Dialogue: Monarchy outdated but it can be valuable

IAN MORRISON* suggests New Zealanders shouldn't be in too much of a hurry to ditch the monarchy.

In an age of global terrorism, refugee crises, ethnic strife, environmental degradation and pandemic despair, it takes a certain heroic triviality to start fretting about the monarchy.

But, since Colin James has raised the subject, might I offer a cautious defence of this anachronistic yet curiously resilient institution.

To start with, there are few countries that have enjoyed stable, constitutional, representative government for more than a century.

Offhand, I can think of 12, of which only two (the United States and Switzerland) are republics. The other 10 all have hereditary heads of state, clearly suggesting that, if you value democracy, constitutional monarchy might be your best bet.

The four old Commonwealth monarchies, the three Benelux countries and the three Scandinavian kingdoms don't, of course, just share stable democratic government and a high regard for personal freedom. They have also long enjoyed the benefits of enlightened and humane social reform and, with the exception of Britain, of an unusual degree of social equality.

In other words, they are the kind of countries sensible people like to live in.

Republicans would argue that many other nations have in recent years found their way to democracy and good governance without the help of monarchs.

But most new democracies have yet to prove their staying power. Moreover, one of the most successful democratic transformations of recent decades has taken place in Spain, under the aegis of its restored crown. It's highly doubtful whether Spaniards could have avoided another civil war in the 1970s without King Juan Carlos' skilled and courageous exercise of his constitutional role.

How is it that an inherently undemocratic institution has come to play so effective a role in bolstering democracy?

One reason might be that, under monarchy, the highest branch of the tree can't be reached on the basis of money or power alone.

True, Queen Elizabeth is an extremely wealthy woman, as is Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. But neither owes their position to their wealth.

Another reason is that largely powerless monarchs, often in absurd but colourful costumes, help to cut prosaic but power-hungry elected politicians down to size. That must be good both for the politicians and for the voters who put them there.

And it's also good for politicians to have to deal with someone who, unlike them, is probably not overly consumed with ambition and for whom high office is an inherited trust and not just a career goal. Somehow or other, it raises the tone of the political bear garden.

Paradoxically, monarchy can also help to neutralise the recurring, apparently instinctive, human need to think of politics in dynastic terms.

Republican democracies such as the United States or India are afflicted by dynasticism, as are republican tyrannies such as Syria or North Korea.

Constitutional monarchy, in contrast, performs the neat trick of indulging dynasticism in all its warm fuzzy silliness while keeping real power in the hands of overwhelmingly non-dynastic, elected politicians.

The Crown is primarily to be valued because of its institutional role and not because of the personal attributes or foibles of any particular monarch.

Even so, it's undeniable that Queen Elizabeth has given her people 50 years of exemplary service.

In addition, she has set her mark firmly on the Commonwealth, helping it to develop into a genuinely multi-racial association of free nations, within which New Zealand plays an important role.

How bizarre that this painstaking, dutiful and intelligent woman should have her half century of good work undermined by our brain-dead celebrity culture and by the tawdry soap opera the British media have made out of the marital and emotional problems of some of her family's members.

Few families are completely without such problems but most don't have to spend their lives in the constant glare of prurient and sensationalist publicity.

Of course, it's a double absurdity for New Zealand to have not only a hereditary head of state but a head of state who lives in another country on the other side of the world.

We could, if we wished, easily replace the Queen with a figurehead president, with more or less the same powers as those enjoyed by the Governor-General. What a mind-witheringly boring solution that would be.

Yet the alternative would be a US-style executive presidency but without the checks and balances provided by America's federal structure.

Would it really strengthen our democracy if we travelled down that path?

Meanwhile, what are we to make of Colin James' argument that our royal connection is bad for our branding as a nation? Our status as a constitutional monarchy underlines our membership of the club of affluent, stable democracies. Take that away and a world which knows little about us and cares even less might well start bracketing us with other once-prosperous commodity producers from the Southern Hemisphere, such as Argentina and Uruguay.

How much good would that do our economy?

* Ian Morrison is an Auckland public relations consultant.