[LINK] "The Prince vs. the 'Paupers'"

[rfmcdonald]

Foreign Policy's Michael Wise has an article examining the surprising resilience of something that looks awfully like absolute monarchy in early 21st century central Europe.

The principality of Liechtenstein, wedged between Switzerland and Austria in the Alps, is unique in the world as the last German-speaking monarchy extant.* Like many other microstates in the post-Second World War world, Liechtenstein has become prosperous thanks to its marketing of its sovereignty as an asset, becoming--among other things, and yes, like the Channel Islands off of Europe's Atlantic coast--a tax shelter. The princely family has done by all accounts a decent job of shepherding Liechtenstein's transformation into one of the wealthiest polities in the world. The only problem is that the princely family also insists on retaining a tight control over domestic politics. Calls for full democratization--specifically, lifting the prince's veto over popular referenda--have been met by promises from the princely family that, if a constitutional referendum scheduled for the 1st of July succeeding in overturning the veto, they would abandon the country to an uncertain quasi-republicanism.

(The referendum failed, 76% voting against.)

With a net worth estimated at $7 billion, the silver-haired monarch ranks among the world's richest heads of state, and he owns one of the most important art collections in private hands. His conservative principality, nestled between Austria and Switzerland, has the planet's second-highest GDP per capita, and it is an island of economic stability in troubled Europe. But discontented rumblings are afoot after Prince Hans-Adam's heir, 44-year-old Prince Alois, threatened to veto the result of a referendum last fall aimed at overturning Liechtenstein's ban on abortion.

Although Prince Hans-Adam supports a formal division of church and state, he and his family do not hide their Catholic devotion. Eighty percent of their principality's population of 36,000 is also Catholic. A massive carving of Jesus on the cross looms over the fireplace in Prince Hans-Adam's vaulted office, and when he showed me around the 130-room castle this past winter, we stopped in a chapel adorned with a Gothic altar where he and his offspring pray regularly.

But unlike in the United States, where the battle over abortion rights is part of a larger cultural war, the tempest in Liechtenstein is not primarily related to religious belief: Rather, it centers on the extraordinary degree of political power retained by a dynastic leader in the heart of 21st-century democratic Europe.

"Dominions … are either accustomed to live under a prince or to live in freedom," wrote Machiavelli. Liechtenstein is accustomed to having some of both, but Prince Hans-Adam clearly tipped the balance when he used a 2003 constitutional referendum approved by 64 percent of the electorate to increase his leverage over parliament and the courts, obtaining power to irreversibly veto any law, dissolve the legislature, and appoint judges. But since November's unsuccessful bid to allow abortion -- it failed in the wake of a princely threat to veto it if it gained voter approval -- a new citizens' initiative is pushing for limits on the royal veto prerogative.

Even so, neither power nor money fully satisfies Prince Hans-Adam, who talks in terms of generations rather than the short-term goals of most elected leaders. To ensure a smooth succession, in 2004 he appointed his son Prince Alois as his representative in running day-to-day government matters, but he remains head of state and still exerts considerable influence. Prince Hans-Adam, free from the daily rigors of governance, has recently sought international recognition by writing a book -- called The State in the Third Millennium and published in 10 languages so far -- presenting Liechtenstein's odd constitutional monarchy as a model for other countries.

[. . .]

The prince, whose aristocratic roots stretch back nearly a millennium, describes himself as "a convinced democrat committed to a form of democracy that far exceeds what is normal today," even if it's hardly the norm nowadays for monarchs to be more than symbolic leaders much less have anywhere close to his degree of power. But he sees no contradiction in tenaciously clinging to inherited dynastic privilege. Prince Alois, who attended the British Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, is only slightly more circumspect, warning parliament in March that the princely house would not serve as a "fig leaf" for policies it did not support and "would completely withdraw from political life in Liechtenstein" if it lost the "necessary political instruments."

Adherents of the prince in the tiny country, once part of the Holy Roman Empire and only actually inhabited by the Liechtenstein royal family since 1938 (they lived primarily in Austria and what is now the Czech Republic until the rise of Nazism) hail what's called a "dualistic" political system, whereby policy is shaped jointly by the princely house and a 25-member parliament. A large portrait of Prince Hans-Adam hangs in the chamber as if to keep an eye on the proceedings. The legislators, who serve on a part-time basis, rose in the prince's defense on May 23, voting 18 to 7 against the citizens' initiative as part of the procedure to put the referendum on the veto power before the public. Although open threats of a royal veto are rare, David Beattie, a former British ambassador to Liechtenstein, notes that the prince and his son regularly meet behind closed doors with officials, so "it's impossible to know how many times government policy may have been influenced by the possibility of a veto."

(I exclude Luxembourg from consideration, owing to the Grand Duchy's allegiances to the Low Countries, as well as the implantation of French as a language of wider communication alongside the slow elevation of Luxembourgish to the status of national language. nwhyte?)