What social, cultural, political, or economic situations would it take to make the various European royal families to intermarrying with each other again? What would it take to extend this to Asian and African royal families?
A return to the Middle Ages.
They don’t really have to worry about getting deposed, since they are almost all constitutional monarchs. No need to marry your dumb ugly second cousin to secure an alliance when you can marry some hot model, or anyone else for that matter. Edit: To answer the question yes, a return to the sort of hereditary powerful monarchies that were prevelent in the Middle Ages, like the dude above me said much more succinctly lol
It would take two people who actually believed there was something special about their “royal” blood. In other words, two complete idiots.
Maybe move to the U.S.? That way they’ll be in one country.
You’d probably want to start by having more of them. There are a lot fewer royal families, and those that still exist have followed the general trends of society in having fewer children. They used to be able to go off to some obscure German statelet and find some morganatic prince or princess if they were really desperate, but those don’t really exist any more.
The ex-royal families still exist, and some still have vestiges of estates and spend some effort arguing who is the rightful head of the family.
Which doesn’t exactly help with the smiley-wavey chitchat, making people feel their work/good cause is recognised and important, and uncontroversial speechifying on worthy issues, that take up most of the time of modern constitutional monarchs.
Also, come to think of it, the social life of current royals is way beyond the restricted circles and activities of pre-WW1. They are so much less likely to meet the offspring of footnotes in the Almanach de Gotha.
No, no more so than any other two people who happen to marry.
The current Queen of Denmark married a Frenchman; her elder son married an Australian, while the younger married firstly a woman from Hong Kong and secondly a French woman. The Grand Duchess of Luxembourg was born in Cuba, while her daughters-in-law are Belgian and German. Queen Maxima of the Netherlands is from Argentina. As it happens, none of those are royalty (although Hereditary Grand Duchess Stephanie of Luxembourg was a Belgian countess by birth), but there’s no particular reason why not. When you move in the same social circles, it’s not unreasonable you’ll find a spouse there.
Princess Astrid of Belgium, for example, married a Habsburg in 1984; her cousin Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg likewise married a Habsburg, in 1982, and one of her daughters in turn married a distant cousin, Prince Henri of Bourbon-Parma, in 2020.
The Pauline Laws for the Russian Czars (in pretense) are still in effect so technically European royal intermarriage still exists. When the son of lead claimant to the Russian throne (Maria Vladimirovna Romanov) married someone that was not royal, it had to be a morganatic marriage.
And there must have been some wailing and arguing in the Romanov court before Maria Vladimirovna gave even that much recognition to the marriage. George is her only son; if he has no dynastic heir, then the imperial title, according to the Pauline laws, would pass to Maria’s father’s oldest sister Maria Kirilovna, Princess of Leiningen, and her issue, with her heir being currently Karl Emich, Prince of Leiningen, who currently claims to be Czar Nicholas III and is recognized as such by the Russian Monarchist Party, in opposition to Maria’s own claims.
The social, cultural and political situation would have to shift back to the time when royals and nobility had real power and their marriages held significance for the interaction between rich landed families and between nations.
Or, since we’re entirely in the real of the extremely improbable, they social and cultural situation would have to shift to one where marrying another royal is just “how it is done”. This previously existed at the tail end of what I described in the previous paragraph, but as long as we’re doing hypotheticals it could arise again independently. Maybe because of a super popular video game or something.
According to scholar Clive Barker in his treatise Night Of The Living Dead: London, a zombie apocalypse would do the job.
Especially as Maria invokes Pauline Law to support her claim as Czar. She can’t very well say that royals are too hard to find and disavow PL.
We’d have to go back to a political world where royals had real powers. The old system of marrying members of two royal families together was to form an alliance between the powers that ran their two kingdoms. Nowadays, civilians run governments and international relationships are handled by civil servants.
What would get European royal family intermarrying again?
Popular support for a royal line with distinctive physical abnormalities. It’d be like creating new dog breeds.
“Our kings and queens have short snouts and long ears!” “Ha, our royalty are all under five feet tall!”
As a bonus, it’d revive the paparazzi.
The statelets have gone, or rather got incorporated into federal states, but the parasitic nobility still exists, with all their pompous titles. I don’t want the people gone, but their status and wealth grounding on centuries of exploiting and robbing the common people. That’s one thing Austria did better after the war than Germany: they got rid of the aristocracy, at least of their official titles. Of course they weren’t expropriated either.
ETA: sorry for this little side-rant, but the concept of nobility disgusts me.
Is this a good place to mention that Napolean still has 2 heirs with competing claims? I don’t know how to link, but they there still is a House of Bonaparte.
George R. R. Martin could offer cash payments for material for his new tv show.
There’s also two Bourbon heirs with competing claims, so Louis Alphonse de Bourbon and Jean, Count of Paris are competing with Charles, Prince Napoleon and his son Jean-Christophe for a throne that hasn’t existed in a century and a half.
(Jean-Christophe married a countess of the German nobility, who is a great-granddaughter of the last Habsburg emperor; his mother was a princess of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. The Countess of Paris is of noble [Spanish and Austro-Hungarian] birth, while Jean’s mother was born a Duchess of Wurttemberg. Only Louis Alphonse married outside the old European aristocracy; his wife is a Venezuelan heiress.)