Monarchy Versus Nationalism

Monarchies cannot be nationalist in the technical, nineteenth-century sense. Nationalism is a product of the Revolution.

Monarchies suit very local or tribal contexts: pre-Unification Germany or Italy, the Netherlands before and after empire, Luxembourg, pre-imperial Portugal, the Nordic countries, numerous old states of Africa or of the Indian subcontinent, a collection of Pacific islands, a United Arab Emirate, Japan.

Or monarchies suit multinational entities: the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, Canada, Belgium, Spain (and her Empire in its day), Lusotropical Brazil, the Dutch Empire, the Ottomons, the Mughuls, Byzantium, the Tsardom, Yugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, pre-Revolutionary France with her huge populations that did not and could not speak French until the Jacobins Terrorised them into it. Even then, it took well into the twentieth century in many places, and has still not been entirely achieved.

China was and is a fascinating combination of the two, a vast empire but with one massively predominant ethnic group.

The attempts to turn the King of Prussia into the Emperor of Germany and the King of Sardinia (though really of Savoy) into the King of Italy were utterly disastrous, and the supplanting of what had gone before created the gaps that Hitler and Mussolini were therefore able to fill. Look how the ostensibly monarchist Franco never restored the monarchy in his lifetime, nor did the ostensibly Legitimist Vichy regime ever do so.

But think of the anti-capitalist Carlist enthusiasm, bound up with Catholic Social Teaching, both for local fueros and for ties with Latin America and elsewhere. Or consider how the same people, also often characterised by an active Christian social conscience, who are keenest to preserve against capitalism whatever little local variation in their own corner of Britain are also those who cherish most deeply Commonwealth ties, also essentially anti-capitalist, to every corner of the earth.