Pan-Celticism (, Scottish Gaelic: Pan-Cheilteachas, Breton: Pan-Keltaidd, Welsh: Pan-Geltaidd, Cornish: Pan-Keltaidh, Manx: Pan-Cheltaghys), also known as Celticism or Celtic nationalism, is a political, social and cultural movement advocating solidarity and cooperation between Celtic nations (both the Brythonic and Gaelic branches) and the modern Celts in Northwestern Europe. Some pan-Celtic organisations advocate the Celtic nations seceding from the United Kingdom and France and forming their own separate federal state together, while others simply advocate very close cooperation between independent sovereign Celtic nations, in the form of Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish, and Welsh nationalism.
Just like other pan-nationalist movements, the pan-Celtic movement grew out of Romantic nationalism and specific to itself, the Celtic Revival. The pan-Celtic movement was most prominent during the 19th and 20th centuries (roughly 1838 until 1939). Some early pan-Celtic contacts took place through the Gorsedd and the Eisteddfod, while the annual Celtic Congress was initiated in 1900. Since that time the Celtic League has become the prominent face of political pan-Celticism. Initiatives largely focused on cultural Celtic cooperation, rather than explicitly politics, such as music, arts and literature festivals, are usually referred to instead as inter-Celtic.
Terminology
There is some controversy surrounding the term Celts. One such example was the Celtic League's Galician crisis. This was a debate over whether the Spanish region of Galicia should be admitted. The application was rejected on the basis of a lack of a presence of a Celtic language.
Some Austrians claim that they have a Celtic heritage that became Romanized under Roman rule and later Germanized after Germanic invasions.Carl Waldman, Catherine Mason. Encyclopedia of European Peoples. Infobase Publishing, 2006. P. 42. Austria is the location of the first characteristically Celtic culture to exist. After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, in October 1940 a writer from the Irish Press interviewed Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger who spoke of Celtic heritage of Austrians, saying "I believe there is a deeper connection between us Austrians and the Celts. Names of places in the Austrian Alps are said to be of Celtic origin."Walter J. Moore. Schrödinger: Life and Thought. Cambridge, England, UK: Press Syndicate of Cambridge University Press, 1989. p.373. Contemporary Austrians express pride in having Celtic heritage and Austria possesses one of the largest collections of Celtic artefacts in Europe.Kevin Duffy. Who Were the Celts? Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1996. P. 20.
Organisations such as the Celtic Congress and the Celtic League use the definition that a 'Celtic nation' is a nation with recent history of a traditional Celtic language.
History Modern conception of the Celtic peoples
Before the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, people lived in Iron Age Britain and Ireland, speaking languages from which the modern Gaelic languages (including Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx) and Brythonic languages (including Welsh, Breton and Cornish) descend. These people, along with others in Continental Europe who once spoke now extinct languages from the same Indo-European branch (such as the Gauls, Celtiberians and Galatians), have been retroactively referred to in a collective sense as the Celts, particularly in a wide spread manner since the turn of the 18th century. Variations of the term "Celt", such as Keltoi, had been used in antiquity by the Greeks and the Romans to refer to some groups of these people, such as Herodotus' use of it in regards to the Gauls.
The modern usage of "Celt" in reference to these cultures grew up gradually. A pioneer in the field was George Buchanan, a 16th-century Scottish scholar, Renaissance humanist and tutor to king James IV of Scotland. From a Scottish Gaelic-speaking family, Buchanan in his Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582), went over the writings of Tacitus who had discussed the similarity between the language of the Gauls and the ancient Britons. Buchanan concluded, if the Gauls were Celtae, as they were described as in Roman sources, then the Britons were Celtae too. He began to see a pattern in place names and concluded that the Britons and Irish Gaels once spoke one Celtic language which later diverged. It wouldn't be until over a century later when these ideas were widely popularised; first by the Breton scholar Paul-Yves Pezron in his Antiquité de la Nation et de la langue celtes autrement appelez Gaulois (1703) and then by the Welsh scholar Edward Lhuyd in his Archaeologia Britannica: An Account of the Languages, Histories and Customs of the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain (1707).
By the time the modern concept of the Celts as a people had emerged, their fortunes had declined substantially, taken over by Germanic people. Firstly, the Celtic Britons of sub-Roman Britain were swamped by a tide of Anglo-Saxon settlement from the fifth century on and lost most of their territory to them. They were subsequently referred to as the Welsh people and the Cornish people. A group of these fled Britain altogether and settled in Continental Europe in Armorica, becoming the Breton people. The Gaels for a while actually expanded, pushing out of Ireland to conquer Pictland in Britain, establishing Alba by the ninth century. From the 11th century onward, the arrival of the Normans, caused problems not only for the English but also for the Celts. The Normans invaded the Welsh kingdoms (establishing the Principality of Wales), the Irish kingdoms (establishing the Lordship of Ireland) and took control of the Scottish monarchy through intermarrying. This advance was often done in conjunction with the Catholic Church's Gregorian Reform, which was centralising the religion in Europe.
The dawning of early modern Europe affected the Celtic peoples in ways which saw what small amount of independence they had left firmly subordinated to the emerging British Empire and in the case of the Duchy of Brittany, the Kingdom of France. Although both the Kings of England (the Tudors) and the Kings of Scotland (the Stewarts) of the day claimed Celtic ancestry and used this in Arthurian cultural motifs to lay the basis for a British monarchy ("British" being suggested by Elizabethan John Dee), both dynasties promoted a centralising policy of Anglicisation. The Gaels of Ireland lost their last kingdoms to the Kingdom of Ireland after the Flight of the Earls in 1607, while the Statutes of Iona attempted to de-Gaelicise the Highland Scots in 1609. The effects of these initiates were mixed, but took from the Gaels their natural leadership element, which had patronised their culture.
Under Anglocentric British rule, the Celtic-speaking peoples were reduced to a marginalised, largely poor people, small farmers and fishermen, clinging to the coast of the North Atlantic. Following the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, greater multitudes were Anglicised and fled into a diaspora around the British Empire as an industrial proletariat. Further de-Gaelicisation took place for the Irish during the Great Hunger and the Highland Scots during the Highland Clearances. Similarly for the Bretons, after the French Revolution, the Jacobins demanded greater centralisation, against regional identities and for Francization, enacted by the French Directory in 1794. However, Napoleon Bonaparte was greatly attracted to the romantic image of the Celt, which was partly based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's glorification of the noble savage and the popularity of James Macpherson's Ossianic tales throughout Europe. Bonaparte's nephew, Napoleon III, would later have the Vercingétorix monument erected to honour the Celtic Gaulish leader. Indeed, in France the phrase "nos ancêtres les Gaulois" (our ancestors the Gauls) was invoked by Romantic nationalists,. typically in a republican fashion, to refer to the majority of the people, contrary to the aristocracy (claimed to be of Frankish-Germanic descent).
Dawning of Pan-Celticism as a political idea
Following the dying down of Jacobitism as a political threat in Britain and Ireland, with the firm establishment of Hanoverian Britain under the liberal, rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment, a backlash of Romanticism in the late 18th century occurred and "the Celt" was rehabilitated in literature, in a movement which is sometimes known as "Celtomania." The most prominent native representatives of the initial stages of this Celtic Revival were James Macpherson, author of the Poems of Ossian (1761) and Iolo Morganwg, founder of the Gorsedd. The imagery of the "Celtic World" also inspired English and Lowland Scots poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Scott. In particular the Druids inspired fascination for outsiders, as English and French antiquarians, such as William Stukeley, John Aubrey, Théophile Corret de la Tour d'Auvergne and Jacques Cambry, began to associate ancient megaliths and dolmens with the Druids.The current of neo-Druidism, deriving from the writings of the likes of William Stukeley and Iolo Morganwag, had its origins more in the milieu of freemasonry than any lineal connection to the ancient Celtic Druids and their culture, which survived latest in the Gaelic world with the filí and seanchaí (existing alongside Christianity). Thus neo-paganism had a very limited appeal to most people in Celtic nations, instead being largely English and Welsh based. English-based quasi-masonic groups such as the Ancient Order of Druids provided the inspiration for Iolo's Gorsedd. Later masonic groups and writers such as Godfrey Higgins and then Robert Wentworth Little's Ancient and Archaeological Order of Druids, were English founded or based.
In the 1820s, early pan-Celtic contacts began to develop, firstly between the Welsh and the Bretons, as Thomas Price and Jean-François Le Gonidec worked together to translate the New Testament into Breton. The two men were champions of their respective languages and both highly influential in their own countries. It was in this spirit that a Pan-Celtic Congress took place at the Cymreigyddion y Fennis annual Eisteddfod in Abergavenny in 1838, where Bretons attended. Among these participants was Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, author of the Macpherson-Morganwg influenced Barzaz Breiz, who imported the Gorsedd idea into Brittany. Indeed, the Breton nationalists would be the most enthusiastic pan-Celticists,. acting as a lynch-pin between the different parts; "trapped" within another state (France), this allowed them to draw strength from kindred peoples across the Channel and they also shared a strong attachment to the Catholic faith with the Irish.
Across Europe, modern Celtic Studies were developing as an academic discipline. The Germans led the way in the field with Indo-European linguist Franz Bopp in 1838, followed up by Johann Kaspar Zeuss' Grammatica Celtica (1853). Indeed, as German power was growing in rivalry with France and England, the Celtic Question was of interest to them and they were able to perceive the shift towards Celtic-based nationalisms. Heinrich Zimmer, the Professor of Celtic at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (predecessor of Kuno Meyer), spoke in 1899 of the powerful agitation in the "Celtic fringe of the United Kingdom's rich overcoat" and predicted that pan-Celticism would become a political force as important to the future of European politics as the much more established movements of pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism.. Other academic treatments included Ernest Renan's La Poésie des races celtiques (1854) and Matthew Arnold's The Study of Celtic Literature (1867). The attention given by Arnold was a double-edged sword; he lauded Celtic poetic and musical achievements, but effeminised them and suggested they needed the cement of a sober, orderly Anglo-Saxon rule.