GOD SAVE THE KING :

This Throne of Kings (Michael Kinsley, May 4, 2002, washingtonpost.com)

Is anyone else bothered even a little bit by the idea that the war on terrorism has somehow put the United States in the business of installing a king in Afghanistan? Re-installing, actually. His name is Zahir Shah, he's 87 years old and he's been on an extended leave of absence since 1973. But he apparently has used up all his vacation days at last. Or, more to the point, we think he might be useful as a unifying figure during Afghanistan's transition from a hellish cauldron of feuding warlords to a prim parliamentary democracy, which is penciled in for the second half of this year.

The idea, presumably, is not that the king would actually run things but that he and his family could concentrate on the activities we associate with modern royalty -- smiling and waving, committing adultery, getting divorced -- while the real work of nation-building swirls on around him. We might not want a king ourselves. But Afghanistan, you see, is what one calls a "traditional" culture, in which they take innocent pleasure in pretending that some doddering 87-year-old is better than everybody else because his father was too. The United States of America was long associated with the idea of rejecting kings. And that "branding strategy," as the business world calls it, worked pretty well. When we find ourselves installing kings instead, the course of human events has taken a strange turn. [...]

Doesn't our president understand that there are two different kinds of nations in the world? There are nations where the rulers are determined by heredity -- where the person in charge is in charge for no better reason than that his or her father was in charge before him. Then there are nationswhere the rulers are determined by democracy -- where the person in charge is in charge because he or she got the most votes in an election among thecitizens. And in this great divide, the United States stands proudly on the side of . . .

Oh, never mind.

Suppose for just a moment that two things about last weekend's French elections were changed. Suppose that Le Pen had actually won the presidency, though with a very small percentage of the vote (we'll say 30%) and suppose that France still had at least a British style monarch. On the
following Monday, the King of France, though he has not exercised any real authority since the 18th Century, steps forward and declares : "These election results are a blight upon the soul of France and we can not allow them to stand. We, therefore, declare this election null and void and order that a new election be held, immediately."

France does not have a king of course and that is a very unfortunate thing. For while the scenario above has not yet unfolded, it may well in the not too distant future and France has found itself stuck with equally repellent pro-Nazi (Vichy) and Socialist (Mitterand) governments. Likewise, king-less Germany brought Hitler to power by democratic processes and even America has labored under governments in which the people had lost all faith and whose continuance threatened the health of the nation--Wilson, Hoover, Nixon, Carter.

What a constitutional monarchy would provide to even these most advanced democracies is a final check and balance on the powers of the government. A monarchy is uniquely well-suited to staying above the rough and tumble of partisan politics and, at least in theory, able to place the good of the nation above all other concerns. A kingship where the sole power was to intercede when government went badly awry and which exercised such power exceedingly rarely would quite possibly improve even the political systems of the West.

Now consider a nation like Afghanistan or other places that do not even have viable government institutions. What a king can provide, so long as he does not seek to run the day to day operations of the country, is a way of legitimizing a nascent government in the eyes of the people. Such a monarchy does not preclude democracy--most of us would call Britain a democracy, even though it retains the monarchy--but instead provides a bulwark against a truly ruinous (though maybe democratically elected) government or a descent back into chaos.

Mr. Kinsley's faith that democracy necessarily produces good government is touching, but quite naive. And if the choice is between a bad government that is absolutely democratic or a good government that is not quite democratic enough for Mr. Kinsley, which do you think the people of a chronically misgoverned nation like Afghanistan would choose?

Oh, never mind...

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 4, 2002 1:55 PM