Does Serbia need a king?

Prof. Dr. Radoslav Stojanović, Radio Free Europe, 11 January 2004.

The English people once restored the monarchy to prevent dangerous people such as Cromwell from coming to power again. Regrettably, there are many people like him in today's Serbia....

I think that, in our case, the restoration of the monarchy abolished after World War II would be more than a symbolic gesture of reconciliation, but also a confirmation that the civil war among Serbs is finally over, and that things are back where they used to be. Whether we want to admit it or not, the Serbian people are still divided between the royalist chetniks and the communist partisans, and restoring the monarchy might restore its identity.

I am talking about a contemporary European model of a monarchy. As we all know, eight members of the European Union are monarchies. It is absolutely clear that a monarchy with prerogatives enabling the king to become a tyrant is out of the question today.

I cannot accept the legitimacy of the 1945 vote to abolish the monarchy. The monarchy was rejected in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and maybe in Macedonia, but that was not the case in Serbia. I talked about this in two public speeches, first in front of 200,000 people and then in front of 100,000. I remember well the ovation I received when I mentioned the restoration of the monarchy. People react that way today simply because they never accepted the way the monarchy was abolished in 1945. Searching for its identity, the people have to overcome their divisions.

Members of dynasties – whether Karadjordjevic or any other – aren’t superhuman. They share all human weaknesses. Affairs are omnipresent because human relations suffer from passions and weaknesses. However, I have more confidence in a man with a pedigree than in someone who appeared out of nowhere to preach to us. Let us not forget the recent legacy of these „nobodies,“ the crimes they committed and the shame they brought upon the Serbs.

Of course, it is close to any democrat’s mind that it’s better to elect a head of a state than to have somebody make a claim for life on the basis of his birth. But one should not forget about Hitler and other elected leaders who went on to commit crimes. And in the Serbian case, we cannot compare King Aleksandar's royal dictatorship with the much bloodier one the communists imposed in 1945.