Always remember that the existing figurehead monarchies of Great Britain, Spain, and northern Europe, especially Scandinavia, continue to play a vital role in the relatively boring stability of those countries’ politics. “The institution of monarchy, shorn of its absolute power,” writes the mid-20th-century American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, possesses virtues that arise from “the continuing will and unity of a nation as distinguished from the momentary will, embodied in specific governments.”[13]
