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I love classical music but I’ll be honest, The Last Night of the Proms is not my cup of tea.

Current discourse on personal identities has made me realise that my own identity is pretty simple. There are lots of important ancillaries but I am a Welsh woman.

I do realise that my national identity has been shaped and expressed largely through sport, but the Proms’ Union Jack waving (albeit with a smattering of European, Welsh and Scottish flags mixed in) and Rule Britannia make me feel like a foreign tourist.

However, in the absence of Match of the Day last weekend, I watched some of the action from the Albert Hall and it underlined just how prominent questions of our national identity are currently.

Brexit is the biggest cause, of course. 52% of Welsh voters wanted to leave the EU. Subsequent analysis/soul searching judged this to be a rejection of Wales’s historic place in Europe, an effective voluntary merger with England, the outcome of neo colonialism, and even the death knell for Wales itself.

This scale and range of emotion is inevitable and about right for a momentous historic event which has schism and binary choice right at its heart. Whatever the outcome of the acrimonious Article 50 negotiations, by next March we will have visited some deep, visceral emotions about who we are, and our broader sense of self and relationship with the rest of the world.

In my opinion, one of the underlying causes for this rush of emotion (mostly negative, but with a few positives chucked in) is our reluctance to properly discuss who we actually are and how our nation has changed.

Probably outside the EU in eight months’ time and stuck on the western fringe of a shaky, outdated union of four increasingly different nations, Wales faces an existential crisis.

What’s worse, we have very little control of the debate.

Who knows how the desperate scrambling around for a replacement identity for the new “UK outside the EU” will pan out? The very task of selling Brexit back to us means it surely has to incorporate a certain outdated sense of historic, cultural and political superiority (the expensive UK Government “GREAT Britain” campaign anyone?).

But we have to look at ourselves too.

I think we’ve all been guilty of a slightly lazy complacency about our Welsh identity, or maybe it’s even willful blindness? There is a sense that Wales will always be there – but will it? Is there even an agreed basis on which we can start a conversation about this?

There’s no doubting that we Welsh are a passionate sporting nation – witness Wales at the Euros, the rugby Six Nations or Geraint winning the Tour. But waving Y Ddraig Goch and singing our anthem is easy, populist and uncontentious.

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Meanwhile, well below half of us bothered to vote in the last Assembly election. When asked to decide who should represent us and oversee how we do hospitals, schools, roads and care for the vulnerable, only around four in 10 bothered to stroll to the polling booth.

So how much commitment is needed to be Welsh? How much Welsh identity are we happy with and in what forms for it to survive?

Perhaps even the flag-waving, sports-obsessed Welshness won’t survive outside the EU as we stare at a future without natural allies, minus a distinctive political discourse and maybe even without our own language and our own democratic national institution?

None of this is scare mongering. There is a very real threat posed, not only by Brexit, but also by the rise of populism and anti-establishment, anti-politics parties, often with a charismatic leader but some don’t even need that.

In Wales, we’ve already seen how a semi-proportional voting system, combined with a simplistic message, can flourish electorally. In the last Welsh election, the Abolish the Assembly party gathered around 4.4% of the vote, that’s over 40,000 Welsh votes with no campaign or leadership to speak of. Not enough to elect AMs, but more votes than the Green Party. And we’ve already heard the new UKIP leader’s intention to cloak himself in another “anti” campaign next time around, this time against devolution itself.

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Gaps in the usual, recognised infrastructure of a nation are well-known and regularly lamented in Wales, but much harder to remedy of course. We are only now starting to feel the impact of this.

The limited distinctive and popular media – both broadcast and print – is not compensated by growth in online for many Welsh citizens and this means we don’t know about each others’ lives or understand our different experiences. Little wonder then that we feel like a nation with more divisions than connections.

And yes, an exceptionally large proportion of our population was not born in Wales, with most having moved from our nearest neighbour.

In a recent blog on the excellent and much welcomed Nation.Cymru site, Daniel Evans drew attention to the fact that “in many parts of Wales, you can’t rely on a solid, secure sense of Welsh identity. Many people still feel extremely British. You can’t assume people like or even care about devolution. You can’t assume people speak Welsh or even care about the language.”

This makes painful reading, especially for those of us who have had no emotional connection to Britishness.

But he’s right: if we bury our heads in the sand and fail to engage with the “infidels”, we miss the fact that not everyone sees our small country as we do - and some don’t see Wales at all. In doing what we effectively did in the run up to the EU referendum, we could find ourselves complicit in the death of Welshness.

So where do we go from here?

A start is to acknowledge that many people are pretty laid back about their national identity and see little, if any, contradiction between calling themselves Welsh and British. Some will talk about “the country as a whole” and I’m afraid they don’t mean Wales; many quite like the Royal family too and, last year, over a third of us voted Conservative.

Only in certain sectors – football, for instance, where there is no British identity for the game – can one safely say there’s a relatively straightforward and linear connection between the people and Welsh identity so it’s no surprise that football has become a site for pretty radical debate on Welshness.

In a structurally poor country, dominant narratives around the necessity of economic growth at all costs usually drowns out respect for national identity and borders. Does anyone care if the ending of Severn Bridge tolls and a M4 relief road swallows up Gwent into a greater South West England? Does it matter if the Northern Powerhouse means visitors to north east Wales won’t know if they are in Wales or England?

We at least need to debate this with each other. If our political and civic apparatus was stronger, more pluralist and more confident, we could, and it may be that the dialectic alone would help secure our national future.

But perhaps deep down, ours continues to be the mentality of the submissive and the compliant. Little wonder, given our history is characterised by conquering and assimilation.

We have precious few champions who speak for Wales as a nation and reach all of its communities which is why we cling to our sports stars with an emotion that edges on desperation.

But without the debate, we are playing roulette with our national future. How big a “buy in” to being Welsh is needed for us to remain a nation? We’d better start asking the question and finding some answers fast, or the oft quoted existential crisis might well be just around the corner.

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