Monarchy and Democracy

[EnglishEdward]

I say yes. I like the fact that our army and police swear loyalty to the Queen. Could you imagine anything worse than the army marching through London and saluting people like Tony Blair instead? It would give him funny ideas - so it's no accident that we have such a long and stable tradition of democracy. Surely clarity of hierarchy - with the highest position being a constitutional non-entity - keeps the State functioning smoothly?

Problem is that Tony Blair got funny ideas and was allowed to progress them.

And Her Majesty did not sack him when it became clear he had lied over Iraq.

 

[Leoreth]

Why must they salute to an actual person at all? Isn't serving their society itself enough?

 

[Traitorfish]

Exactly. Monarchy has time and again proven that it can be a stabilizing factor in times of painful transformation.

Too bad the Russians didn't re-introduce it when the USSR collapsed.

Well, the Tsar didn't exactly have a particularly strong track record in that respect.

 

[Benefactor]

Why must they salute to an actual person at all? Isn't serving their society itself enough?

People like figureheads, symbols, flags, that sort of thing .

Ideals are only part of the equation.

 

[Leoreth]

But that seems to be only a self-reinforcing notion. People like the tradition of their military saluting the monarch, so they want to keep it. It's the tradition that's important to them, not the institution it's associated with itself.

 

[Arwon]

Moreover an elected head of state (in terms of a presidency) would undermine the (very successful) Westminster model of democracy. This relies on the sovereignty of parliament and the consensus that parliament is the only body with the legitimacy required to govern. An elected head of state could clearly claim legitimacy from national constituency and could leverage this legitimacy into political influence. This is not a good thing.

Um. I take it you're not familiar with Ireland or India then? Both systems developed directly based on the Westminster model. In both cases the president does essentially what the Queen or Governor-General does. (Australia, for the record, has something often called a "Washminster" system - because somewhat unusually among Westminister systems we have a strong fully elected Senate which is the equal of the Lower House and can block bills)

This would seem to suggest you believe that parliamentary-supremacist republics aren't a thing. Nothing about having an elected head of states suggests they have to wield power or be anything other than ceremonial, and there are literally dozens of examples of republics where this is shown. In fact, outside the Americas, only a minority of republics have a strong active head of state. Can you name the president of Germany, of Israel, of India? Yeah, exactly.

Finally, the international benefits of the monarchy are often ignored. The monarchy is what unites the commonwealth and thus creates and excellent network of diplomatic links. For Britain, the monarch constitutes and excellent international ambassador which greatly helps the country maintain close relationships with its former empire. An elected head of state would make this whole system unstable.

This is actually just factually wrong. Firstly the Commonwealth is essentially pointless, and secondly, only 16 of the 54 members have Elizabeth as their head of state. Five others have autochtinous monarchies, but the majority of Commonwealth members are in fact republics.

None of your post says anything about the compatibility of monarchy with liberal democracy, though. All it's actually saying is that "there are benefits to having a ceremonial monarchy" (or rather, for ceremonial heads of state), which in fact concedes that to have a liberal democracy, you must neuter the monarchy to the point of ceremonialness, so the mon doesn't actually arch.

I should say I do actually accept and support the idea of a ceremonial head of state. I'm not convinced the presidential republic model practiced in the Americas works very well. Sometimes I think the American President is treated like some sort of elected god-king.

 

[Leoreth]

Also an interesting thing to look at is what recently established democracies modeled themselves after. Even without any monarchic traditions being available, most post-communist European states chose a parliamentary over a presidential system, and given the circumstances, they fared well without the "unification" of a monarch.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

The only way in which a monarchy would be compatible with a democracy is if one were so subsumed to the other than only one functionally existed. In the UK, for instance, the Queen is only a figurehead with little real power. Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, despite having some trappings of democracy has as elected local councils, the state is quite firmly an absolute monarchy.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Monarchs are not really compatible with liberal democracy. Figureheads in general aren't particularly compatible. I don't really see a need for a head of state. I am also reluctant to call any modern country except Switzerland a democracy though.

 

[Arwon]

But they have SEVEN heads of state

 

[Benefactor]

But that seems to be only a self-reinforcing notion. People like the tradition of their military saluting the monarch, so they want to keep it. It's the tradition that's important to them, not the institution it's associated with itself.

I mostly agree TBH. But the Military has to salute something when they're parading about, may as well be the Queen. It's hard to salute and march about in front of the abstract ideals of "Freedom and Democracy" .

 

[Dachs]

Exactly. Monarchy has time and again proven that it can be a stabilizing factor in times of painful transformation.

Just like it was in the 1910s in Russia, right

or China in the same decade

 

[Winner]

Well, the Tsar didn't exactly have a particularly strong track record in that respect.

It doesn't matter. Societies in transition can use a popular figure, someone to look up to, someone who is respected and whose moral authority helps people deal with hardships. Of course having a monarchy is no guarantee the monarch himself will be such a figure, but it's better than nothing.

It would IMO be far better than what they've got instead - a presidential (oh, sorry, I mean prime-ministerial) cult of personality and something what amounts to a dictatorship precisely because many ordinary Russians simply need someone to look up to. Unfortunately for them, that man turned out to be Putin. If it was a popular, but relatively powerless monarch who would provide an outlet for the Russian authoritarian impulse, then perhaps Russia would have made it through the transition as a democracy.

 

[Antilogic]

It seems most of the discussion, if it allows for compatibility, is discussing the compatibility of liberal democracies with figurehead monarchies. Does anyone think an active, maybe not absolutist but empowered monarch is compatible with the ideas of democracy?

 

[Winner]

Depends on the monarch I'd say it wouldn't be much different from an activist* president in parliamentary democracies.

---
* - this is a term coined by our illustrious president. In his "campaign" (our presidents are elected by the parliament) he promised he would be an active, but not activist president, meaning that he would use his presidential powers sparingly and responsibly and he would not abuse them to pursue his own political goals and agenda. Of course, the moment he got the job he started doing precisely that.

---

But if you mean a monarch who would still be the head of the executive, who would name and dismiss prime ministers at will, and so on, then no, this isn't compatible with a modern representative democracy. The executive needs to answer to an institution which has democratic legitimacy. A monarch who is empowered yet answerable to no one is thus not compatible with a liberal democratic order.

 

[Dachs]

It doesn't matter. Societies in transition can use a popular figure, someone to look up to, someone who is respected and whose moral authority helps people deal with hardships. Of course having a monarchy is no guarantee the monarch himself will be such a figure, but it's better than nothing.

Any institution of sufficient weight can provide that sort of stability, whether it is a collection of crotchety old men who enjoy buttsecks with boys, some idiot with a crown, vague conceptions of rights, or a sufficiently revered legal document.

 

[Winner]

Any institution of sufficient weight can provide that sort of stability, whether it is a collection of crotchety old men who enjoy buttsecks with boys, some idiot with a crown, vague conceptions of rights, or a sufficiently revered legal document.

It's always better when people can put a human face on it.

 

[Dachs]

It's always better when people can put a human face on it.

I disagree. Putting a human face on something means that all the flaws and foibles of that person can transfer to the institution as a whole, something that's extremely bad if you lose the genetic lottery and get an idiot. Was the tsarist system a Bad Thing overall? It didn't matter in 1917 in Russia because the Romanovs were associated with everything that they did that sucked.

 

[Traitorfish]

It doesn't matter. Societies in transition can use a popular figure, someone to look up to, someone who is respected and whose moral authority helps people deal with hardships. Of course having a monarchy is no guarantee the monarch himself will be such a figure, but it's better than nothing.

It would IMO be far better than what they've got instead - a presidential (oh, sorry, I mean prime-ministerial) cult of personality and something what amounts to a dictatorship precisely because many ordinary Russians simply need someone to look up to. Unfortunately for them, that man turned out to be Putin. If it was a popular, but relatively powerless monarch who would provide an outlet for the Russian authoritarian impulse, then perhaps Russia would have made it through the transition as a democracy.

You don't think that a revived Tsar may have been a bit contentious in Russia? I think you should try to remember exactly what the regime of the Autocrat of All the Russias was like- surely if the historical connection is important in acting as this political buttress, then it has to be a positive connection?

 

[onedreamer]

Simple question: Is a liberal democracy ideologically compatible with an institution of monarchy? There's more than enough examples to demonstrate that the two can function side by side, of course, and yet it seems to me that very few people would, if asked to draw up a model liberal constitution, chose to involve this particular form of institution. It seems for most people be counter-intuitive to on the one hand adopt the universalist principals of liberal democracy, and on the other preserving as explicitly exclusive and specific office as this. The existence of such institutions, then, would appear to be an historical relic, rather than an ideologically integrated facet of a liberal democratic system of government.

Is it entirely compatible, and I'm just being dense? Is it basically incompatible, and their current co-existent is a blatant contradiction? Or does it depend too heavily on the details any given instance to generalise?

They are not at all compatible and there are no examples of these 2 institutions functioning side by side, as far as I can tell. It's just a matter of names since the role taken up by kings and queens of constitutional monarchies today is similar or identical to that of most presidents of parliamentary republics. Modern constitutional monarchies exist just because the people of those countries weren't mad enough at their monarchs to cut their heads or exile them, but there is no fundamental difference with other representative forms of government.