Dick Wilson: The mystique of kings is increasingly a figment of the past

Probably the wisest thing ever said about kingship was the prophecy of King Farukh of Egypt that there soon would be only five kings in the world, namely the King of England and the four kings in a pack of cards.

Certainly it has not been a good year for kings. Two have fallen by the wayside – King Gyanendra of Nepal and King George Tupou V of Tonga in the Pacific. Both of these abandoned their royalty voluntarily, much to their credit.

There is a mystique about a king which no Prime Minister or President can match. Shakespeare said it in Hamlet: “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would.”

Kings will go all out to magnify that mystique, even though they may appear to be liberal in their countries’ domestic politics. Tupou V of Tonga had a gilded throne made for him in China! Educated at Oxford and Sandhurst, he was well placed to use the networks of British rule.

In the case of Nepal, it was the Maoists who won the recent elections and who went on to abolish the monarchy by a crushing vote of 560 to 4. King Gyanendra could see that he had no future in Nepal, and so he went out quietly, giving his crown to the government. He was the only surviving Hindu monarch, which may be surprising. His demotion to ordinary citizen cost him 600 servants and countless material advantages.
These examples are inevitably compared with King Bhumipol of Thailand, who allowed his followers to build up the royal mystique while himself maintaining a more liberal approach to public affairs, but he never allowed his mystique to be breached by anyone, neither Thai nor foreign.

I once had an interview with King Bhumipol, but I was not allowed to call it an interview. It was referred to instead as “a few remarks” surrounding a presentation of books. Great pressure was put upon writers who wanted to judge the King as being correct in some things but open to criticism in others.

He could not, of course, rule without making some enemies and towards the end of his reign his reputation began to unravel. Not even Thailand could escape the forces of democracy, and in December 2007 it was the People’s Power Party who won the most votes. It was a short step to Western-style democracy, meaning vote-buying money politics. All the same, Bhumipol stood out to show what a king could do if he was right-minded and sufficiently courageous. Then, as with so many monarchs, the politics of succession quickly broke down into open factionalism after a period of relative suppression.

Are there any other kings? What about the Malaysian monarch, who enjoys a short reign by rota with his fellow-monarchs. His power and significance was thus strictly limited. The politicians remained on the whole restrained in their positions, but in March 2008 the opposition gained a great increase in its parliamentary numbers, and politics is just as fierce and tarnished as it is in other countries.

Passing the torch
It is not necessary for a strong personality to become a monarch in order to tell everybody what to do. Even after the legendary nationalist leaders passed on after the 1960s, their sons and daughters were expected to take over the mantle, sharing the mystique of their father and enjoying a special political position.

The great example of that was Burma, where Suu Kyi tried to carry on the ideas and the appeal of her father Aung San. But it was not enough to avoid references by politicians to her as a “naughty child” deserving of a flogging. She won 80 percent of the vote in the 1990 elections, backed by such stalwarts as the journalist U Win Tin, who was only released after nineteen years of being held prisoner. “I will keep fighting,” said U after his release, “until the emergence of democracy in this country.”

Aung San would surely have played the part of a benevolent monarch had he survived. Whether his daughter had the same qualities and character we may never know.

The women dependent on outstanding nationalist leaders had a similar role to play. One former Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, eventually left for medical treatment in the US, but then another Prime Minister, Khaleda, had to face trial for corruption.

There is no longer a real story to be made of Asia’s kings and their families. But the fact that there were two kings in Nepal and Tonga who gave up their thrones, either voluntarily or under great pressure, and the continent-wide phenomenon of leftist thinking is partly to be explained by the more progressive of the monarchs and their exploitation of popular feelings about them.

What is perhaps more germane today is the ending of the nationalism of the old purist kind, with an opening up of so many Asian countries to cosmopolitan internationalism.

Take one very recent example. HSBC and Standard Chartered have won approval as the first overseas banks to open wholly-owned units in Vietnam. This is partly to honour the undertaking given when Vietnam joined the World Trade Organisation in 2007.

It is an attractive market for such banks, being one of the less penetrated markets in Asia. They are both now busy opening up thirty to forty branches in the coming years.

“We see the consumer retail market”, said the Chief Executive of HSBC in Vietnam, Tom Tobin, “as a big opportunity over the medium term.”

That takes us a long way from kings, but the influence of kings has demonstrably receded to the benefit on the whole, of the people, just as economic ownership has been liberalised in order to accommodate the practices and philosophy of foreign capitalism.