Monarchism

Monarchical rule is among the oldest political institutions.[2] Monarchies have existed in some form since ancient Sumeria.[3] Monarchy has often claimed legitimacy from a higher power (in early modern Europe the divine right of kings, and in China the Mandate of Heaven).

In England, royalty ceded power elsewhere in a gradual process. In 1215, a group of nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which guaranteed its barons certain liberties and established that the king's powers were not absolute. In 1687–88, the Glorious Revolution and the overthrow of King James II established the principles of constitutional monarchy, which would later be worked out by Locke and other thinkers. However, absolute monarchy, justified by Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), remained a prominent principle elsewhere. In the 18th century, Voltaire and others encouraged "enlightened absolutism", which was embraced by the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II and by Catherine II of Russia.

In 1685 the Enlightenment began.[4] This would result in new anti-monarchist ideas[5] which resulted in several revolutions such as the 18th century, American Revolution and the French Revolution. Which were both additional steps in the weakening of power of European monarchies. Each in its different way exemplified the concept of popular sovereignty upheld by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1848 then ushered in a wave of revolutions against the continental European monarchies.

World War I and its aftermath saw the end of three major European monarchies: the Russian Romanov dynasty, the German Hohenzollern dynasty, including all other German monarchies and the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg dynasty.

The rise of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 provoked an increase in support for monarchism; however, efforts by Hungarian monarchists failed to bring back a royal head of state, and the monarchists settled for a regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, to represent the monarchy until it could be restored. Horthy was regent from 1920 to 1944. In similar wise the 1938 autocratic state of Franco in Spain claimed to have reconstituted the Spanish monarchy in absentia (and in this case ultimately yielded to a restoration, in the person of King Juan Carlos). In 1920s Germany a number of monarchists gathered around the German National People's Party which demanded the return of the Hohenzollern monarchy and an end to the Weimar Republic; the party retained a large base of support until the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.

With the arrival of socialism in Eastern Europe by the end of 1947, the remaining Eastern European monarchies, namely the Kingdom of Romania, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Kingdom of Albania, the Kingdom of Bulgaria and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, were all abolished and replaced by socialist republics.

The aftermath of World War II also saw the return of monarchist and republican rivalry in Italy, where a referendum was held on whether the state should remain a monarchy or become a republic. The republican side won the vote by a narrow margin, and the modern Republic of Italy was created.

Monarchism as a political force internationally has substantially diminished since the end of the Second World War, though it had an important role in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and also played a role in the modern political affairs of Nepal. Nepal was one of the last states to have had an absolute monarch, which continued until King Gyanendra was peacefully deposed in May 2008 and the country became a federal republic. One of the world's oldest monarchies was abolished in Ethiopia in 1974 with the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie.

The majority of current monarchies are constitutional monarchies. In most of these, the monarch wields only symbolic power, although in some, the monarch does play a role in political affairs. In Thailand, for instance, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who reigned from 1946 to 2016, played a critical role in the nation's political agenda and in various military coups. Similarly, in Morocco, King Mohammed VI wields significant, but not absolute power.

Liechtenstein is a democratic principality whose citizens have voluntarily given more power to their monarch in recent years.

There remain a handful of countries in which the monarch is the true ruler. The majority of these countries are oil-producing Arab Islamic monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Other strong monarchies include Brunei and Eswatini.

Absolute monarchy stands as an opposition to anarchism and, additionally from the Age of Enlightenment, liberalism, and communism.

Otto von Habsburg advocated a form of constitutional monarchy based on the primacy of the supreme judicial function, with hereditary succession, mediation by a tribunal is warranted if suitability is problematic.[6][7]

The following is a list of countries and opinion polls for the restoration of abolished monarchies in those countries.

Country	Polling firm/source	Sample size	Percentage of supporters	Date conducted	Ref.
Brazil	Circle Monárquico Brasileiro	188	32%	September 2019	[11]
Croatia	Consilium Regium Croaticum	1,759	41%	2019	[12]
Czech Republic	SC&C Market Research		13%	2018	[13]
France	BVA Group	953	17%	March 2007	[14]
Germany	YouGov	1,041	16%	April 2016	[15]
Georgia	Doctrina	560	30%	July 2015	[16]
Greece	Kappa Research	2,040	11.6%	April 2007	[17]
Italy	Piepoli institute		15%	2018	[18]
Nepal	Interdisciplinary Analysts	3,000	49%	January 2008	[19]
Portugal	Correio da Manha		15.6%	2004	[20]
Romania	Institutul Roman pentru Evaluare si Strategie	1,073	21%	March 2016	[21]
Russia	Russian Public Opinion Research Center	~1,800	6%[note 1]	March 2017	[22][23]
Serbia	SAS Intelligence	1,615	39.7%	April 2013	[24]

• Abolition of monarchy
• Dark Enlightenment
• Legitimists
• List of dynasties
• Reactionary modernism
• Royalist

• The Monarchist League
• IMC, official site of the International Monarchist Conference.
• SYLM, Support Your Local Monarch, the independent monarchist community.