving supranational integration in Europe was laid visible after public referenda in the Netherlands and France

rejected a proposed European constitution. This rebuke of integration, no doubt, reflected public uncertainties about the ultimate aims and direction the EU would take in the present and future. Yet these developments also highlighted longer-standing rifts in Europe about how legislative author-ity and concomitant rights of citizenship should be divided among the EU, its member states, and regional governments connected to Europe’s supranational network. Conflicts over sovereignty have been no more expressed than over the EU’s policy on regulating GMOs, an issue which became “fair game” for critique in 2003 when the EU ended a five-year moratorium on GMOs under pressure from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to allow the “free trade” of imports into European territory. As I will argue in this chapter, this event effectively unleashed competing claims of sovereignty and legitimacy that could not occupy the same space of gov-ernance, thus highlighting the ambiguities and uncertainties of devolved democracy as a condition of subnational empowerment under state and supranational governance.

7

Cross-Pollinated Sovereignties


Having opened with internal analyses of Welsh devolution, and then moved to consider the influences of civil society and UK governance on Assembly policy, I now address the overlapping intersections of UK and European politics, public demand, and globalization as shaping the meanings of Welsh empowerment. The GMOs issue is ideal for such an analysis: these debates are globally dispersed, involving local and national communities, governments at various levels of authority, international organizations, and economic interests ranging from indigenous produc-ers and small farmers to multinational agribusiness conglomerates (Shiva 2000). The symbolic and institutional tensions between an “integrated Europe” and “nationhood within Europe” are thus specified in reference to a GMOs policy promoted at the supranational level yet opposed by substate institutions like the National Assembly for Wales. GMOs policy provides a vivid example of how the institutional and representative legitimacies of the National Assembly, which I have argued entail distinct (if sometimes overlapping) political practices, can come into conflict. In a noteworthy book on European integration, Balibar (2004: 198) has argued that substate sites of European governance are key “worksites of citizenship … open to new, nonpredetermined developments” (see also Bellier 2000: 69–70). While I do not take issue with this observation as a matter of principle, I would argue that the GMOs issue indicates the need for a more balanced assessment of both the potentials and limitations for supranationalism to empower minority populations. In other words, this chapter takes the view that the future of democracy in Europe is neither predetermined nor open-ended, but tied to cultural politics embedded in multileveled governmental practices alternately carried out in the name of legality or popular representation.

To explore the complexities implied in this position, the first section of this chapter reviews academic and political debates about EU integration and UK devolution to indicate the present uncertainties of Europe’s politi-cal transformations: events that could lead the empowerment of subna-tional, state, or supranational institutions, but not all three. Bringing these debates into focus, it then analyzes the economic and cultural contexts informing Welsh resistance to GMOs contra the UK and EU. The second section contrasts the anti-GMO strategies of Welsh civil society with those of the National Assembly to highlight the challenges inherent to affirming both the representative and institutional legitimacies at stake in setting a Welsh GMOs policy. Bringing the discussion back to the level of parlia-mentary discourse, the third section examines a 2003 Assembly debate on GMOs to assess how questions of sovereignty, legitimacy, and party ideol-ogy are negotiated at the margins of neoliberal globalization and supra-national integration. The final section describes how the Welsh Labour

CROSS-POLLINATED SOVEREIGNTIES 153

Party sought to legitimate its policy position—one that both resisted and affirmed the asymmetries implied in devolved government—in a party-sponsored public conference on GMOs in West Wales. When taking this evidence in total (i.e., incorporating the varied themes and research foci of this book into an analysis of a specific policy development), I argue that Wales’ struggle to regulate GMOs demonstrates the weaknesses of the National Assembly’s devolution settlement to democratically empower Welsh citizens within the institutional and political party dynamics of asymmetrical governance in the UK and Europe.

Where lies the legitimacy of integration?

Supranational integration prompts anthropology to reformulate an already nuanced critique of the contemporary state (Trouillot 2004; Balibar 2004) to account for the overlapping sites of governance through which multiple collectivities are constituted as a singular European polity and, paradoxically, where popular and political notions of ethnic and national difference are institutionalized as the vibrancy of European experience. “Europe” has meant many things to different social scientists, including anthropologists, since the momentum towards integration gathered steam in the 1990s. Questions abound about the EU’s struc-tural relations with member states (Smith 1993; Llobera 2003), its “pan-European” cultural content and identity (Bellier and Wilson 2000; Shore 2000; Diez 2001; Baubock 2001), and its potential to invigorate or quell nationalisms (Billig 1995: 131–133; Hroch 1996: 94; May 2000; Guibernau 1999; Dogan 1994). Anthropology has largely attended to the impacts of supranationalism on political, cultural, and economic processes at the European and member state levels (Bourneman and Fowler 1997; Shore 2000; Holmes 2000a), with less treatment given to government institutions at its margins (O’Dowd, Anderson, and Wilson 2007; Wilson and Donnan 1998; Donnan and McFarlane 1997). These latter institutions, however, are critical administrative components of integration, as well as sites of con-flict and policy divergence from the state/supranational power centers of Europe. With all due acknowledgement of the disproportionate influence of the state/supranational over the regional, it is arguably the interplay of regional, state, and supranational politics that will determine the mean-ings of belonging and sovereignty questioned by Derrida (above). Not only a matter of “postmodern” cultural politics, it is also a consequence of institutional design.

The EU’s principle of subsidiarity, or transferring decision-making authority to the lowest possible level whenever possible, has a long history (see Holmes 2000b) yet assumed prominence with the signing of the


Maastricht Treaty in 1993. Among the treaty’s important outcomes was the establishment of a Europe of the Regions as a key pillar of European gover-nance. Not unlike the debates about integration as a whole, the meaning of regional policy has since encouraged broad academic discussion and dis-agreement. At turns, regionalism is seen as a source of functional integra-tion and power sharing (Henderson 2000: 355; Laursen 1999; Committee of the Regions 2000: 115; Christiansen 1996: 108, 113), a site of reinvigo-rated (or newly inspired) ethnic identity movements contra the suprana-tional (Wright 2000: 187–188; Holmes and Murray 1999; Bellier 2000: 69), or both (Keating 2005). The implications of a European regional policy remain unclear, even to the EU’s own Committee of the Regions (1998: 10, 13; see also Holmes 2000b: 10; Delgado-Moreira 2000: 462; Wagstaff 1999: 188; on the UK specifically, see Cameron and Ndhlovu 2001: 329 and Berger 2000: 154). There is also evidence that the EU’s higher profile in regional affairs has raised public awareness of “Europeaness” in the UK’s devolved regions (Ichijo 2004), though additional research should clarify how specific types of EU intervention might influence these extralocal self-identifications. The regionalization of Europe, in short, has produced quite uneven effects, owing in part to the priorities and organizational structures of member state governments, the strengths and goals of substate “nationalist” parties as compared to statewide parties, and the specificities of integration policies (see De Winter and Cachafeiro 2002). On balance of these viewpoints, European regionalism marks a productive and constraining space of governance where claims of minority empower-ment are made possible within the limits of member state and suprana-tional membership.

Creating “clean, green Cymru”

European politics have been relevant to Wales for decades even if support for integration has not always been strong, particularly in Conservative and Labour Party circles. Ultimately, it was during the span of Conservative rule between 1979 and 1997 that Wales (like Scotland) looked to “side-step Westminster and promote Welsh interests in the increasingly significant context of EU politics” (Bulmer 2001: 139). If anything, devolution has complicated the straightforwardness of this model. Many of the early sessions of the National Assembly, in fact, were preoccupied with trying to determine the precise balance of power between Cardiff Bay, London, and Brussels (Gay 1997: 16). Part of the confusion lies in the different functions of subsidiarity and devolution: the former leaves the downward transfer of decision-making power to the discretion of the member state while the


latter enumerates specific rights and powers to substate political units. To manage potential conflicts of interest, the governments in Whitehall, Holyrood, and Crickhowell House signed onto a three-way Memorandum of Understanding in 1999 to encourage a united front when dealing with European policies, international affairs, and nondevolved economic issues, which is further reinforced by several cross-institutional working groups organized by the UK government.1 In principle, Welsh and Scottish min-isters may represent the UK in European negotiations when the issue in question is devolved to Cardiff Bay and/or Edinburgh, but Wales and Scotland must tow the UK line during such meetings. In practice, however, the case of GMOs indicates that Welsh policy cannot be reduced to a mat-ter of routinely affirming this decision-making hierarchy.

There are good reasons why the Welsh public and its AMs oppose GMOs contra the UK state and EU. A Welsh GMOs policy touches on elements of the Assembly’s environmental, economic, agricultural, and health-related powers, and thereby goes a long way toward defining the institution’s democratic persona. Foremost, the Government of Wales Act of 1998 requires the National Assembly to actively promote sustain-able development (i.e., an integrated approach to economic regenera-tion, cultural preservation, and environmental stewardship), which the government in Wales has translated into a focus on “communities” as the contact point of parliamentary intervention (Welsh Assembly Government 2001a: 5, 2002). Agricultural policy is an obvious area for promoting sustainability, yet also represents a tactical engagement with a global food economy driven by the logic of neoliberal competition. The government officially states that global shifts in agricultural production “are eroding the pattern of Welsh family farms, with potentially serious consequences for rural employment and rural communities …. [T]he challenge is to slow that decline to create time for alternative employment to be developed in rural areas, which local people can take up” (Welsh Assembly Government 2000: 2). Wales is ill-suited to compete on the global market with its numerous small producers and, due to the land-scape and climate, a limited range of production choices. In response, the Assembly has sought niche markets for Welsh agriculture by emphasizing quality over production cost and developing a “Wales Brand” distinc-tion through marketing and other forms of promotion (Welsh Assembly Government 2001b). One way the Assembly has cultivated a Wales brand has been to institutionalize the image of “clean, green Cymru”. For instance, the government promotes organic production through grants and other incentives to encourage conversion from conventional farming methods. It has set a target of achieving 10 percent to 15 percent organic production by 2010 in conjunction with developing a market demand for


organic products, including working with agencies such as schools and hospitals under the Assembly’s control. The government can claim some success with its policy: organic farms have increased from 120 in 1998 to 610 in 2003 (Agri-Food Partnership Organic Strategy Group 2004: 5). Moreover, a “clean, green” countryside is integral to the Assembly’s tour-ism marketing strategy, which represents a largely rural-based industry accounting for roughly seven percent of the Welsh GDP and 10 percent of the workforce.

Not only economically pragmatic, these interventions are culturally symbolic. As the Assembly’s response to its agricultural crisis, Farming for the Future, attests: “socially, the family farm defines the character of Welsh rural society, and its sense of identity” (Welsh Assembly Government 2001b: 4; see also Cloke, Goodwin, and Milbourne 1997: 145). The symbolic ties between Welsh rurality and Welsh identity run cen-turies back, even if this conception is rooted more in the sociological imagination than in the lived experiences of an increasingly urbanized society. Agricultural subsistence was the preindustrial locus of Welsh life, for instance (Smith 1984: 43), as well as a more recent source of inspiration to Romantic writers, nationalists, and Welsh language campaigners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Davies 1993: 347–348, 407). In the era of devolution, the landscape is a commonly featured image in Assembly-funded tourism campaigns aimed over the Welsh-English border and overseas. Also suggestive of the symbolic power of the Welsh landscape, about two-thirds of the political officials I interviewed during my field-work mentioned the rural as one of the defining characteristics of Welsh identity. Protecting the environment and rural farm communities, there-fore, is paramount to the National Assembly’s mandate to serve Welsh interests.

Adding impetus to the cultural and economic contexts of GMOs opposition, public concerns over human-environmental relations were heightened across the UK in the late 1990s by the devastating effects of mad cow disease and in the early 2000s by an outbreak of foot-and-mouth (livestock) disease. Wales was hit particularly hard by these events due to its generally rural character and the tourism industry’s close relationship to the environment. Public and media perceptions that the Assembly Government failed to adequately deal with these issues placed additional pressure on public officials to decisively respond to the GMOs issue when the EU ended its five-year moratorium on GMOs imports in 2003 under pressure from the United States and WTO. To understand how Welsh officials responded, it is first important to trace the parliamentary and civil origins of resistance prior to 2003 (see Nottingham 2003 for background on the EU dimension of GMOs regulation).


Supranationalism and regionalism in conflict

Though a GMOs import ban was in effect when the National Assembly began operations in 1999, the issue still received a great deal of parliamentary attention from the moment of the institution’s inception. Numerous GMOs debates occurred in the first weeks and months of the Assembly’s operation, for example. Belying the cultural and economic imperatives of devolution, a Liberal Democrat AM stated during one such debate that a GMOs ban would give “the Assembly an opportunity to show that it has an identity and to promote that Welsh identity. Being GM [i.e., genetically modified] free as well as extensively organic would be one of Welsh food’s best selling points” (Record of Proceedings June, 23 1999). Yet, while the majority of the political opposition stood unequivocally against GMOs, as did some Labour backbenchers, the Assembly Government was challenged with creating a corresponding policy within the asymmetries of EU law made in Brussels and party/government policy emanating from London.

The Assembly’s Secretary for Agriculture encapsulated these contradic-tions during another early GMOs debate in which she refuted calls for a categorical GMOs ban. “The Assembly’s powers are not unfettered,” she argued, “and it would not be possible to impose a general moratorium on GM crops in Wales. So, it would be Welsh and bold but I am afraid it would not be legal” (Record of Proceedings June 29, 1999; my emphasis). Not only in conflict with its Memorandum of Understanding with Whitehall and at risk of political fallout with the New Labour leadership, the govern-ment also faced the potential of EU fines if judged to be noncompliant. Alternately, acquiescing to the UK/EU line on GMOs meant undermining another fundamental tenet of devolution: democratically representing Welsh public interests. Two ideologies of democratic sovereignty were thus in conflict: that which legitimated the rights of an abstract national public through parliamentary representation and that which legitimated the sov-ereignty of more powerful institutions through diffuse chains of account-ability and compliance. The government’s challenge was to develop a policy that could accommodate each master.

Public opposition to GMOs

Part of the impetus for the Assembly’s early discussions about regulating GMOs stemmed from the public sphere in Wales. A campaign of public opposition was launched in the late 1990s to shape the Assembly’s response to the GMOs issue, not unlike other anti-GMOs movements occur-ring in Europe around this time (see Heinelt and Meinke-Brandmaier 2006). Friends of the Earth Cymru (FoEC), an environmental advocacy


group based in Cardiff and part of the international Friends of the Earth network, was at the forefront of a tactical campaign of direct lobbying and public demonstration. Developing support within the Assembly and among prominent interest groups, FoEC sought to supply the National Assembly with a legal justification for denying the consent of GMOs applications. Outside lawyers were commissioned to determine the legal veracity of Wales’ ability to regulate GMOs, which encouraged the Assembly’s Presiding Office, Plaid Cymru, and the Liberal Democrats to seek outside legal advice as well. Essential to FoEC’s case was an inter-pretation of EU law as empowering its subsidiary institutions and of the UK’s Government of Wales Act as granting Wales the sovereignty to set its own agricultural policy. Specifically, the power to review applications for the “deliberate release” of GMOs into the Welsh environment was considered to be devolved to Wales through the latter Act.2 Drawing from the language of the UK parent document, the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) of 1990, which emphasizes that GMOs applications are justified only when potential crops “are not capable of causing [environmental] damage”, FoEC’s legal council argued that a GMOs ban was possible if established on the grounds of protecting the environment, as opposed to purposefully restricting ‘free trade’ (see Friends of the Earth-Cymru 1999 and 2000). Working through its contacts in the Assembly, FoEC promoted a draft policy in September 1999 that would have declared de facto Welsh sovereignty over GMOs decisions. The draft emphasized the restrictive language of the EPA concerning the meaning of “harm.” By interpreting “harm” in the sense of forcing would-be GMOs producers prove the safety of GMOs rather than making the government disprove it, the policy would have shifted decision making power to GMOs application review bodies in Wales. A representative of FoEC explained the process to me:

The policy we drafted for [the National Assembly] at the time [recognized] that … the government’s advisory committee would look at the [GM application] papers and invariably give permission. Although the Assembly couldn’t say as its policy we will not allow GM crops to be planted in Wales, it could declare as its intention that anytime anyone wants to apply for planting these crops, it could phrase its request to its advisory committee in such strong terms that the advisory committee would actually be [irratio-nal] if it came up with a positive answer. So, we took the terms directly from the Environmental Protection Act, which essentially [asked] the committee if the crop is capable of causing harm to human health or the environment. That was judged to be a phrase that was perfectly valid within the law and the Assembly had every right to ask the committee for advice in that form of words. But the [idea was that the] form of words would be so strong the committee would be probably hesitant to advise the Assembly that this


particular crop wasn’t capable of causing harm. We published this. We got the Assembly to comment on it. Their officials constantly told us it was unlawful, that it could be successfully challenged and [EU] commissioner-reviewed.

(Interview June 2, 2003).

Seeking legitimacy before the Welsh public but perhaps hesitant to chal-lenge the governments of London or Brussels, the Assembly Government rejected this interpretation but declared its intention to create the ‘most restrictive policy possible’ within what it viewed as its legal limits of sovereignty. By 2001, the Assembly issued a notification to the European Commission challenging the introduction of a GM maize strain for crop trials in Wales. Though falling short of an outright refusal, the notifica-tion raised important questions about how the EU would deal with the unintended cross-pollination of conventional and/or organic crops by GMOs. Emphasizing the need to regulate separation distances as well as work out a means of settling compensatory disputes in cases of cross- contamination, the Assembly’s actions triggered a wider debate in Brussels about managing the demands of global trade policy without jeopardizing the economic rights of regions and citizens. The Assembly Government had thus found a way of defining itself against the governments in London and Brussels without endorsing FoEC’s tactical reading of the EPA. By slowing the process of introducing GM trials in Wales, in other words, it could claim to legitimately represent Welsh interests by defining Welsh sovereignty within the institutional boundaries of UK/EU law. (To its credit, no crop trials occurred in Wales during 2002.) Despite these efforts, many AMs considered the executive’s response inadequate: as one Labour backbencher cynically declared on behalf of his constituents in plenary, “No green, clean future for us” (Record of Proceedings May 1, 2001). Hardly dormant under these circumstances, the GMOs issue only heated up when the EU’s import ban ended in 2003.

Public and political resistance to GMOs in 2003

The European Commission lifted its GMOs moratorium and initiated the normalization of GMOs imports in May 2003 under pressure from the WTO and the United States. Almost immediately, a group of biotechnol-ogy multinationals submitted applications to import several GM food varieties for cultivation in EU territory. Contrary to the opposition of some member states—most notably Austria, Germany, and France—the United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal led the way in supporting GMOs within the EU. At the UK level, the British government in London linked


its support for GMOs to the merits of “scientific evidence” (based on field trials) and to the outcome of a public consultation about popular support for GMOs. Yet public support was already low and the very meaning of government evidence was challenged by a variety of scientific, economic, political, and cultural arguments. First, GM opponents argued that few tests had been conducted to study the health effects of GM foods, prompt-ing a former UK environment minister under Blair to claim government studies were “scientifically vacuous” and that the UK was rushing to bring GMOs to the market (Britton June 23, 2003: 4; Dubé July 28, 2003: 19). Second, critics suggested that GMOs production could introduce herbi-cide tolerant strains of plants that would damage other cultivated and wild plant species. Raising important questions about Wales’ territorial integ-rity on this issue, FoEC further argued that the wind’s capability to carry pollen over several kilometers rendered a GM-free Wales all but impossible if England did not set the same policy (Dubé July 14, 2003: 19). Third, opponents rightly emphasized that the economic benefits of GMOs were not clear, particularly in a social context where many consumers opposed GM foods and protestors had previously attacked GM crops (McCarthy July 12, 2003: 2). Given the additional implications on Wales’ fledgling organic production sector, many AMs argued that the relative lack of supportive evidence meant advocating Europe’s precautionary principle to reject GMOs imports, at the very least until more data was available (Buchanan July 9, 2003: 6). For the government in London, in contrast, a lack of data meant towing the EU line given that no information conclu-sively indicated harm would occur (Dubé July 22, 2003: 1).

Political maneuvering

Negotiations behind the scenes of the UK’s public consultation process give some indication of how the National Assembly asserted decision-making authority during this period. Initially, Whitehall planned its public consultation, titled GM Nation?, for early 2003 in advance of GM crop trials scheduled for later that year. However, the lack of chronologi-cal overlap between these related exercises raised concerns in Wales and Scotland where elections were scheduled for May: the timing could have diverted public attention away from the elections or encouraged a public backlash in the voting booth. Because the Welsh and Scottish governments were expected to provide some funding for the consultations, each refused to contribute funding until the consultation period was moved to follow the elections.4 In effect, the devolved administrations worked together to hold the UK government accountable to a different standard of disclosure and accountability in the consultation process. Whitehall responded by


proposing a month-long public consultation for June 2003 at an estimated cost of £500,000 (Dubé May 19, 2003: 18). These actions do not suggest that opposition in England (for example) was lacking, but that devolution had created a small space in which Wales and Scotland could institutional-ize expressions of national difference from the UK state in the context of European politics. At the European level, Wales also stated its opposition as a signatory with nine other officially recognized European regions demand-ing more information about GMOs before supporting the lifting of the moratorium. Again working within the narrow parameters of institutional legitimacy granted to Europe’s regions, the Assembly voiced its objections on the grounds that EU regions should be allowed the right to define their own territories as GM-free (E-mail, Welsh Assembly Government Plant Health and Biotechnology Branch, November 19, 2003). In concert with this action, a coalition of MEPs (including Wales’ small contingent) passed labeling, genetic traceability, and cross- contamination legislation in the EU Parliament (Dubé July 7, 2003: 19).

Public resistance

A public campaign paralleled these efforts by drawing on the longer history of formal campaigning and civil disobedience against GMOs in Wales. A “GM Free Wales” coalition was formed by environmental groups (includ-ing FoEC), the Farmers’ Union of Wales, and the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (Wales). Two thousand signatures were collected in Pembrokeshire, a Welsh county where previous test crops had been destroyed, calling for a ban on all GMOs in Wales (Dubé July 14, 2003: 9). At the Royal Welsh Show, an annual agricultural fair held in July, Plaid Cymru additionally criticized a lack of bilingual consultations even as the EU’s Agriculture Commissioner visited to explain the intractability of the EU position. Lending his symbolic stature to public opposition, the Prince of Wales, Charles, that same month branded the UK/EU position “ridicu-lous” on both religious and scientific grounds (Dubé July 30, 2003: 1). By October, an organic farmer from Pembrokeshire began a 380-mile journey to Westminster on his tractor to join other farmers in protest of GMOs, stopping off at the Assembly to receive well-wishes from a cross-party group of AMs (Dubé October 6, 2003: 20; Western Mail October 9, 2003: 11).

The publication of the UK crop trials that month did not help GMO proponents: two of three test crops proved detrimental to the surround-ing plants, insects, and birds and the research design for a “successful” third crop trial was challenged by GMOs opponents (Dubé and Buchanan October 17, 2003: 2). Moreover, when the long-awaited publication of the GM Nation? report finally arrived, it demonstrated an overwhelming


public disapproval of GMOs. Given the mounting evidence against the EU/UK position, the Assembly Government faced a fresh wave of criticism of its GMOs policy, which now rested uncomfortably between acknowl-edging two forms of legitimacy that were in clear contradiction.

Debating GMOs/defining sovereignty

The numerous anti-GMOs discourses at play in UK and Welsh politics converged during a Plaid Cymru-sponsored debate held in the Assembly’s plenary chamber on October 7, 2003. In essence, the debate reinstitution-alized these discourses as valid points of discussion for determining the legitimacy of government policy on GMOs. The Assembly as a collective body did not disagree with the Labour government’s position to maximize restrictions in principle, yet there was a diversity of interpretations about how an Assembly GMOs policy should ideally position Wales in relation to the UK, EU, and global market economy. What was most interesting about this debate, in other words, was that it became a surrogate discussion about what Welsh nationhood should ideally signify under devolution. In opening the debate, for example, Plaid Cymru’s spokesperson argued:

Gallwn gasglu o’r ymatebion hyn bod lefel uchel o anfodlonrwydd ynghylch y syniad o dyfu cnydau GM yn fasnachol ym Mhrydain. Gwyddwn fod ymateb pobl Cymru i gnydau GM yn fwy negyddol fyth …. Oherwydd anfodlonrwydd ac amheuaeth pobl Cymru y cyflwynodd Plaid Cymru y cynnig hwn. Mae pobl yn wyliadwrus, ac y mae disgwyl i Gynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru ymateb i lais a chonsýrn y bobl a phenderfynu ar y mater hwn. Yn ail ran y cynnig, galwn ar Lywodraeth Cymru i lynu at yr egwyddor ragofalus a fabwysiadwyd fel polisi’r Cynulliad ac i osod y cyf-yngiadau cyfreithiol mwyaf ar gnydau GM yng Nghymru, beth bynnag fo ymateb Llywodraeth San Steffan …. Nid ydyw Plaid Cymru yn hyderus y gallwn ddibynnu ar Margaret Beckett a Tony Blair i adlewyrchu barn pobl Cymru ar y mater hwn. Yr ydym yn llawer hapusach i drafod y mater hwn yn Ewrop gyda phobl sy’n deall y problemau ac sydd am i’r cyfyngiadau gael eu cyflwyno. Mawr hyderaf y bydd y Gweinidog yn cydnabod mai Ewrop yw’r lle gorau iddo ddadlau achos Cymru.

[We can conclude from these responses (to the GM Nation? Report) that there is a high level of dissatisfaction about the notion of growing GM crops commercially in Britain. We know that the response of the people of Wales to GM crops is even more negative … Plaid Cymru tabled this motion in response to the dissatisfaction and the misgivings of the people of Wales. People are wary, and the National Assembly for Wales is expected to respond to the voice and concerns of the people and make a decision on this matter. In the second part of the motion, we call on the Government of Wales to


adhere to the [EU] precautionary principle that was adopted as Assembly policy and to set the tightest possible legal restrictions on GM crops in Wales, regardless of the response of the Westminster Government …. Plaid Cymru is not confident that we can depend on [UK agriculture and environment minister] Margaret Beckett and Tony Blair to reflect the opin-ion of the people of Wales on this matter. We are much happier to discuss this matter in Europe with people who understand the problems and who want to see the restrictions put in place. I am confident that the Minister will recognise that Europe is the best place for him to argue the case for Wales.]

(Record of Proceedings October 7, 2003)

In this passage, Plaid’s spokesperson clearly lays the blame for a weak GMOs policy at the feet of the UK state, even to the point of glossing over the EU’s very real institutional (i.e., nonparliamentary) support of global trade policy. By distinguishing Europe’s bureaucratic and legislative func-tions in this way, he makes the initial case that the Assembly’s representa-tive legitimacy must ultimately derive from the representation of public interests in Europe. Secondarily, he inverts Europe’s bureaucratic hierarchy by utilizing the EU’s precautionary principle to call for the EU to fall in line with the Assembly, not vice versa, thus redoubling his case for repre-senting public interests in the context of adhering to the institutional legit-imacy of one of Europe’s key decision-making principles. This position, moreover, is a reflection of party ideology favoring Welsh independence from the UK state whereby European politics—despite its greater scale and corresponding legislative complexities—is posited as a site for advancing Welsh autonomy. The obvious paradox of this position is that any Welsh influence in Europe would be proportionally smaller than compared to Welsh participation in the UK’s multileveled parliamentary system, but to denounce Europe in this context would only undermine Plaid’s nationalist vision of empowerment. Whatever the logical inconsistencies, parliamen-tary debate thus serves the higher purpose of advancing larger notions of nationhood well apart from the specifics of a particular policy. “Europe,” in other words, is a structural condition of Welsh government and a sym-bolic tool that can be fashioned to advance any number of political goals. Contrary to Plaid Cymru, for instance, a Conservative intervention later in the debate moved in the opposite ideological direction by calling for Wales to make an explicit break from Europe:

Cynigiaf welliant 1 yn enw Jonathan Morgan. Ychwanegu pwynt newydd ar ddiwedd y cynnig: yn galw am adfer pwerau o

‚r Undeb Ewropeaidd yn ôl

i‚r aelod wladwriaethau o ran tyfu cnydau GM … Yr oeddwn yn siomedig i

glywed na fydd Plaid Cymru yn cefnogi gwelliant y Ceidwadwyr. Gobeithiaf y


bydd yn newid ei feddwl a’i gefnogi. Os bydd y pwer i ddelio â chnydau GM yn aros ym Mrwsel, ni fydd Llywodraeth Prydain na Chaerdydd yn gallu gwneud dim amdano.

[I propose amendment 1 in the name of Jonathan Morgan. Add as a new point at the end of the motion: calls for the repatriation of powers from the European Union to the member state in respect to the growing of GM crops …. I was disappointed to hear that Plaid Cymru will not support the Conservatives’ amendment. I hope that it will change its mind and support it. If the power to deal with GM crops remains in Brussels, then neither the UK nor the Cardiff Government will be able to do anything about it.]

(Record of Proceedings, October 7, 2003; italics indicate wording of amendment)

The Conservative amendment is not surprising given the party’s typical (but by no means uniform) support for UK unionism over European integration or British devolution. What is more important is analyzing supranational integration as a flexible signifier of the legitimacy of power. Here Europe, not the UK government, is the foil to be reckoned with: just as Plaid’s intervention strategically overlooked the limits of regional autonomy in Europe, the Conservatives disregarded the UK’s role in curtailing devolved decision making in Wales over GMOs. Ironically, the Tories were not sponsoring an amendment through the Assembly’s policy process to render Wales more sovereign, but using the process to reas-sert the sovereignty of the UK over Europe and Wales. The Conservative amendment could not have been respected no matter how many votes it garnered that afternoon: entering into or withdrawing from European compacts is a matter of member state discretion. Just as paradoxical as Plaid’s argument about Europe as empowering Wales, the political party most allied to the idea of preserving the UK status quo was attempting to empower Wales’ devolution settlement to undo EU integration. While only implicit in this statement, a rebuke of Europe’s institutional legitimacy was clearly at stake.

A final example from this debate helps to indicate how integration is not only mobilized as an “either/or” proposition of state versus suprana-tional sovereignty in Wales. An exchange between Liberal Democrat and Labour AMs (who were no longer in coalition government) effectively widened and localized the GMOs issue as a conflict between democratic autonomy and neoliberalism:

Mick Bates (LD): [The National Assembly should] reaffirm the ethical stance that we have taken hitherto in protecting the third world from the development of GM crops, which endanger the viability of many of the world’s rural economies. The dominance of large global companies is well


documented by many sources. I urge the Assembly and the Minister to reaffirm our international approach and oppose this globalisation, which works against local economies and destroys local farmers who take out con-tracts with major companies with whom they must deal exclusively, buying one seed type because that is all they can afford.

Brian Gibbons (L): Is not the substantive problem that multinational corporations own the patent rights of the GMO? Would not some form of international agreement to hold these patent rights in the public domain address some of the concerns you raised?

Mick Bates (LD): You raise an important point about patents. However, that issue does not deal with the ethics of what happens when a multina-tional company takes over agriculture worldwide, whereby the diversity and freedom of local economies to develop their own sustainability are lost. Patents may be relevant, but local communities’ sustainability is what is at stake …. The European Union, rather than the Westminster Government, may be a better bet for us in Wales in terms of establishing power over genetically modified crops.

(Record of Proceedings October 7, 2003)

Here the question of the Assembly’s sovereignty shifts to a local-global opposition of resisting abstract global economic forces: multinational capital, not member states or the EU, are now identified as the source of power behind the GM controversy. What is most interesting about this exchange is the ethical turn taken by the Liberal Democrat, a position that was also reflected in other speeches made that day. Wales is first drawn into solidarity with the “third world” against neoliberal globalization, and following a Labour intervention, the primacy of protecting com-munities—not political units or territories—is asserted over and above questions of legality and patenting. Implicitly recognizing the Assembly’s limitations in this area, the Liberal Democrat concludes by reasserting the importance of engaging with Europe in pursuit of sustainability against multinational capital.

The Labour government responded to the debate by falling back on its institutionalist argument of legitimate governance: adhering to EU policy while pursuing “the most restrictive policy possible in the areas where we can make a difference” (Record of Proceedings October 7, 2003). The minister speaking correctly reminded the AMs in attendance that the Assembly Government had made important contributions to regulating GMOs at the European level. The more significant difference between the positions of the government and opposition was not a matter of degree of resistance, however, but the latter’s promotion of the Assembly as some-thing more than an institutional node in a bigger constellation of power. Whatever the legal-institutional legitimacy of the opposition’s position(s),


the larger point was that the Assembly should act first as a caring welfare “state” representing public interests against the impersonal, externalized forces of the UK, EU, and/or globalization. GMOs brought the discussion into focus, but the overriding issue at stake was significantly greater than any one policy outcome: defining the very purpose of political nationhood in Wales.

Going public: A Labour Party-sponsored GMOs conference

On December 2, 2003, I traveled to West Wales to attend a Labour Party-sponsored public conference on GMOs. Those scheduled to speak included one of two Welsh Labour Party MEPs, the Assembly Minister for Environment, an Austrian MEP (whose country had played a lead role in opposing GMOs at the EU level), and representatives of the European Commission’s Directorate General of Environment and the United States’ Mission to the EU. A representative of the UK’s GMOs policy unit was also to appear and skeptical laughter filled the room when it was announced that she was unable to attend due to illness. In the audience were about 50 people, most of them concerned citizens and farmers, but also the area’s AM and MP (both nongovernmental representatives and both Labour) and a few Assembly-based lobbyists involved in farming and/or envi-ronmental issues. In the words of its chief organizer, Welsh Labour MEP Elenud Morgan, the purpose was to explain the limits of Welsh sovereignty to regulate GMOs given public anxieties about the end of the EU’s mora-torium. Though expressing a sympathy for public opposition, she opened the meeting by stating that it was not a forum for repeating well-known criticisms of GMOs. Rather, it was an attempt to explain the intracta-bility of the EU position given the overriding influence of global trade agreements. As she argued, “If, in the EU, we think Genetically Modified Organisms are indeed a danger, we need to prove that point. It’s our legal responsibility to prove it. Anything else would look like protectionism” (transcribed from video recording of December 2, 2003).

Not surprisingly, many in the audience disregarded the MEP’s instruc-tions to avoid criticizing GMOs, though a few attendees did state their support for GMOs in Wales. Many speakers expressed concerns about US food companies “dominating our food supply,” the UK being controlled by Europe, and/or Wales being unrepresented by the UK government’s pro-GMOs policy. Both the EU and U.S. representatives were repeatedly interrupted by the hostile audience. The constituency’s Labour AM sitting in the audience also challenged these officials on several points, but later explained to me in an interview that the goal was not to challenge the official party line emanating from London.


On balance of the presentations, sovereignty was said to be divided between Cardiff Bay, London, and Brussels, but only in the context of adhering to the globalization of agricultural trade. The Assembly could do its part by administering the EU Directive in a cautious way, but only in reference to the powers conferred upon it by UK law; it could raise ques-tions about GMOs, but only in the context of the EU’s ultimate intent to introduce GMOs in response to global trade regulations. The Labour Party, in short, was faced with explaining how introducing GMOs was its only legitimate institutional choice even at the expense of acting without the legitimacy of popular support. Though the invited speakers made many compelling legal-institutional arguments, I was also acutely aware that the potential for substantive dissent was dampened by the lack of Welsh political representation beyond a pro-UK/Assembly Government faction of the Labour Party that day. A Plaid Cymru MEP I interviewed in Brussels, in fact, interpreted the singularity of “available options” in Wales to be a consequence of party-to-party relations between Labour govern-ments in Cardiff Bay and London. “One of the things that disappoints me,” the MEP explained,

is that the National Assembly for Wales in a sense is doing all the right things, but they’re so timid. You hear [the Minister for Environment and Rural Affairs] on television saying, “Oh no. We’re not saying we want to be GM-free. But we’re going to bring in these separation distances. We’re going to do this, that, and the other.” But politically they won’t come out [in opposition] because Tony Blair is so pro-GM. To hear these other ministers throughout Europe really kind of laying down the law to the Commission, saying, “It’s our right [to ban GMOs]. We demand this,” made us all aware of how weak the government in the Assembly is on these issues.


Plaid’s MEP insisted these criticisms were meant to strengthen the government’s hand in dealing with the UK and EU. And while unquestion-ably partisan, the MEP’s comments were corroborated by a Labour AM I interviewed who maintained allegiance to the party’s socialist/radical roots in Wales. For this AM, which I should note was widely acknowledged to have had personal as well as political differences with the Labour leader-ship in Cardiff Bay, the GM issue was merely indicative of the Assembly Government’s failure to challenge New Labour to the benefit of Welsh public interests. Half joking, half serious, he suggested that:

At the moment I am convinced that, though I can’t prove it, that [Assembly first minister] Rhodri Morgan phones up Blair every week and says, “What


are my orders?” … He talks about clear red water but in fact there is no difference between policies in Westminster and policies carried out here. But, yes, there are those policies where there clearly is a public will which Rhodri Morgan can’t completely dismiss. The GM issue is one such case in point. There would be pressure amongst his own Labour Assembly Members as well as with people in Wales as a whole for us to remain GM-free if that is possible. It’s not Rhodri’s decision. It’s not Blair’s decision. It’s involved with the EU and the possibility of infraction proceedings. How timid are we going to be?

(Interview October 22, 2003)

Again, these comments are partially a matter of political perspective. (The Labour MEP/GMOs conference organizer quoted above has publicly criticized the Assembly for not embracing New Labour policies enough, for example.) But they are also a reminder that the future of suprana-tionalism, state authority, and devolved governance depends in part on the degree to which political actors at each level actively participate in its reproduction; it is more than reacting to the self-evidence of any existing multi-institutional and/or legal parameters of governance. It is ultimately not relevant to judge if the Assembly Government was “timid” or bold in dealing with Europe over GMOs, at least in this context. What this case revealed more fundamentally was that the legislative-bureaucratic process of institutional legitimation trumps the legitimacy of representing public interests as the starting point of parliamentary action in Wales’ democrati-cally elected institution. Any real challenge to the institutional legitimacy of this network in the name of democratic representation would not have been simply controversial, but truly revolutionary.

Summary

I do not claim that the evidence of the GMOs debate in Wales conclusively settles academic and political disagreements about the meanings of integra-tion and regionalism in supranational Europe, but it does add to the texture of discussion. I have attempted to avoid “simplistic dichotomies” (Balibar 2004:133, 135) about how power is distributed and contested across Europe’s many sites of government by illustrating how the meaning(s) of integration, devolution, and state power are tied to specific institutional arrangements and regulations. Foremost, the GMOs issue demonstrates that the legislative and territorial boundaries of integration are not fixed absolutely, but serve as symbolic resources for alternately supporting or resisting the UK state, UK devolution, European integration, economic globalization and community change, multinational capital, the WTO and


the United States, or general perceptions about GMOs bringing harm to humans and the environment. The relationship between GMOs, the Welsh environment, and the Assembly’s policy powers meant that setting an anti-GM policy “in Wales, for Wales” would go a long way toward defining Welsh nationhood from a political-institutional perspective. This not only helps to explain why public and political opposition was so high, but also why the GMOs debate of October 7, 2003 served as a discursive vehicle for articulat-ing several, sometimes contradictory visions of Welsh nationhood within state, supranational, and global contexts. By observing how the Assembly Government responded to these pressures, this chapter is revealing about the limits of self-determination in democratic societies, and about how democratic institutions attempt to name the criterion for evaluating their own legitimacy before public, political, and cross-institutional interests. Labour’s representatives could not reconcile the absence of representative legitimacy in the process of setting its GMOs policy, only claim institutional legitimacy on the basis of the legality and transparency of the process itself. In contrast, the political opposition could only challenge the legitimacy of the official position by claiming to ethically represent the public will against the grain of legality.

If one accepts that institutional and representative legitimacies are indeed different discourses of justifying political power, even if constituted through a shared structure of government action, then the most important conclusion we can come to is that public representation is secondary to bureaucratic and legal rationalization in democratically elected institu-tions. The multiple institutional alignments that define Welsh sovereignty in the UK and EU also spell out its limits. Faced with potential fines from Brussels and political fallout with New Labour in London over GMOs, the Assembly Government chose institutional legitimation over representative legitimacy, a position that is defensible in one sense and undemocratic in another. While a detailed case study of Wales’ GMOs policy aids in speci-fying the philosophical contradictions and institutional entanglements of devolution and integration as coexisting forms of empowerment, it is also more broadly indicative of the problems created by political decentraliza-tion within any larger network of power. The only obvious question that remains to be addressed is, would increasing the powers of the National Assembly bring these legitimacies into greater harmony, and thus decrease the possibility of denying the parliamentary representation of Welsh interests in the name of legality?

8

A Parliament for Wales

Devolution in the UK, as former Welsh Secretary Ron Davies once famously stated, is a process, not an event, and I conclude my

study by calling for the process to continue. Most supporters of devolu-tion would likely agree that the principle of electoral representation is a baseline legitimating criteria of political decentralization, as is the insti-tutionalization of a legislative process for meeting the particular needs of the UK’s cultural/economic peripheries. Devolution has undoubtedly created distinctly Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish political arenas in this sense, initially by territorial default but over time through policy/leg-islative divergence from London. Ten years on from the opening stages of this experiment in parliamentary democracy, however, a central question remains for many of its proponents and detractors alike: to what end? Whereas devolution can be said to be legitimate in the “thin” sense of meeting a legal/rational criterion of justifying power, the evidence pre-sented on the actual practices of legitimacy in the National Assembly calls for a more nuanced assessment of devolution’s impact on UK democracy, if not the meaning of governance more generally. Curtice’s (2005: 107) analysis of the Scottish Parliament comes to a similar conclusion about making distinctions between the luster and substance of devolution:

The legitimacy of the government in Scotland requires, it seems, the exis-tence of an institution that is elected separately from anything that exists [in] England. Rather than to provide accountability or representation, the function of the Scottish Parliament elections may simply be to act as a ritual that provides that legitimacy [to the government]. But whether in the long run ritual alone will be sufficient to maintain the interest and participation of voters in Scottish Parliament elections is perhaps a more debatable question.

I have argued that a significant conundrum democratic institutions face—and particularly those at the bottom rungs of Europe’s multisited,


asymmetrical universe of governance—is that legitimacy is not a singular, prefigured condition of democracy, but a pluralized set of practices that do not by necessity overlap and corroborate each other. Decentralized parliamentary power must be justified across a range of cultural, political party, legal/procedural, state/supranational, and economic lines that complicate the meaning(s) of empowerment that devolution is ultimately premised on. This book has arrived at the conclusion that the representation of public interests through parlia-mentary governance is secondary to the reproduction of political power through the institutional networks of devolved government, even if both are necessary components of democratic practice in Wales. Despite these complications—and because of them—I now turn to advocate for a more fully empowered Parliament of Wales even while admitting that such a change in the balance of UK power will not by necessity resolve the tensions between the institutional and representative legiti-mation of Welsh democracy. To reinforce this argument, I first revisit and integrate the four elements of my research program—historical context, institutional practice, representative practice, and social/multi-institutional context—to pose the practical question: how might the National Assembly better justify itself as a site of Welsh democracy?

History, practice, context

My initial goal was to set parliamentary practices of the National Assembly in historical context to explain the premises of their legitimacy. History first helps to indicate why devolution emerged as a rational pol-icy response in the UK, and secondarily why the discourses of inclusion, transparency, and modernity featured so prominently in the institutional design and subsequent parliamentary practices of the National Assembly. In the first instance, social and economic history distinguishes Wales as a space of negation of and subordination to Anglicization and/or the larger program of UK industrialization and empire building. While the encroachment of a UK public sphere/parliamentary complex no doubt extended the rights of and opportunities for representation in Welsh society, the social and economic foundations of this process set Wales apart from the UK mainstream, whether as “one-class” industrial com-munities or rural enclaves steeped in agricultural, religious, and/or Welsh language traditions. The case of the long-term struggle for full parlia-mentary recognition of the civil and educational rights of Welsh speakers specifies some of the complications inherent to officially acknowledg-ing social diversity within a universalizing framework of citizenship. It can be argued that the movement for Welsh-medium education was

A PARLIAMENT FOR WALES 173

institutionalized sooner and more broadly than with parliamentary language rights precisely because the social pressures for a change in edu-cation policy were more ubiquitous to lived experience in Wales. Whereas the very reality of an alternate public sphere was continually reproduced through acts of speaking and teaching Welsh, conducting official busi-ness in Welsh was not by necessity a daily practice of social life, even if practically and symbolically significant to the legitimacy of the UK state. In the latter case, a bilingual Assembly repositioned the politics of speaking Welsh within the UK as the language became an instrument of parliamentary power.

Political activism and the development of party competition in Wales can be read as a somewhat disjointed series of responses to these and other transformations in UK parliamentary democracy. Even if commonly bound to a shared trope of “community” as an operative unit of social and par-liamentary intervention, the gamut of Welsh politics—Conservatism and Unionism, Liberalism and Nonconformist religion/education, Labour and trade unionism, Plaid Cymru and linguistic/political self- determination, plus the many additional social movements, such as the antiwar move-ment, that have fought for particular issues—reveals quite divergent orientations to balancing state power and democratic representation. If there is a common thread, it is that each intervention can be said to have developed in response to challenges posed to the legitimacy of govern-ment power as construed in that historical moment. While I have delved into this complex history at several points in this book, the analysis of political debate in the Assembly (Chapter 4) emphasized how history is a resource, not merely an undercurrent, of Welsh democracy. The partiality (and significance) of historical interpretation to devolution was expressed in a policy debate over indigenous business development where AMs spent as much time trying to define the impacts of Thatcherism as deliberating about the Assembly’s future policy agenda. Conversely, Chapter 7 observed how these inventions of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) can also unify the Assembly in opposition to the pace and scope of supranational integration and globalization, in this case against GMOs.

Secondarily, history is helpful for explaining why Welsh devolution was engineered as a process of open, inclusive, and modern governance contra the UK mainstream. The push for some form of self- determination, of course, dates back much farther than the 1990s, including nationalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and incremental transfers of power to Welsh administrative units under Conservative, Labour, and Liberal governments in London. As Chapter 5 demonstrated, Thatcherism proved to be an important tipping point for garnering enough Labour Party support to realize a Welsh Assembly and a Scottish


Parliament in the 1990s. There forward, Welsh democracy was envisioned as the transparent and participatory antithesis of “unaccountable, unrep-resentative” Tory governance between 1979 and 1997, as well as the nega-tion of the older Westminster model of formalized, adversarial politics. Coupled with similar modernizing reforms ongoing in Europe at the time, Welsh devolution was legitimated as both the outcome of a histori-cal process of incorporation and resistance and as a convergence with the more contemporary circumstances of supranational integration. These two readings of historical context explain the institutional and symbolic contours of Welsh democracy in the present.

The second goal of this book was to track how the institutional contexts of policymaking justify parliamentary action in Wales as democratically legitimate, which I primarily addressed in chapters 3 and 5. First working with Weber’s model of bureaucratic rationalization, Chapter 3 analyzed how the objectivity of democratic governance is manifested in a policy-making culture that balances informal practices of plenary preparation with formalized, technologically driven protocols of parliamentary behav-ior. Participant observation of this process revealed that, while founded on the premise of institutional neutrality and democratic government, the legitimacy of the institutional process is ultimately negotiated through hierarchies of parliamentary practice that bind together the political opposition, the government, and the legislative civil service in a common network of action. The Assembly’s formal and informal networks delineate the boundaries of legitimate parliamentary behavior, as evidenced (for instance) in the work of the Presiding Office and the Table Office, which jointly determine the legitimacy of institutional processes of government scrutiny and plenary deliberation in reference to the Government of Wales Act and the Assembly’s Standing Orders. While these practices tend to play an important role in consolidating institutional power by virtue of nor-malizing legislative/executive interactions, this chapter also revealed more overt displays of and challenges to government power in Cardiff Bay. First, observation of the Assembly Government’s plenary preparations indi-cated how the executive is in a stronger position to shape the direction of plenary debates by virtue of its bureaucratic information service, Special Advisors, and style of debate preparations. Alternately, my participation as a policy researcher and cross-party interview data suggested that the political opposition has found ways to resist government power within this action framework, such as with submitting ministerial queries for Question Time with the sole intent of gathering government information believed to be “hidden.”

Chapter 5 also focused on practices of institutional legitimacy, but in this case by mobilizing Foucault’s theory of governmentality


(i.e., a simultaneously productive and constraining discourse of power) to analyze Open Government policy as a legislative/policy outcome and as a form of self-regulation. Contrasting the “thin” legitimation criteria of Open Government with its “deep” meanings indicated that transparency and secrecy are mutually productive elements of demo-cratic governance in Wales. Belying these complexities, many AMs held the bifurcated view that the media facilitates the observation of gover-nance (i.e., transparency) but also hinders the parliamentary process by virtue of intruding into the spaces where compromise and candor would be otherwise possible. In turn, the media and other civil interests were shown to respect the Assembly’s movement toward transparency while (generally) remaining skeptical about its absolute fulfillment. If anything, it is the principle of openness that legitimates the Assembly as a democratic institution, not its realization, even if its participants and close observers recognized the difference between the two. While Foucault was invaluable to this analysis, this chapter also pointed out potential limitations to his power/resistance dialectic: “resistance” is a constituting strategy of legitimation, and thus a means of reproducing parliamentary power, not challenging it.

My third goal was to examine how political actors utilize institutional and political channels of legitimate action to claim to represent Welsh public interests. Chapter 4 attended to the history of language politics in Wales and to the circumstances of parliamentary deliberation in the National Assembly in the context of Habermas’ legitimation theory of the public sphere / parliamentary complex. The first half (discussed above) questioned the UK public sphere’s representational capacity with respect to the historical development of Welsh-medium education and institutional safeguards for speaking Welsh in official settings; the second half analyzed how consensus is negotiated in plenary deliberations of the Assembly. It was argued that Habermas provides a useful framework for understand-ing the rationalization of public interests via parliamentary means, but only through a “thin” reading of legitimacy. First, interview data with AMs revealed the complexities—and, at times, shortcomings—of the National Assembly’s bilingual operations policy, which elevates Welsh to a status equal to that of English but at the cost of potentially rendering Welsh-speaking a performance of legitimacy rather than a depoliticized medium of democratic governance. More damaging to Habermas’ theory, however, is the questionable meaning of consensus produced through plenary deliberations in Cardiff Bay. True to Habermas’ articulation of the ideal speech community, the Assembly debate on indigenous business development revolved around three common frameworks for discussion (i.e., historical, statistical, and experiential discourses), which allowed for


a cross-representation of public opinions on the legitimacy of government policy. But at the deeper level of constructing shared meanings to achieve rational consensus, which is the real key to legitimation for Habermas, the deliberative strategies of AMs depended upon delegitimating compet-ing interpretations and opinions to argue that their own policy positions represent/are in the public interest. If only one interpretation and applica-tion of parliamentary knowledge is legitimate in the deep play of plenary debate, then there are significant limits to the normalization of democratic consensus through communication.

More specific to Wales, the data from Chapter 4 again demonstrates the significance of Welsh social and economic history to contemporary Welsh democracy. Devolution, no doubt, was influenced, if not shaped, by several historical moments and movements of political and social struggle, but it is clearly AMs’ lived experience under Thatcherism that was most relevant to parliamentary deliberations that afternoon. Many AMs cited Thatcher’s political ascendancy as their reason for being in politics (Chapter 2), for example. More practically, the neoliberal transformation of the Welsh economy introduced by Thatcher (and continued under New Labour) renders the “clear red water” of Welsh Labour—including its practices of Open Government—an intelligible policy/ideology for many Welsh political interests. While the structural impacts of Thatcherism in Wales are unquestionable (see Griffiths 1996), the plenary transcripts of Chapter 4 are a reminder that Thatcher is no longer a ruler, but an icon that is interpreted and reinterpreted to alternately confront or justify gov-ernment policy/power. Inevitably, AMs must position themselves along this continuum of opinion (and thereby continually revisit the meaning of Thatcherism) to legitimate their policy positions as representative of a Welsh polity. It is not that AMs and political parties look back for the sake of historical inquiry, however, but for the purpose of justifying a particu-lar vision of the Welsh future. These deliberations therefore had the effect of defining the very purpose of expressing Welsh nationhood through parliamentary means.

Chapter 6 examined representative legitimacy in the context of elec-toral and antiwar campaigning in Wales in 2003, which shifted the book’s analytical framework from an internal perspective to a civic-parliamentary balance. In the case of elections, it observed how Assembly candidates and party volunteers created spaces of political intimacy to connect events in Cardiff Bay and nationwide campaign discourses (such as party mani-festos) to the local affairs of civil society. With the antiwar movement, it analyzed how the institutional and political party asymmetries of devolved governance shaped representations of antiwar sentiment in the Assembly. It was argued that these conflicting examples of democratic participation


indicate that civic apathy at the ballot box does not necessarily reflect public disinterest in politics, only a disengagement from the parliamentary process. The major political parties in Wales certainly utilized the ortho-dox infrastructures required of political relevance—branch offices and surgeries, volunteer networks, information technologies, local-to-national party connections, canvassing and leafleting campaigns, et cetera—but the larger challenge remains of actually meeting public demands through the parliamentary process. Of course, the National Assembly has enacted many policies that are supported by the public at large, but devolved democracy also means that absolute representation will always tempered by Wales’ institutional and political connections to the UK and Europe. In this con-text, how do we distinguish between the legitimacy of antiwar protestors forcing their removal from the Assembly’s plenary chamber and Captain Beanie sharing a stage with candidates actually aspiring to solve Wales’ socioeconomic problems? In the first case, protestors had no “legitimate” right to civil disobedience in the Assembly as war-making is a nondevolved power; in the second, a self-styled superhero has as much right to stand for elections as anyone, but it does little to bolster the Assembly’s profile as a serious site of democracy. The lesson is clear: representative and insti-tutional legitimacy are not the same thing, and may come into conflict, particularly when issues of sovereignty enter the parliamentary process in Cardiff Bay.

The book’s fourth goal was to analyze these entanglements by situating parliamentary action in Wales in the broader civil, political, and institu-tional contexts of devolution. Chapter 5 engaged this issue by comparing the views of AMs and bureaucrats with those of media and interest groups on transparency, thus exposing different interpretations of and experi-ences with access and participation in the Assembly’s democratic process. Chapter 6 examined the political and local social networks required of electoral campaigning in Wales: party manifestos indicated the differ-ent aspirations of political parties to redefine the Assembly’s legislative power; the Assembly Government’s reluctance to support or oppose the UK Government’s war on Iraq revealed the complications of representing Welsh public opinion given the party-to-party relations between Cardiff Bay and London. Chapter 7 brought these and other issues to the fore in analyzing the social, political, multi-institutional, and global dynamics of the Assembly Government’s resistance to GMOs in Wales. As a subor-dinate to London and Brussels, the Welsh Assembly Government fought for a “best-possible” stance against GMOs that was robust in institutional terms yet under-representative of Welsh public opinion. That many AMs, environmental interest groups, and members of the public called for an absolute ban indicates that the Assembly’s sovereignty is open to debate in


the Welsh public sphere even if the precise boundaries of Welsh autonomy are already proscribed by the Government of Wales Act(s) and UK/ EU law. To paraphrase an Assembly Member quoted at the start of Chapter 7, if the National Assembly for Wales cannot make a sovereign decision about regulating GMOs, then what is the point of devolution? The politi-cal character of this pronouncement is obvious enough, but it also indi-cates the relevance of this book’s larger objective: to argue that legitimacy is not a preexisting condition of elected institutions, but a series of elite political practices intended to justify government power, however posi-tioned in relation to institutional codes of conduct or electoral support. The hierarchical relationship between institutional and representative legitimacies was evident in this analysis but was also expressed elsewhere. The significance of institutional principle over representative practice was clear in the First Minister’s willful nonparticipation in Iraq war debates, which he defended around the notion that devolution did not require him to express an opinion. The legitimating power of principle was again expressed in Chapter 3 when the First Minister refused to accept responsibility for an administrative scandal within the Welsh education bureaucracy on the grounds that it would be undemocratic under the rules of devolution.

While these four elements of analysis were applied to the specific cir-cumstances of UK devolution, I also assert that it provides an exploratory framework for advancing a wider anthropological study of government. Relying on the methodological and theoretical perspectives of anthropol-ogy to analyze substate governance, I believe, has added a needed dimen-sion to the study of political transformations in the UK and Europe. This contribution is not mine alone, of course, but it is perhaps time that anthropologists enter into more concerted collaborations (with each other and with colleagues outside the discipline) to investigate the role that culture plays in shaping the justification of governmental power. Some anthropologists are likely to disagree with the theories, methods, and top-ics (i.e., legitimacy, transparency, etc.) I have chosen to highlight, but that is a good thing: it will only be through a broad conversation of research perspectives and techniques that a better understanding of government will be reached. Equally, I hope that my use of political research generated outside of anthropology indicates a robust source of data that ethnogra-phers can tap into to advance our understanding of changes in state power and civil-state relations, whether in Europe or elsewhere. The benefits of an anthropology of government are obvious in this context: not only will ethnographers have a stronger understanding of how government impacts the governed, but our advocacy of social justice and equality can only be more effective.


What is empowerment?

It is a common refrain of all political parties in Wales to call for some mod-ification of the Assembly’s powers, which range from undoing devolution to cautious and incremental adjustments in administrative capacity to parliamentary equivalence with Scotland, if not more. Essentially, all demands for further powers of any sort must be made on the grounds that more parliamentary power will be better for Wales. Some of these demands were answered with the passage of a new Government of Wales Act in 2006, which took effect in mid-2007 after the third National Assembly elections. As of that May, the National Assembly’s executive and legisla-tive spheres were cleanly divided and Wales was empowered to draft its own legislation under a system of Legislative Competence Orders (LCOs). LCOs essentially allow the Assembly, strictly within its existing legislative competence, to write bills and pass them on to London for parliamen-tary scrutiny and passage into law. The early going of this arrangement indicates that several questions remain about what powers the Assembly Government can marshal (some draft legislation, for instance, has been ruled out because it oversteps the Assembly’s devolved powers) and the extent to which the Welsh Affairs Select Committee in Westminster should scrutinize, rather than simply approve, Welsh bills for passage. There are significant hurdles to clear, in other words, but this change in legislative responsibility is already having an impact on the legislative culture of the National Assembly. As my old colleagues from the Liberal group explained during a visit in 2007, AMs are beginning to debate LCO legislation on a line-for-line basis similar to that of the Westminster model. In principle, this is surely to the benefit of Welsh policymaking, but in practice it will prove difficult to the established parliamentary process. With increased work constraints (LCO development, passing secondary legislation, con-stituency work, etc.), AMs will be harder pressed to devote the time needed to do any of their tasks well.

Contrary to the cliché that those in power will always seek more power, however, the Labour Party-led Assembly Government has been a reluctant traveler on this journey. As evidenced in its 2003 election manifesto, for instance, Labour does not advocate any wholesale changes in the balance of power between Cardiff Bay and London. The reasons for taking this posi-tion are understandable in the short-term but more perplexing over the long-term. To date, there have been two instances in which the Assembly Government has called for investigations into the impacts of granting the Assembly additional powers. The first came as a Labour Party conces-sion to the Liberal Democrats as part of the coalition government deal reached during the first Assembly session of 1999–2003. The independent


Richard Commission was thus formed and took evidence from a broad cross- section of the Welsh political community, a few hearings of which I attended in 2003. Its findings were generally favorable to further devolu-tion but the Labour Party’s participants, including the First Minister, were cool to the idea when giving evidence. If anything, the cautious changes of the LCO system created by the second Government of Wales Act reflect Labour’s reluctance, which might be explained in light of the UK’s settle-ment for a Scottish Parliament. With full legislative powers granted to Scotland, the number of MPs from Scotland was reduced to “correct” potential imbalances whereby Scottish MPs could vote on England-only legislation in Westminster but English MPs would have no say in Scotland-only legislation made in Holyrood. It would only follow that a fully empowered Welsh Parliament would mean a reduction of Wales’ cur-rent 40 MPs. The political problem underlying this is not so much one of legislative imbalance, which may be a fair institutional argument, but the loss of a traditionally pro-Labour voting bloc in the House of Commons. In the short-term, therefore, it is in the Labour Party’s interest to resist further devolution to Wales.

The second inquiry into additional powers (still ongoing at the time of this writing) is the result of the One Wales governing agreement reached between Labour and Plaid Cymru after the 2007 elections. Not only creat-ing the cross-party All Wales Convention to examine further devolution, an important point won by Plaid was gaining Labour’s support for a referen-dum in 2011 to win public support for a Welsh Parliament. Labour’s partici-pation in mobilizing its supporters to vote “yes” will be crucial and difficult, but a failure to win the referendum could very well be to the detriment of Wales over the long-term. Labour’s hold on Westminster politics (now 1997–2009) will inevitably end and Welsh Labour will likely lose control of the Assembly at some point in the future. (Just prior to the One Wales agreement, in fact, last-minute complications narrowly derailed a three-way governing coalition composed of the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Plaid Cymru.) Even if this book has exposed complications in devolved governance resulting from same-party relations between Cardiff Bay and London, what will the Assembly’s bargaining position be when different parties eventually control these centers of parliamentary power?

The legislative outcomes of the Scottish Parliament elections of 2007 will give some indication of one possible future of Welsh democracy in this context. The SNP made tremendous gains to outpace Labour and form a coalition government with the Scottish Liberal Democrats. The up-and-down electoral returns for Welsh nationalists through three Assembly elections suggests that the SNP’s success should not be viewed as irreversible, but it is clear that devolution can mean significant policy


divergence—and cross-institutional conflict—when parties controlling devolved governments are not beholden to UK-wide equivalents. Even more important than who controls the executive in Cardiff Bay or Edinburgh, a Conservative ascendance in Westminster will almost surely mean a marked reduction in UK support for the transfer of more power to Wales or Scotland. In short, it is in the long-term interests of Welsh Labour (and Wales) to acquire additional powers now given that Whitehall’s gov-erning philosophy may not accommodate devolution in the future.

My point, however, is not to lay the blame for the uncertainties of devolution at the feet of any current or future government regardless of party (including the Tories right to resist devolution as a UK election platform). Short of “independence”—which would likely mean another type of sub-integration into larger networks of political and economic power, such as the EU or World Trade Organization—expressions of Welsh democracy will always be qualified (as much as they are enabled) by the structure of devo-lution and party leadership. The National Assembly can be rightly credited with enacting many socially beneficial policies, but a record of only- partial resistance to GMOs, debates about the legitimacy of even having war debates, and more recent conflicts over Assembly autonomy and LCOs indicate that devolution is not by default the equivalent of empowerment. This important issue is not specific to Wales alone (see Ferguson 2002: 406; Barkan and Chege 1989; Cheater 1999; Lea and Wu 1980; Rondinelli 1981: 607). In this context, devolution can be read as a strategy for recognizing exceptions to centralized planning and policy administration without challenging the underlying integrity of state power. If and when in conflict, in other words, legality and procedure may very well always win out over public interest by virtue of the secondary statuses of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland in UK/EU governance. In turn, party politics and social diversity will con-tinually complicate political claims made in each territory to legitimately represent the (devolved) national interest, whether by working within or challenging these institutional frameworks. But would more power at least better approximate Welsh empowerment?

With the above limitations acknowledged, I conclude by advocating for a Scottish-style Welsh Parliament. Even if an attenuated consolida-tion of power, it is my view that giving Wales primary legislative powers will increase the capacity to represent Welsh interests in Cardiff Bay. It is irrelevant if further devolution proves to be the oft-feared slippery slope that ends in independence, which may have more to do with institutional circumstances than political motivations anyway (see Greer 2007). The problem with the slippery slope argument is that, whether opposing further devolution or full-blown independence, the choice should really reside in the hands of voters, not politicians, if it is to be democratically


legitimate. One could argue, in fact, that curtailing the Assembly’s power (i.e., maintaining the secondary legislation/LCO system, etc.) could enhance the case for independence as the Assembly is faced with a wide swath of policy issues that it cannot act on without constraint, thus limit-ing parliamentary effectiveness and redoubling voter apathy and dissat-isfaction: a critical mass of disempowered voters could eventually decide to opt out of the whole system of UK governance. The UK and EU would retain a great deal of discretion over a Welsh Parliament, of course, but it would be far less limiting (and far less confusing) than devolution is presently structured. If a referendum is set to determine public support by 2011, it is now contingent on proponents of further devolution to show how more powers would have made a difference in solving prereferendum socioeconomic problems and, perhaps more challengingly, for opponents of devolution to demonstrate that additional powers would not have improved parliamentary responses to these issues.

Changes in the Assembly’s human capacity to represent Wales would also have to accompany a transfer of full primary legislative powers. One means of doing so would be to increase the number of AMs from 60 to 80, an idea which found its way into the recommendations of the Richard Commission in 2003. The small group of 60 AMs is already overloaded by the twin demands of legislative and constituency work; one can only expect that the full-time task of writing legislation, as opposed to reviewing and (potentially) amending it, will command more attention than currently devoted to secondary legislative work. More AMs means a broader distri-bution of this workload as well as a greater potential to address specific and local constituent needs. The Labour Party has also argued that the Assembly should do away with proportional representation in elections on the principle that constituency AMs shoulder more casework and can be held responsible for policy failures more so than regionally elected AMs. This may be true, but is hardly defensible in light of Welsh devolution’s emphasis on democracy-as-inclusion. Overwhelmingly, Labour AMs are elected to constituency seats and doing away with proportionality would only reduce Labour’s competition.

In contrast to Welsh Labour’s present position, I argue that an 80-strong, more fully empowered Welsh Parliament elected by mixed means can bring the institutional and representative functions of Cardiff Bay into greater accord. With fewer powers encumbered by state or supranational machi-nations and more people to the carry the parliamentary workload, future governments in Wales would not so easily defer to the legitimacy of extra-institutional principles to justify policies that are out of synch with the pub-lic will. There is no guarantee that the legitimacy of Welsh democracy will be secured through these changes, but the potential to do so would be increased


exponentially. Politicians would have more options for representing public interests and, in reciprocal fashion, more citizens might invest themselves in participating in Welsh democracy at the ballot box and beyond. Important debates about the political meanings and purpose of Welsh nationhood would remain—the work of legitimating a Welsh Parliament would always remain, for that matter—but Wales’ social and economic problems would be addressed on the firmer democratic footing of increased representation, responsibility, and accountability. This, after all, was the original purpose of devolution, and it could only be to the benefit of Wales if it is realized.

Notes

Chapter 1

1. To paraphrase a few of the opposition’s amendments: seating should be in alphabetical order; AMs should get seat X on their birthdays; women to one side and men to the other; and the leaders of the Assembly Government and official opposition (Plaid Cymru) should sit next to each other. See press cov-erage in Brindley (16 July 2003: 6) and Shipton (11 July 2003: 9).

2. The exact wording of the motion is, “The National Assembly for Wales censures the Minister for Assembly Business for bringing the Assembly into public ridicule” (Record of Proceedings July 15, 2003).

3. The leader of the Welsh Conservatives said, “It is entirely right that all of us learn a lesson from this. If we had not tabled the amendments, you would no doubt have put the [seating proposal] to a [nondebatable] vote …. This is a welcome move and we should all recognise that. We are pleased to withdraw the censure motion, which was triggered by the debate on seating arrange-ments in the Chamber. As I see it, one motion automatically falls with the other” (Record of Proceedings, July 15, 2003).

4. One reporter went so far to claim that the press briefing “would not have seemed out of place at a congress of the North Korean Communist Party” (Shipton, 18 July 2003: 5).

5. Legitimacy can be based on notions of political kinship (Schatzberg 2001), the manipulation of religious symbols (Akbarzadeh 2003), or the application of religious law to governance (Farhi 2003) and is certainly not limited to the study of modern states (Cohen and Toland 1988).

6. Taken as a whole, ethnographic research indicates the variability of “democ-racy” as a concept of social organization and political rule operating in dif-ferent cultural and economic contexts. Whitten (2004) examines indigenous movements of “interculturality” against the hierarchical cultural pluralism of an Ecuadorian state enmeshed in neoliberal restructuring. Nugent (2002) points out the problems of applying national procedural models of democ-racy to explain the emergence of local alternatives in northern Peru. Levinson (2005) writes on the institutionalization of concepts of citizenship and democ-racy in the public education system of Mexico. Shaffer (1997: 47) analyzes how language shapes the meanings and practices of democracy in Senegal. Verdery (1997) makes connections between state-sponsored notions of democracy and property rights in Romania. Faier (1998) describes how youth camps

186 NOTES

for Palestinians in Israel created “local-to-global” spaces of democratic and gendered equality against the grain of discourses of “coexistence” (or “separate but equal”) in Israeli society. Paley’s (2001) ethnography of democratic transi-tion in Chile tracks differences in elite and local conceptions of democracy, as well as the influence of international economic processes on the institution-alization of democratic participation. Greenhouse and Kheshiti (1998) offer a cross-cultural comparison of democratic processes in the United States and Spain. Whitten (2004) examines democratization in Ecuador. Elizondo, Aida, and Castillo (1996) analyze multicultural state policy and the legitimacy of political reform in 1990s Mexico (see also Gledhill 2002). See Paley (2002) for an excellent review of the state of research on the anthropology of democracy. Outside of anthropology, Tilly’s (2002) well-documented study of democrati-zation in different national/historical settings offers another example.

7. I tried to construct my sample of AMs in the image of the National Assembly after the May 2003 elections: equal in terms of gender and proportionate by party according to the number of seats each held in the Assembly. In the end, I was fairly successful in meeting these targets. Twenty-five initial interviews were conducted with AMs, the core group of the research project, followed up by six secondary interviews. Because interviewing began before an election and concluded afterwards, my sample represents 33.8 percent of 74 possible AM con-sultants. Eleven female and fourteen male AMs participated. Four were govern-ment ministers and I met with the Presiding Officer and the Deputy Presiding Officer on more than one occasion. Regarding the overall interview sample of 89 consultants, the majority of interviewees were male (64 percent) and white (92 percent), which reflects the institutional settings I was working in.

8. For Weber, agents orient their activities according to their understanding of institutional priorities and goals without recourse to absolute values at one extreme, or emotion and the habit of custom at the other, to guide action (Weber, 1978: 24–26). In turn, it is “the belief in the existence of a legitimate order” that reproduces institutional power for Weber (1978: 31).

9. A short list of texts that reflect some of the directions taken in the debate over Habermas includes: Calhoun (1992); Benhabib (1996); Dean (1996); Ashenden and Owen (1999); Crossley and Roberts (2004); Valadez (2001).

10. The issue of minority cultural representation—and to a slightly lesser extent, economic empowerment—runs throughout the case literature on devolution. In a survey of Francophone and Anglophone speakers in Quebec, for example, Nadeau, Martin, and Blais (1999:529) found that 60 percent of respondents believed economic crisis would follow from Quebecer independence, but this opinion was held by only 57 percent of Francophones compared to 95 percent of Anglophones (see also Dion 1996). Zariski (1987: 131–134) notes how regional development issues were critical to the creation of regional authorities in Italy as a means to deal with economic disparities across the country during the 1970s. Of central importance, however, were linguistic and cultural dis-tinctions between the Italian mainstream and Sardinians, Sicilians, and Italy’s French and German-speaking border regions. In Spain, the central govern-ment initially devolved power to its ethnic-linguistic minority populations in

NOTES 187

the 1980s, that is, the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Galicia, as an economic and political imperative, and only later offered regional empowerment on a lesser scale to economically lagging regions representing the Spanish majority (Giordano and Roller 2004). Rudolph and Thompson (1985) offer a com-parative review of ethnicity and devolution in Belgium, Canada, Greenland (Denmark), and Switzerland. Devolution, moreover, is not specific to Western states. Nigeria, for instance, created in 1967 a regional system within its central-ized structure to redress problems of power sharing among its numerous ethnic minority groups (Osaghae 1998). A Provincial Council System was created in Sri Lanka in the 1980s in an attempt to reduce conflicts between the Singhalese majority and Tamil minority (Hubbell 1987). See Roberts and Comaroff (1979) on ethnicity and devolution outside the nation-state context.

11. It should be noted that while Wales no longer qualifies, this has less to do with the success of “economic convergence” with European socioeconomic averages and more to do with the comparatively lower economic standing of countries within the EU’s eastern borders postaccession. As such, Wales is now rated a “midtable” region and receives some transitional funds that are below Objective One funding levels.

Chapter 2

1. Gwyn Williams (1985: 89) writes of this process: “in the sharp legal discrimina-tion which immediately came into operation throughout Wales, [the Welsh] were classed as meri Wallici (mere Welshmen); across the apartheid line were the Anglici, who were privileged, who were not to be condemned in law by the oaths of Welshmen alone, who were to be tried only by English law and never in the Welsh language, who were authorized to exclude every Welsh person from their towns as forinseci (foreigners). To build the new boroughs in Gwynedd, 5,000 acres of the best agricultural lands were confiscated and their numerous inhabitants, mostly serfs, turfed out …. [T]he Welsh were removed from the fertile vale of Clwyd to the rain-drenched lands of the Hiraethog mountains, 1,500 feet above sea-level. The memories of these evictions rooted themselves in folklore.”

2. Not only has the term Senedd (the “dd” pronounced like a soft “th”) been adopted as the name of the National Assembly building, but Owain Glyndwr’s flag is often flown by Welsh supporters at international sporting events.

3. As indication, the population of Wales grew from 1,163,139 in 1851 to 2,523,500 in 1914, a 117 percent increase (Davies 1993: 398, 402). Not only were Welsh speakers in the minority by this time, but it was also the first recorded instance in which the absolute number of speakers declined.

4. For example, many members of the South Wales Miners’ Federation were knowledgeable of international labor affairs and participated in marches in London to protest fascist governments on the continent; 174 of its members expressed their support for democratic socialism by volunteering to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War (Francis 1984).

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5. See Tanner, Williams, and Hopkin (2002) for a history of the Labour Party in Wales. For UK-wide histories of the Labour Party, see Tanner, Thane, and Tiratsoo (2000) and Thorpe (1997). On the multiple uses of “socialism” as an organizing principle in UK history, see Bevir (2003).

6. For example: a Welsh Day was created to debate Welsh interests in parliament in 1944; a Council for Wales (founded 1948) brought together business, union, and cultural interests; twice (1951 and 1957) subcabinet level positions were created to represent Welsh interests in the government.

7. At the turn of the twentieth century, just over half of the population (roughly 900,000 persons) spoke Welsh and fewer than 23,000 were monolingual speakers. By 1961, Welsh accounted for 26 percent of the total population, a drop of nearly 275,000 speakers from the census of 1901 (Phillips 2000: 463).

8. First the technical: the “West Lothian” question centered on how Welsh and Scottish MPs could vote on legislation that would only impact England, that is, in cases where a policy area is reserved for legislation in Wales and Scotland, but devolution meant English MPs could not vote on the same legislation for Wales or Scotland. (This debate is still alive today.) Second the ideological: some were opposed on the basis of contradicting the collectivist/internation-alist tenets of socialism. Others objected because it was seen to enamor Plaid Cymru, which was by now Labour’s political rival in Wales. Additionally, some voters in northern Wales feared a South Wales/Cardiff-dominated assembly and some southern voters feared a Welsh language-driven agenda emanating from northern Wales.

9. The economy by this time had become inherently multinational in character: by 1992, there were 400 foreign-owned manufacturing companies in Wales, accounting for 30 percent of the manufacturing workforce (Harvie 1995:178).

10. One notable exception is the Tower Mine. In this case, miners contributed their buy-out pensions to purchase the mine from the ownership. Until 2008, and against Thatcher’s claims that these mines were no longer profitable, this worker-owned facility operated in the black every year since the takeover.

11. Electorally, the Tories by 1983 enjoyed their best parliamentary showing in Wales since 1896 (14 of 36 seats). The party can also be credited with increas-ing financial support for Welsh language preservation programs compared to Labour in the 1970s. The Conservatives also passed the Welsh Language Act in 1993 in support of the language. See Butler (1985) for a history of the Conservatives in Wales.

12. Greer (2007: 72) argues that for the first several years of Thatcher’s premier-ship, Scottish institutions did not significantly resist her political reforms because her “policies did not directly and demonstrably affect their autonomy and organizational stability.” Only when the Conservative government sought to reorganize (and thereby better control) nationalized industries and public services after 1987 did devolution emerge as a salient political issue. Using Scotland’s separate legal system to implement policy a year ahead of England, an infamous “poll tax” (drawn from property owners) was introduced in 1988, which resulted in a spike in homeowners’ taxes (due to revaluation) and a reduction in business taxes. One of the most important responses was the

NOTES 189

formation of a Scottish Constitutional Convention, which created a space in which a variety of civil and political interests came together to outline possible scenarios leading to greater autonomy for Scotland within the UK system.

13. See Fairclough (2000:9–10, 23–25, 51–65); Parekh (2000:12–13); Atkinson and Savage (2001); and Thomas (2001). See Giddens (2002) and Mouffe (2000) for opposing viewpoints on the New Labour project.

14. There are also technical reasons why devolution emerged as a viable policy option of Labour. Two layers of local government existed throughout the UK at the time of the 1979 referendum. A Welsh Assembly represented a burden-some additional layer of bureaucracy in this context. These objections were mute after the dissolution of one of these layers in 1994.

15. One reporter wrote that the “constant flurry of activity is a campaign aimed only, it seems, at the media rather than the public” (Cleaver August 7, 1997: 2). In a separate incident, a letter written by the chair of the Yes Campaign to the Director General of the BBC (dated July 28, 1997) criticizes the BBC for characterizing the Yes group as the “elite of the Welsh Labour establishment” (Yes Campaign Steering Committee 1997).

Chapter 3

1. Though it is not the primary focus here, it is worth mentioning the substantial elements of the Senedd’s building design that confirm its constitutional com-mitments to environmental sustainability. Every room in the building, for example, has at least one exterior wall that allows natural light to illuminate each room. Computers control a system of blinds that open or close accord-ing to the intensity of the sun. A large funnel made of cedar forms a skylight above the plenary chamber to bring in sunlight, which is intensified by a mir-ror positioned at the top. Moreover, dozens of geothermal heating coils sunk below the surface of the building radiate warmth or cold (depending on the season) through the slate slabs making up the ground floor. Rainwater is col-lected for use as “grey water” in the building’s plumbing system. In sum, it is a literal means by which the Assembly is attempting to internalize the changes in society it tries to bring about through policy.

Chapter 4

1. I am grateful to a contact in the Welsh press who cautioned that, in his view, this issue has abated somewhat since the period of my primary research in 2003. In short, he explained that speaking Welsh had become more normalized by the time he reviewed this chapter in early 2009.

2. Gal (2005: 27) writes: “There can always be a public imagined or projected to exist within any private …. With each recursion, one changes the perspec-tive of the view/interpreter and hence the scope of comparison …. The exact significance of the distinctions does not stay identical/ there are subtle changes in the meanings of the contrast at each recursion.”

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Chapter 5

1. I am grateful to the staff member who shared this story during my visit in 2007.

Chapter 6

1. In a much smaller event in Swansea, Wales held two weeks later, which was no less impassioned, I endured stifling weather conditions (even by UK stan-dards) with a couple of hundred other protestors, a few AMs, and a couple of Labour MP who gathered outside the Welsh Labour Party’s annual conference to denounce the war and Tony Blair’s arrival.

2. “While the rest of the world knows where their leaders stand on the issue of war with Iraq,” a reporter for the Western Mail would write the next day, “Wales stood alone last night in the wake of Rhodri Morgan’s repeated refusal to speak out” (Brindley March 20, 2003: 4). In a more stinging critique, a Labour Party candidate for Assembly elections in Swansea condemned the war as “the 21st Century’s version of colonialism,” and urged that “Rhodri Morgan … indicate ‘clear red water’ between the policies of central government and the will of the Welsh people” (Western Mail March 20, 2003 4).

3. Because I wanted to compare campaign activities in different areas of the city and among different parties, I declined an offer to stay on after the internship period to avoid a potential situation where I might influence the party’s cam-paign strategy based on my inside knowledge of the specific activities of other parties’ campaigns in Cardiff. Equally, I did not volunteer in Cardiff ’s fourth electoral district (Cardiff West) because I wanted to avoid being identified with a specific political party in my home neighborhood, which was also an area where I conducted many informal and a few formal interviews about Welsh politics.

4. The amplification of the asylum issue is apparent, even if resonating with Tory voters or the right-wing press: a mere 1,580 asylum seekers were housed in Wales, a nation of three million, in 2002 (Shipton and Buchanan April 23, 2003: 1).

5. My family and I, for example, joined an antiwar rally in Cardiff city center in mid-April. The peace rally was organized as part of the UK-wide Stop the War Movement in a major retail-shopping district across from Cardiff Castle. Although I learned that previous rallies had garnered a larger turnout, that evening’s event featured no more than 15 participants.

Chapter 7

1. In addition, a Joint Ministerial Committee brings together all UK central and devolved ministers annually. Policy specific meetings (e.g., agriculture) of the committee bring together UK ministers and devolved ministers with similar policy portfolios to discuss policy matters controlled by Whitehall but affecting the devolved governments (Laffin, Thomas and Webb 2000: 228). The Secretaries of State for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland (i.e., Members

NOTES 191

of UK Parliament in ministerial positions) also attend Whitehall’s European Cabinet Committee meetings. Ultimately, the United Kingdom is sovereign in European affairs, including the responsibility to ensure its devolved admin-istrations adhere to European law. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Wales is also embedded in European politics through participation in numerous regional-level organizations, such as the Committee of the Regions, and maintains a “Wales House” in Brussels to advance Welsh interests in Europe.

2. Through the European Communities Act of 1972, member states are granted the power to modify European legislation to fit the demands of member state law. In this case, Council Directive 90/220/EEC of 1990—which lays out the process of applying for and approving GM applications—was rewritten and came into force in the United Kingdom through Section VI of the UK Environmental Protection Act 1990, then transferred to Wales with devolution in 1999.

3. An independent survey conducted in February 2003 found that 56 percent of Britons opposed GM products and only 14 percent supported them; opposi-tion was also uniformly high across political parties in the UK (Western Mail April 29, 2003: 9).

4. As the minutes of the GM Nation? Steering Group (2003) report, “Neither the Scottish Executive nor the Welsh Assembly Government were prepared to commit additional funding to the debate until the matter of timing was resolved.”

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Index

Act of Union (Wales), 1, 20, 32, 82, 83, 87, 99, 135

Blair, Tony, 1, 18, 25, 45, 47, 106, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 145, 149, 160, 162, 163, 167–168, 190

Committee of the Regions (EU), 13, 22, 154, 191

Conservative Party (Wales), 1, 13, 19, 25, 41, 43–44, 47, 49, 57, 58, 59, 70–71, 76, 86, 94–95, 96, 98, 154, 173, 180, 181, 185, 188

elections (2003), 133, 138, 139, 140, 141, 147, 148

election manifesto (2003), 135–136and Iraq war, 129, 130and New Labour, 45, 89, 95party ideology, 26, 163–164party origins (UK), 34–35, 36, 37and Thatcher, Margaret/

Thatcherism, 45, 50, 83, 90–93, 107–108, 137

Cymru Fydd, 36–37, 80

Devolution referenda (Wales)of 1979, 43, 46, 189of 1997, 1, 11, 21, 125, 135

European Parliament, 13, 48, 161European Union (EU), 1, 6, 9, 11, 13,

18, 21, 22–23, 26, 29, 45, 51, 84, 89, 90, 105, 107, 120, 151–169, 178, 181, 182, 187, 191

First Minister (National Assembly for Wales), 3, 67, 69–72, 85, 130–132, 133, 144–145, 149, 178, 180

Foucault, Michel, 7, 13, 14, 15–17, 77, 91, 104–105, 115, 119–120, 174, 175

Government of Wales Act (1998 and 2006), 2, 48, 49, 51, 53, 55, 109, 155, 158, 174, 178, 179, 180

Habermas, Jürgen, 7, 8, 14, 16–17, 35, 76–78, 83, 87–88, 99, 100, 104, 175–176, 186

Houses of Parliament (Commons and Lords), 2, 13, 19, 34, 35, 42, 45, 49, 59, 66, 70, 94, 103, 106, 110, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 140, 180, 191

Labour Party (Wales), 38–39, 40, 42–44, 46, 49–51, 57, 59, 60, 63, 65, 71, 75, 76, 82, 83, 86, 90, 92, 106, 108, 113, 118, 152, 154, 159, 162, 173, 179–182, 188

and Bevan, Aneurin, 41, 75, 76and Davies, Ron, 47, 48, 109, 171elections (2003), 128, 133–138, 140,

141–142, 144–145, 147–148, 149–150

election manifesto (2003), 136–137and Griffiths, James, 41and Iraq war, 126, 127, 129, 130,

131, 132, 139–140, 146and Morgan, Rhodri, 1, 3, 19, 27,

70–72, 85, 116–117, 128, 133, 144, 167–168, 190

216 INDEX

Labour Party (Wales)–continuedand New Labour, 1, 9, 22, 25, 27,

45, 50, 89, 93, 95, 127, 136, 150, 157, 167, 168, 169, 176, 189

origins, 38–39Legislative Competence Orders

(LCOs), 179–180, 181, 182Liberal Democrat Party (Wales), 1, 12,

13, 24, 25, 26, 46, 76, 86, 88, 87, 157, 158, 164, 165, 179, 180

elections (2003), 132, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142–143, 146, 148

election manifesto (2003), 135and Iraq war, 126, 129, 130office work, 53–54, 57–62, 66, 67party ideology, 26

Liberal Party, 35–38, 39, 42, 45, 80–81, 173

and George, Lloyd, 37

Nonconformist religion, 32, 35, 37, 38–39, 80, 81

Northern Ireland (politics and government), 6, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22, 36, 37, 40, 43, 59, 78, 81, 107, 181, 190

Plaid Cymru-The Party of Wales, 1, 12, 13, 24, 43–44, 45, 46–47, 49, 50, 57, 58, 59, 60, 70, 83, 85–86, 89, 91, 93, 95–97, 109, 112, 151, 158, 161, 162–163, 164, 167, 173, 180, 185, 188

election manifesto (2003), 135elections (2003), 133, 137–138,

140–141, 145, 146, 147–148and Iraq war, 126, 129, 130,

132, 139and Lewis, Saunders, 41, 42origins, 40–41, 42, 81party ideology, 25, 40

Presiding Office/Presiding Officer, 8, 53, 66, 67, 69, 70, 86, 95, 96, 98, 128, 148, 158, 174, 186

Record of Proceedings (National Assembly), 70–71, 91, 92, 93–94, 95, 96–97, 103, 130–131, 157, 159, 163–165, 185

Scotland (politics and government), 6, 18, 19, 20, 25, 35, 36, 37, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 65, 80, 91, 154, 155, 160, 161, 171, 179, 180–181, 188–189, 190

Secretary of State for Wales, 42, 45, 48, 109, 117, 145, 147, 171

Standing Orders (National Assembly for Wales), 2, 48, 53, 67, 174

Wales Office/Welsh Office, 42, 45, 49, 108, 109, 111, 113, 120

Weber, Max, 7, 8, 14–15, 16, 54, 55, 65, 72, 111, 174, 186

Welsh Language Society (Cymdeithas yr Iaith), 42, 82

toward an anthropology of government: democratic transformations and nation building in wales

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