Decentralized governance promotes stability, says Habsburg.

The Key to Stability and Success: Subsidiarity

When a country’s local government on the lowest level is very strong, and each higher level of governance has less and less power, with the central government being very weak, the country is best suited to become stable and successful, said Eduard Habsburg.

Eduard Habsburg, a member of the house of Habsburg-Lorraine, the former ruling family of Austria-Hungary, believes that subsidiarity is the key to success for a country. Although monarchy and constitutional republic are diametrically different systems of governance, the United States and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire were both employing the same principle of subsidiarity.

According to Habsburg, the United States is built on a great idea, and its unique structure of how townships, homesteads, and counties are built is totally different from what is in Europe. “America has the seed of really being the land of freedom, the land of the free,” he said.

Respect for Local Rights

“America is built from the bottom up,” Habsburg said. It has built homesteads first, then township, county, and state. “The strongest power is on the basis,” Habsburg explained, meaning the lower the level of government, the stronger its power.

Respect for local rights has been the Habsburg principle even from the 13th century, Habsburg said. He cited advice given by Emperor Charles V to his son Philip II, the king of Spain: “If you rule over several nations and countries, you have to respect their languages, their rights, their political institutions, their habits, local habits, and their peculiarities or you will be in deep trouble.”

The principle to respect the lower level of the country’s administrative structure can be illustrated by the relationship between the Habsburgs and Hungary, Habsburg said. When the Habsburgs began to respect Hungarians and their local rights, gave them the right to call in their own diet, and let themselves be crowned the king of Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian Empire became great, Habsburg said.

Monarchs vs. Elected Leaders

Although monarchy is considered a tyrannical system of governance by some intellectuals and portrayed as such in literature and movies, Habsburg believes that there are positive sides to royalty and focuses on those aspects in his book.

The great difference between political leaders of today and monarchs is that “a monarch is in it for life” while a political leader can hold an office in government only for a certain period of time and then moves to another job, Habsburg said. “That’s a temptation in today’s political world.”

Another big difference between elected political leaders and monarchs manifests in their approach to crisis, Habsburg said. Elected officials are always tempted to pay attention to headlines in the news, worrying which headline will help them get reelected and which headline will pose a risk to their political career, but monarch does not need to be concerned with media coverage, Habsburg said.