On a more local level I think in 1979 there was a strong ‘British’ working class consciousness in south Wales aided by a still powerful union movement, a sentiment exploited by Kinnock & Abse to vote against devolution in the name of solidarity with their comrades in the rest of Britain.

The defeat of the Miner’s Strike 84/85 effectively killed off any coherent idea of a ‘British’ working class and the unions were emasculated & the Labour party began the long road back to power by ditching some of the old left principles associated with ‘class’. The idea of a ‘British’ working class, which once had formidable structure & form, was now rapidly fading away.

People who’d always seen themselves as Welsh but also as members of a ‘British’ working class saw one part of their identity effectively wither away, the part closely associated with defending their interests.

Devolution offered a way ahead, a re-affirming of identity & means to defend their interests should another Tory government be returned in Westminster. The pro-devolution vote in 1997 had a strong anti-Tory element.

Based on this perception, I feel perhaps there’s something to be said for enduring a couple of terms of Tory rule before going for a referendum on further powers for the Assembly.

However, hopefully we’ve moved on from seeing devolution as something to react against what happens in London, so that we can use it as an active means to take more control to shape our future

The antecedents that provide the foundation – and necessarily underpin our current devolutionary position – are very important and deserve closer investigation. We seem at the moment, for obvious reasons, to be fixated with what comes next and not to keen to look back at why we are at this point.

I’m afraid however, that I have to disagree with you that the origins of our current settlement can be found in the notion that Wales as a nation can be defined in terms of a supposed position on a continental stage and one which has such great significance in geopolitical terms.

Please forgive me if this sounds as if I am doing dear old Gwalia a disservice in denying her a place in such highly esteemed surroundings. But my point is this. I can find no other rational justification for our current form of devolution that challenges the commonly held view that her separation from a manufactured Albion hegemony was due to a desire on behalf of New Labour to split the socialist voting Wales and Scotland.

As you rightly point out there is a greater meta-narrative that allows us to link Welsh self-determination (I notice how you shy away from the words Nationalism and separatism) to the period of protest of the 1960s but we would need to find much more substance before we can prove your claim of a link directly to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So may I offer a starting point for such a link?

The fall of the wall and the commencement of as you put it a Unipolar world did see the reemergence of nationalism as a viable post cold war doctrine. The question is why is this so? Why as you put it did it become “why not” instead of “why”? Is it because successive electorates across Europe have turned to the perceived assurances of the local and national as opposed to the uncertainty of a new world?

Is it because in Wales, as in other jurisdictions, political and media elites have skilfully avoided the worst manifestations of nationalism and have presented their publics with a sanitised form which belies its true nature. In particular, Welsh Nationalism as you point out has been crafted into a form of pan Europeanism. If so it would explain why Wales is not alone on the global stage in thinking that defining its politics within a closely circumscribed notion of the self and the other is a better place to be than contending with the real challenges of globalisation and an ever shrinking world where the problems we face are no respecter of national identity or international borders.

Einsterin’s word of the 1930s to me remain true …. Nationalism has and will continue to spread and become a dominant political ideology the question is at what cost and will Gwalia succumb to its charms and deadly virus?

I feel rather silly now.