The Transformation of the World (127 page)

The Asian monarchies were not just fancy “theater states” in which inconsequential rituals were simply kept ticking over for the sake of aesthetics.
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In the non-Muslim traditions of Asia, the ruler's task was to act as spiritual intermediary with higher powers, keeping up etiquette and ensuring that the correct forms of communication were used at court and in relations between the court and the
population. Royal spectacles served to integrate the king's subjects symbolically; they were seldom merely ceremonial husks, as in the French Restoration monarchy between 1815 and 1830, which sought to cover up its legitimation deficit by means of nostalgic reenactments.
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Asian monarchs, like their European counterparts, had to legitimize themselves performatively: the king had to be “just” and to order his country in such a way that a civilized life was possible. Fed by various sources, theories of worldly statecraft were of major significance for what people expected of their rulers, both in the great traditions of China and India and where they came together in Southeast Asia. The good king or emperor had to control resources, surround himself with dependable administrators, maintain a strong army, and wrestle with the forces of nature.
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The monarchy itself stood above all criticism, but the individual who sat on the throne was obliged to prove his worth. These multiple tasks and expectations confronting the monarchy meant that its abolition by the colonial revolution created deep fissures in the social web of meaning. Transitions were especially difficult where a monarchical link to the symbolic repertoire of the past was totally lacking, and where, after the end of the colonial state, only the military or a communist party remained as a vehicle of national centralization.

By 1800 the age of unconstrained despots and arbitrary rulers was already over. Mass slaughter in the style of Ivan IV (“the Terrible,” r. 1547–84), the Hongwu Emperor (founder of the Ming dynasty, r. 1368–98), or the Ottoman sultan Murad IV (r. 1623–40) was a thing of the past. The example of a “bloodthirsty monster” most widely publicized in Europe was the South African military despot Shaka. Europeans who visited him after 1824 unfailingly reported that, before their eyes, he had ordered an execution with a wave of his hand and dismissed the English penal system (which they described to him) as incomparably worse.
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Shaka was a great exception. In Africa too, a simple opposition between total omnipotence and European monarchy bound by law and custom does not correspond to the true picture. Zulu kings and other rulers may or may not have had greater latitude than European monarchs in relation to local traditions. Their legitimacy did rest on arbitrary reserve powers, but clans and their main lineages always remained semiautonomous factors that the king had to take into account, and his control over the economic resources of his people (especially their livestock) was tightly circumscribed.
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In Southeast Asia, back in the precolonial years bridging the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, monarchical systems had already moved away from extreme personalization toward greater institutionalization.
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In China, with its strong bureaucratic proclivity, emperors repeatedly had to fight with officials to stamp their authority on the course of events. Those who ruled after the abdication of Qianlong in 1796 did so less and less successfully than their eighteenth-century predecessors had done. By the end of the nineteenth century, China's political system was in effect made up of an unstable equilibrium among Dowager Empress Cixi, the Manchu court princes, top officials resident
in the capital, and some provincial governors with a semiautonomous power base. In addition, the general laws and statutes of the Qing state remained in force, as did the residual role models to which Cixi could do only limited justice. This, too, was a system of checks and balances, but not in Montesquieu's sense of a division of powers.

Constitutional Monarchy

Restricted monarchy, regulated to prevent excesses, was not a European invention, but constitutional monarchy was first conceived and tried out in Europe and then exported to other parts of the world. It is not an easy category to define unambiguously, since the mere presence of a written constitution is not a reliable guide to how things worked in practice. Cases where the royal will possessed ultimate force in every sphere of politics are relatively straightforward: one speaks then of “autocracy,” with reference to Napoleonic France between 1810 and 1814 (although there were representative bodies even then) and above all to Russia until 1906 and the Ottoman Empire between 1878 and 1908. “Absolutism,” on the other hand, signifies that the estates act as a force restricting the royal will, and that the monarch is usually less actively engaged in politics than an outright autocrat. Such conditions prevailed in Bavaria and Baden until 1818 and in Prussia until 1848. When they were reintroduced after an interlude of liberalization, the proper category would be “neo-absolutism”; an example is Austria between 1852 and 1861, essentially a form of bureaucratic reform-despotism with liberalizing tendencies. Within the group of law-governed states, historians like to differentiate between monarchical and parliamentary constitutionalism: the former involves a delicate balance between monarch and parliament that can tip either way, while the latter leaves no doubt in theory or practice that the parliament alone is sovereign. The monarch then rules as
king in parliament
, but he (or she) does not govern.
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This parliamentary sovereignty, so strong that it even excluded an independent role for a constitutional court patterned on the US Supreme Court (fully operative since 1801) was a British specialty that no one in the nineteenth century followed outside the empire: a special path resistant to export. Only Britain finally overcame the constitutional authoritarianism that still permeated the atmosphere in continental Europe as a late effect of absolutism. Only there, in a country without a written constitution, did it become clear at the latest by 1837 (the year of Victoria's accession to the throne) that the monarch had to respect the constitution even in times of crisis.
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Victoria was one of the most diligent queens in history: she read mountains of legislation, kept informed about all possible matters, and allowed herself an opinion about nearly every political issue. But she refrained from meddling in politics beyond what was customary, or opposing the majority view in Parliament. Like her present-day descendants, she had a little leeway in appointing the government if the election result or the leadership situation in the political parties was unclear—but she was very
reluctant to use it, and it never led to anything that might be described as a constitutional crisis. Queen Victoria had a trusting relationship with some of “her” ministers, especially Lord Melbourne and Benjamin Disraeli. The premier for four terms of office, however, was a man she did not like at all personally: William Ewart Gladstone. She had no way to avoid dealings with him.

The “absoluteness” of a monarchical system may be gauged from the extent to which the prime minister acts as arbitrator and initiator in political life. That never happened in the Tsarist Empire, for example. Bismarck, who as Prussian first minister complained that he had insufficient control over other ministers, wrote a stronger role for the chancellor into the Reich constitution of 1871. But it was only under the British solution of cabinet government, as it had gradually taken shape since the reign of William III and Mary II (1689–1702), that the prime minister's position became unassailable. In the nineteenth century—as still today—Parliament selected from its midst a head of government who, certain of a parliamentary majority behind him, could act confidently in his dealings with the monarch. At the same time, the cabinet as a whole was accountable to Parliament; the monarch could not go over its head by dismissing the prime minister or any other cabinet member. The cabinet was subject to the principle of collective responsibility, by virtue of which its majority decisions were binding on all. A minister who disagreed with his colleagues could express himself freely at cabinet meetings, but outside his hands were tied by cabinet discipline. This meant that the cabinet became in effect the strongest body of state—an ingenious way of getting around the dualism of parliament and monarch typical of constitutions on the Continent. Cabinet government was one of the most significant political innovations of the nineteenth century. Only in the twentieth century would it spread outside the ambit of British civilization.

In a parliamentary monarchy, especially one like Britain with a “first past the post” electoral system, the parliament can ideally serve as an efficient mechanism of leadership selection. In nineteenth-century Britain there was rarely a truly incompetent executive—yet another advantage in its competition with other nations. The strength of a parliament and government is also apparent in the fact that the individual personality of the monarch is relatively unimportant. Britain never had to face a stern test in this regard; Victoria, after sixty-four years on the throne, was replaced upon her death in 1901 by her (admittedly less well suited) son Edward VII (r. 1901–10). The German Reich was not so fortunate, since its constitution meant that the personality of the monarch was of much greater significance. Although one should not overstate, or indeed demonize, the role of Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918), his numerous public appearances and political interventions seldom had constructive results.
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Contrary to a persistent legend, the succession problem was not necessarily solved in a more rational way in Europe than in Asia, where the practice of putting lesser brothers to death when a monarch ascended the throne belonged to the past. Europe's single advantage was that if a new dynasty had to
be imported from one country to another, it could draw on a large reserve of ruling houses and an upper nobility capable of playing a role at court. Such interchange was unavoidable in the founding of monarchical states such as Belgium and Greece, and royal houses such as Saxe-Coburg and Gotha served as reliable suppliers of dynastic personnel. Mobility of this kind was lacking in Asia, where princes and princesses simply did not circulate around the continent. Ruling dynasties therefore had to find a way of regenerating themselves. In the nineteenth century, it was a point in favor of monarchy as a state form across the planet that the people occupying the throne in some of the most important countries in the world were not lacking in either energy or experience: Queen Victoria in Britain and the British Empire (r. 1837–1901), Franz Joseph I in Austria-[Hungary] (r. 1848–1916), Abdülhamid II in the Ottoman Empire (r. 1876–1909), Chulalongkorn in Siam (r. 1868–1910), the Meiji Emperor in Japan (r. 1868–1912). Where a formally powerful but personally incapable monarch chose weak ministers, as Victor Emmanuel II (r. 1861–78) did in Italy, the institution failed to fulfill its potential.

New Monarchical Fashions: Queen Victoria,

the Meiji Emperor, Napoleon III

A certain revival of monarchy, associated with the prominent “Victorian” rulers, countered the worldwide decline mainly at the level of symbolic politics. This took a number of very different forms. Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918) used (and was in turn used by) the press, photography, and the newfangled motion picture, becoming Germany's first and last royal media star thanks to his frequent public appearances.
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Ludwig II of Bavaria (r. 1864–86), who would probably have been good at such a role, belonged to a previous age in the development of the media, but he may also be understood as an early escapee from the obsolete hustle and bustle of the court.
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Whereas Ludwig was an aficionado of the avant-garde music of Richard Wagner, Wilhelm II's passion was for the latest technology, especially if it had to do with war; he did not surround himself only with old Prussian nobles, but, as Walther Rathenau noted, felt best among “dazzling
grands bourgeois
, gracious Hanseatic citizens, and wealthy Americans.”
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The Russian tsars stuck to a more traditionalist image and, in the conflict with modern ideas of rationality, cultivated a political symbolism that emphasized the sacred aura of the ruler while in no way disdaining the new media. In three other high-profile cases—Queen Victoria, the Meiji Emperor, and Napoleon III—the monarchy was actually redesigned in accordance with nineteenth-century conditions.
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When Victoria was crowned in 1837, respect for the British monarchy was at an ebb. Supported by her capable husband Albert (named the first Prince Consort in 1857), she acquired over time the reputation of a conscientious mother of the nation with an exemplary family life. After Albert's death in 1861 at the age of 42, she withdrew for many years from all ceremonial functions and led a
secluded life on her Scottish estates. This did not fail to have an impact on the public, some voices even calling the future of the monarchy into question, but it only underlines the importance of the role that the royal family had come to play in the emotional life of the nation. As the journalist Walter Bagehot put it in his influential book
The British Constitution
(1865), the monarchy was not a ruling apparatus of the British state machinery but a symbolic institution that ensured civic trust and community spirit.
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Bagehot underestimated the momentary weakness of the British monarchy. Victoria reemerged from her solitary widowhood in 1872 and, thanks to her serious interest in public affairs, her ever more credible reputation of standing “above classes,” and above all her carefully orchestrated political propaganda, she went on to become a genuinely popular queen. A number of her nine children and forty grandchildren ended up on European thrones, and when Disraeli had her elevated to Empress of India in 1876 she became a kind of global monarch, closely identified with and supportive of British imperialism. However, the youthful Victoria had already developed a strong sense of India's imperial belonging and of her own obligations to its peoples. Her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 aroused a degree of royalist enthusiasm right across British society that had never been seen before. When she died in 1901, most people in Britain could not remember a time without her. Critics of the monarchy fell almost completely silent.