Monarchy, Ethnonationalism, and the Political Position of Neoreactionaries

For a long time, nationalism and ethnonationalism were practically the same thing. The highest social caste of the Spanish Empire were ethnic Spaniards. The Russian Empire was dominated by ethnic Russians like the Russian state is today. The French nation was composed of… wait for it… ethnic French. Even the British Empire was (mostly) ruled by ethnic Brits. Only with the rise of civic nationalism and the backlash to the ethnic nationalism of Nazi Germany did the common definition of nationalism change from something based on blood to something based on words on a page.

This changing of definitions is very recent, barely 70 years old, but the propaganda in its favor has been so intense that people, even otherwise “right wing” people, have been fooled into thinking that ethnic nationalism is somehow leftist or that ethnic nationalism has been the exception throughout history rather than the norm. The victorious Allies criminalized ethnic nationalism (in White countries only, of course) so intensely that they tried to tar it as evil for all time. This does not change the fact that most European countries were (and still are) based on their respective sub-white ethnicities.

What is interesting is considering the interface between ethnic nationalism and monarchy. At times, the monarch of a given realm might have blood from another European ethnicity, for instance Empress Catherine the Great of Russia was German. There was the understanding, however, that when Catherine the Great was Empress, her primary concern would be to look out for ethnic Russians, not Germans. She was the ruler of a Russian ethnic nation, not a German one.

Most monarchs of European nations throughout history were simply the ethnicity of the nation they ruled over. The French monarchs were French, the British monarchs were Brits, and so on. It’s an incredibly simple concept. The monarch of a group of people is usually that type of person, genetically.

This is where monarchy and civic nationalism come into conflict. A civic nation is composed of different races and ethnicities with deeply conflicting interests and substantial genetic distance. America for instance. The nation of America could never accept a monarch, not just because it is against monarchy as an institution (it is), but also because if there were a monarch, whichever races were not represented by that monarch would feel left out. Blacks would feel left out by a White monarch or vice versa. Making matters worse is the inheritance of monarchical power, meaning the next king is probably going to be the same race as the last one.

That is why monarchy and civic nationalism would have trouble coexisting. Historically speaking, even in multiethnic monarchies there was usually a given ethnicity on top. In the Habsburg monarchy for instance, which ruled over a conglomeration of different European ethnicities, the court would have been dominated by ethnic Germans with names like Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz and Gerard van Swieten. Conflict between the constituent ethnicities of Austria-Hungary led to crisis in the 1870s. So the union of monarchy and civic nationalism was something that was inherently unstable.

At The Diplomat, Akhilesh Pillalamarri praises monarchy and expresses a view contrasting with my own:

Monarchies have an extremely valuable role to play, even in the 21st century. If anything their number should be added to rather than subtracted from. To understand why, it is important to consider the merits of monarchy objectively without resorting to the tautology that countries ought to be democracies because they ought to be democracies.

There are several advantages in having a monarchy in the 21st century. First, as Serge Schmemann argues in The New York Times, monarchs can rise above politics in the way an elected head of state cannot. Monarchs represent the whole country in a way democratically elected leaders cannot and do not. The choice for the highest political position in a monarchy cannot be influenced by and in a sense beholden to money, the media, or a political party.

Secondly and closely related to the previous point is that in factitious countries like Thailand, the existence of a monarch is often the only thing holding the country back from the edge of civil war. Monarchs are especially important in multiethnic countries such as Belgium because the institution of monarchy unites diverse and often hostile ethnic groups under shared loyalty to the monarch instead of to an ethnic or tribal group. The Habsburg dynasty held together a large, prosperous country that quickly balkanized into almost a dozen states of no power without it. If the restoration of the erstwhile king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, widely respected by all Afghans, went through after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, perhaps Afghanistan would have more quickly risen above the factionalism and rivalry between various warlords.

I would say that monarchy only works to hold together multiethnic countries that are relatively small and weak and preferably based around one metropolitan area like Belgium. Obviously, the co-occurrence of monarchy and ethnic homogeneity have had more success in the historical record than monarchy over a multiethnic state.

What gets confusing fast is when neoreactionaries, who mostly eschew ethnic nationalism, appear to advocate for a monarch. They do not understand that the fundamental mechanism by which monarchy has been generated was usually when some ethnic warlord rose to sufficient power to create a state and rule over it. The entire engine of the establishment of military power by that monarch would be the tribal feeling among those of the same ethnicity. That is how monarchies get started. Apparent counterexamples, like the monarchy of Brazil, are either inauthentic because they are constitutional monarchies (monarchies in name only) or few and far between.

The institution of monarchy and the political state which can be described with the word “ethnonationalism” are very closely connected. If you want a monarchy, you would have to swallow ethnonationalism, along with all the messy stuff that entails. No monarch is ever going to gain traction in a multiethnic state. So embracing private government (monarchy) and rejecting ethnonationalism is not really a consistent position, it is a fantasy.