Prime Minister ’15: Phase One (Nominations)

Burt Likko in reply to North says:

Perhaps not a surprise; a dictator’s government is generally more likely to be efficient and therefore effective at implementing policies than its more republican counterpart. But efficiency does not bestow legitimacy.

A nation like the UK gets legitimacy in its government to the degree that the role of the monarch in actual politics is minimized. The Queen is carefully apolitical and discharges her role in the government in a ministerial manner, which is only minimally acceptable in my estimation.

Further, I think you’re viewing history through a skewed lens, one focused on the powerful and wealthy British Empire, which seems to ignore that republican governments throughout history have had many impressive success stories. What non-British constitutional monarchies do you point to as success stories? I can point to many examples of nations that have dispensed with the notion of hereditary rule and enjoyed substantial success at disseminating their culture, durable territorial expansion, military strength, and economic wealth.

The Greeks as a culture did pretty well, I should think, during their democratic phase and the Romans did quite well during their republican phase, although admittedly it did not survive the growing pains upon acquisition of a politically unified, if federalized, empire. Carthage was governed in a republican fashion, too, and lasted for centuries and began forging their own transmediterranean empire until the Romans swallowed them up bit by bit.

The oldest republican government in the world, San Marino, has over seventeen hundred years of continuous rule patterned after the style of the Roman republic. Today it is, per capita, one of the wealthiest, most peaceful and crime-free societies on the globe. (Admittedly, it hasn’t done so well from a territorial point of view, having been content throughout its history to hold one incredibly rugged mountain and its hinterlands as the full extent of its physical footprint. But then again, that may be an element of its economic success.)

Iceland’s democratic form of government has stood for a thousand years; to the extent it has been under the political control of Norway or Denmark, such control has been nominal indeed. There has never been, to my knowledge, a king of just Iceland.

Venice’s republic was significantly oligarchic and non-democratic but it stood for over a thousand years until it was conquered from outside outright by the Corsican corporal; its real weakness was not its form of government but its reliance on trade from the East as its principal source of money — the opening of circumafrican navigation was its ultimate doom but even so it took three hundred years after that before it grew so week that it could be conquered from without.

As nation-states go, the United States of America has been a spectacular success in a historically brief period of time, using any index of success one might plausibly identify.

France has done rather better for itself as a republic than it did when it had a king or an emperor, IMO: under Napoleon there was a brief period of great military success followed by great military failure.

Brazil cast off its monarch and has been better off for it. So too with Mexico. Yes, both nations have had more than their fair share of problems. But they’ve been better off with elected than appointed or hereditary heads of state.

Russia overthrew its Tsar and ascended to the status of global superpower rather than a regional player.

Germany has dispensed with its nobility in every meaningful sense and now stands as the unquestioned first among equals within the EU.

Japan, Korean, and China are all significantly more industrialized, wealthier, and free under non-monarchial governments than they were before; Japan, as with France, enjoyed a brief period of great military success followed by a terrible reversal during its most recent experiments with vesting the hereditary monarchs with actual power.

India, sometimes unified and sometimes not, lost its own nobilities and monarchies after the Europeans came, and after it came to be ruled first by the Company and then by the Empire, won its independence as a republic. And as a parliamentary republic with no monarch since 1950, India has prospered and today stands on the threshold of toe-to-toe equal standing with the likes of Russia, China, France, and the UK as a nuclear power sitting atop a massive and robust economy.

But my objection is not that republican government is “more successful” than monarchial government, though as you can tell, I think there is reason to question that claim. Monarchism in any form is fundamentally illiberal and the United states is at its fundament a liberal nation. (This is small-L, Voltaire-style, classical liberalism of which I write.) Liberalism is, in turn, devoted to the concept that all people are fundamentally equal to one another; no one has a right to rule by accident of birth but rather must demonstrate their abilities to their peers and be selected to hold power, and even then very clearly devoid of any assumption that power — or even ceremonial importance — will be held indefinitely.

I think this model of government and culture has served its adherents admirably well, overall, particularly since it gained intellectual purchase in the European Enlightenment.Report