How 'the Celts' have struggled throughout history to become a political force

Of the many cultural identities claimed by people in Europe today, ‘Celtic’ is probably one of the better recognised. Even if the average person does not know that the Celts were an ancient people broken up into groups who spoke related languages but likely did not recognise much kinship, chances are they have heard of the label.

They might even be vaguely aware that today the ‘Celtic’ countries are those where these ancient languages were spoken into modern times: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Brittany in France.

Maybe they have also heard of Celtic music or the new-age mysticism that some claim preserves the truths of the ancient Celtic priests, the druids. If it seems likely that most people have at least heard of the Celts or parts of what is considered to be modern ‘Celtic’ culture, why have they remained seemingly politically impotent? It’s not been for want of trying.

Druids were a shared feature of ancient Celtic culture that has been revived in more recent times (Picture: Joseph Martin Kronheim, 1868) | Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

French revolutionaries

The Celts have been claimed as national ancestors across Europe for centuries, often for highly political reasons. In pre-revolutionary France, the French nobility claimed descent from the Germanic Franks, who had invaded and subdued the (at that point very Romanised) Gaulish population, while the Third Estate claimed they were descended from the ancient Gauls, recognised by Caesar and other classical authors (and confirmed by modern linguistics) to be a Celtic people.

When the nobility was overthrown in the Revolution, the Abbé Sieyès, a political theorist as well as a clergyman, exhorted the nobles to return to the other side of the Rhine, allowing the Celtic origins of the French nation to triumph.

Meanwhile, 19th-century Germans wanting to resist Prussian hegemony claimed that their regions were the descendants of the ancient Celts and therefore shouldn’t be folded into a greater Germany. Both of these claims relied on historical and nebulous racial arguments and, while rhetorically effective, were hampered by the lack of apparent Celtic signifiers in the modern era.

Linguistic connections

The crucial piece of ‘Celticity’ – of being Celtic – is possessing a relevant language. The modern Celtic nations are only recognised as such because it was shown in the first decade of the 18th century that their languages are related.

Prior to this point there was no realisation that Irish, Scots, and Manx Gaelic were related to the Welsh, Breton, and Cornish languages (and therefore their speakers, the logic went). In medieval Wales, ‘Irishman’ was a term of abuse.

Even after this realisation about the linguistic connection, there was no great family reunion. The two language branches are unintelligible to speakers from one another. Meanwhile, many of the Irish chafed against the political union that they had been suckered into, the same one in which Scots and Welsh fitted quite comfortably.

Eventually, a Celtic-based nationalism did emerge at the end of the 19th century: Pan-Celticism, which sought to connect all of the Celtic nations in a union based on their shared ‘racial’ and linguistic heritage. But although some high-profile nationalists participated – such as WB Yeats and Patrick Pearse in Ireland – the Pan-Celtic movement was met mostly with head-scratching.

Advanced Irish nationalists felt it wasn’t radical enough, Welsh cultural patriots were annoyed by the pugilistic rhetoric of the Irish members, while Scots were mostly uninterested (apart from a few fringe figures).

The problem with Pan-Celticism

The early movement folded relatively quickly, which should not come as a surprise. The ‘Celtic’ languages were dividing, not uniting these nations; any shared history lay long outside the bounds of living memory; and though stock characters like druids existed in their vernacular literary traditions, there was little further cultural overlap among these nations that was distinctive within the wider European context.

The equivalent to Pan-Celticism would have been a Pan-Germanicism connecting all the speakers of Germanic languages: Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, perhaps Flanders and maybe Britain and Ireland too. The result would have been entirely incoherent.

Stilll, Pan-Celticism continued through the 20th century in various cultural and political guises. One of its most high-profile and radical supporters was the Scottish poet Christopher Grieve (1892-1978), better known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid, who articulated a view of Celtic republicanism in a distinctly leftist frame.

He sought “to get rid of the English Ascendancy and work for the establishment of Workers’ Republics in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall, and, indeed, make a sort of Celtic Union of Socialist Soviet Republics in the British Isles”. The leftist framework is that maintained by most of the Celtic League today, but one distinctly more sceptical of the British state.

Changed days?

Celtic-based politics have ultimately, ironically, perhaps been most successful outside of the nations where the languages remain. The Lega party in Italy, for example, claims descent from the Celts, from which it bases claims for an independent northern nation-state named Padania.

Celtic particularism seems not to have played any real role in Scottish devolutionist politics over the last few decades, beyond a rhetorical flourish here or there. While Celtic identity was probably stronger a century ago, there was little will for independence in a Scotland that sat proudly near the heart of the Empire. Although not being English may have been something to be proud of, it was not a strong enough foundation on which to build a political movement.

Things may be different now.

Ian Stewart is a historian of modern Britain, Ireland, and Europe, and is a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of The Celts: A Modern History (Princeton University Press, 2025).