When King Charles delivered the throne speech to open the Canadian parliament last month, British journalist Martin Kettle sought to capture the rare and elaborate occasion:
The idea that a vibrant democracy such as Canada, with a highly sophisticated sense of its own complex identity, might summon an elderly hereditary monarch from across the ocean to provide a focal point for its resistance to Donald Trump’s existential threat takes some believing.
Kettle’s description points to an ongoing foreign policy tension for all the remaining Commonwealth realms, including Australia: the role and status of the crown and British monarch as diplomatic tools.
Canada’s recently elected Prime Minister Mark Carney had invited the king to deliver the throne speech – the first time a reigning monarch has done so since 1977 – as a statement of Canadian sovereignty, pushing back against the repeated goading threats by Trump to make Canada the 51st state. The king’s speech reinforced this message, declaring that “[d]emocracy, pluralism, the rule of law, self-determination and freedom are values which Canadians hold dear, and ones which the government is determined to protect”.
But while the Canadian government has sought to use the crown to defy Trump, the British government is instead harnessing it to charm the president.
How should the United States, or for that matter the rest of the world, interpret the one head of state serving two very different strategies of two separate countries?
In March, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered a letter to Trump from King Charles, inviting him for a second state visit (his first was in 2019). Such visits are a commonly employed tool of British diplomacy, feting foreign leaders with the pomp and pageantry of the royal house.
The dissonance is striking. How should the United States, or for that matter the rest of the world, interpret the one head of state serving two very different strategies of two separate countries? Is Trump meant to have two different conversations with Charles, one as King of Canada and another as King of the United Kingdom?
As a matter of law, the crown exists separately for each Commonwealth realm, meaning Charles, strictly speaking, is just as much King of Canada as he is King of Australia or the United Kingdom.
But in every other relevant sense – politically, socially, historically and indeed personally – the Crown and Charles himself are ultimately British.
The divisibility of the crown is a clever legal construct allowing countries to have separate governments and laws while sharing a sovereign. It rarely causes problems given that the Commonwealth realms tend to share similar enough political values. However, when these countries pursue foreign policies at odds or at least in tension with one another, then any involvement of their shared monarch becomes fraught.
For instance, when the king travels to a country that is not a Commonwealth realm, he does so as a representative of Britain, not all the realms. He might do so to help promote the UK’s trade – but that could mean capturing market share at the expense of other realms.
While the trade example is a more subtle tension, the British monarch’s role as head of multiple states and head of the Commonwealth has also caused more explicit political controversy. Though the exact course of events remains unclear, it is known that Queen Elizabeth was faced with opposing views between UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and most of the other Commonwealth prime ministers over sanctions imposed on apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
All this points to the fact that for modern democracies, such as Canada and Australia, a system of constitutional monarchy with a shared head of state is a largely harmless, but occasionally incongruous, anachronism.
For Australians, Charles’ insertion into Canadian diplomacy also begs another question: if Australia found itself in a similar position – its sovereignty threatened in some way – would Australians want an unelected septuagenarian Englishman representing their interests as head of state?
For most Australians, the answer is probably no.
Perhaps ironically, then, it is the king’s representative in Australia, Governor-General Sam Mostyn, who has provided a preview of what a unifying, apolitical and authentically Australian head of state could look like. See her via Instagram: Approachable, low key and transparent, Mostyn has breathed fresh air into what can be a stuffy vice regal office.
But to turn a governor-general into a president, Australia will first need a republican movement less concerned with enacting broader constitutional reform and more capable of making the case for a minimal-change model that ensures stability and continuity.
If Canberra is to pursue a more independent foreign policy, then a head of state that is exclusively Australian would be a good place to start.
