This chapter answers Pocock's plea to break out of historical and political science ‘silos’ and consider our main theme – nationalist unionism – more ‘holistically’ (Pocock 1975: 16). Given the multi-national nature of the United Kingdom, it was not just in Scotland that parties of the union borrowed from nationalist discourse and promoted autonomous ‘imagined communities’; arguably it occurred to an even greater degree in Wales and even, in a different form, in Northern Ireland (see Chapter 10).

Bulpitt's theory of ‘territorial management’ is relevant here, with Liberal, Conservative and Labour governments ‘showing a proper respect for Wales and its cultural traditions’ as one way of ‘shoring up the United Kingdom’ (Morgan 1981: 418). So too is Billig's ‘banal nationalism’, which in Wales pushed secessionist nationalism (in as much as it existed) to the periphery while promoting institutional, administrative and, later, legislative autonomy within the UK, an ‘official’ Welsh nationalism which, as in Scotland, drew upon myths, symbols and historical motifs, most notably the ‘invented tradition’ of investiture ceremonies in 1911 and 1969.

But Wales was – and is – not Scotland, thus its nationalism operated in a different historical context and expressed itself in different ways. The mid-sixteenth-century Anglo-Welsh Acts of Union were not analogous to the Anglo-Scottish Treaty of 1707, for they did not preserve a panoply of distinct institutions which might have preserved Welsh national identity. The latter union flattered Scotland as an ‘equal’ partner, whereas the former refused even to view Wales as a distinct entity. To Morgan, the ‘supreme object’ of Welsh national leaders was essentially ‘equality within the United Kingdom and an expanding empire, not severance from it’ (Morgan 1995: 206–7).

Until the 1920s, therefore, political nationalism – that is, the campaign for administrative or legislative devolution – was stronger in Scotland than in Wales, where it took a more cultural and religious form. Indeed, the campaign to disestablish the Anglican Church in Wales was ‘an issue that raised passions difficult to comprehend in a more secular age’ (Wyn Jones et al. 2002: 233), non-conformism having taken on a distinctly Welsh persona in the mid nineteenth century (Morgan 1995: 201).

During the existence of Bulpitt's ‘Dual Polity’, however, all Wales's major parties competed on nationalist-unionist territory, over who could best ‘stand up for Wales’ within the UK.