The wedding of Prince Williams and his fair Lady Catherine in faraway England generates some interest here in America, but it is an interest of a purely folkloristic kind; nobody takes the matter seriously. “Look, what quaint customs they have over there!”, Americans of all stripes and colours seem to be saying to themselves. “And what a great show those Brits put on!” Then the hand reaches out to the remote control and lazily switches to a different channel.

Perhaps it could not be otherwise. For Americans, their liberties lie on a trajectory that is leading straight away from monarchy. The stations on this journey can roughly be numbered: 1215 – 1649 – 1688 – 1776 – 1787. The Magna Carta, which forced King John of England to defer to the aristocracy. The Puritan Revolution, which beheaded Charles I in the name of the sovereign people of England. The Glorious Revolution, which secured the powers of Parliament over the monarch. And, finally, the American Revolution, which carried the principles of English liberty to their logical conclusion and did away with the monarch altogether. When Americans think about this issue at all, they equate monarchy with tyranny; they believe that any return to crowns and scepters must necessarily also mean dungeons, repression of religious freedom and dictatorship generally. I understand why you rebel colonists in the New World are telling yourselves this tale. I am not even saying it is completely false. But it is not what I see when I close my eyes.

When I shut my eyelids I see in my European mind – which was thoroughly steeped in the writings of Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Gregor von Rezzori and others – the benign whiskered face of Emperor Franz Joseph. This face does not stand for tyranny. It symbolizes the peoples of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire living together in some semblance of live-and-let-live, in a spirit of sloppy tolerance. Emperor Franz Joseph – whose portrait, by the way, hangs in my study as I write this – is the metaphor of Europe before its descent into madness; before the crazy Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and declared war on their own population, before fascism was born in Italy, before almost every ridiculous little tribe in the center of Europe had turned into a murderous gang of nationalists, before the horrors of Nazi Germany were even thinkable, a time when anti-Semitism had not yet mutated into a lethal force but was something nasty that Jews could, willy-nilly, live with. These were the good old days. And looking back with a shudder at the 20th century, I say this without a trace of irony.

The best argument in favor of monarchy as a form of government was put forward by a radical socialist. George Orwell, the author of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, wrote that the desire to deify human being, to put them on a pedestal and worship them, could not be eradicated. Therefore this desire has to be satisfied in a harmless way. And of course it is much more benign if people worship the Queen Mum rather than the Fuehrer or Duce. Orwell was a sworn enemy of all kinds of totalitarianism, be they of the right or of the left; at the same time, he never stopped dreaming that his beloved England would one day turn into a socialist and democratic utopia. But his leftist England would not be a republic. It would have a King or Queen as its figurehead, a smiling, flag-waving monarch who would give uplifting speeches every Christmas and root the socialist state firmly in its traditional past.

There is a second argument in favour of monarchy: the job is hereditary. This means that nobody has any messianic expectations or high hopes concerning the person who holds it. The king can be a genius or a drooling idiot, he can be kind and helpless (as Franz Joseph was) or a mean-spirited, Napoleonic character – in a higher sense this does not matter. The monarch merely fulfills the function he was born to fulfill. He has no choice in the matter. One might even call him the most unfree person in the country because he is tightly bound by court etiquette. Everybody understands that he is a performer, not an original thinker or a political saviour. Thus monarchies tend to be less prone to bipolar disorder than republics: the high-blown expectations which usually greet the incumbent president simply are not there, nor is the bleak despondency when the president turns out to be a mere mortal who cannot walk on water.

The third argument in favour of monarchies is a bit more subtle. You need to understand where Kings and Queens in Christian Europe derived their legitimacy from: they were no longer able to claim that they were descendants of the gods as the monarchs in pagan times had done. They had to find a Biblical source for their elevated status. Hence the Kings and Queens of Europe claimed that they were somehow linked to King David; they were legitimate heirs of the Kings of ancient Israel. This, incidentally, is the reason why the Princes of the House of Windsor are circumcised on the eighth day after their birth by a Jewish mohel. They are considered Israelites (of sorts). Of course this is bogus, but it helped contain anti-Semitism: you cannot both be loyal to the House of Windsor (or the House of Hapsburg) and believe in racial purity. The vicious and pseudo-scientific “Aryan myth” rose to prominence in Europe precisely after the hereditary monarchies had been toppled.

What does all this mean for America? Far be it from me to suggest that you should put a crowned head in the White House or be governed by your rightful Sovereign from o’er the waters once again. It is, alas, a bit too late for that. Also I must grudgingly admit that the US is not so bad as far as republics go. But I do suggest that you take a new and sharper look at the rest of the world – Western Europe, for example: you will then perceive that a large chunk of it does not consist of republics at all. Sweden is a monarchy. So is Norway. The Netherlands is governed by a Queen, and so is Denmark. Belgium is a monarchy. Spain is a monarchy. Please note that all of the above are stable and liberal, whereas most of the European republics are either chaotic and irresponsible (Italy) or have an authoritarian streak (France, Germany) or both (Greece). Once you come to realize this, you might adjust your foreign policy accordingly.

Usually when Americans spread liberty across the globe they try to export their own model of government. But more often than not this ends in utter and abject failure. Sometimes you find yourselves surrounded by tribes which are bitterly hostile to each other yet have to share a territory and certain resources, countries in which each attempt to make the natives govern themselves seems to lead only deeper into the swamp. Afghanistan is a good case in point: what this country needs is not a presidential democracy à l’Américain. What Afghanistan needs is a king. And with this thought in mind, let us now switch back to William and Kate.