national unity, and a focus for citizen loyalty, than do presidents. Monarchist
tendencies have not entirely died out among ultra-traditionalist and conserva-
tive elements in European countries that have dispensed with them; in
particular, there has been a monarchist resurgence in some Eastern European
countries since the collapse of communism there in the late 1980s. The
monarchies which have survived in Europe look likely to continue, if only
because they provide a convenient way to separate the head of state role from
thehead of government, and because they remain popular with their
subjects; in such countries the royal families regularly gain extremely high
support in public opinion polls. However, especially in the United Kingdom,
the public standing of royal families is vulnerable to their private behaviour,
because the values society feels it needs them to espouse are in fact very
different from the values by which much of society lives. The more ‘ordinary’ a
monarchy becomes, the less support it gets in practice, although at the same
time, egalitarian views in society run against the idea of a distant and superior
monarchy.
Monetarism
Monetarism, as used in ordinary political discourse rather than in technical
economics studies, refers to a general understanding of certain economic
theories, usually associated with Milton Friedman or theChicago School
of economics. It rapidly became popular with politicians on the right in the
USA and United Kingdom as an apparent alternative toKeynesianismin
capitalist societies. The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher
elected in 1979 was perhaps the first avowedly ‘monetarist’ government in
the UK, although many would argue that the economic policies of most
governments since the late 1960s, including the Labour governments, have
used monetarist policies. Certainly during the 1980s monetarism gained the
same sort of consensus position that Keynesianism used to hold, and few
politicians could honestly deny they were not, to some extent, monetarist.
The dominant concern of monetarism is the reduction of inflation at all
costs, and its name derives from claims that the money supplyin the
economy is virtually the only factor affecting the inflation rate. However, in
practice definitions of money are various, and under some of them money
turns out to be extremely difficult to control. One implication of the theory is
that inflation is itself the prime evil, and the prime cause of all other economic
ills, especially unemployment. At the same time the theory, certainly as
understood by most right-wing politicians, argues for a virtual return to
laissez-faireeconomics and an abandonment of government control in any
direct way, in favour of operating almost entirely through the money market
and the rate of interest. As taxation increases are eschewed by monetarists their
Monetarism