Why didn't monarchies reinvent themselves as dictatorships?

Great Debates
1

Many countries went from being hereditary monarchies to one-party states ruled by a president-for-life (with or without ever having been democracies in anything but name). I wonder; what are modern dictators doing right that former absolute monarchs did not? I’ve thought about this and although I don’t have any firm answers, I have a few speculations:

First, classical monarchies based themselves on the feudal/aristocratic model where ownership of productive land was everything; consequently, as land became less important and industry more so they became increasingly estranged from the modern basis of wealth and power. Dictators today usually preside over corrupt bureaucracies which dole out contracts and business licenses to whoever pays the biggest bribes, of which El Presidente gets his cut or gains outright ownership of profitable enterprises. By this hypothesis, monarchies failed when they made the mistake of spurning the patronage of mere greasy mechanics and moneylenders.

Second, many dictators today are heads of parties that style themselves as revolutionary, and however decayed and corrupt still maintain the glow of the glorious uprising. A hereditary monarchy can hardly make the same claim.

Lastly, it’s difficult for power to be transmitted by heredity any more. Witness how successful dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti passed control to his son “Baby Doc”, who failed to retain it. In a classical monarchial system, if the heir to the throne is incompetent to keep power, there are any number of royal brothers, uncles and cousins who could seize power if a sufficent portion of the nobility backed them. Today a ruling elite would consist of whoever was smart and ruthless enough to gain and keep large amounts of wealth. Maybe some “old money” families to be sure, but also any number of self-made persons who’ve risen through the ranks, especially in the ruling party bureaucracy and it’s spoils system. Any of whom might feel that with cleverness, patience and a little luck they might be the king of the hill someday. In short, dictators might have chosen sucessors but almost never heirs.

The closest thing today to what I’m thinking of might be the house of Saud. And that’s a special case because Saudi Arabia’s wealth is almost completely dependent on a single extraction industry which is both lucrative and can be tightly controlled.

ETA: as a fictional example, there the Cross Time Engineer series by Leo Frankowski, whose protagonist Conrad Stargard introduces something like industrial feudalism to an alternate-past Poland and eventually becomes emperor of an alternate Polish Empire.

2

Post-Colonial politics play a big role. Today’s dictatorships were created by Cold War power plays, where the US and Russia were competing to put their guys in control of as many developing countries as possible, if not just to keep the other guy out. Dictators were just fine by both powers- they were more relient on their patron superpowers and thus easier to control. Plus, they could be counted on to brutally suppress any left-wing agitation. I think it’d have been much harder for the superpowers to embrace a monarchy.

Even today, these legacies depend heavily on military support and aid from their patron superpowers, which support them under the theory that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. It’s only in the 1990s that France decided it was going to stop playing an openly active role in African politics- a promise it hasn’t kept very well. Many of today’s dictatorships are still being quite actively propped up. Without this, these dictatorships may have fallen the way of monarchies long ago.

I doubt many modern dictators want their kids to carry on the dictatorship. The children of many African dictators are safely ensconced in European private schools, where they live lives of privilege among an international upper-class. Why would they give up a life of trendy Paris discos, shopping holidays in Dubai and invitations to events among the world’s jet-set to go run a screwed up country where half the people are pretty actively trying to kill you? Would you give up a London Flat, an estate in the French countryside and a few summer homes in Spain for a palace in N’Djamena that needs an army to protect it?

3

For instance?

I don’t get it. What are they doing right as regards holding onto power? Or, as I understand you, as regards passing that power on to a child? (Syria and North Korea spring to mind as successfully doing so, but no others. Congo appears to have been a case of the younger Kabila being in the right place at the right time, not an intentional passage of power.) They don’t, in short, appear to be doing it right, as far as I understand your meaning.

Am I misunderstanding you?

4

I’m pretty sure every single dictator working today would love to be a king if he could get away with it. Kings have mystique. Unfortunately, to be a king you have to have royal blood, whatever that is, and most dictators lack that all-important ingredient.

5

Holding on to power personally and maintaining at least some continuity in that the system produces a sucessor rather than having a revolution and/or civil war every time the former leader dies. Or to put it another way, what did Lenin and Stalin do that couldn’t have been done by a sufficiently shrewd and amoral Czar instead?

6

Yeah, but “royal blood” has got to start somewhere, doesn’t it? It doesn’t spring full-grown from the brow of Athena.

Let’s assume, for instance, that Bokassa had held onto his Empire, and passed it to his son. Wouldn’t that make them, by definition, royal blood?

7

Well, most countries with dictators don’t feel it necessary for the leader to die to stage a revolution or civil war. As in, per your example, the absolute monarchy of the Czars.

I’m still extremely unclear on your point. What would the Romanov’s have gained from changing to a dictatorship? They already were.

(And, I’m still interested in what nations have changed from a hereditary monarchy into a president-for-life.)

8

If his subjects accepted it, yes. But people who are willing to accept a dictator may balk if he declares himself a king, especially if he claims to represent “the people”, as dictators usually do. Napoleon could do it, but then he was fuckin’ Napoleon.

9

It seems to me that a kingship is precisely a dictatorship that’s attained a measure of stability over multiple generations. Most dictatorships fall apart quickly; those that don’t (and which pass down power in the family) get called kings.

10

Heh. I didn’t even think of him. But doesn’t he prove my point?

The son of a Corsican lawyer, he was (and is) recognized by European royalty (with the likely exception of the U.K.) as fellow royalty, and he didn’t even have an heir who ruled until some 40 years later. Isn’t royal blood simply what one can say it is and get away with it?

11

Depends on how sharp a transition you insist on; many went from monarchy to parlimentary monarchy to republic-on-paper to dictatorship-in-practice. Certainly many countries of Latin America which started out as officially being ruled by the King of Spain count. Spain itself went from monarchy to Franco between the 19th and 20th centuries. Egypt went from being ruled by the Ottomans to having a lip-service-to-Istanbul local dynasty to a British semi-puppet to finally having a nationalist party take over in the 1950s. China went from having an emperor to a weak republic wracked by civil war and invasion to the rule of Mao as head of the People’s Republic. The list goes on.

12

I think Egypt comes close, doesn’t it? The military overthrew the monarchy of King Farouk II in 1952. The first President was Muhammad Naguib, who was a senior figurehead for Nassar. Nassar placed Naguib under indefinite arrest in 1956 when he replaced him as President. Nasser served as President from 1956 to his death in 1970, when he was replaced by Sadat, another member of the military group which had overthrown Farouk. Sadat served as president until his assassination in 1981, when he was replaced by Hosni Mubarak, another military man. Mubarak is of course still President of Egypt.

13

Dictators are sustained by priveleged members of a society. The same goes for a monarchy concept. Really there is no difference but monarchies also get a lot of help with the divine right concept as long as the people really believe it. Divine right can only be determined by God who chooses the progeny.

That is why the situation in North Korea is so fucked up. An atheist regime attempting to keep some semblance of hereditary right to being top dog going.

Its oxymoronic.

14

Yeah, it does. Good example.

I see you raised Egypt as well, Lumpy. China is a less good example; I’m not convinced China had any government at all between the Empire and the Communists except for that provided by the invading Japanese. And, of course, I reject entirely the concept that the Latin American countries felt that the Spanish king was their king. Why, after all, did they seek independence? (Brazil, on the other hand, you might could talk me into.)

15

because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. To make the constitutional change from monarchy to republic or from republic to monarchy is a big psychological shock to everybody. Meanwhile, to reapportion power behind the scenes while keeping everything called as before is a lot easier. E.g. there were several dictator type politicians in late Roman republic (one of whom, Sulla, was a sincere republican who saw himself as an emergency type ruler to restore traditional order and subsequently resigned) before Octavian declared himself emperor. And even Octavian maintained a lot of the republican forms and offices unchanged.

A monarchy can be as dictatorial, as oligarchic or as democratic (dominated by parliament) as it wishes to be while preserving the same constitutional form. E.g. Russia under Romanovs vacillated between strong dictatorship by the sovereign to looser oligarchic rule by the aristocracy with weak sovereign to even some failed attempts at parliamentary government.

16

You forget the emotional link to “Our King”. A King represents and is the embodiment of his Country, fountain of justice, Defender of faith, protector of liberties etc etc etc. A Dictator is some jumped up Corps Commander who realized that “President” sounded much better on his business card than “Commander”.

17

Who are the people at the peak of the power structure in the wealthiest, most powerful and most stable nations today? They are presidents and prime ministers. In a few of those nations (a number of western European nations, and Japan) there are still kings or queens, relics of an earlier system, but they have negligible power and influence compared to the prime ministers who nominally serve them.

If you are a dictator who has just seized power in your country, you will want, as far as possible, to gain the respect of your new subjects, or, at the very least, to be feared by them. What comparison is best going to inspire that respect? One with Barack Obama (or other recent presidents of the U.S., or, come to that, the president of France or the Prime Minister of Britain or Japan) or one with Elizabeth II, Juan Carlos I, or Akihito? I think the answer is clear enough. If a new ruler, in the modern world, wants to be taken seriously, by his own people and by the rulers of other countries, he had better call himself a president rather than a king. On the rare occasions, over the last century or so, where a new ruler has declared himself a king or an emperor, that has generally been a an excellent sign that he was a buffoon who would not stay in power very long. Whether or not power passes from father to son is really beside the point. In countries such as Haiti under the Duvaliers or North Korea, where the grip on power has been strong enough that it did pass successfully from father to son, the ruling family was smart enough not to try and call themselves kings. If they had, they might well have failed to pass on power to their sons!

By contrast, in the Roman Empire, it was actually rather uncommon for power to pass successfully from father to son, but the rulers called themselves Emperor, and paid lip service to hereditary model of power transition, because that title - rather than say, Consul, which would have been the nearest Roman equivalent to president - was the one that, after Augustus, carried the prestige and respect. The period of the “five good Emperors” was probably Rome’s most successful era (apart from the Augustan age), and it managed to have smooth transitions of power through the device of the Emperor choosing a competent and honorable young man as his successor, and adopting him as his son. Rome maintained teh appearance of a hereditary monarchy, thus preserving legitimacy and avoiding civil war, whilst avoiding the problem that sons of rulers very often do not make good rulers. When Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five, broke with the tradition of picking and adopting a successor, and passed on power, instead, to his biological son Commodus, things rapidly went to hell (as the movie Gladiator attests ;)).

Napoleon, mentioned upthread, is an interesting case because he gained power at a time in history when real power was just beginning to move from kings to presidents and prime ministers, but when the kings still retained quite a lot of real power. He tried calling himself Consul for a while, then moved to Emperor. Even just a few decades later, I think, he would probably not have tried to call himself an emperor.

18

President Bashir Assad in Syria was compelled to do just that. He was much happier being an ophthalmologist in London.
Rajiv Gandhi was perfectly happy being an airline pilot before being compelled to become the latest scion of the Nehru family to enter politics after his brother Sanjay’s death in an air crash.

19

The Fascist Party in Italy always thought it was a bad idea for Mussolini to allow the king to remain on the throne. This gave the Allies an effective propaganda tool when they got Italy to surrender. By enlarge the Italians still allowed the Germans to disarm them but Mussolini never had as tight a reign on things as he could’ve had.

Monarchys are not “in” now-a-days. Most countries that have a monarchy like the idea, but I do wonder if say, “Queen Elizabeth” of the UK died and had no kids or siblings, would the UK continue? They might well, but I think without no direct heir, the citizens would at least seriously consider doing away with it, if there was no direct and clear heir

20

There would be a clear heir, as the whole thing would be laid out well in advance. There’s ALWAYS a clear heir. Queen Victoria’s accession came as a surprise to no one.