European Constitutional Monarchs

Abstract

Democracy and monarchy — two elements which many nineteenth century radicals would have thought incompatible — find themselves happily combined not only in a number of Commonwealth countries, but also in some of the most stable and long-lived democracies of Western Europe. Before 1914, monarchy — though not necessarily constitutional monarchy — was the predominant pattern on the Continent; there were only three European republics, France, Portugal and Switzerland. By the 1980s, however, of the seventeen democracies of Western Europe, excluding such mini-states as Lichtenstein — only eight were monarchies. They were, in addition to Britain — Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden. Of these, all but Spain lies in the north-west of Europe, and five of them — Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden — are predominantly Protestant. Spain is the only southern European country to have a monarch as Head of State, but it was a republic between 1931 and 1975, and the monarchy was not restored until the death of General Franco. Because the restoration of the monarchy was so recent, Spain is in general excluded from further consideration in this chapter, as is Luxembourg on account of the paucity of information concerning monarchical institutions in that country.

This chapter is a slightly revised version of ‘The Government Formation Process in the Constitutional Monarchies of North-West Europe’, from Comparative Government and Politics: Essays in Honour of S E Finer, edited by Dennis Kavanagh and Gillian Peele, London, 1984. Thanks are due to Heinemann for permission to reprint.