Does Constitutional Monarchy Deserve Any Cheers?

Or are its apparent successes just selection bias?

I have no particular feelings about the death of Queen Elizabeth II. I am too steeped in I Samuel chapter 8, Richard II Act III Scene ii, and the history of the American founding to hold much truck with the mysteries of monarchy. I’ve written on this subject extensively before. As regards Elizabeth Windsor herself, I tried watching The Crown and found it deadly dull. I did enjoy The Queen, but that’s a story about a canny politician who changes artfully when the charism she relied on all her life appears to have departed, superseded by one of a very different kind, so it naturally suits someone like myself already inclined to find the crown, well, hollow.

Nonetheless, I’ve heard sentiments of the following sort more than occasionally, and I’ve even occasionally voiced them myself:

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

It's hard to defend constitutional monarchy in terms of first principles, but the empirical track record seems good.

The problem with this view, though, is simple. The track record “seems good” because a number of long-lived constitutional monarchies are also among the most successful and prosperous liberal democracies in the world, a list led by countries like Norway, Sweden and Denmark. But is that evidence that constitutional monarchy is a good system in practice? Or is it evidence that successful, prosperous liberal democracies don’t tend to suffer violent revolutions, so if they were already constitutional monarchies they tend to remain so?

I’m increasingly inclined toward the latter view. If constitutional monarchy actually promoted stability, one would expect it to exhibit greater longevity than other systems for the same country in similar situations. But it’s not obvious that it does. Consider the history of France. In the eighteenth century, France attempted to transition to a constitutional monarchy, and wound up quickly going all the way to republicanism. The republic didn’t last either, and after Napoleon’s empire was utterly defeated by a coalition of anti-republican nations, they set up a restored constitutional monarchy under the Bourbons. This monarchy fell to another revolution in 1830, which ushered in the bourgeois constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe — and that monarchy also was toppled by revolution in 1848, which ushered in the short-lived Second Republic, followed by the short-lived Second Empire, followed by the Third Republic — the first system of government for France to exhibit any longevity since the fall of Louis XVI. It’s really hard for me to look at French history and call out constitutional monarchy for its exemplary track record of promoting stability.

Nor is France an outlier; establishing and keeping a constitutional monarchy just isn’t easy. Britain itself got a stable constitutional monarchy only after a brutal civil war, a republican interregnum, a restoration of the monarchy, and a largely bloodless “glorious revolution” that established parliament as sovereign. And one has to wonder to what degree Britain’s stability after 1688 was underwritten by the rewards of two empires (first in North America and then in Africa, Asia and Oceania) that both bolstered national wealth and provided an easy escape valve for troublemakers and malcontents of all sorts. The record elsewhere is similarly checkered. The Ottomans embraced constitutionalism in the 1870s, but the Sultan took back full power after only two years; the Young Turks’ revolt established a second constitutional monarchy in 1908, which was ultimately done in by military failure in World War I. Japan became a constitutional monarchy in the 1880s, only to decay into a fascist military state; its current, so-far quite stable constitution was only established after total military defeat by the United States. China’s constitutional monarchy lasted only four years before a republic was declared. Nor have constitutional monarchies distinguished themselves when they were set up in the post-colonial period. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is often lauded for being an island of stability in the turbulent Middle East, but the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq did not fare so well, nor the Kingdom of Egypt.

The great modern example held up to demonstrate the virtues of constitutional monarchy is Spain, whose king, Juan Carlos, restored to the throne after the death of the dictator General Francisco Franco, played a pivotal role in thwarting an attempted military coup in 1982. He was able to play that role because of the importance of the monarchy to the ideology of the rightists coup-plotters; frank refusal to obey the orders of the sovereign would have meant contradicting their own professed purposes in staging the coup. But Juan Carlos could have done precisely the opposite, and endorsed their efforts. Inasmuch as the charism of monarchy is what enabled him to put an end to the coup, using that power for nefarious or self-interested purposes would have plunged the country into much deeper crisis — deeper, I suspect, than the crises that countries like Chile have faced after the fall of military regimes precisely because it would be so much more wrenching to subsequently reject a decision made by the living symbol of the nation.

So I’m skeptical that constitutional monarchy actually works better in practice than in theory. If there’s a monarchical system of government that “works” in practice, it’s absolute monarchy, which has a track record of thousands of years of survival, and endures today in countries like Saudi Arabia. Patrimonialism is not a good form of government if what you care about are progress and the general welfare. But if you overwhelmingly care about stability above all, they have the virtue that, once firmly established, they can be very hard to overthrow, and can therefore last quite a long time.

Where constitutional monarchy works best, by contrast, is in theory, and that theory was articulated with exceptional concision by Peter Hitchens, who once said that the king in the British constitution is much like the king in chess. He doesn’t do very much, but by occupying his square, he prevents any other piece from occupying it. In other words: the purpose of a constitutional monarch is not so much to represent the nation effectively, much less to wield power, but to prevent any more dangerous character from claiming to represent the nation and thereby causing trouble.

That theoretical claim has some force, I think, but only if you assume that the constitutional monarch will not himself be a dangerous character, which based on history cannot reasonably be assumed. But if I could make that assumption, I would see the appeal, particularly as an American in this moment in time. One aspect of our ongoing derangement is that we no longer seem to know just what our nation is, and this gets expressed partly in increasingly acrimonious disagreement about how the nation might be represented — a disagreement that might be muted if there were a monarch we could all point to and say: representation is your responsibility, not ours. The closest thing we have to that is the American presidency, our quasi-monarchical tribune of the people — but recent presidents have been notable unsuccessful at performing that function. Both President Obama and President Trump in their very different ways leaned into that aspect of the job, and both were — again in very different ways — furiously rejected by a very large fraction of the nation. President Biden, being singularly unsuited to lead a cult of personality, has inspired a more “normal” level of disdain from the opposition (particularly notable given that many of them profess him to have been fraudulently elected), and little or no identification from his co-partisans, which I think has been all to the good. But it has left that central “who are we?” dispute manifestly unresolved.

But that very fact points to the problem with imagining that a constitutional monarchy could be a solution to that problem of ours. Who, after all, would the monarch be? Yes, there are figures who it is possible to imagine bridging or transcending the country’s deep cultural divides to the point where an overwhelming majority could agree “that’s us” even if they can’t say “that’s me.” It’s hard, though, to imagine an electoral system that would reliably result in such choices. And it’s impossible to imagine a single family who would have a hope of coming close.

And what about the family that already has the job? I imagine that’s a question on a lot of minds right now, not so much in Britain but, much more so, in Canada (and Australia and New Zealand). Elizabeth II’s accession marked the end of the “Dominion of Canada” in favor of treating the country as one of her “realms” in principle no different from (and in no way lesser than) any of the others. But that transition was completed long ago, and what the country is going through now is a continuous roiling reckoning with its identity as a settler state, which is not the most opportune time for a formal reaffirmation of the sovereignty of the House of Windsor. I just got back earlier this week from two weeks at the Stratford Festival, and as the ubiquitous land acknowledgements that precede performances unfailingly remind the audience, if there is a symbolic patrimonial “owner” of the country, it’s not Charles III. And I’m afraid Charles would have to agree; the indigenous peoples of Canada learned in 1982 that their relationship with the monarchy was no longer what the relationship between sovereigns that they had believed it to be, if it ever was. In that context, how can Charles possibly perform the function of constitutional monarch?

I suppose we’ll find out. Either Canada’s constitutional monarchy will endure in its current form, or they will end it and establish a republic — or they will find a new mechanism for choosing a symbol of the nation that can transcend that nation’s many divides, which are quite real if not quite so vocal and public as ours. I’d cheekily suggest that the Assembly of First Nations might have some thoughts on who such a figure might be, but they’ve got their hands full with their own problems, of a kind familiar to republics and monarchies alike.

In the end, constitutional monarchy, whether hereditary or elected, is an attempt to separate politics from patrimony. And while it’s a happy circumstance when that separation comes to pass, I’m just not sure it’s possible to engineer.