The United States was the first country of which I know that is organized on the basis of a social contract. All political and legal authority stems from the U.S. Constitution, which was ordained and established by “we the people.”
The legal basis of authority in the United Kingdom are different. Legal authority stems from the monarchy, based on the divine right of kings, and the powers that the monarch over the years has ceded to Parliament. The UK has no written Constitution and no Bill of Rights, only royal charters and grants of privileges.
American patriotism is defined as the obligation to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. British patriotism is true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law.
Does this matter?
I recently happened to come across an odd but interesting book, THE ENCHANTED GLASS: Britain and Its Monarchy by Tom Nairn, which says that it does. Nairn argues that the British monarchy is not a mere anachronism, but the core of what gives Great Britain its particular social structure and its identity as a nation.
In the first part of the book, Nairn documented the intense interest and love the British people, especially working people and the lower middle class, have for the British royal family. It is not quite like the reverence the Japanese have for their emperor or the Tibetans for their Dalai Lama, but it is more than mere celebrity-worship. To the British, the royal family are simultaneously superior beings on a higher plane than they are, and also “just like us.”
What harm does this do? As far as Nairn is concerned, a lot. It creates a habit of deference to authority instead of the suspicion of unchecked power appropriate to a free people. And it creates a habit of deferring to the upper classes, of regarding their manners and their speech patterns as the standards to be followed.
Nairn pointed out that the royal family was not always worshiped as it is now. In the 17th century, the British be-headed King Charles I and replaced him with a short-lived republic. Later, in what was called the Glorious Revolution, they drove out King James II and invited the Dutch William of Orange to rule as a partner with Queen Mary.
The Glorious Revolution, according to Nairn, put in power a ruling elite that continues to these day — an alliance of landowners, bankers and merchants who have a talent for imperial rule, but not for managing an industrial economy (which didn’t exist in 1688).
The cult of the royal family was consciously built up by politicians and aristocrats as a bulwark against popular sovereignty. The British people came to not only revere the royal family, but to regard their upper-class lifestyle, manners and accents as marks of superiority.
It is not happenstance, Nairn said, that Britain was one of the last western European nations to adopt universal suffrage. On the other hand, he wrote, the British monarchy is perfectly compatible with the rise of the Labor Party. The existence of a party that represents the working class does not threaten the British class system.
If anything, the system was threatened much more by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, who reduced everything to questions of money and gave the ruling elite a rationale for abandoning any sense of social responsibility.
As I read the book, I thought of how the British system as described by Nairn facilitates abuses of power — growing inequality, an out-of control financial elite hiding behind government, an out-of-control surveillance state hiding behind secrecy. But then I thought about how our American system, based on a very different history and theory of government, is just as bad or maybe worse. So I’m not sure to what degree Nairn’s claims of British exceptionalism are true.
We Americans, with our written constitution, our separation of powers and our creed that “all men are created equal,” ought to be able to better resist authoritarian government and the rule of a hereditary aristocracy of wealth. We who believe in liberty and democracy at least have a standard to which we can appeal. Whether this will mean anything in practice remains to be seen.
An important positive aspect of allegiance to the royal family is that it is a form of unity not based on race or ethnicity. The United Kingdom came into existence before the rise of nationalism based on common ancestry and language.
The royal family was the focus of loyalty for three nations, England, Scotland and Wales, and the ruling class of a colony, Ireland. Later the royals became the focal point of the British Empire which, at its height, encompassed one quarter of humanity, from India to Nigeria, the Falklands and the Yukon. Even today loyalty to the crown binds together a diverse people — which is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Without loyalty to their 16th century monarchy, the British would have no basis of unity or identity, just as we Americans would have no basis of unity or identity without our loyalty to our 18th century Constitution. It is possible for nations to reinvent themselves. The Germans did after World War Two. But I am unable to imagine what new basis there could be for either British or American nationality.
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The Enchanted Mirror was first published in 1989, with new editions in 1994 and 2011.
Click on A Republican Monarchy? England and revolution for Nairn’s foreward to the 2011 edition.
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