9 ms·

Among Europe’s Ex-Royals

75 points by lordylord 4y ago

verisimi 4y ago
- mongol 4y ago
  Started yesterday to read Churchill's "The Gathering Storm", where he describes the follies of the victors after the first world war: "Wise policy would have crowned and fortified the Weimar Republic with a constitutional sovereign in the form of an infant grandson of the Kaiser, under a Council of Regency. Instead a gaping void was opened in the national life of the German people. All the strong elements, military and feudal, which might have rallied to a constitutional monarchy and for its sake respected and sustained the new democratic and Parliamentary processes were for the time unhinged." I will not quote further but in essence he speculates that in a still young Germany, a monarch could have provided the stability that it came to lack, and which in time lead to the fall of its young democracy. A monarch may not be the right answer always, but sometimes it may very well be.
  - yywwbbn 4y ago
    Having a king didn’t help Italy too much. However Churchill probably had a point conservatives and monarchists weren’t really ever wholeheartedly committed to the survival of the Weimar republic. They might not had been as keen to undermine at every opportunity had it been ruled by a monarch. Then again , the nazis might just have turned the emperor into an impotent figurehead (as happened in Japan and Italy).
    - danans 4y ago
      > Then again , the nazis might just have turned the emperor into an impotent figurehead (as happened in Japan and Italy). I bet that is exactly would have happened. The reality is that the advance of science and technology and general literacy was quickly eroding the traditional notion of the monarch having the consent of God or heaven. By the turn of the 20th century this was almost complete, and largely irreversible. From that point on, the only value left in the monarch in industrialized societies was as a symbol of a national ethnic identity for societies that defined themselves in those terms. Today, only the most extreme religious movements around the world see a return to monarchical society as a goal. Even the neo-fascists would prefer a dictator drawn from their ilk, not a king.
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        There is an observation, though, that most European monarchies that turned into republics or dictatorships in the 20th century did so after losing a major war. Monarchist countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the UK ... that either stayed out of the war mess or ended up on the winning side were more likely to keep their monarchy. Prior to the military conflagrations that started in 1914, vast majority of Europeans lived in monarchies, even though the democratization and personal emancipation process was well underway. The only republican countries in Europe at the outbreak of WWI were France, Switzerland and (very recently) Portugal. Well, and San Marino, yes.
        danans 4y ago
        > Monarchist countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the UK ... that either stayed out of the war mess or ended up on the winning side were more likely to keep their monarchy. If I'm not mistaken, those are also countries that had already significantly diminished the actual power of their monarchs prior to WWI. The UK in particular arguably started that process centuries earlier with Magna Carta. On the other hand, places where the monarch retained the most power, like Russia, saw their monarchs assassinated pretty early in the industrial period.
        karencarits 4y ago
        Since Norway became independent from Sweden as late as 1905, they voted on whether the country should be a monarchy or not that year (80% voted for monarchy). But as you say, the process of limiting the power of the Swedish king was quite important during the 1800's. Today, 80% are still supporting monarchy [1], also among the young [2] [1] https://www.nrk.no/norge/8-av-10-vil-beholde-kongehuset_-storst-oppslutning-blant-de-unge-1.13383378 https://www.nrk.no/norge/8-av-10-vil-beholde-kongehuset_-sto... [2] https://www.nrk.no/norge/3-av-4-unge-stottar-opp-om-monarkiet-1.15807716 https://www.nrk.no/norge/3-av-4-unge-stottar-opp-om-monarkie...
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - pasabagi 4y ago
    Does he go on to discuss Hindenburg? The problem for his argument, obviously, is that Hindenburg was the president of the Wiemar republic for the ten or so years that were the meat of the Nazi's rise to power, and he was far more of a hero to the 'strong elements' (far right / conservatives) than the monarchy ever were. (Obviously, there's a second problem, which is that it's unclear to me if a lack of respect for 'democratic and Parliamentary processes' was the problem with the Nazis. They were voted in, and elections were suspended during wartime, which is normal in a democracy, and were by all accounts very popular throughout the war and after[0]. They also did not substantially alter or suspend the constitution: rather, they used emergency provisions and broadly interpreted resources that were already there). [0]: Notably, many of the laws they authored, many of the companies and people they elevated or created, went on to successful post-war careers.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  The royal warrant system in the UK was very successful at promoting national business and culture, and I remember looking into tracking down some of these other european royals to stand up something similar for craftsmanship. The other use is they have convening power, where if they call, people answer, and toward peace and creating value, that's a huge benefit. That convening role has been taken up somewhat by celebrities, but celebrities don't offer dignity to people the same way nobility can. I can't defend the behaviour of any of them, but there is value in the roles they occupy. The point of nobility is to be able to take risks for principles, and having royals around provides a basis for that. Another is what can only be described as our modern managerialists seem to offer everything to people except dignity, and royals can wield that. I'm all for republics when you can keep them, but I think setting royals up as symbols just to militate against is a bit coarse. They can provide a source of stability and continuity, legitimate convening power, and dignity for people who have earned recognition. Having nobles and royals around is more useful than I think most people realize.
- speeder 4y ago
  I am from Brazil... The monarchs here been very useful: 1. Pedro I declared our independence, and later helped Portugal with some crap and became known there as Pedro the Liberator. 2. Pedro II believed in technology, half of all railways in Brazil was built during his reign, he installed the second telephone in the world in Brazil (the first was obviously, Graham Bell`s one), built a research centre in the same place that produced awesome results (it is not heavily celebrated as launching rockets but most of the food production from Brazil, including exported things, are stuff developed by them at some point) and heavily defended that the education level should rise as whole. Also he, ironically, strengthened a lot Brazillian democracy, he himself believed monarchy to be useless and left basically voluntarily. Brazil immediately after the coup derailed, the first republic was basically a crappy military dictatorship disguised as republic, it ended with another guy stealing the "throne" and becoming dictator himself, then a period of actual republic voting but with lots of instability and flirting with both fascists and communists, then another dictatorship, and now we have a republic where there were more failed to finish the rule than successes (1 president died, before taking power even, 2 were deposed, and only 2 actually got elected and finished their time in power) The reason monarhy works, in principle, is because the monarch has to think long term, he can't fuck up the country or his heirs will be screwed. Of course there are always someone that go off rails but this apply to any system of government. The advantage of democracy, in theory, is that there is less violence to choose who is the next ruler... That said our current president was stabbed during elections, a former president was in prison for a while, and politicians here have a knack of having very weird deaths in inopportune moments... EDIT: I realized I should explain why Pedro I became Pedro the Liberator: Portugal was basically conquered by someone wanting to return Portugal to absolute rule, with the monarch having all the power. Pedro I despite starting with a heavy disvantage managed to free Portugal from the absolutists and put in power a Liberal government.
  - diegoholiveira 4y ago
    > The advantage of democracy, in theory, is that there is less violence to choose who is the next ruler... That said our current president was stabbed during elections, a former president was in prison for a while, and politicians here have a knack of having very weird deaths in inopportune moments... I think you wanna say “the advantage of a republic” because a monarchy doesn’t mean lack of democracy. Many europeans countries are a monarchy and a democracy. Monarchy and Republic are one thing. Democracy and Dictatorship is another thing. Btw, great explanation about Dom Pedro II, many scholars call him “the magnanimous” and one of the best imperator of the modern times.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  In a world where one can be "famous for being famous", where pretenders to titles and thrones can spend half a century pursuing Diplomacy as a semi-professional hobby, and where high-ranking government officials are often out of office within a few years, well-prepared pretenders can occasionally prove quite useful. And when they're not needed - it's not like they're being paid anything, to keep waiting in the wings.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  You may want to remember the moment when the King of Spain successfully preserved the democracy of the country by shutting down a military coup just 40 years ago. "[...]the King of Spain appeared live on television, wearing the uniform of the Captain General of the Armed Forces (Capitán General de los Ejércitos), the highest Spanish military rank, to oppose the coup and its instigators, defend the Spanish Constitution and disavow the authority of Milans del Bosch. He declared: I address the Spanish people with brevity and concision: In the face of these exceptional circumstances, I ask for your serenity and trust, and I hereby inform you that I have given the Captains General of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force the following order: Given the events taking place in the Palace of Congress, and to avoid any possible confusion, I hereby confirm that I have ordered the Civil Authorities and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take any and all necessary measures to uphold constitutional order within the limits of the law. Should any measure of a military nature need to be taken, it must be approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Crown, symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, will not tolerate, in any degree whatsoever, the actions or behavior of anyone attempting, through use of force, to interrupt the democratic process of the Constitution, which the Spanish People approved by vote in referendum. From that moment on, the coup was understood to be a failure[...]" Monarchs still have the same function they always had. The represent a direct connection between the nation and the people, and in times of crisis they can stabilize the nation or put an end to political brinkmanship, even if they only hold symbolic functions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat_attempt#Juan_Carlos's_repudiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hulitu 4y ago
    And before that ? When Franco was in power ? What did he do ?
    - evgen 4y ago
      The failed coup attempt was in 1981. Franco died in '75. Is history really this hard for some people?
- usrn 4y ago
  I feel like people are about to learn a "Chesterton's fence" lesson on national scales.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Comments like this irritate me to no end. The OP hand waves away centuries of good, bad and indifferent history, in many countries, with a single pithy comment, and people act like that's insightful. It's barely even worth acknowledging. Don't encourage sassy reddit one liners.
  - verisimi 4y ago
    I, the OP, understand why you could be irritated. In fairness to myself, as someone who holds to individual sovereign autonomy as the only morally acceptable governing principle, I was being consistent! I don't accept the assumed right of government or of kings to rule over another, or me specifically. Our deferral to people we are taught are our betters, whose pronouncements we unreflectively accept as akin to the word of God, has always been the problem. The solution is individual autonomy. You may disagree with my view of course, but my one line 'sassy' comment was earnest and in keeping with my position!
    - GlassKingdom 4y ago
      There are many low-quality populist websites which will be more receptive to your cringe one-liners. Someone already mentioned the R word, also suggest you try T.
- dc-programmer 4y ago
  I don’t know if they offered nothing. But European monarchism is a government structure situated in the past. It arose out of the material conditions and culture of a certain place and time, that no longer exist. Further, it’s ideological justification, the Mandate of Heaven, would be strongly contested by contemporary people. So I don’t think it’s rational to transpose the historical benefits or flaws (if it’s even possible to disentangle the causal relationship between government structure and societal outcomes) into the political discourse and assume they would remain the same. One salient massive societal change has been the de-mystification of the aristocracy due to increased transparency. Instead of reverence, commoners view these people with contempt or even pity. Speaking generally, I think way too much emphasis is being placed on the importance of government structure on outcomes. I understand why programmer types would be drawn to this analysis. But there are more salient dimensions: societal trust, peoples sense of stake in outcomes, the integrity of institutions, and material conditions.
- gumby 4y ago
  > They had nothing to offer in previous centuries... Are you kidding? They had the tremendous value of "do what I say or I will draw this very long knife and push it into you." They literally offered the gift of life.
kingcharles 4y ago
https://archive.ph/20220418100835/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/leka-ii-crown-prince-albania-europe-monarchy/629368/ https://archive.ph/20220418100835/https://www.theatlantic.co...
gwern 4y ago
"what do the ex-royals have to offer Europe?" tldr: nothing, for the most part, with the exception of a long profile in the middle of the Albanian pretender, which discusses his argument that Albania is still so impoverished and shattered by the legacy of Communism that some sort of constitutional monarchy would help repair it and enable it to recover and reach its potential. That part is interesting.
dc-programmer 4y ago
Friends don’t let friends get into neo-monarchism
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
goblinux 4y ago
highly recommend Noble Blood podcast if you like this kind of stuff. totally changed my views on history. the narrator does a great job of showing that people are, and always have been, people - noble or not. part of the reason so many nobles died in the past is that people then didn't know what to do with ex-nobles either https://noblebloodtales.com/ https://noblebloodtales.com/
madaxe_again 4y ago
Small correction to the article - Alexander Karađorđević is not crown Prince of Serbia, but of Yugoslavia. I went to school with his sons, we were in the same house, same year - they went by “Prince” rather than Karađorđević - quite a few kids had fictitious surnames to avoid attention. They were regular and likeable dudes, liked skating, cars, hip-hop, bad 80’s movies, games. Nobody cared that they were princes, or treated them differently, as it wasn’t all that unusual at the school, and typically, the higher your rank, the less airs and graces and nobbery you bothered with. Me, I’m a baronet - not that I ever use the title, or even tell anyone (these days - as a kid rubbing shoulders with outranking aristos it mattered far more to me) - I’ve grown to think the whole thing bloody stupid, as my politics careened wildly off to the left after a tumultuous start to adulthood - and as I realised I really didn’t want all the perceived responsibilities and expectations of an aristo - there are only so many balls and parties and royal enclosures you can go to before you’re sick to the eye teeth of it. I guess the main thing that I saw among those heirs who were expected to actually take a throne, or were the primogeniture of a non-ruling family, was an overwhelming sense of obligation, the anticipation of a life run on rails, the desire to live absolutely wild here and now because later is a gilded cage. It’s hard to be an isolated and aloof aristo in the modern world - nobody is raised in court any more. I can tell you that the millennial heirs of several European thrones are seriously sitting on the fence over whether they’ll take the baton - one, I know, definitely won’t - another probably will, but intends to fundamentally reshape the monarchy.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  As a bona-fide commoner, I'll say that it's been at least a couple of centuries since European royalty has been more than at-will employees of the republics ruling the land. The English went first, poor Charles I was terminated with extreme prejudice when he got ideas. 'Tis a pity, us commoners could use a good monarch to keep the blood-sucking senators in line.
- Biologist123 4y ago
  Thanks for this post. Not standard fare for HN. May I ask - do you ever laugh at the weirdness of it all? That hundreds or even thousands of years ago, a bunch of cut throats and thugs started to give themselves cute names, and - cut to the present - all of the United Kingdom bows and scrapes in deference to their descendants who still sport those made up titles? From the inside - which more or less is your position as a baronet - does this feel more or less peculiar? Do you ever just think, WTF? How did we get to this?
ggm 4y ago
The second HN article in a week in which I can refer to John Steinbeck's work "The Short Reign Of Pippin IV" (1957)

75 points by lordylord 4y ago

mongol 4y ago
Started yesterday to read Churchill's "The Gathering Storm", where he describes the follies of the victors after the first world war: "Wise policy would have crowned and fortified the Weimar Republic with a constitutional sovereign in the form of an infant grandson of the Kaiser, under a Council of Regency. Instead a gaping void was opened in the national life of the German people. All the strong elements, military and feudal, which might have rallied to a constitutional monarchy and for its sake respected and sustained the new democratic and Parliamentary processes were for the time unhinged." I will not quote further but in essence he speculates that in a still young Germany, a monarch could have provided the stability that it came to lack, and which in time lead to the fall of its young democracy. A monarch may not be the right answer always, but sometimes it may very well be.
- yywwbbn 4y ago
  Having a king didn’t help Italy too much. However Churchill probably had a point conservatives and monarchists weren’t really ever wholeheartedly committed to the survival of the Weimar republic. They might not had been as keen to undermine at every opportunity had it been ruled by a monarch. Then again , the nazis might just have turned the emperor into an impotent figurehead (as happened in Japan and Italy).
  - danans 4y ago
    > Then again , the nazis might just have turned the emperor into an impotent figurehead (as happened in Japan and Italy). I bet that is exactly would have happened. The reality is that the advance of science and technology and general literacy was quickly eroding the traditional notion of the monarch having the consent of God or heaven. By the turn of the 20th century this was almost complete, and largely irreversible. From that point on, the only value left in the monarch in industrialized societies was as a symbol of a national ethnic identity for societies that defined themselves in those terms. Today, only the most extreme religious movements around the world see a return to monarchical society as a goal. Even the neo-fascists would prefer a dictator drawn from their ilk, not a king.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      There is an observation, though, that most European monarchies that turned into republics or dictatorships in the 20th century did so after losing a major war. Monarchist countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the UK ... that either stayed out of the war mess or ended up on the winning side were more likely to keep their monarchy. Prior to the military conflagrations that started in 1914, vast majority of Europeans lived in monarchies, even though the democratization and personal emancipation process was well underway. The only republican countries in Europe at the outbreak of WWI were France, Switzerland and (very recently) Portugal. Well, and San Marino, yes.
      - danans 4y ago
        > Monarchist countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the UK ... that either stayed out of the war mess or ended up on the winning side were more likely to keep their monarchy. If I'm not mistaken, those are also countries that had already significantly diminished the actual power of their monarchs prior to WWI. The UK in particular arguably started that process centuries earlier with Magna Carta. On the other hand, places where the monarch retained the most power, like Russia, saw their monarchs assassinated pretty early in the industrial period.
        karencarits 4y ago
        Since Norway became independent from Sweden as late as 1905, they voted on whether the country should be a monarchy or not that year (80% voted for monarchy). But as you say, the process of limiting the power of the Swedish king was quite important during the 1800's. Today, 80% are still supporting monarchy [1], also among the young [2] [1] https://www.nrk.no/norge/8-av-10-vil-beholde-kongehuset_-storst-oppslutning-blant-de-unge-1.13383378 https://www.nrk.no/norge/8-av-10-vil-beholde-kongehuset_-sto... [2] https://www.nrk.no/norge/3-av-4-unge-stottar-opp-om-monarkiet-1.15807716 https://www.nrk.no/norge/3-av-4-unge-stottar-opp-om-monarkie...
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pasabagi 4y ago
  Does he go on to discuss Hindenburg? The problem for his argument, obviously, is that Hindenburg was the president of the Wiemar republic for the ten or so years that were the meat of the Nazi's rise to power, and he was far more of a hero to the 'strong elements' (far right / conservatives) than the monarchy ever were. (Obviously, there's a second problem, which is that it's unclear to me if a lack of respect for 'democratic and Parliamentary processes' was the problem with the Nazis. They were voted in, and elections were suspended during wartime, which is normal in a democracy, and were by all accounts very popular throughout the war and after[0]. They also did not substantially alter or suspend the constitution: rather, they used emergency provisions and broadly interpreted resources that were already there). [0]: Notably, many of the laws they authored, many of the companies and people they elevated or created, went on to successful post-war careers.
motohagiography 4y ago
The royal warrant system in the UK was very successful at promoting national business and culture, and I remember looking into tracking down some of these other european royals to stand up something similar for craftsmanship. The other use is they have convening power, where if they call, people answer, and toward peace and creating value, that's a huge benefit. That convening role has been taken up somewhat by celebrities, but celebrities don't offer dignity to people the same way nobility can. I can't defend the behaviour of any of them, but there is value in the roles they occupy. The point of nobility is to be able to take risks for principles, and having royals around provides a basis for that. Another is what can only be described as our modern managerialists seem to offer everything to people except dignity, and royals can wield that. I'm all for republics when you can keep them, but I think setting royals up as symbols just to militate against is a bit coarse. They can provide a source of stability and continuity, legitimate convening power, and dignity for people who have earned recognition. Having nobles and royals around is more useful than I think most people realize.
speeder 4y ago
I am from Brazil... The monarchs here been very useful: 1. Pedro I declared our independence, and later helped Portugal with some crap and became known there as Pedro the Liberator. 2. Pedro II believed in technology, half of all railways in Brazil was built during his reign, he installed the second telephone in the world in Brazil (the first was obviously, Graham Bell`s one), built a research centre in the same place that produced awesome results (it is not heavily celebrated as launching rockets but most of the food production from Brazil, including exported things, are stuff developed by them at some point) and heavily defended that the education level should rise as whole. Also he, ironically, strengthened a lot Brazillian democracy, he himself believed monarchy to be useless and left basically voluntarily. Brazil immediately after the coup derailed, the first republic was basically a crappy military dictatorship disguised as republic, it ended with another guy stealing the "throne" and becoming dictator himself, then a period of actual republic voting but with lots of instability and flirting with both fascists and communists, then another dictatorship, and now we have a republic where there were more failed to finish the rule than successes (1 president died, before taking power even, 2 were deposed, and only 2 actually got elected and finished their time in power) The reason monarhy works, in principle, is because the monarch has to think long term, he can't fuck up the country or his heirs will be screwed. Of course there are always someone that go off rails but this apply to any system of government. The advantage of democracy, in theory, is that there is less violence to choose who is the next ruler... That said our current president was stabbed during elections, a former president was in prison for a while, and politicians here have a knack of having very weird deaths in inopportune moments... EDIT: I realized I should explain why Pedro I became Pedro the Liberator: Portugal was basically conquered by someone wanting to return Portugal to absolute rule, with the monarch having all the power. Pedro I despite starting with a heavy disvantage managed to free Portugal from the absolutists and put in power a Liberal government.
- diegoholiveira 4y ago
  > The advantage of democracy, in theory, is that there is less violence to choose who is the next ruler... That said our current president was stabbed during elections, a former president was in prison for a while, and politicians here have a knack of having very weird deaths in inopportune moments... I think you wanna say “the advantage of a republic” because a monarchy doesn’t mean lack of democracy. Many europeans countries are a monarchy and a democracy. Monarchy and Republic are one thing. Democracy and Dictatorship is another thing. Btw, great explanation about Dom Pedro II, many scholars call him “the magnanimous” and one of the best imperator of the modern times.
bell-cot 4y ago
In a world where one can be "famous for being famous", where pretenders to titles and thrones can spend half a century pursuing Diplomacy as a semi-professional hobby, and where high-ranking government officials are often out of office within a few years, well-prepared pretenders can occasionally prove quite useful. And when they're not needed - it's not like they're being paid anything, to keep waiting in the wings.
Barrin92 4y ago
You may want to remember the moment when the King of Spain successfully preserved the democracy of the country by shutting down a military coup just 40 years ago. "[...]the King of Spain appeared live on television, wearing the uniform of the Captain General of the Armed Forces (Capitán General de los Ejércitos), the highest Spanish military rank, to oppose the coup and its instigators, defend the Spanish Constitution and disavow the authority of Milans del Bosch. He declared: I address the Spanish people with brevity and concision: In the face of these exceptional circumstances, I ask for your serenity and trust, and I hereby inform you that I have given the Captains General of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force the following order: Given the events taking place in the Palace of Congress, and to avoid any possible confusion, I hereby confirm that I have ordered the Civil Authorities and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take any and all necessary measures to uphold constitutional order within the limits of the law. Should any measure of a military nature need to be taken, it must be approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Crown, symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, will not tolerate, in any degree whatsoever, the actions or behavior of anyone attempting, through use of force, to interrupt the democratic process of the Constitution, which the Spanish People approved by vote in referendum. From that moment on, the coup was understood to be a failure[...]" Monarchs still have the same function they always had. The represent a direct connection between the nation and the people, and in times of crisis they can stabilize the nation or put an end to political brinkmanship, even if they only hold symbolic functions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat_attempt#Juan_Carlos's_repudiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hulitu 4y ago
  And before that ? When Franco was in power ? What did he do ?
  - evgen 4y ago
    The failed coup attempt was in 1981. Franco died in '75. Is history really this hard for some people?
usrn 4y ago
I feel like people are about to learn a "Chesterton's fence" lesson on national scales.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Comments like this irritate me to no end. The OP hand waves away centuries of good, bad and indifferent history, in many countries, with a single pithy comment, and people act like that's insightful. It's barely even worth acknowledging. Don't encourage sassy reddit one liners.
- verisimi 4y ago
  I, the OP, understand why you could be irritated. In fairness to myself, as someone who holds to individual sovereign autonomy as the only morally acceptable governing principle, I was being consistent! I don't accept the assumed right of government or of kings to rule over another, or me specifically. Our deferral to people we are taught are our betters, whose pronouncements we unreflectively accept as akin to the word of God, has always been the problem. The solution is individual autonomy. You may disagree with my view of course, but my one line 'sassy' comment was earnest and in keeping with my position!
  - GlassKingdom 4y ago
    There are many low-quality populist websites which will be more receptive to your cringe one-liners. Someone already mentioned the R word, also suggest you try T.
dc-programmer 4y ago
I don’t know if they offered nothing. But European monarchism is a government structure situated in the past. It arose out of the material conditions and culture of a certain place and time, that no longer exist. Further, it’s ideological justification, the Mandate of Heaven, would be strongly contested by contemporary people. So I don’t think it’s rational to transpose the historical benefits or flaws (if it’s even possible to disentangle the causal relationship between government structure and societal outcomes) into the political discourse and assume they would remain the same. One salient massive societal change has been the de-mystification of the aristocracy due to increased transparency. Instead of reverence, commoners view these people with contempt or even pity. Speaking generally, I think way too much emphasis is being placed on the importance of government structure on outcomes. I understand why programmer types would be drawn to this analysis. But there are more salient dimensions: societal trust, peoples sense of stake in outcomes, the integrity of institutions, and material conditions.
gumby 4y ago
> They had nothing to offer in previous centuries... Are you kidding? They had the tremendous value of "do what I say or I will draw this very long knife and push it into you." They literally offered the gift of life.

https://archive.ph/20220418100835/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/leka-ii-crown-prince-albania-europe-monarchy/629368/ https://archive.ph/20220418100835/https://www.theatlantic.co...

gwern 4y ago

"what do the ex-royals have to offer Europe?" tldr: nothing, for the most part, with the exception of a long profile in the middle of the Albanian pretender, which discusses his argument that Albania is still so impoverished and shattered by the legacy of Communism that some sort of constitutional monarchy would help repair it and enable it to recover and reach its potential. That part is interesting.

dc-programmer 4y ago

Friends don’t let friends get into neo-monarchism

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

goblinux 4y ago

highly recommend Noble Blood podcast if you like this kind of stuff. totally changed my views on history. the narrator does a great job of showing that people are, and always have been, people - noble or not. part of the reason so many nobles died in the past is that people then didn't know what to do with ex-nobles either https://noblebloodtales.com/ https://noblebloodtales.com/

madaxe_again 4y ago

Small correction to the article - Alexander Karađorđević is not crown Prince of Serbia, but of Yugoslavia. I went to school with his sons, we were in the same house, same year - they went by “Prince” rather than Karađorđević - quite a few kids had fictitious surnames to avoid attention. They were regular and likeable dudes, liked skating, cars, hip-hop, bad 80’s movies, games. Nobody cared that they were princes, or treated them differently, as it wasn’t all that unusual at the school, and typically, the higher your rank, the less airs and graces and nobbery you bothered with. Me, I’m a baronet - not that I ever use the title, or even tell anyone (these days - as a kid rubbing shoulders with outranking aristos it mattered far more to me) - I’ve grown to think the whole thing bloody stupid, as my politics careened wildly off to the left after a tumultuous start to adulthood - and as I realised I really didn’t want all the perceived responsibilities and expectations of an aristo - there are only so many balls and parties and royal enclosures you can go to before you’re sick to the eye teeth of it. I guess the main thing that I saw among those heirs who were expected to actually take a throne, or were the primogeniture of a non-ruling family, was an overwhelming sense of obligation, the anticipation of a life run on rails, the desire to live absolutely wild here and now because later is a gilded cage. It’s hard to be an isolated and aloof aristo in the modern world - nobody is raised in court any more. I can tell you that the millennial heirs of several European thrones are seriously sitting on the fence over whether they’ll take the baton - one, I know, definitely won’t - another probably will, but intends to fundamentally reshape the monarchy.

B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
As a bona-fide commoner, I'll say that it's been at least a couple of centuries since European royalty has been more than at-will employees of the republics ruling the land. The English went first, poor Charles I was terminated with extreme prejudice when he got ideas. 'Tis a pity, us commoners could use a good monarch to keep the blood-sucking senators in line.
Biologist123 4y ago
Thanks for this post. Not standard fare for HN. May I ask - do you ever laugh at the weirdness of it all? That hundreds or even thousands of years ago, a bunch of cut throats and thugs started to give themselves cute names, and - cut to the present - all of the United Kingdom bows and scrapes in deference to their descendants who still sport those made up titles? From the inside - which more or less is your position as a baronet - does this feel more or less peculiar? Do you ever just think, WTF? How did we get to this?

ggm 4y ago

The second HN article in a week in which I can refer to John Steinbeck's work "The Short Reign Of Pippin IV" (1957)