Monarchy

• 1. Introduction

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  A monarchy is a form of government where political power passes legally to the family members of a ruler who holds the position for life. At the start of the 19th century, nearly half of all independent states fit that description. Then something shifted. The proportion of monarchies in the world reached a peak in the middle of the 19th century and has steadily declined ever since. Republics replaced many of them, especially at the close of two world wars. Yet the institution did not vanish. Today forty-three sovereign nations still have a monarch as head of state. How does a system rooted in bloodline and lifelong rule survive into an age of elections and parliaments? And how did a single word, drawn from Greek, come to describe everything from a Sumerian king to a ceremonial figurehead? This is the story of rule by one person, and of the many shapes that rule has taken.

• 2. The Rule Of One

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  The word monarch first appeared in English in the mid-15th century as monark, meaning a supreme governor for life, a sole or autocratic ruler of a state. It traveled there through Old French monarche, recorded in the 14th century, and from Late Latin monarcha. The deeper root is Greek monarkhes, one who rules alone. The companion word, monarchy, is slightly older in English, dating to the mid-14th century, when it named a kingdom or territory ruled by a monarch. By the late 14th century it had stretched to mean rule by a single person with supreme power. That sense came from Old French monarchie of the 13th century, meaning sovereignty or absolute power. Trace it all the way back and you reach the Greek monarkhia, literally the ruling of one, built from monos, alone, and arkhein, to rule. The vocabulary of kingship, then, began as a plain description of arithmetic: government held in a single pair of hands.

• 3. From Chiefdom To Throne

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  Narmer, Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt around 3100 BCE, and Enmebaragesi, a Sumerian King of Kish around 2600 BCE, stand among the oldest recorded and evidenced monarchies. Before them lay something older still. The societal hierarchy known as chiefdom, or tribal kingship, is prehistoric, and it supplied the very concept of state formation. That formation began with civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and the Indus Valley civilization. In some parts of the world, chiefdoms hardened into monarchies. Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mesopotamian, and Sudanic traditions, along with reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion, often tied the monarch to sacred duties. The ruler held sacral functions connected to sacrifice and was sometimes said to carry divine ancestry. That belief may have planted the seed of an idea with a long future: the divine right of kings. The notion that a ruler answered to heaven would echo for millennia, eventually invoked even by Hong Xiuquan to justify his Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

• 4. Kings And Their Critics

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  Polybius placed monarchy among three benign basic forms of government, beside aristocracy and democracy, and set them against three malignant forms: tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy. The monarch of classical antiquity went by many names, translating archon, basileus, rex, or tyrannos, with female rulers called basilissa or regina. Polybius first understood monarchy as one component of a republic, but since antiquity the two ideas have stood in opposition. In a republic, executive power belongs to free citizens and their assemblies. The 4th-century BCE Hindu text Arthasastra laid out the ethics of monarchism, even as Rome abolished its kings for the Roman Republic in 509 BCE and Athens turned to democracy around 500 BCE. By the 17th century, evolving parliamentarism pressed against royal power through bodies like the Icelandic Commonwealth and the Swiss Landsgemeinde. Then came the open ruptures: the Parliament of England's overthrow of the monarchy in 1649, the American Revolution of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789. Not everyone cheered. Elizabeth Dawbarn published an anonymous 1794 dialogue in which a character named Clara lectures the liberty-loving Louisa on God's approval of monarchy. From this clash two creeds took their names: republicanism for those seeking abolition, and monarchism for those defending the crown.

• 5. Hereditary Lines

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  Most monarchs have been born and raised within a royal family, the centre of a household and court, and trained from childhood for the responsibilities ahead. When such a family continues for several generations it is called a dynasty. Succession has followed many systems, including proximity of blood, primogeniture, and agnatic seniority, also known as Salic law. Primogeniture, where the eldest child stands first in line, became the most common arrangement. For much of history it was patrilineal, excluding females and their descendants entirely, while a semi-Salic variant let women succeed only once every male line had run out. Before primogeniture was fixed in European law, kings often crowned a chosen son during their own lifetime, producing two kings in coregency, a senior and a junior. Henry the Young King of England and the early Direct Capetians in France were examples. The rules later softened. In 1980, Sweden became the first monarchy to adopt full cognatic primogeniture, letting the eldest child of either sex inherit. The Netherlands followed in 1983, Norway in 1990, Belgium in 1991, Denmark in 2009, and Luxembourg in 2011. The United Kingdom adopted equal primogeniture on the 25th of April 2013, after the prime ministers of sixteen Commonwealth Realms agreed at the 22nd Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. Some lines moved sideways instead of down. In Saudi Arabia, the throne long passed to the monarch's next eldest brother before reaching his children, until King Salman broke with that pattern on the 21st of June 2017, electing his own son as heir.

• 6. Elected And Self-Made Kings

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  Four elective monarchies exist today: Cambodia, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates are 20th-century creations, while the papacy is ancient. In an elective monarchy there is no popular vote. A small electoral body chooses the ruler, who then reigns for life or a set term like any other monarch. The Holy Roman Emperors, picked by prince-electors, and the freely elected kings of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth show the older form. Pepin the Short, father of Charlemagne, was elected King of the Franks by an assembly of leading men. In Malaysia the federal king, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, is elected for a five-year term from among the hereditary rulers of nine states on the Malay peninsula. The College of Cardinals elects the Pope for life, and he need not be a citizen of the territory before his election. In New Zealand the Maori King is elected by a council of elders at the funeral of his predecessor, every holder a descendant of Potatau Te Wherowhero, elected the first Maori King in June 1858. Other crowns were simply taken. Napoleon I held the title of First Consul of the French Republic for five years after the coup of 18 Brumaire, then declared himself Emperor of the French. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, president of the Central African Republic, proclaimed himself Emperor of the Central African Empire in 1976. Yuan Shikai, the first formal President of the Republic of China, crowned himself emperor of a short-lived Empire of China. Power could also be seized by fraud, as when, according to Herodotus, someone impersonated Smerdis to claim the throne of Cyrus the Great after his death.

• 7. How Much A Crown Commands

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  In an absolute monarchy the ruler governs with absolute power over state and government. Roughly twelve such monarchies remain, run as autocracies. Brunei, Oman, and Saudi Arabia sit in this category, and the Pope governs Vatican City State as an absolute monarch by virtue of leading the Roman Catholic Church. Most modern monarchs occupy the other end of the spectrum. Under a constitutional monarchy the ruler's power is bound by a constitution, often reduced to a ceremonial role as a symbol of national unity and state continuity. Between these poles sit the semi-constitutional monarchies, where a ruler governs under a democratic constitution yet keeps substantial powers. Liechtenstein and Monaco fall here. The 2003 constitution referendum gave the Prince of Liechtenstein power to veto any law the Landtag proposes, while the Landtag may veto laws the Prince tries to pass, and the Prince may appoint or dismiss any elected member or government employee. The Prince of Monaco wields a lighter touch; he cannot hire or fire elected members, but he can choose the minister of state, the government council, and judges. In nations such as Morocco, Qatar, Liechtenstein, and Thailand, the hereditary monarch holds more political influence than any other single source of authority in the state.

• 8. Crowns In The Modern World

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  King Charles III is, separately, monarch of fifteen Commonwealth realms, from Australia and Canada to Tuvalu and the United Kingdom, states that evolved out of the British Empire into fully independent members of the Commonwealth of Nations. Across Europe, constitutional crowns endure in Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. Andorra is stranger still, a diarchy whose co-princes are the president of France and the bishop of Urgell. Some of the world's most distinctive monarchies sit far from Europe. Japan, by legend, has had an emperor since Emperor Jimmu, who reigned from 660 to 585 BCE, making it the world's oldest existing monarchy, though its defeat in the Second World War handed almost all imperial power to the National Diet. Eswatini operates as a diarchy where the King, or Ngwenyama, rules alongside his mother, the Ndlovukati, originally a check on political power. Cambodia lost its monarchy under the Khmer Rouge and saw it restored in the peace agreement of 1993; Bhutan turned constitutional in 2008. Some rulers wear no crown at all. The Kim family of North Korea has been described as a de facto absolute monarchy, and in 2013 a clause of the Ten Fundamental Principles of the Korean Workers' Party declared the revolution must be carried eternally by the Baekdu bloodline. A 2023 study offered one reason the institution survives: a monarchy can democratize without destabilizing its leadership by becoming a constitutional monarchy, since the prospect of keeping the ruler appeals to opposition groups who value both democracy and stability.