Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/778 on 08.03.2017 by CS (TIS)The political events of the 1960s and 1970s in "Celtic Britain" led to the
demise of the Anglocentric conventional wisdom which had asserted the
fundamental homogeneity of the United Kingdom, and ushered in a new
orthodoxy which stressed diversity and the territorial dimension of the
state. Ihese events were mirrored to an extent in Cornwall, with competing
explanations seeking to interpret "peripheral protest", but with a more
comprehensive model emerging to emphasise the complexity of the
relationship between "centre" and "periphery" in modern western European
states, pointing in particular to the existence of historical phases of
peripherality.
In an initial phase of "Older Peripheralism", Cornwall was isolated
territorially and culturally from the core of the expanding English state,
conquered and annexed but with an array of constitutionally "accommodating"
devices and a multi-faceted Celtic identity. However, political and
economic change eroded this isolation, creating a new era of "second
Peripheralism". This phase was marked by a rapid industrialisation which
brought Cornwall into the forefront of technological innovation but which
was over-specialised and incomplete, leading initially to a new, assertive
sense of identity based upon technological prowess but precipitating in the
longer term industrial collapse and a consequent Cornish social, economic
and political paralysis. This paralysis endured from the end of the
nineteenth century until after the Second World War, an experience which
was highly distinctive when compared to that of England.
However, this paralysis was at length disturbed, with post-war Regional
Development policies facilitating the construction of a "branch factory"
economy in Cornwall and encouraging a process of "counterurbanisation”.
Paradoxically, this socio-economic movement led not to the erosion of
Cornwall's peripheral status but was in fact evidence of a "Third
Peripheralism", with the Cornish economy acquiring features which continued
to contrast with those of England's core, and with an increasingly
politicised "Cornish Revival" injecting an important strand of anti-metropolitanism
into Cornish political behaviour, with its critiques of
regional policy and demands for renewed constitutional "accommodation"