The Making of Modern Atlantic Monarchies. Volume 2 Fall, Strife, Survival: Conservative Monarchism since the Age of Extremes, 1900-2020

The First World War toppled crowned heads and turned the majority of European monarchies into republics.As the silver age of monarchy ended, monarchy ceased being a fundamental demand of conservative thought. Still, monarchism endured, both in nations that remained monarchies and in those that had long become republics. This is the first volume in any language to study the role of conservative monarchism in the twentieth century, and one of the very rare few to analyze monarchism during that era from a comparative point of view. Bringing together scholars from fourteen countries to study as many national cases in Europe and Africa, the collection illustrates the many forms that conservative monarchism adopted, and the great variety of uses to which it was put, during the last two waves of democratization. Whether as a means of expressing the political demands of women’s movements (in the Weimar Republic); as the philosophy of a self-asserting prince turned political thinker (in Liechtenstein); or as the traditionalist backbone of the theocracy that achieved independence (in Libya), conservative monarchism remained a political force to be reckoned with throughout the twentieth century. Long overshadowed by the era’s extreme newcomers – fascism and communism – it should, as the papers in this collection abundantly exhibit, help develop a more detailed and balanced account of the age of extremes.