Huw Price has an interesting, if quixotic, article at "Pearls and Irritations", Conscription and the Monarchy -- the infant in the room. In it he argues that the children of royalty aren't allowed normal choices in life and that they should have the right to them. He has made this argument before, and for some very difficult to discern reason he always seems to take it as an especially clinching argument against the Australian monarchy.
It's very difficult to pin down what exactly the right is that Price thinks princes and princesses are denied. "Normal choices in life" is not something children generally have; at least, the actual choices children have are extremely limited. For instance, Australian children are in some sense denied normal choices in life; if 'normal choices' are just choices that can usually be made, it's a statistical normality, and being born in Australia prevents you from making all sorts of choices that are normal around the world. The population of Australia is dwarfed by populations that have very different customs with regard to children and therefore very different choices. I can hardly imagine that Price thinks we should abolish citizenship as well as principality and republics as well as monarchies. It's obviously some particular kinds of 'normal choices' that Price has in mind; but he never really tells us what they are, nor why these rather than other kinds of choices are the ones about which we should be concerned. And when he's ever actually pressed on it, what he actually talks about is not the child's choices but the parents' choices, as he does in this very argument when countering the objection that the children of the wealthy are often in analogous situations.
Likewise, he likes to use the word 'conscription', but never does anything to contrast it with other things that have been called the conscription of children, like mandatory schooling, which is almost always justified as making them suited to a what is in fact a public office, even if not always called such because of its fundamental nature, namely, that of citizen. In fact, that's where conscription, at least in modern societies, is found: in countries that have the draft, or like the United States leave open the option of the draft, actual conscription is based on the duties of citizenship. And this is part of the problem; he seems so taken with the argument that he never clarifies what we are to make of the fact that we are all born under duties and obligations that are taken to override our choices.
What I really find puzzling, though, is that he never discusses the actual reason for the situation he bemoans, in which princes and princesses have limited options. Why do they have limited options? Because the role of the Royal Family has been sharply curtailed so as to be nothing but a tool of the Crown. Being nothing but instruments of the Crown, princes and princesses are obviously going to be required always to do things in light of the interests of the Crown. There are lots of monarchies in which kingship is just a title with some responsibilities, in the way that being a landed baron is, but the British form of monarchy partly develops as a way to limit both the power of the king and even more sharply the power (and thus choices) of anyone around the king. Both the United Kingdom and Australia are sometimes called 'crowned republics'; this cannot be taken seriously (at all of the United Kingdom, which is not in any way republican at all, and for most things of Australia, which does have republican features but interwoven with clearly non-republican features), but the grain of truth in it is that much of how the monarchy currently works in Commonwealth countries has arisen not from the nature of monarchy itself but from continual attempts to force the monarchy not to act quite like a monarchy but like a state-dignity-machine.
He ends:
Many of us hope that we’ll have another chance to make Australia a republic—within our lifetimes, if we’re lucky. In pressing for that change, let’s remember that it is not just about our right to govern ourselves. It’s also about the rights of a few British children, presently conscripted to do the job.Australians usually have their referenda on monarchy or republic when the reigning monarch dies, so I almost read this as Price wishing for King Charles to hurry up and die; but then I remembered that the Australians postponed the referendum after the death of Queen Elizabeth, so perhaps that is the one that he means. Or perhaps he thinks it might happen by some other means. But in any case, what I actually find interesting is the phrase "make Australia a republic", which sums up entirely why republicans in Commonwealth countries are usually loons. You can't just up and make something a republic. That's not how republics work at all; a lot of things have to come together for them. The transition from monarchy to republic is a particularly harsh transition, because the habits of governance and self-governance have to change rather extensively in order to make it; no nation has ever made the transition without several severe stumbles, and remarkably few have even succeeded at all. Most attempts to "make monarchy X a republic" end up actually making a third-world dictatorship in which the tyrant calls himself "President" and the people are less free than they would be under a king. The consistent evidence of history is that monarchies are just easier to build and maintain than republics, so the move from the former to the latter switches a lot of things from 'easy' to 'hard', and every people who have ever made the change have struggled with some of the new hard-mode features. Actually rising to the challenge requires a complete change in politics, because in a republic everything that is a matter of national identity is a matter of politics. People abroad are often astonished at the insanities of American politics, but I tell you, my friends, this is how politics in an actual republic works; the formats and institutions may change, but there is a particular kind of mixture of patriotism and paranoia and chaos that is needed to make a republic work, and by the nature of a republic it infects everything.
Of all the Commonwealth monarchies (and indeed, I would argue all the Commonwealth nations, monarchy or not), Australia is the one best positioned to make the transition to a republic. A major part of that is that its hybridized form of government means that its habits of governance and self-governance are already adapted to at least some republic-like institutions. Since lack of this adaptation is one of the big stumbling-blocks, as far as history seems to tell us, that headstart counts for a lot. But 'republic' is not just a decal you slap on the chassis; it's an entire way of doing things. Even if Australians were to vote to become a republic, and start calling themselves a republic, Australia will not be a republic in our lifetime, but only some weird hybrid thing sliding erratically in a vaguely republican-ish direction. Republicans in Commonwealth countries are usually loons because they have somehow picked up the idea that you can just wave a magic wand of voting and transform, but republics are an immense amount of work.
