An Evaluation of the Prospect of Republicanism in New Zealand Written by Leonardo S
An Evaluation of the Prospect of Republicanism in New Zealand Written by Leonardo S. Milani This PDF is auto-generated for reference only. As such, it may contain some conversion errors and/or missing information. For all formal use please refer to the official version on the website, as linked below. An Evaluation of the Prospect of Republicanism in New Zealand https://www.e-ir.info/2011/07/07/an-evaluation-of-the-prospect-of-republicanism-in-new-zealand/ LEONARDO S. MILANI, JUL 7 2011 Throughout modern history, the concept of monarchy along with its structural institutions of power, have been recurrently challenged by their theoretical antithesis, republicanism, as an anti-monarchical governance model that craves the reshaping and redefinition of the configuration of power in sovereign-based systems primarily by removing the unelected sovereign from the political system’s pyramid of power. From a structuralist perspective, one can argue that depending on the environment of political regimes in which republican aspirations are operating, the nature of such challenges materialize either as revolutionary (e.g. American Revolution, English Civil War, French Grand Revolution, Iranian Revolution) or as transitional (e.g. Persian Constitutional Movement of 1906, Australian Republican Movement). By placing the two categories in the context of late 20th and early 21th centuries’ waves of democratization and globalization, republicanism, within stable parliamentary democracies with a monarch as a head of state, falls into the second category. In this context, the political environment of New Zealand as a member of the British Commonwealth, an entity operating under the Westminster system with Queen Elizabeth II as the head of state, is a unique laboratory to observe republican dynamics and the direction of political change, whether to retain the status quo or, to what determinist republicans audaciously claim, to be the ‘inevitable’ establishment of a republic through a mechanical, irreversible transition.
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