Guest post: King Haakon refused to yield
Originally a comment by Harald Hanche-Olsen on No tell us what you really think.
This is a bit of an aside from the main story, but since monarchy was discussed, I dare say that Norway has the best functioning constitutional monarchy in the world. The royal family demands tremendous respect, and much of it is well deserved.
When the union between Norway and Sweden was dissolved in 1905 and king Oscar of Sweden could no longer be king of Norway, prince Carl of Denmark (full name Christian Frederik Carl Georg Valdemar Axel, how is that for a mouthful?) was offered the throne. Many Norwegians were in favour of a republic instead, so prince Carl demanded a referendum to decide between the alternatives, republic or constitutional monarchy. The monarchy side won by a good margin, and he accepted the throne, taking the name Haakon.
In 1928, the Labour Party won the election for parliament. Conservatives were alarmed at this, as the Labour Party was more of a revolutionary party in those days. But Haakon, determined to stay within his constitutional role, asked a representative of the Labour Party to form a government. “I am also the communists’ king” he said – a statement well remembered.
Then, when Nazi Germany attacked in April 1940, the occupiers demanded that the King appoint one Vidkun Quisling – yes, that Quisling – as prime minister. At that point, Parliament had dissolved itself, giving over all its powers to the King and government for the duration of the war. The government was undecided, but King Haakon refused to yield, saying he would rather abdicate. So in the end, he escaped to England with the government and stayed there for the rest of the war.
These two events go a long way to explain the popularity of the royal family to this day. One more story, from more recent days:
After the July 22 terror, a nearby hotel was converted to a center for taking care of the survivors and their families. At one point, two girls walked through the lobby, both crying. There they walked into the arms of an elderly man, and after sobbing into his chest for a while, one of them looked up and discovered they were being hugged by the king.
I am still tearing up just writing this, and that helps explain why, though I am a republican in theory, I am sort of a monarchist in practice. I think many Norwegians share the sentiment. So long as the royal family keeps living up to the high standards they have set for themselves, I am willing to put my republican impulses on the back burner.
The NY Times did a piece on King Harald and July 22:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/world/europe/king-harald-of-norway-proves-mettle-with-response-to-july-22-deaths.html
Good article. I spotted only one minor factual mistake: While Haakon was crowned king in 1905, none of his successors had a crowning ceremony. Apparently, that would be too much pomp and circumstance for how they see their role in society. Instead, they just settled for a ceremony of blessing by the church.
Wow, I didn’t know this about the Norwegian royal family. Fascinating.
It reminds me a bit of how I’ve come to feel about the UK House of Lords. Unelected life-long peers? No thank you! Thought I, pretty much since I learned of their existence. But then, it was explained to me the idea that they’re supposed to temper and smooth out the dramatic ups and downs that can plague the House of Commons and the fickleness of electoral politics and the (dirty, ignorant, foolish, to many old aristocrats) masses. Democracy does indeed have a weakness in that sometimes crazes and fads and crazies and fascists can command the zeitgeist of the moment, and perhaps there needs to be a sort of ballast to moderate the pace of change. This all sounded to me like a bunch of entitled elites both romanticizing and aggrandizing the importance of their role in British society — it’s all so conveniently self-serving — and no doubt a lot of Peers are just that. But then something comes along like gender identity ideology or social media censorship, and it’s people like the Baroness Emma Nicholson and many other members of the Lords who are speaking out, and pushing the UK government to get a grip and moderate themselves.
So I get it. Sometimes something that looks in principle like a useless vestige of old aristocracy can turn out to be a not-entirely-bad thing, especially in tumultuous times where popular opinions — and therefore democratic elections — can veer to destabilizing extremes.
It’s the old chestnut that Churchill supposedly said about democracy — the worst form of government except for all the others (or whatever, it’s probably just an internet meme). I don’t know, maybe that “worst form of government” can be tempered with just a teensy dose of the old ways once in a while, just to keep things stable.
Artymorty@3: In the U.S., the Senate largely performs that same role. The adage is that “The House proposes, the Senate disposes.” Were the House a more representative body (the House is currently far too small–the average ‘Representative’ is supposed to speak for three times as many people as the average Senator did in 1776–this is one of the reasons that gerrymandering is such a viable tool), the two houses would actually balance each other out nicely.
@3 Excellent post Arty. Dispensing with what’s good and stable in the world isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Artymorty @#3:
Churchill was no democrat. He was an entitled peer who had to renounce his entitlement in order to pick up a seat in the House of Commons and so qualify to become PM. The original ‘commoners’ were the people who worked the ‘common lands’ of Britain before the Enclosure Acts from 1750 to 1914 transferred them to private ownership, mainly to ownership by the established aristocracy. This has resulted in the modern British reality where the majority live cheek-by-jowl Alf Garnett style jam-packed into housing estates while yer haristocracy still rides ‘appily to ‘ounds damn near wherever they please. This situation contrasts markedly with that of France, in which the 1789 revolution did away pretty-well completely with the French aristocracy, resulting in smallholdings being the agicultural rule there until reversed by the usual process of capitalist consolidation in the last half of the 20th Century. (Over the last 25 years, France has reportedly lost over 55% of its farms.)
Tan tivvy, tally-ho and all that.
There’s a reason Labour won the first general election after the War, despite Churchill’s wide popularity as war leader.
Churchill was only (imprecisely) summarizing Aristotle on the subject.