The ancient distinction among monarchies, tyrannies, oligarchies, and constitutional governments, like other traditional classifications of political systems, is no longer very descriptive of political life. A king may be a ceremonial dignitary in one of the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe, or he may be an absolute ruler in one of the emerging states of North Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. In the first case his duties may be little different from those of an elected president in many republican parliamentary regimes; in the second his role may be much the same as that of countless dictators and strongmen in autocratic regimes throughout the less-developed areas of the world. It may be said of the reigning dynasties of modern Europe that they have survived only because they failed to retain or to acquire effective powers of government. Royal lines have been preserved only in those countries of Europe in which royal rule was severely limited prior to the 20th century or in which royal absolutism had never firmly established itself. More successful dynasties, such as the Hohenzollerns in Germany, the Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary, and the Romanovs in Russia, which continued to rule as well as to reign at the opening of the 20th century, have paid with the loss of their thrones.
Today in countries such as Great Britain or the Netherlands or Denmark the monarch is the ceremonial head of state, an indispensable figure in all great official occasions and a symbol of national unity and of the authority of the state, but is almost entirely lacking in power. Monarchy in the parliamentary democracies of modern Europe has been reduced to the status of a dignified institutional facade behind which the functioning mechanisms of government – cabinet, parliament, ministers, and parties – go about the tasks of ruling.
The 20th century has also seen the demise of most of the hereditary monarchies of the non-Western world. Thrones have toppled in Turkey, in China, in most of the Arab countries, in the principles of India; in the tribal kingdoms of Africa, and in several countries of Southeast Asia. The kings who maintain their position do so less by the claim of legitimate blood descent than by their appeal as popular leaders responsible for well-publicized programs of national economic and social reform or as national military chieftains. In a sense, these kings are less monarchs than monocrats, and their regimes are little different from several other forms of one-man rule found in the modern world.
