Democracy Isn’t Just About Voting

Precolonial kingdoms challenge our beliefs about people power and monarchies.

For Americans who rebelled against Britain’s King George III in 1775, monarchy was another name for tyranny—by definition, incompatible with democracy. This view of Britain softened over the next centuries, as many Americans drew inspiration from the British empire’s “civilizing mission” in regions suffering under “oriental” and other despotisms. During the Cold War especially, they saw Britain as a vital partner in a contest against Soviet tyranny, tolerating its monarchy as a quaint vestige in a country otherwise committed to liberal democracy. The bond sustained the U.S.-U.K. partnership in the subsequent war on terror, including the invasion of Iraq in the name of spreading democracy.

But if Britain’s royals were perceived as benign ornaments, the death of Queen Elizabeth II last year launched a new global conversation about their role. In former colonies, such as Jamaica, where the British monarch remains the head of state, republican sentiment has gained strength. Historians have highlighted the monarchy’s role in slavery and imperialism and the origins of its hereditary wealth and jewels. And revelations about the monarchy’s racist treatment of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, have fortified the old equation of monarchy with despotism. In a New York Times column about a Netflix documentary on the Sussexes, American writer Roxane Gay affirmed: “Monarchies are almost never benevolent, even if they have no political power. They are often upheld with one form of violence or another.” For Americans, monarchy is either ornamental or autocratic, never democratic.

Yet Americans are also concerned about the reality of democracy in their own republic. They ask: Does the power to elect one’s rulers guarantee democracy? And can democratic republics holding regular elections become deeply coercive even as they fly the flag of liberty? As it turns out, Americans’ narrow focus on voting has blinded them to other, more robust, forms of democratic expression practiced even in some monarchies in the past. Behind myths about foreign despotisms are lost kingdoms where monarchs were often actively accountable to the ruled.

Read the full article on the Foreign Policy website.