The genius of democratic crown

The hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II arrives at Windsor castle on September 19. Picture: Getty Images

Now that just about everything that could be said has been said, one question remains: why has the monarchy survived?

The question is hardly a trivial one: in his classic book Political Man (1963), American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset lamented the “absurd fact” that “ten out of twelve stable European and English-speaking democracies are monarchies”.

Of course, institutions had considerable inertia; but the historical trends seemed so powerful as to not be readily defied. World War I had been a stark turning point in that respect. Until then, to be a country had virtually meant having a monarch.

It is true the US had decided on an indirectly elected president; but, as Harvard’s Eric Nelson brilliantly showed, that was a close-run thing, with strong support among the nation’s founding fathers for some form of “king for life”. And while American presidentialism was broadly imitated (usually to disastrous effect) by its southern neighbours, the new polities that emerged in 19th-century Europe craved the respectability that came with the crown.

Greece, which had just conquered its independence, took the lead, scouring Europe’s royal families for a candidate who could bind the still fragile nation to the continent’s tightly intermarried dynasties. After Leopold of Saxe-Coburg refused the job in 1830, opting instead to rule the more “civilised” Belgians, the Greeks ended up with one of the Wittelsbachs, Prince Otto, who proved a mixed blessing. That imbroglio didn’t prevent the development of a flourishing market in minor royals, with Roman­ia crowning Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in 1866, Bul­garia Prince Alexander of Battenberg in 1879, and Albania Prince Wilhelm of Wied in 1913.

More unhappily, Serbia and Montenegro went for meritorious native rulers, missing out on the cachet and connections long-established titles could bring – an error staunchly democratic Norway didn’t fall for when, on separating from Sweden in 1905, it invited a Danish prince, Carl, who had wisely married the youngest daughter of Britain’s Edward VII, to take the throne.

But the cataclysm of World War I more or less brought that historical cycle to a close. Finland, which gained its independence from Russia in 1917, was its last participant; however, the new nation’s monarchists made a disastrous mistake in choosing Friedrich Karl of Hesse (Kaiser Wilhelm II’s brother-in-law) to be king of Finland literally days before Germany’s defeat doomed the Hohenzollern dynasty. With the Finns fearful of provoking the victorious allies, the country promptly became a republic.

From then on, monarchy was in retreat – but not everywhere. In effect, confounding the predictions of political scientists, the monarchy didn’t merely survive in Eur­ope’s most successful democ­racies: it became increasingly popular.

In part that was because it adjusted to the times, both by gradually withdrawing from the bus­iness of governing and by readily accommodating the rise of left-wing parties that drew on the votes of the recently enfranchised working class. Nowhere was that clearer than in Sweden, Norway and The Netherlands; but it was apparent in the UK, too, where the genuine warmth and unfailing probity George V and George VI displayed in their dealings with the Labour Party cemented its support for the crown.

Yet the monarchy was not just acceptable in vibrantly democratic polities; there was, it turned out, a strong, mutually reinforcing, affinity between constitutional monarchy and political stability.

Writing in 1936, Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud’s great disciple and biographer, outlined the mechanism he believed was at work. Every society, he noted, needs effective ways of representing authority; but authority evokes ambivalent, love-hate, reactions. The genius of constitutional monarchy lay in separating those reactions: their antagonistic element was channelled towards everyday politics, as well as on to the institutions and individuals it involves; meanwhile, the royalty could embody moral authority – and the unity of the nation – without incurring the hostility the assertion of social norms engenders.

Thus protected from the full blast of destructiveness by its very powerlessness, constitutional monarchy was in a position to “bask in the sunshine of an affection unadulterated by its opposite”. At the same time, the greater the monarchy’s ability to mobilise that affection, the more aggressive the political battle could be without tearing society apart. As a result, democracy could, somewhat paradoxically, be especially full-blooded in what seemed the least democratic form of rule.

Those mechanisms created a profound difference, later emphasised by British political scientist Herman Finer, between the constitutional monarchies and other forms of democratic governance.

In American-style presidentialism, the functions of head of state and head of government were combined, creating an irresoluble tension, which permanently fractured the body politic, between the unifying role of the head of state and the inevitably divisive role of the head of government.

In contrast, European-style parliamentarianism separated the functions, making the prime minister the head of government while relying on an elected president to be the head of state. But most elected presidents were far too colourless, too low-profile and too transient to properly bear the burden of representing the unity, continuity and integrity of the nation, especially during existential crises. As for those who were truly vigorous and well-known, they were invariably controversial, threatening the parliamentary system that their constitutional role was intended to protect.

Ultimately, there was less to fear – and maybe even more to hope – from a monarch who knew, deep down, how fragile royalty’s legitimacy was in the modern world than from presidents who could claim an electoral mandate.

None of that condemned the other systems of democratic governance to collapse; usually, they were there for good reasons. But their vulnerability to extremism and demagogy had proven greater than that of the constitutional monarchies. More generally, they seemed less at home with their past, which, instead of being society’s common ground, was fractured terrain. And last but not least, they missed out on the respite from the dreariness and routine, commonplaceness and triviality, of daily life that the splendour of majesty provides.

Years ago, the Marxists regularly castigated the working class – which so obviously relished the pure sensual pleasure of ancient ceremonies, traditions and displays – for worshipping false gods when it should have been doing its dialectical duty.

But perhaps ordinary men and women, unlike their critics, understood societies are held together by a measure of internal agreement about fundamental moral standards; and that, in an age of shabbiness and vacuous rhetoric, the monarch’s devotion to the polity can, however imperfectly, remind us of those standards’ enduring glory. Maybe that, in the end, is why constitutional monarchy has survived – and why we should think long and hard before deciding to bid it farewell.