Europe's museum-piece monarchies
For today's edition, La Stampa ran a follow-up on the Danish queen's abdication and asked me to write a piece about whether Europe's monarchies should be abolished. Of course they should, I said...
When my Asian friends want to offend a European like me, they often accuse our continent of being nothing more than a museum. In one political sense they are right: Europe is home to an astonishing total of eight constitutional monarchies, including of course my own country, Britain, and all of them belong in a museum.
In fact, when a member of one of those royal families, especially the Hollywood-scale one in London, gets asked what their royal life is like they will typically complain, of course in a carefully polite way, that it may look luxurious but actually it is like being an object in a museum, with no independent life apart from being looked at, envied and sometimes laughed at. The Netflix series The Crown was for the British royals a kind of virtual reality tour of their museum.
The serious issue is that none of Europe’s eight monarchies any longer has any true political or constitutional role beyond merely being decorative. In 2008 even the Grand Duke of Luxembourg lost his power to assent to laws made by the Duchy’s Parliament: like other monarchs, including King Charles, he is no more than a rubber stamp. In the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Norway monarchs who may once have played a role in government formation now have to watch it on TV like the rest of us.
Some might say that this doesn’t matter. Monarchs are part of these eight countries’ histories, they remind us of some past glories, and like the historic palaces they typically live in they are just nice to have around. To that one can reply that the Palace of Versailles remains beautiful, reminds the French of past glories and is still one of Europe’s most popular tourist attractions more than two centuries after French monarchs met the revolutionary guillotines.
In Britain’s case, there is a political price to pay for the fact that the country has not yet admitted that it is really a republic. This is that the disappearance of the monarch’s political power has not been compensated for by the proper checks and balances that could be vested in an elected president like Italy’s and a constitutional court, with the result that rogue prime ministers such as Boris Johnson can make up their own rules.
In all the monarchies there is also a cost to the public finances. In Britain, which has the largest royal family in Europe, that cost is officially about £100 million per year but is actually much higher as the institution is subsidised by its extensive ownership of land and property which if it were abolished would be owned by the State and probably sold off.
It is not surprising that the late Queen Elizabeth was able to finance from her private wealth the reported US$16 million settlement paid two years ago by her son, Prince Andrew, to the American woman he was sued by as part of the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking and abuse saga. That wealth is, in reality, state wealth, since no modern royal family has done any more to earn it than simply by being born into their monarchical museum.
The current trend for abdication, which was arguably begun by Europe’s other quasi-monarchy, the Vatican, when Pope Benedict abdicated in 2013, may be doing us a favour by confirming what we already knew: that these occupants of these monarchical positions are not divine but human, and that they can be replaced without anyone noticing that anything has changed.
Japan’s Emperor Akihito, Asia’s last great monarchy, did the same when he abdicated in 2019. Queen Elizabeth chose not to do so, wanting to do her duty right up until her death, and we all admired her for it. But ask any Briton what difference has been made by having King Charles on the throne instead, and they will be hard-pressed to come up with an answer.
Thirty years ago this year, in October 1994 at the height of the drama surrounding Prince Charles and Princess Diana, I shocked the readers of The Economist by calling for the abolition of the British monarchy, using the title “An idea whose time has passed”. If I’d thought of “unfit” at that time, I would have used it. [Note: this is a reference for Italian readers to the “unfit to lead Italy” cover we ran at The Economist on Silvio Berlusconi in 2001.]
The letters we received divided pretty clearly according to age: the older ones thought I should be locked up in the Tower of London, whereas younger readers agreed with me. I still think I was right, and that with 30 more years of all these museum-piece monarchies, it really is time to abolish them all. We can keep the palaces, we just don’t need the human exhibits any more.
Totally agree with abolishing the British monarchy. Your point about its political impotence allowing rogue PMs like Johnson, Truss, Sunak to ride roughshod over British constitutional norms is spot on. As a baby boomer brought up on an endless stream of 'royalty reinforcement' via fawning news coverage and cosplay pageantry I now find the Windsors utterly contemptible in their selective expropriation of the country's assets. What has become particularly apparent these past few years of venal misgovernment is a rising public antipathy toward the monarchy. People have woken up to how utterly complicit the royals have been in allowing the politicians to get away with suppressing freedoms and letting the country run to seed. A much bigger segment of the public no longer accepts uncritically the idea that the monarchy is 'worth' keeping and is due our deference. On the contrary one senses a deep undercurrent of republican sentiment in the UK that I have never felt in the past 60 years. King Charles should ask himself whether the public are awed by - or rather feeling trolled by - his constant posing for portrait photos draped in all the glitter and gewgaws of a state office past its sell by date.
If you abolish the monarchy who or what will you put in its place?
David Attenborough won't be around for ever.