This article is offered as a reply to the criticisms of monarchy which appeared in the previous issue of The Open Society, one of them by my friend Max Wallace. It will, I hope, be understood as my contribution to the debate among friends and colleagues – one of the key indicators of an open society. This is purely my personal opinion and I am more than happy to acknowledge it is probably a minority view.

The first thing that needs to be said is how peripheral this issue is. Worrying about the merits of constitutional monarchy is much like reshuffling the chairs on the Titanic

as we overlook the truly existential threats facing us: AI and the climate emergency. It is far from clear that spending the time on this issue is the best we could be doing right at the moment, being more likely to generate division at a time when a feeling of common ground in the face of a shared threat to us all is so desperately needed.

The second thing to make clear is that this article is not going to defend monarchy as a system of government. Absolute monarchies – I am thinking of Tonga, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland (or Eswatini as the monarch there has decreed it is now to be known as) – have no place in a civilised political culture. Open society and absolute monarchy are mutually exclusive. And even constitutional monarchies improperly arranged, like Thailand and Morocco, are not being defended here.

What is being defended is the constitutional monarchy found in the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations. Has anyone noticed that these are repeatedly at the top of lists of being the least corrupt, most prosperous, most open societies on the planet? I am not saying that constitutional monarchs are directly responsible for the relatively happy state of these nations when compared with other forms of governance. But I am prepared to say that it is an integral part of the happy mix. I am generally going to restrict my argument to the British crown as it is the one I am most familiar with and because it is the most relevant to the New Zealand experience of monarchy.

Opponents of monarchy often revolve around these main criticisms:

• the head of state should be elected;
• the monarchy presents a threat of absolute power;
• the monarchy represents useless privilege;
• the monarchy is irrelevant to people’s lives.

We will look at these very briefly in turn.

The head of state should be elected

This argument would have been relevant four hundred years ago, but misses the point today. Constitutional monarchs aren’t delegates for the people; they represent the people, in ceremonial terms, and act as a check on the branch of government that is run by delegates of the people. Let us remember that Hitler, Putin and Erdogan were all elected to office. Voting is no guarantee either of a fairer system or better-quality leaders. The primary need for name-recognition would be likely to bias any presidential contest in a republic to already well-known figures, with little regard to their worthiness for office. If Richie McCaw stood for president, to take one example, he would have a more than average chance of victory. And he may do a good job, but what guarantee would there be? Rule by celebrities is not an obviously superior system to a constitutional monarchy. It is true that monarchs are not elected to office. That is part of their value, to act as restraint on the legislative branch of government, which is elected. But in well-organised constitutional monarchies, they have a wealth of advisors to help them negotiate the minefields of their role. And they face constant, often brutal, media scrutiny.
 
The widespread decline in voter turnout around the more prosperous countries of the West suggests that voting is no longer seen as a panacea. Changes in technology may well render voting antediluvian, with direct democracy coming to our phones. And several think-tanks, like the Sortition Foundation, are looking at variations of focus groups as a better way to gauge public opinion in conditions less easily manipulated and rigged.

The monarchy presents a threat of absolute power

While watching the coronation ceremony, with its talk of the Protestant succession and other rhetoric from past ages, it is tempting to see the spectre of absolute power. But that ignores the long history of how Britain became a constitutional monarchy in the first place. A bloody civil war was fought in the seventeenth century over these principles. And within a short space of time after beheading the king Oliver Cromwell was dubbed Lord Protector, king in all but name. With the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 Britain established what we have today, a constitutional monarchy, able to change and adapt thanks to the flexibility of an unwritten constitution. Written constitutions only empower lawyers, as the United States has shown. What Britain has now is a ceremony full of glamour from past ages couched in that language. Nobody, apart from some republicans, takes the language seriously. To worry about the absolute power of Charles III is to fight yesterday’s battles while ignoring the far more real danger of absolute power exercised, or sought, by Xi, Putin, Modi, Erdogan and Orban among many others.
 
Related to this is the objection of the British monarch being at the same time head of the Church of England. There is no formal separation of church and state in Britain, while there is in the United States, which is of course a republic. But, having lived in both countries, I am much freer to express my atheism in Britain than in the United States. Religion is languishing, a marginal irrelevance, in all the north European constitutional monarchies, but is in rude, even dangerous, health in the republic where church and state are supposed to be separated. Go figure.

The monarchy represents useless privilege

Critics of the monarchy like to wax lyrical about the disparities of wealth and their lives of lazy opulence. Not infrequently the claims come across as little more than casual insults. Recently a prominent English republican accused Princess Anne of being a ‘layabout’, for attending only 214 charity engagements in 2022. For accusations like this to be effective, the critic would need to have a more impressive record himself, but that information was not shared. Another popular line of attack is against royals misbehaving, but it shouldn’t need too long an investigation of the selfish and scandalous lives of the super-rich and the celebrities to see that those sorts of misdeeds are not the exclusive preserve of monarchy. No system of government is free from human stupidity, greed and selfishness. And due to the media focus, monarchies are more motivated to bring their black sheep to heel. The super-rich and the celebrities have powerful lawyers and privacy legislation to protect them which is not available to royal families. Constitutional monarchs live in a gilded cage in a way few of the super-rich, or republican critics, would put up with. Abolition of monarchy does not get rid of useless privilege, it only makes it harder, meaner and more sheltered from public scrutiny.

The monarchy is irrelevant to people’s lives

This is the most emotive and subjective of the arguments against constitutional monarchy and the one most prone to virtue-signalling. Viewing numbers hit record highs for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth and many thousands of people queued for hours, around the clock, to walk past her casket in Westminster Hall. Viewing figures and crowd numbers for the coronation of Charles III were not as high but still very significant. The person of the queen generated a nationwide feeling of coming together and remembering what values we share. And, by and large, that shared feeling has now transferred to the new king. For the argument that monarchy is irrelevant to people’s lives, all these people must be wrong or deluded in some way. The people who fawn at royals must be fools, or unenlightened. But such a claim smacks of both elitism and hypocrisy. Condescension in the name of democracy is, to say the least of it, inconsistent.
 
What people recognise, which the critics do not, is that national identity is not a rational construct. A shared history is a powerful emotional bond, a social glue that keeps societies together when they may be divided by other issues. Yes, that history includes errors, follies and crimes. What shared history does not? But to ditch a system that works because of past offences or hopes for a better future under a system allegedly free from error is to misunderstand human nature.
 
Also overlooked is the good that contemporary constitutional monarchs do. Before he became king, Charles had a forty-year career as an environmental Cassandra that only recently has been given the recognition it deserves. Prince William’s sponsorship of the Earthshot Awards is a prime example of what a high media profile and name-recognition can achieve. William and Harry have both been active on mental health issues and support for veterans. Charities across Britain acknowledge Princess Anne’s work as crucial to their ability to function effectively. Princess Diana’s campaign against land-mines had a significant impact. It’s not that these things wouldn’t happen without monarchy, but it is fair to claim that they’re having more impact because of the royal links. It should also be noted that the monarch is the titular head of the Commonwealth. In a world as fractured as ours, any community of nations is a good thing. That’s why countries like Mozambique and Cameroon, neither of which were part of the British Empire, have joined the Commonwealth. They see its value even if people in more privileged nations do not.

The New Zealand situation

When thinking of these arguments in a specifically New Zealand situation, things change somewhat. New Zealand will probably ditch the monarch as head of state at some time in the not-too-distant future. But it won’t necessarily all be sweetness and light. First is the threat to the constitutional status of the Treaty of Waitangi if one signatory is terminated. That is probably manageable constitutionally, but would be fraught with political risks. Abolition of the monarchy would also put into sharp focus the status of the Maori king. And who would want to take that issue on, but the far right? Ditching the monarchy, I fear, will bring about some very ugly and divisive politics.

At the heart of that ugly divisiveness is likely to be the nebulous question of identity. Some people subscribe to the notion that adherence to the British monarchy offends New Zealand’s identity as a sovereign nation. But this only works as a zero-sum notion which would require the identity of a New Zealander to be expressed in opposition to or, as seen all too often, while expressing contempt for, the British heritage of the country. Of course colonialism is wrong, but as more recent scholarship is arriving at (I have people like Nigel Biggar in mind), something being wrong in principle, as colonialism is, does not preclude good things happening in its name or as an unintended consequence. The idea that ‘Britain was the colonial power, therefore Britain is bad and wrong’ is simplistic and one-dimensional. We’re getting used to hyphenated identity in some contexts but not in others. If one can have a shared identity of one’s Maori whakapapa and, say, Scottish ancestry, why can one not also be a pakeha New Zealander with a British (or Welsh, English, Irish, whatever) ancestry? It is dangerous and paranoid to shoe-horn national identity into zero-sum silos of us-versus-them.

Conclusion

The error behind so much republican thinking is their assumption that the changes in governance will proceed easily and well. Republicans so often succumb to the best-case fallacy, which says: this reform will certainly be an improvement on the current system, presenting no possibility of unintended consequences, so no objections to it need be taken seriously. In this way, only the best-case scenario is allowed for in the understanding of how the current system will be replaced. Revolutionaries and dreamers have fallen foul of the best-case fallacy for centuries, and millions of people have suffered as a result. Replacing a system that works with one that might work (and just as easily might not, and either way will produce unintended consequences) falls foul of the best-case fallacy.

To finish, then, I claim that constitutional monarchy, absurd as much of it is, generally works in preserving continuity and stability in societies, provides a focus for national identity and offers a means by which good causes can be promoted in a way that is not divisive. This contributes materially to the prosperity and relative cohesion of the constitutional monarchies in the northwest corner of Europe that are the envy of the world. In the best case, a republic might do many of the same things. But without a shared history, and given the fair chance of unintended consequences skewing the final result to something less satisfactory, the odds are against it. We should have learned by now that not everything turns out for the best.