Peter Hitchens writes:
"He was a Christian, a patriot and a conservative, who thought the end of communism should mean more than a tidal wave of trashy rock music, gambling clubs, value-free sex and drugs."
Quite so.
Mocked as a throwback to Holy Russia, we should have listened to Solzhenitsyn, not least when he opposed the break-up of what had been the Soviet Union. As in Yugoslavia, and as putatively in Belgium (or Spain, or the United Kingdom), we are now seeing that, once begun, such a process need never end, with talk today of an enclave of ethnic Georgians inside Abkhazia declaring independence.
The pseudo-Left is fond of a wildly decontextualised quotation from George Galloway (not without his faults), in which he describes the end of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of his life. But he meant, not the end of Stalinism, but this. Solzhenitsyn was of the same mind. And they are both being proved right.
Whether in Yugoslavia or in the former Soviet Union, the monarchy should have been restored in the early 1990s. Both in Serbia and in Russia, it very well will be in the twenty-teens. Meanwhile, God Save (as He very well might) The King of the Belgians. God Save The King of Spain. And God Save The Queen.
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The Slovenes, Croats and Bosniaks owed a more historic allegiance to the House of Habsburg of than the House of Karageorvic.
ReplyDeleteThe Macedonians did not like them much either. It was a Macedonian nationalist who shot Alexander I Karageorvic in 1934 at Marseilles.
The Karageovics overthrew their relatives in Montenegro as well not pleasing many there.
Remember the House of Karageovic came to power at the beginning of the 20th century after a coup supporting them murdered Alexander I Obrovinic (the king had his hands chopped off, he was shot and then he was thrown off a balcony into the palace courtyard below, the fall causing his eyes to fall out of their sockets!). As you can imagine the new lot were ostracised for this.
By the way, do you think that Albert II father Leopold III should have been tried for being a collaborater and Nazi stooge?
No. As was decided at the time, it would have done more harm than good.
ReplyDeleteIn my lighter moments, I consider the possibility of reuniting Austria, Hungary, the old Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and possibly even the Catholic part of the Ukraine under the Habsburgs. But it is never going to happen, even though the alleged importance of Protestantism to the Czechs is in fact an invention of Czech nationalists who were themselves lapsed Catholics, notably Masaryk himself.
(I am not at all convinced that the Bosniaks ever really had any allegiance to the Habsburgs, or to any other European house or power. They still haven't, in fact. They look to and beyond Turkey, as they always did.)
Restoration of the Karageorvic and Romanov monarchies, with a renewed understanding that monarchies are by definition irreducible to ethnicity or ideology as any basis for the State, would have been vastly preferable to what happened instead. I still think that Serbia and Russia might very well restore their monarchies sooner rather than later, but not, alas, on that basis (at least, not in Serbia).
Whether or not the monarchy survives in Belgium depends on how neocon and how paleocon the Flemish separatists really are. Deep down, someone like Paul Belien will never be able to bring himself to abolish a Catholic monarchy defined in the above terms.
Similar strands also exist among the Basques and the Catalans, whose nationalism is, however pardoxical this might seem today, very much a reaction against the centralising and homogenising tendencies of nineteenth-century secular liberalism, and even a product of the "Fueros" emphasis in the Carlist slogan, "Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey".