Is the monarchy more postmodern than the republic?

Mark’s post on Troppo re the ‘republican debate revived’ apparently because of the news of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles’s impending wedding, prompts me to put forward a few provocative thoughts of my own. The main one being that I think the optimum time for a republic has been and gone, and that the constitutional monarchy in fact is better suited to Australia, in these postmodern times, than ever.
Before you all fall down on top of me for being some kind of royal lap-dog, let me say this: I was born and bred in a republic, one of the world’s oldest and most emblematic republics, that of France. But like many migrants who have come from republics, I am much less starry-eyed than many Australian republicans about the reality of a republic and what it does for democracy and the ‘rule of the people.’

France, in fact, simply exchanged one kind of ruling upper class for another, and managed to combine–because this was an ideological kind of republic, which suffered greatly from the fact true reform was stifled by the Jacobins, who seized power in 1792–the worst features of the monarchy with the worst features of republicanism: hence, you got authoritarianism, instability (France suffered 22 changes of government since 1789, most of them turbulent ones, caused by coups of various sorts and constitutional crises), a parliament which is by and large nobbled; and an extraordinary sense of hierarchy which is backed up by instiutions such as the Ecole Normale Superieures, where nearly all French pollies have been. If you think the Labour Party here has become unrepresentative of the Australian electorate, with its candidates coming from certain professions or backgrounds only, I can tell you it’s much, much worse in France, where practically all pollies, and all important bureaucrats and technocrats have come out of the Ecole Nationale Superieure system–an old boys’ (and it mostly is old boys in France, you can count female pollies on the fingers of one hand!) network to beat all old boys’ networks. The result has been a democracy that is rather less than a true democracy, and that is much harder to fight against than a monarchy, because the entrenched privileges and networks of patronage are huge and spread very wide, not just into an aristocracy, but into the whole machinery of State and business. The corruption, secretiveness and arrogance that this system has bred has led to many French people becoming completely cynical about politics–or wanting to back people such as Jean-Marie le Pen, that consummate, opportunistic and manipulative politician, who is nevertheless an outsider to the system, can present himself as a victim of it, and thus reap the rewards of the huge ‘blowback’ of the system, which is that many French people feel quite disenfranchised. And no wonder–in one instance of an extremely high-handed rort, the deals done for instance with the Communist party–which claims about 2 or3 percent of the national vote–means that not only does it get a guaranteed quota of deputies in the Parliament (whereas Le Pen’s voters, at 15-20 percent, get not one deputy), but it was also able, through a secret deal, to get, since the end of the war, a certain levy on all electricity bills paid in France! (This last has been the source of a huge recent scandal). Add to that the fact that horrible stories of corruption, intimidation of judges (as in the Elf Aquitaine case) links to organised crime and even murder (as in a hideous sex and murder scandal involving deputies from both the Right and Left), surface from time to time, plus the fact that the President himself is not arrested for corruption simply because his high office prevents it(people joked that he only ran for President again because otherwise he’d be in the can)leads many French people to think that the Republic is just another name for the Mafia.
OK, you might say–we in Australia won’t get that sort of republic. We’re not that sort of country. Fair enough. Look at other republics–America’s, that other emblematic 18th century creation; or Ireland’s, created in the early 20th. Well, I admire both countries, but I don’t think we’re quite in the same circumstances. And I don’t think we need to graft either one on to our own polity. The US’ is a very democratic system, because it operates from the bottom up, from communities to regions and States to federal (whereas in France, you need permission from Paris before a village council can construct a toilet block in a village!). But it has its problems, which I don’t suppose I need to go on about here. As to Ireland, I sort of prefer that system–but, and this is a big but–the Irish fought a long, long war with the British over the very fact of their identity, sovereignty, and land. Their enthusiasm for republicanism is bound up with their nationalism, which was under direct threat from Britain, and had been so for centuries. Though the Republic was proclaimed in the 1920’s, it is really a product of 19th century enthusiasm for nationalism, which saw Italy and Germany too both become nation-states. That nationalism also had a strong dose of xenophobia, incidentally, both overseas and here (just read what 19th century republican nationalists thought about ‘yellow hordes’ and foreigners in general, for instance.)
What is the real reason for a change here? What urgency drives us? We missed the 18th century boat–the boat of independence from old things, old traditions. We missed the 19th and early 20th century boat–that of nationalism, tinged with xenophobia. We’ve even missed the boat of worrying about identity, in my opinion–the worry about identity that led Australians till about the 70s or so, to distinguish themselves as absolutely Australian, in opposition to the ‘mother country’. In a multicultural, postmodern Australia–an Australia where migrants are actually taken into the fold(and who have no hang-ups about Britain, incidentally), when it’s thought that to be Australian is to be many diverse things, the constitutional monarchy, with its mixture of origins, its muddle-through, chequered history, its distance too(someone once described the system here as being ‘like a school where the headmaster’s on permanent long-service leave!)seems much more like a fit–albeit an imperfect fit ,than a republic on which no-one can agree. As that Democrats person pointed out, we are a republic in all but name–the monarchy interferes not a whit, and all it provides is a bit of harmless titillation and celebrity gossip. So what if the Windsors are dysfunctional? Please, no hypocrisy on this. Don’t you think that the Chiracs, the Bushes and so on of this world have things to hide, and personal embarassments to overcome? So what if it’s an inherited thing, as long as they don’t have any real power? Many republics, both democratic and not, have featured dynasties–India, the US, Syria, and more. And they have REAL power. Look at the other constitutional monarchies, not only ones under the British Crown such as Canada and New Zealand, but others, such as Japan, Thailand, Denmark, the Netherlands, and more. Pretty stable and admirable, wouldn’t you say? Sure, an absolutist monarchy like Saudi Arabia or an interfering one like Nepal’s are bad; but then ditto for the same kind of republic.
Frankly, most Australians don’t care about getting a republic. It doesn’t mean they’re all monarchists(though a surprising number are); it just means that they’ve seen the options and don’t want to bother with changing a perhaps imperfect system–symbolically, mostly–for something that might well make things worse. And they are strong enough in their identity as Australians–which does not mean defining yourself by the Government you have, but on something quite other–not to be taken in by blatant appeals to crude nationalism and sometimes xenophobia per se(we don’t want a nasty foreigner as our head of State!) I was horrified to hear some of the nonsense that was trotted out at the time of the referendum, and to see the insult to intelligence and even common sense that was the ARM’s manifesto sent to every home–whilst the monarchists worked hard at that document, with pages and pages of exhaustive detail on what would change, the ARM provided just a few pages of emotional nationalist blather(which I think of as ‘bunyip’ nationalism) and slogans which obviously showed that they thought most Aussies were stupid and so TV-stupefied that they would react, Pavlov’s dog style, to appeals to ‘come on, Aussie, come on!’ for something that would affect people for generations to come.
And also people are suspicious of many of the kinds of public figures who fronted up to the republican cause last time, some of whom gave the impression that the only thing really wrong with the monarchy, in their opinion, was that they couldn’t be kings themselves! The late 20th and early 21st century is not a good time for the ‘visions’ of self-aggrandising public figures; the ‘masses’ have really come onto the scene in their own right, and whilst many intellectuals might lament their view of life, and of their country, as petty and banal and without a sense of ‘vision’, it’s actually about self-preservation. No longer can 18th century ideologues harangue the mob and then just seize matters into their own hands, precipitating civil wars; no longer can 19th and 20th century nationalists fire up crowds with sometimes destructive visions of national destiny; ordinary people now want peace, security, order–and not too many pollies. Certainly not another layer of pollies and bureaucrats; and certainly not a change which is hastily thought through, if at all, but which would have long-term knock-on effects. Great for lawyers, maybe–but, with all due respect to Ken and other lawyers on Troppo, that is not a recommendation for the population at large. And any amount of bitching about the monarchy and the personal behaviour of its members is going to stop that.. No, if republicans want to promote their cause, they’re going to have to think a great deal more clearly, with a great deal more lateral-minded solutions, than just appealing to a national identity that simply doesn’t need reinforcing. And they maybe need to come to terms with the fact that the monarchy, that flexible institution that has changed many times over the centuries, holds perhaps more winning cards than you might imagine, in this day and age.