A Liberal Democratic Defense of Monarchy
On Sunday, the Kingdom of Denmark appointed a new monarch. Queen Margrethe II abdicated the role which she held for exactly 52 years which transferred the monarchy to her fifty-five year old son Frederik. The abdication and ascension of the new king only took about an hour. Margrethe traveled to the Capitol at Christiansborg, signed a paper making her abdication official and Frederik signed a paper making him king. Shortly thereafter, the Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced via the Capitol balcony that Denmark had a new monarch: King Frederik X. The new king delivered a short speech, less than two minutes with pauses for applause, and spent the rest of the day riding around Copenhagen with his family waving at his fellow country folk.
I watched the whole ordeal with a bit of skepticism and curiosity. Copenhagen was swamped as thousands descended on the Capitol to get a glimpse of the old queen’s departure and the new king’s accession. Danish television sent reporters out to all corners of the country to bring live looks at the parties and festivities going on far away from the capital city. I found myself smugly amused at a dozen women in their 60s and beyond, dressed in fine jewelry and faux tiaras, becoming visibly emotional while watching the new king on television. How can these women care so much about this?
King Frederik X is a notoriously uncomfortable public speaker. He spent many of his younger years being critiqued and disdained by Danish tabloids and gossipers for not adequately projecting the air of royalty. He joined the military and worked his way into Denmark’s most elite special operations force, the Frogman Corps. He spent years promoting active lifestyles and met his future wife, the Australian Mary Donaldson, while in a bar at the Sydney Olympics as a part of the Danish Olympic delegation. Since his fiftieth birthday, he has hosted a nationwide event each year called the “Royal Run” where he and his family travel around the country, meeting and running with thousands of other participants in multiple cities. Polling from just before his mother’s abdication show that over 4/5th of Danes believe Frederik will be a good monarch, 78% think the country should remain a monarchy and only 15% desire a republic.
An American in Monarchy
I’m not supposed to like monarchy. Growing up in the American school system taught me that monarchy was inherently unfair, undeserved, and simply antiquated. That we, as Americans, threw off the yoke of royal prerogative and pomp with the declaration of independence is a point of national pride. No man, or woman, is a god ordained leader, above the law, and without restraint.
But there’s always been a certain strain of hypocrisy to that American story. We tell ourselves that to have a King or Queen would be un-American, an expression of our long removed colonial masters. Yet large numbers of Americans look favorably upon the monarchy that could still be their own. Gallop polling from last August, found that William, Crown Prince of England, was the most popular political figure amongst Americans. What’s more, his father, the recently crowned King Charles III came in as the fourth most popular political figure, behind only his son, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and First Lady Jill Biden.
Monarchy is not a fair system. Random children are not born into a monarchy being told that someday they could be the king or queen. It is a purely hereditary system. And while modern monarchies have seen commoners become the spouses of future kings and queens and various other royals, the actual seat of the throne will never grace the behind of any ole’ Jack or Jill. Because it is an unfair system, because nobody but the direct descendants can aspire to one day be monarch, it is seemingly incompatible with the meritocratic vision of liberal-democracy. But, while unfair, there are still ways in which a properly constrained monarchy can serve a liberal-democractic system, and by extension, the people of the nation.
What is Monarchy
Monarchy is a form of government in which supreme authority is vested in a single person, traditionally a male king but occasionally a female queen, with lifetime appointment. It is an ancient type of government with early examples developing out of chiefdoms or tribal kingships. Many early kingdoms elected their monarch out of the elite members of the polity but as time went on, most monarchs were selected via inheritance. The version of monarchy that we are maybe most familiar with in the West is the traditional European monarch.
In Christian Europe, the idea that God had ordained and selected the monarch to rule their lands was a popular conception in the medieval period. This had both a political and theological grounding. It gave kings the ability to claw back some of the political rights that the church was attempting to exert around the continent by claiming that both the church and the monarch had the support of God.
By the time of the Protestant Reformation, a new conception of the state was forming around “nationhood.” This meant that kings were no longer just the ruler over a complex set of sub-rulers (dukes, earls, counts, margraves, barons, viscounts, etc.), but were now the kings of a distinct group of people, the nation. At the same time, as many states divorced themselves from the theocratic monarchy of the papacy, most states were a confusing mix of arrangements between kings, dukes, counts and various other titles. Out of this relative chaos came a more clear distillation of the heavenly ordained monarch.
The “divine right of kings” was a concept formulated to cut through the governing chaff. Under this definition, the monarch was chosen by God and thus accountable to nothing and nobody other than God. No earthly authority can restrain or direct the monarch. This allowed monarchs to centralize their states, removing or rearranging the authority of lesser titles, placing the church under his command (particularly in protestant states), and generally amassing greater wealth for himself and his family. This arrangement became known as absolute monarchy.
But much as the chaos of the reformation and late medieval period resulted in the formulation of absolute monarchy, so too did the wanton excesses of monarchic power result in a new social and political transformation. The Enlightenment was a period of philosophical and intellectual flourishing from which many of our modern ideas of reason and politics are derived. This is also where the roots of modern liberal-democracy were seeded.
As different ideas about how and why a state should be arranged percolate in the intellectual firmament, the absolute monarchs saw different paths. Many embraced the ideas of the enlightenment and sought to cast themselves as the benevolent rulers of their people, as enlightened absolute monarchs. Others resisted the enlightenment and had its proponents jailed or executed.
Ultimately the age of absolute monarchs was disrupted by social transformations brought about by the enlightenment. The American and French Revolutions were transformative events which threw off monarchy entirely. In France, the chaos that resulted would lead to a commoner, Napoleon, rising to power and declaring himself as a new monarch while smashing and reshaping many of the rest of Europe’s monarchies. That a commoner could himself become emperor seemed to destroy the idea of the divine right of kings. Napoleon displayed a new form of legitimacy, the temporal right of power.
In order to survive this period, many monarchs accepted dramatic lessonings of their power. Absolute monarchs either relinquished power peacefully (keeping their titles and some role) or were deposed violently. Today there are only 11 monarchs left in Europe and all but one, the Pope in Vatican City, are constitutionally constrained.
Constitutional Monarchy
The constitutional monarchy is one in which the monarch’s role and purpose is clearly defined via a written and democratically approved constitution. Power flows to the monarch not via the heavens, but from the people. This also reorients the monarch’s justification. They are not there by the appointment of god and beholden only to that heavenly power. They are allowed to serve in their role by the people in order to serve the good of the nation and the state.
Under a constitutional monarchy, most of the political power has been stripped from the monarch. They are often barred even from weighing in on contested political ideas. Instead the monarch’s role is placed in the purely ceremonial role of head of state. The head of state is the physical embodiment of the state and the nation. In this role, the head of state receives foreign dignitaries, holds public events, and generally projects a positive and unifying vision of the state.
The head of state in non-constitutional monarchies is almost always an elected position. In some cases the head of state is clearly political, such as in the United States or France where the elected President is the head of state. In other systems, the head of state is elected but plays a similarly ceremonial role as monarch in a constitutional monarchy, such as in Ireland or Germany.
So why would a liberal support a constitutionally constrained monarch? Why not just get rid of them and replace them with a system like the Irish or the French?
Liberal support for Constitutional Monarchy
Constitutional monarchs enjoy several advantages that elected heads of state do not. To start with, as members of very old families, most monarchs have a clear and definable historical connection to their country. This is not by some way of saying that historical connection denotes greater loyalty or a stronger sense of “being” but considering that the nation is only as strong as its members belief in it, then having a person in the role as the head of state for that nation can help shore up their legitimacy.
Constitutional monarchs hold their position for life (or until abdication) meaning they can bring stability to a system that is constantly changing and in flux. While the rest of the democracy rightfully transformers and moves to the general will of the voters, the monarch holds their ceremonial role for life. In most other roles of power, I would argue this is a bad thing. But for a ceremonial role as now prescribed, this allows for a certain sense of ease for both the nation and for foreign interlocutors. Monarchs can build a stronger network and ease relationships with other foreign powers simply by having been in their position for many years. It also allows monarchs to choose abdication when they believe their heir is prepared and ready to take on the role.
A constitutional monarch also runs less of a risk of appearing politically compromised. One of the potential drawbacks of the elected ceremonial heads of state is that the people who generally get elected for those roles have a former political past. While some systems require that the ceremonial head of state not run as a member of any individual party, some do allow them to run as a party member and most others have a history as a member of some political party or movement. This means that the elected head of state may not enjoy the benefits of a nonpartisan, and therefore may have a harder time convincing certain portions of the population that they represent all members of the state. While this isn’t usually a problem, it can be in states which have become highly polarized.
Which is perhaps my strongest argument for why a liberal can support a constitutional monarchy. In systems like France and the United States, the president is both the head of state and the political head of government. This means they must fulfill both the roles of supporting a political agenda on which they were elected to office while also going about the ceremonial and binding duties of head of state. This can be done and has been successfully done by many presidents around the democratic world. But in states with high levels of political distrust or strong polarization, presidents run into the trouble of being unable to, or worse, unwilling to fulfill their duty to be a representative for the entire nation.
Perhaps the most striking example of this dereliction of head of state duties came during the presidency of Donald Trump in the US. Trump had little interest in understanding his dual roles as both head of state and head of government and preferred to run a form of personalistic government in which he was beholden only to himself and the voters who supported him. If he had been elected only as head of government this would be fine (outside of the personalistic element). A head of government is there to enact the political agenda they were elected to serve, they need not be overly worried about appealing to the entirety of the electorate except for a desire to be reelected. Instead the head of government can focus on passing laws which a majority of voters agreed to supporting through their vote for that candidate or their party.
The United States was left without a real head of state for the four years of Trump’s presidency, even as the man himself loved to partake in the ceremonial aspects that would normally constitute that part of his job as president. But his inability to put aside personal grievances and represent the entirety of America at home and on the world stage left America weakened as a polity, as a nation, and as an international player.
Constitutional Monarchy in the 21st Century
I should be clear, I think constitutional monarchy can clearly be a good, even preferable form of governance in a liberal-democratic system but it must also have certain guardrails and many of the monarchies still extant today need particular reforms.
To start with, a monarchy should no longer have the same level of opulent visual wealth that they have historically enjoyed. Being draped in finery and medals is fine, but the continued use of jeweled crowns and elaborate items in ceremony is not. These relics of the absolute phase of monarchy should be relegated to museum status, not rid of entirely, but given a historical context. The Danish monarchy already has done as much. While the crown jewels still exist, they are never used by the seated monarch and are instead stored away beneath Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen.
Extraneous royalty or aristocratic titles should be abolished. While dukes and duchesses may have served a significant political role at one point they don’t serve one now. All old titles should be abolished; they serve no purpose other than to remind people of an antiquated and unjust social hierarchy that used to exist in their polity.
Further, the royal family should be condensed and mission oriented. Cousins of the current monarch don’t need titles nor attention. The only member of the family who should be treated with any form of titular respect are those who are directly in line for the monarch. This means that some people will be born with the title of princess or prince but will lose that title when their aunt or uncle becomes monarch (as long as the new monarch has children of their own). Royal children are and should be trained with an eye towards why they exist and what their potential role as monarch are. I think a political philosophy and political science education should be mandatory for all members of the royal house.
Ultimately the modern monarch is just a member of an old family which represents the nation. Outside of their family's historical role, they are not somehow special or above the rest of the nation. This is also why I don’t think my support for constitutional monarchy could ever extend to the creation of a new one anywhere that doesn’t already have or recently had one. Finding a family which would be willing to alter their lives by stepping into the role of monarchy would be tedious, confusing, and ultimately unsatisfying. Anyone with a large enough public role to fulfill the duty would either have some element of political affiliation which would make them unsuitable to part of the population, or they would have talents that they would be required to give up on in order to take their new role.
A Job Unlike Any Other.
There is a role for the monarch in a liberal democracy, it’s not always an obvious role, and it’s not the way in which most people think about kings or queens. But a monarch is and always has been a type of particular job. That job has transformed over the centuries of its existence but it still can be an important one if done correctly.
I understand that there are a number of areas that I’ve skipped over in this piece. There are still monarchies which enjoy much more power than what I’ve been writing about here. There are also constitutional monarchies that give more than just ceremonial power to their monarch. I also avoided the question of changing demographics and the ability of a single family to represent the entirety of a diverse nation. I also did not address the question of colonial holdover monarchies such as the case of Australia or Canada still having a monarch via the English crown. These are interesting and important wrinkles that I might address in a later piece.
As much as I’d like to scoff at the gaggle of mature ladies gathered to party and cry over the accession of King Frederik to the Danish Crown on Sunday, there is a part of me that respects the institution that could elicit such an emotional response. These women and millions of others, gathered, watched, cheered, and celebrated at the accession of a new king to their country. It was a moment of national unity, a moment which no politician could inspire outside of maybe wartime or revolution.
It’s the sort of thing that a monarch is supposed to do. King Frederik in his new role is supposed to bring the Danish people together, as a single unit, to inspire a feeling of shared community. It seemed that Frederik understood his duty in that role. When addressing the crowd of thousands from a balcony at the Danish Capitol, he finished his speech the same way countless previous monarchs had by coining an official motto. The shy monarch looked at his notes, then quickly dropped them to his side and said: “Forbundne, forpligtet, for kongeriget Danmark” - Bound together, in obligation, for the Kingdom of Denmark.
