Vivat Rex

There is probably no one who would find it easy to explain what exactly is going to happen tomorrow at Westminster Abbey in London, UK. The coronation of Charles III and his wife Camilla is what will happen, of course. But what does that mean? He will be administered an oath by an archbishop as part of an Anglican service, he will be sprinkled with olive oil, he will be clothed in a gown, a crown will be placed on his head and all sorts of jewelled utensils will be placed in his hands and finally he will be seated in a chair. I get it. But what happens? It’s not as if this were a legal procedure, the illocutionary act that transforms Charles the Prince – pling! – into Charles the King and thus fills the constitutional position of head of state. Charles is already King, and became so at the moment of his mother’s death. Nor is it that a great and glorious ruler is celebrating his greatness and glory with much gold and incense. The ceremony, like everything the king does and says, is strictly controlled and dictated by the government of His Majesty’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, whose greatness and glory, as we know, are not doing so terribly well in these times of national squalor. Crown the king? No other monarchy in Europe does that anymore. So what’s the point? What is happening?

There are two simple answers, neither of which makes sense to me: It’s all just superstitious mumbo-jumbo, is one, an expensive government spectacle to distract the masses and, for the enlightened modern person, an embarrassment about which any word but stinging derision would be wasted. It’s an endearing ritual, is the other, steeped in centuries of tradition, creating a sense of community, security and continuity, which, while perhaps not to be taken entirely seriously, should be enjoyed with cheers and souvenirs and waving flags. Both answers pretend that it is self-evident that the coronation should be good for something at all and serve a purpose beyond itself. It would if it were a modern thing. Which, to state the obvious, it is not.

The British monarchy has come through modern times by being transformed into a smiling, dignified piece of political quasi-nothingness. It could not be otherwise. For a modern, democratic state to have a head at all is an assertion than can be made without self-contradiction a lot easier if nothing very important follows from it. This is no different in a Republic like ours: smiling quasi-nothingness is not the worst choice for a Bundespräsident who wants to get through this strangest of modern state offices with his/her dignity undamaged.

Charles, however, is very much a thing, politically, quite excessively so for many who have always been unable to make sense of this odd, jug-eared, sad, awkward, in so many ways terribly unmodern man. Unlike his mother, he has made his political preferences and opinions widely and relentlessly known. He is as passionately committed to organic vegetables as he is against modern architecture and, to the great irritation of the British press and a not insignificant part of the population, leaves no one in the dark about any of it, least of all the democratically elected government, which he used to bombard with letters for decades without being able to give any better reason for the relevance of his views than his birth. This man looms into modernity, which can’t cope with him any better than he can cope with it. And now he is king.

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The irony, however, is that Charles, heir apparent for 71 of his 74 years, ascends the throne at a time when modernity itself has long since ceased to be modern. In the second season of the legendary BBC miniseries House of Cards (the original, not to be confused with the US remake starring Kevin Spacey), a fictional king who tries to lock horns with the democratically elected government in the laudable but clumsy attempt to make it adopt less anti-social policies is shafted in the most ruthless and delightfully efficient way by the bottomlessly cynical, devilishly clever, murderously power-hungry Tory prime minister Francis Urquhart. That was in 1993, less than three years after Margaret Thatcher’s rule ended. Since then, 30 years and eight prime ministers have passed, six of them of the Conservative Party. I find it rather hard to imagine Rishi Sunak or any other figure in this utterly run-down party in the role of Francis Urquhart. Charles, on the other hand, has remained much the same he was back then. And in some sense, I suppose, many of those who derided him all those years now have to admit that he was kind of right all along.

If it is the distinction between society and nature that characterises modernity, then today, much more than in 1993, it is not just a plausible but a highly urgent political agenda to overcome it. Climate change and species extinction are undeniable realities, and the great political conflict of our time is between those who want to dismiss and postpone the demand for a radical turnaround, and those who want to embrace and act on it. Conservative parties, as far as they do not want to degenerate into an authoritarian-populist abomination or haven’t already, should see this as an opportunity. What can be more conservative than striving to overcome modernity?

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Uckermark lately, a very rural area some 70 km north of Berlin. What strikes me here is the level of dislike that people show towards the Greens, while at the same time there is a high level of awareness of the bad way of what we moderns like to call “nature” and for most countryfolk is simply the land they live on. What it means when no rain is falling for months on end and the harvest withers and the forests burn like tinder, is experienced much more brutally and physically by people in the countryside than by those in the cities. Most people here have known for a long time that we cannot go on like this. They are annoyed by the wind turbines right outside their windows that are generating profits for remote city investors and not for them, and by high petrol prices coupled with an ever thinning infrastructure, and they often have a rather low opinion of politics and the prospect of it improving their lives in general, and I don’t see that I am in any position to contradict them in any of this. Few here are fans of agribusiness and factory farming, and if they drive an SUV, it is mostly because they are actually driving off-roads regularly, and not just for leisure. I don’t want to idyllise anything, but it seems to me that most of the people I meet here would be a lot easier to win over to support an effective climate policy than most “liberal-conservative” inhabitants of leafy suburban and urban districts I know. Just not by the Greens.

As it stands, the British Conservative Party seems to be facing an almost certain crushing defeat of epic proportions at the next general election. They can hardly hope that authoritarian populism will save them, as they have already tried that. Is it completely out of the question that the party, when it picks itself up after the near-death experience that awaits it, will find new orientation by rallying behind their king, as good conservatives do? Even if that would mean breaking radically with their previous alliances? If so, how ironic would it be if the very country that invented liberalism, empirical science, industrialisation, i.e. modernity in its essential parts, were to place itself at the forefront of saving the earth from it?

Well, one can hope a little, right?

The week on Verfassungsblog

… summarised by PAULA SCHMIETA:

Four weeks ago, Sudan was – yet again – plunged into a civil war. MARK DENG sheds light on the background of this extraordinarily complex conflict as well as its potential implications for the region and beyond.

Within the past year, the UK government introduced two legislative proposals which set the UK on a collision course with the ECtHR. ALICE DONALD & PHILIP LEACH show how these bills would undermine obligations of the UK under international law and examine their significance for the debate on a possible withdrawal of the UK from the ECHR.

Whilst Germany is arguing about bans on heating and combustion engines, key energy policy decisions have now been taken in Brussels in a “silent transformation”. MIRIAM VOLLMER gives an overview on the amendment of the Emissions Trading Directive 2003/87/EU and its profound consequences.

In France, the government must submit an impact assessment to each of its draft laws – unlike in Germany, this also includes a “climate check”. ALEXANDER KRATZ analyses a ruling by the conseil constitutionnel in which it found such an impact assessment to be sufficient despite what Kratz considers to be “obvious gaps”.

How should crimes in the course of climate activism be dealt with? FYNN WENGLARCZYK & JANA WOLF shed light on the specific structure of conflict in climate activist crimes and explain why, in their view, prison sentences for “Klima-Kleber” (lit. climate gluers) are the wrong answer.

The coalition government had announced that it would reform the Act on Temporary Contracts in Academia (Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz). This project has now – so it seems – been put on hold. SIMON PSCHORR & ARNOLD ARPACI argue that no reform is not an option, as the current legal situation violates European and constitutional law.

The CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag has requested a Bundestag inquiry committee on the Cum-Ex scandal to investigate Olaf Scholz’s actions in his former role as First Mayor of Hamburg. JOACHIM WIELAND finds that the creation of such a committee would be ultra vires.

Last week, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the Junge Alternative as right-wing extremist. KATHARINA LEUSCH explains what this means for the youth organisation and its parent party, the AfD.

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That’s it for this week. All the best to you!

And please don’t forget to donate!

Max Steinbeis

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