There is that old anecdote about someone asking “That works well in practice, but does it work in theory?” Nobody is quite sure where it came from, nor who said it. It has been attributed to a German Professor, an American economist, and an Irish Prime Minister. That doesn’t matter. Whomever said it, the phrase came to mind when the Editor asked me to compare monarchies to other forms of government.
That is because if one sat down to design a rational and effective form of government – in an Oxford tutorial room, say, or a Paris salon – our constitutional monarchy is not what they would produce. A King nominally sovereign, but who is stripped to a ceremonial role by others governing on his behalf? A Royal family and hereditary succession, combined with a democracy with universal suffrage? Hardly rational. Hardly philosophically sound. And yet, in practice, just about magnificent.
Studies have been done to highlight the virtues of monarchy. Andreas Bergh and Christian Bjørnskov have found that social trust is higher in monarchies, meaning lower crime and less corruption – a finding replicated by Sascha Barker when comparing levels of trust between countries within and outside the borders of the old Habsburg dominions. Yet another reason to bring back the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
There’s more. Victor Menaldo, a political scientist, found that in the Middle East from 1950 to 2006, monarchies offered much more stability than other forms of government; Tim Besley, a former Bank of England rate-setter, argued that “in a country with weak executive constraints, going from a non-hereditary leader to a hereditary leader, increases the annual average economic growth of the country by 1.03 percentage points per year.” Kwasi Kwarteng would kill for those numbers.
Yet as welcome as these studies are, I fear an article that simply reels them off and declares game, set, and match to the Royal family is cheating. It’s very well highlighting that monarchy works in practice, but shouldn’t we choose to show why it works in theory? Or, better yet, combine the two, and give any PPE-ist reading this an excellent argument to quote me in their next essay. Especially if it weans them off republicanism.
A constitutional monarchy like ours works because a hereditary ruler is an effective check against tyranny. Spain could only have Franco because she became a republic, and later avoided returning to dictatorship because the King acted against it. As with France and Napoleon – and, erm, Napoleon. And anybody who has endured GCSE History should be able to list the vulnerabilities of the Weimar Republic. A republic is much easier to turn into a dictatorship than a monarchy.
Removing a monarch removes an independent figure able to place a limit on the ambitions and power-hunger of the average politician. The need for a Prime Minister to regularly report back to their sovereign keeps them humble. No wonder those countries that have monarchies – like the Scandinavian and Benelux – tend to be more democratic and egalitarian. All of this creates a more stable and harmonious polity, producing those much vaunted superior outcomes for trust and economic growth.
Of course, this does rely upon one stressing the constitutional bit of constitutional monarchy. Plenty has been written on the importance of strong institutions for ensuring stable governments, economic growth, and better social outcomes – and a ceremonial monarch can be part of that.
They aren’t essential – the United States and France compensate for their ongoing experiments in republicanism by separating governmental power across several levels. Tedium is the price countries like Germany and Italy pay for a historical unreliability on the tyrant front, as well tying themselves into the European Union.
By contrast, countries such as Saudi Arabia and Thailand are monarchies. But nobody asides from oil sheiks and seedy middle-aged men who bought their wives on the internet would want to live in either of those. Both depart from the forms of monarchy, constitutional or not, we see in western Europe. The Saudis are medieval, whereas the Thai monarch relies on strict controls on free speech and the intervention of the military. And, of course, Mussolini came to power under a monarchy. The system isn’t perfect.
Successful monarchies rely on the character of the country itself and the family and individual at its head. For every Elizabeth II, there is an Edward VIII. For every George V, there is a Nicholas II. And for every Louis XVI, there is a George III. Successful constitutional monarchs are those that accept the limitations imposed upon them by their people. We had our revolution a century before the French did. Ours resulted in William III and the Bill of Rights; across the Channel, they got their Rights of Man at the cost of the Terror, hyper-inflation, and two decades of war.
As ever, Orwell summed it up best. Monarchy, said the erstwhile Eric Blair, was one of the things that had saved Britain from Fascism. Modern people love a bit of pomp and ceremony, they “can’t get along without drums, flags and loyalty parades”, so “it is better that they should tie their leader-worship on to some figure who has no real power.” In an autocracy, the pomp and the power are installed in the same person.
Successful constitutional monarchies are one where “the royal family shall be long-established and taken for granted, shall understand its own position and shall not produce strong characters with political ambitions.” By that we mean figures like the late Queen, or Europe’s new longest serving monarch: a chain-smoking Danish archaeologist. That does not prevent the pageantry: the grand coronations, the fairy-tale weddings, the “touch of the heavens” that a very different Queen thought was central to their appeal.
Human beings need an appeal to both the head and the heart. Constitutional monarchies provide that in their spectacle without the power – a few TV has-beens riding a bus down the Mall is no Nuremburg Rally. And the head, the actual government, is provided by elected politicians of varying quality. It might not be perfect, but it works.
So through a combination of sound personalities, strong institutions, and the ability to please the head as well as the heart, constitutional monarchies provide the best form of government. These virtues should be self-evident. But one fears if these arguments are not continually made, the enthusiasm will fade.