Among Europe’s Ex-Royals

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

They also can to the opposite, i.e. actively destabilizing the country, preventing needed reforms, call for coups etc. In difference to politicians you can't as simply remove their authority on misbehavior because royalty is not something you are elected to.

The fundamental flaw of monarchies is that they raise or fall with the character and competency of a single person (or very small group). (This also applies to system where a single person hold a lot of power mostly unchecked, like e.g. a democratically elected president with way to much power).

Anyway the role they still play differs hugely depending on country. In some it's close to none, in some they still have a bit of old money in some they still have some political influence.

In the end Spain 1981 was lucky, lucky in that the King respected the choice of the people which had removed most of his families power from them. If the King instead would have wanted to reestablish royal power things probably would have ended pretty bad.