Posted by Guy Stair Sainty
on 7/12/2011, 18:59:13, in reply to "Re: The Albanian Monarchy "
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:
: You lost me on Greece. Despite the
: romantic claims of some of its more ardent
: nationalists, the Greek state established in
: the nineteenth century had only the most
: tenuous connection with the Byzantine
: Empire. The leaders of the independence
: movement were not monarchists, and neither
: of the alien monarchies set up to please the
: protecting powers (as you note below)
: managed to implant firm roots in the
: country.
You are right about the tenuous Byzantine connection - the Greeks tendency to believe national fables is even more exaggerated than that of other nations. However the leaders did ask the Powers to help establish a monarchy because they did not trust each other - nothing much has changed.
: However the Albanian monarchy was invented
: at a time when monarchy was far from being
: the accepted form of government. Zog's
: self-proclamation was really an exercise in
: hubris and his search for a wife of
: "suitable" birth caused much
: merriment among the more ancient crowned
: heads. His eventual choice, the beautiful
: Countess Apponyi, was an immense stroke of
: good fortune. His was probably the last
: monarchical experiment in Europe and for
: that reason worthy of note - but not a great
: advertisement for another.
:
: All true, but I return to my point above
: that a monarchy was no more alien than a
: republic. It was just, as you note, that
: in post-Great War Europe there was a general
: sense that the days of monarchies had
: passed. Of course, sophisticated people at
: the time might have been rather surprised at
: how enduring monarchy has been in the
: western and northern parts of the continent.
Indeed - but those monarchies had much longer traditions and were very closely allied with the sense of nationhood. Zog had compromised so much with Italy - he was forced to - and it was of course his decision to say no more to Italian demands that led to his overthrow. But he did nothing to help Albania forge a united national identity. In northern Europe it was the legitimacy that the monarchies represented that made it much more difficult for the occupying Germans to get a firm grip; unlike republican France whose institutions proved all too easy to subvert.
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