Global Britain and the dark side of civility: Monarchy and the legacy of colonialism

Abstract

This article analyses instances of civility and incivility towards the British monarchy at the time of the death of Elizabeth II and the ascension and coronation of Charles III (2022–2023). First, we introduce and unpack the concept of civility, highlighting its three key dimensions: politeness; moral civility; and justificatory civility. Second, we zoom in on specific sets of (in)civility controversies in three areas of the Commonwealth – the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Caribbean – to critically evaluate civil and uncivil responses to the royal transition events by different actors. Third, we show that, due to the potentially oppressive function of civility (especially when the latter embodies legacies of colonialism), uncivil impolite behaviour can sometimes be desirable and help to foster civility in the deeper sense captured by the idea of moral civility. However, we also point out that political leaders and public officials who are in principle critical of established institutions can sometimes find themselves torn between expressing their dissent from those institutions via impolite uncivil acts and abiding by polite civility norms in order to fulfil their positional duties and preserve peace and stability within their political community, a goal that also helps to realise moral civility.

Introduction

In October 2024 the Australian independent Senator Lidia Thorpe, a Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab-Wurrung woman representing the state of Victoria, staged a one-person protest in the presence of King Charles III. Charles was visiting Australia ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHoGM) in Samoa later that month. At the end of Charles’ address to the Australian Parliament, Thorpe shouted:

You are not our king. You are not our sovereign. You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want Treaty. F*** the colony (cited in Williams et al., 2024).

Although there was some support for Thorpe’s stance among the Australian public, members of Parliament and parts of the media were not so supportive, citing norms of civility in an attempt to marginalise or silence her critique. Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, responded that Senator Thorpe’s ‘outburst was reflective of the kinds of naive anti-colonial sentiments which dismiss the long-standing relationship between the United Kingdom and Australia’, adding that ‘[a]s a member of the Australian Parliament, it is incumbent on [Senator Thorpe] to show civility and respectful engagement when conducting her Parliamentary duties’ (cited in Charles, 2024).

Thorpe’s protest sits among broader contentious politics concerned with the legacy of British rule and the British Empire. The royal transition period from the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022 until King Charles’ coronation in May 2023 represented an important moment in the contemporary history of the British monarchy. Citizens and political leaders alike, in the United Kingdom (UK), across the Commonwealth and beyond, reacted to the two events in diverse ways, ranging from a deep sense of loss (for the Queen’s death) and joyful celebration (in the case of the King’s coronation) to feelings of anger and resentment aimed at the enduring legacy of colonialism and the role of the monarchy as a symbol of British imperialism. Yet, throughout this period, and especially among those who were more critical of the monarchy, a number of individuals and groups soon became targets of allegations of incivility. From fans at football matches booing the English national anthem and Caribbean governments using the moment to call for reparations for slavery, to Indigenous journalists being attacked on social media for linking the British monarchy to the ongoing effects of colonial dispossession, the royal transition period occasioned claims of civility and incivility from supporters and critics of the monarchy alike. Thus, international attention became focused on civility norms at a historical moment when a self-consciously post-EU ‘Global Britain’ was seeking new narratives about its place in the international order.

In order to make sense of this almost unique historical contingency, this paper combines two areas of research – the normative political theory literature on civility and the emerging literature on Global Britain in International Relations (IR) – that have developed independently from each other. More specifically, we examine the (in)civility controversies surrounding the royal transition period in light of debates about Global Britain and adopting the conceptual lens provided by a multidimensional ‘civility framework’.

By doing so, our analysis makes a twofold contribution to the existing literature. On one hand, it contributes to the normative political literature on civility (e.g. Bardon et al., 2023; Edyvane, 2017) by applying its normative tools to a concrete case study, thus moving beyond its traditionally abstract and theoretical focus, detached from real-world issues and events. On the other hand, our paper contributes to our understanding of Global Britain, the British monarchy, and IR more broadly by employing the normative civility lens to analyse the legacy of the link between civility and Britain’s imperial past – not least its so-called civilising mission – as symbolised through contemporary political ideas about the legitimacy of the monarchy. Britain’s monarchy is rarely – if ever – examined as a part of Britain’s soft power in IR literature (for some rare exceptions, see Croft, 2012; Gellwitzki et al., 2024) and, more generally, there is very limited literature on Global Britain in IR, with most of the existing work in this area focusing on British foreign policy and/or the Anglosphere (Saunders, 2020; Turner, 2019; Vucetic, 2021), or on the idea of Britain as a ‘global science superpower’ (Melhuish, 2025). Recent work has also highlighted how negative perceptions of the UK around the globe can contribute to undermining the UK’s own ‘Global Britain’ self-perception and, consequently, its status and soft power (Houde, 2025). Our paper contributes to these emerging debates by showing that Britain’s monarchy plays a crucial symbolic part in global politics, certainly within the Commonwealth and on the island of Ireland. It does so by critically evaluating political reactions to the soft power of the monarchy and Britain’s colonial legacies at the historical moment when the UK left the EU and sought a new – or newly articulated – role in the global order (Eaton, 2019; Melhuish, 2022; Taylor, 2024).

Our analysis throughout the paper combines normative political theory with an interpretivist approach. Normative political theory aims (a) ‘to clarify arguments and to highlight the values involved in political choices’ (Bauböck, 2008: 40), and (b) to develop ‘the norms we ought to endorse about the use of power, and/or the way that power and resources ought to be distributed based on those norms’ (Rehfeld, 2010: 475). We focus on civility norms in order to conduct a conceptual and normative analysis of civility and incivility during the UK royal transition period in light of debates about Global Britain. Importantly, normative political theory must take into account real-world facts and empirical insights in order to contextualise its theoretical analysis in real-world terms and ensure that normative statements and recommendations are not grounded in empirically flawed assumptions (Bauböck, 2008: 55–56). We therefore complement our normative analysis with references to primary and secondary sources to illustrate the (in)civility controversies that emerged during royal transition period in the UK. We provide anecdotal evidence from cases across the globe and base our analysis on material from emerging academic research and popular media outlets. We analyse these sources by adopting an interpretivist approach grounded in our detailed engagement with the normative concept of civility. We recognise that shared or divergent understandings of important concepts (like civility) are ‘created, reproduced, imposed, disputed, and changed’ (Schaffer, 2016: 7), therefore our assessments of people’s actions are taken as informed interpretations rather than facts.

Our analysis proceeds in three stages. First, we introduce and unpack the concept of civility, highlighting its three key dimensions: civility as politeness; justificatory civility; and moral civility. Second, we analyse specific controversies in three Commonwealth sites – the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Caribbean – to critically evaluate civil and uncivil responses to the UK royal transition by different individuals and groups. Third, we show that uncivil behaviour in the form of impoliteness can sometimes be desirable and actually help to foster civility in the deeper sense captured by the idea of moral civility, although political leaders and public officials can sometimes find themselves torn between expressing their dissent from those institutions via impolite uncivil acts, on the one hand, and abiding by polite civility norms in order to fulfil the responsibilities of their broader representative roles, on the other hand.

Understanding civility

Civility is a contested concept, both in public life and in academic literature, particularly in political philosophy. This is illustrated, for example, by the different ways in which philosophers have often drawn distinctions between two understandings of civility: political vs polite civility (Calhoun, 2000: 255); formal vs substantive civility (Boyd, 2006: 864); civility of etiquette vs liberal civility (Meyer, 2000: 71); or ethical vs political civility (Edyvane, 2017: 345). In this paper, we draw on previous research (Bardon et al., 2023) and distinguish between two main dimensions of civility: civility as politeness and civility as public-mindedness. These are summarized in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

A multidimensional civility framework.

The first dimension of civility, civility as politeness, involves compliance with norms of etiquette, protocol and good manners – however these norms have been arrived at. Politeness norms regulate people’s interactions with one another and act as a kind of social ‘lubricant’ (Boyd, 2006: 871) that helps people coexist and cooperate despite their disagreements. Yet, as Derek Edyvane argues in terms that have clear colonial connotations, such civility is ‘bound up with the idea of what it means to be civilized, to be well-mannered or polite [and] its focus is on standards of behaviour in our dealings with others in everyday life’ (Edyvane, 2017: 345). Politeness norms were heightened during the period of transition from Elizabeth II to Charles III. Queuing etiquette, for example, was allegedly breached by the well-known British television presenters Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby at the Queen’s lying-in-state in 2022 (Topping, 2022). Senator Lidia Thorpe breached the norm against shouting and swearing in public during the aforementioned incident at the Australian Parliament.

A distinctive feature of civility as politeness is that its norms are inherently contextual. They are ‘generally agreed upon, often codified, social rules’ (Calhoun, 2000: 260). Such rules are not universal, rather they are rooted in specific social and cultural contexts: what counts as a polite act in one context or historical period may be perceived as deeply impolite in a different time and/or place (Kekes, 1984; Sinopoli, 1995). This has implications for civility in practice across cases and contexts as ‘specific behaviours defined as appropriate in one culture, or even in different settings within the same culture, can be inappropriate in others’ (Strachan and Wolf, 2012: 402).

Such questions of civility in relation to historic injustices raise questions about the best way to approach such issues in domestic and global politics. Civility as politeness conveys a basic kind of respect for others: a ‘minimal public deference – a mere forbearance from roughness or unpleasantness’ (Manning, 1976: 13). By complying with queuing etiquette or by politely greeting our neighbours on the street, for example, we show them a minimal kind of respect, and this can help ‘to ease social tensions in order to facilitate social interaction and collaboration across differences and the resulting disagreements’ (Lægaard, 2010: 12). In this sense, acts of civility as politeness are often driven by pragmatic and prudential considerations that can help sustain a well-functioning society, one in which people recognise ‘one another as people among whom they must live’ (Edyvane, 2020: 95).

There is, however, a second and more demanding dimension of civility, which is tied to people’s roles and responsibilities as members of a liberal democratic political community (Edyvane, 2017; Meyer, 2000) as well as an international community bound by certain norms or diplomatic conventions. This dimension, which we call civility as public-mindedness, does not concern our everyday interactions and ‘fleeting public encounters’ (Manning, 1976: 13) with others. Instead, it is ‘bound up with the idea of an association of citizens, and. . .concerns one’s status and duties as a member of a political community, as a citizen with certain rights and responsibilities’ (Edyvane, 2017: 345). Based on this understanding of civility, we are civil when we display our commitment to the public good by complying with core liberal democratic values because we engage in ‘a kind of politics, a type of political discourse that does not harm, injure, or offend fellow citizens’ (Harcourt, 2012: 5). By acting in this way, we communicate to others a more fundamental type of respect than that conveyed by civility as politeness; that we recognise and respect them as free and equal persons. This kind of civil behaviour can help to sustain liberal democratic institutions and thus facilitate social coexistence in the long term.

Civility as public-mindedness presents two sub-dimensions. The first one, moral civility, involves recognising others as free and equal persons by acting in ways that do not undermine their basic rights, freedoms and equal civic standing. For example, we are morally civil when we refrain from being violent (Zurn, 2013), or discriminate against others (Peterson, 2019), or when we avoid engaging in hateful or racist kinds of speech that portray members of certain groups as lesser human beings – or, sometimes, as not human at all (Bejan, 2017: 7; Waldron, 2012). The second sub-dimension of civility as public-mindedness, justificatory civility, also involves communicating our respect for others as free and equal persons. However, the means through which it does so are very different from those that characterise moral civility. More specifically, justificatory civility concerns the way in which members of a political community – and especially politicians and public officials – justify their political decisions. As John Rawls famously argued, citizens of a liberal democratic polity have a ‘duty of civility’ (2005: 217) to provide public reasons in support of the laws and policies they advocate, reasons that all their fellow citizens could in principle accept at some level of idealisation. Such reasons are those grounded in broadly shared political values (such as individual rights, and equality of opportunity) rather than controversial doctrines, and on sound rather than flawed empirical evidence. Providing public reasons for legislation – rather than simply imposing legislation through coercive power – amounts to treating all members of a liberal democratic society as free and equal persons; ‘free in the sense of not being naturally subject to any other person’s moral or political authority, and. . .equally situated with respect to this freedom from the natural authority of others’ (Quong, 2022).

It is important to stress that, while distinct, the various (sub-)dimensions of civility are interrelated. For example, people can politely advance morally uncivil goals, as when so-called ‘polite Nazis’ (Tiso, 2017) strategically abide by politeness norms to promote their morally uncivil political agendas, which deny the status of members of certain groups as free and equal persons. Conversely, other actors may adopt impolite behaviour to advance morally civil goals, as when environmental activists or those aiming to advance the goal of social or racial equality engage in impolite forms of protest that breach the norms of public decorum (Bonotti et al., 2024; Delmas, 2018; Edyvane, 2020). Likewise, justificatory civility can be employed to advance morally uncivil goals, as when far-right political actors appeal to broadly shared liberal values such as gender equality and free speech ‘to make exclusionism [e.g. against immigrant communities] appear liberal and progressive and therefore more acceptable in democratic societies’ (Castelli Gattinara, 2017: 360). Conversely, justificatory incivility can be used to promote morally civil goals, as when religious arguments and doctrines are used to challenge morally uncivil institutions, such as slavery and racial discrimination (Rawls, 2005) – as in the case of reactions to the monarchy in our analysis. As these examples suggest, moral civility plays a more fundamental role than either civility as politeness or justificatory civility in a liberal democratic society. The kind of respect it communicates, and the way in which it communicates it, can help sustain liberal democratic institutions in a more fundamental way than those two other (sub-)dimensions of civility. In other words, it is more important that members of a liberal democratic society treat one another in non-violent, non-discriminatory and non-hateful ways than they abide by norms of politeness or comply with the demands of justificatory civility. When a tension between the three (sub-)dimensions arises, moral civility should always take priority.

The complex ways in which the three dimensions of civility are interrelated, as well as the hierarchical relationship between them, will help us to critically evaluate some of the allegations of incivility surrounding the death of Elizabeth II and the coronation of Charles III in the next section. However, with specific reference to the relationship between civility and monarchy, it should be noted that there are strong links between ideas of civility, politeness and courtesy, on one hand, and norms and protocols regarding how to relate to monarchs, on the other. ¹ As Bejan (2017: 41) has noted, the notion of civility has its roots in forms of communal living. In Italian, the concept civilità had its origins in late mediaeval forms of civic virtue, republicanism and urban life. The idea of courtesy in English can trace its genealogy to French court culture and the idea of courtoisie of the early modern period (Bryson, 1998). Moreover, the relationship between monarchy and power is well known. Thomas Hobbes viewed the Leviathan – monarchical or otherwise – as a means to prevent the (deadly) incivility resulting from anarchic conditions and to enforce civil peace through a social contract (Hobbes, 1994 [1651]). In the case of the British monarchy, the long 17th century saw the development of constitutional forms of monarchy in which its power was balanced by that of a sovereign parliament (Kimizuka, 2024). Since Walter Bagehot’s (2001 [1867]) theorisation of the British monarchy as the ‘dignified’ – as opposed to ‘efficient’ – arm of British governance, the British Crown has exerted what we call today ‘soft power’, both internally and externally.

This articulation of the value of the monarchy as both an important part of the British political system, a symbol of power, and the focal point of popular loyalty to that particular political system rests heavily on narratives and practices of lineage and genealogy, in both the literal and figurative senses that support ideas not just of continuity but of nostalgia too (Melhuish, 2024). Such lineages are crucial for the legitimation of the institution of the monarchy and even more so at times of potential vulnerability, such as the death of one monarch and the ascension of another. Conversely, this lineage can be a source of delegitimisation, particularly when claims of moral (in)civility are deployed against it. This was particularly the case with decolonial critiques of the role of the monarchy in British imperialism, seen not as a historical moment but as an ongoing power structure (Wellings, 2024).

Global Britain, the colonial legacy and the ‘dark side’ of civility

The idea of ‘Global Britain’ – the UK’s post-European Union (EU) re-engagement with the world outside of EU membership – contains implicit nostalgic assumptions (Melhuish, 2022) and wider historical erasures (Akram, 2024). It is profitably understood not solely as a new – or renewed – foreign policy framework but also as a national narrative for understanding the UK’s place in changing world and regional orders (Turner, 2019). The concept was first mentioned by name by Theresa May in her Lancaster House Speech of January 2017 that set out the parameters of the UK government’s negotiating positions for leaving the EU. For May, Brexit was an opportunity to build a ‘truly Global Britain’ because ‘Britain’s history and culture is profoundly internationalist’. May explained that

[w]e are a European country – and proud of our shared European heritage – but we are also a country that has always looked beyond Europe to the wider world. That is why we are one of the most racially diverse countries in Europe, one of the most multicultural members of the European Union, and why – whether we are talking about India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, countries in Africa or those that are closer to home in Europe – so many of us have close friends and relatives from across the world. Instinctively, we want to travel to, study in, trade with countries not just in Europe but beyond the borders of our continent (GOV.UK, 2017).

Implicit in this idea of Global Britain is the sense that many non-EU countries would relate to and understand the UK because Britain had colonised these countries in the past. In signalling Global Britain’s trading priorities once it had left the EU, Prime Minister May’s first official overseas visit was to India in November 2016. The joint statement between the British and Indian prime ministers at the end of that (inconclusive) visit noted that the United Kingdom and India

enjoy vibrant people to people relations supported by the 1.5 million strong Indian diaspora in the UK and an increasing convergence on the way forward on key global challenges of the 21st century. Our shared history, our shared connections and our shared values make this a natural partnership. They form the foundation of a unique friendship (GOV.UK, 2016).

Soft power formed an important element in the idea of Global Britain as it developed between 2016 and 2023. One important element of the UK’s soft power – notwithstanding certain scandals and intra-familial arguments – was the monarchy and Queen Elizabeth II in particular. This assumed affection was captured in the title of Robert Hardman’s biography and subsequent television documentary Queen of the World (Hardman, 2019). However, collective memories of the British Empire and its foremost contemporary symbol, the Royal Family, were not as favourable in some parts of the world as was assumed. The British monarchy was not always seen as a positive symbol and was indeed viewed very negatively in some parts of the Commonwealth (Lord Ashcroft, 2023). As Tina Brown noted in The Palace Papers, published in 2022, ‘[t]he British monarchy is a more than one-thousand-year-old institution with a ninety-six-year-old CEO and a septuagenarian waiting in the wings. It cannot be expected to be nimble’, adding in light of the racialised controversy surrounding ‘Megxit’ that it ‘will be several years before we know how seriously the monarchy has reckoned with its failures to reflect the diversity of the country it symbolises – and works for’ (Brown, 2022: xii). Such racialisation of the monarchy played out as the idea of Global Britain was developed under the May, Johnson and Truss administrations before being quietly dropped during the Sunak government. At these two events, memory of the British Empire – an implicit frame for the idea of Global Britain – tested the limits of civility and revealed an additional aspect of civility specific to its politeness dimension, that has been described as its ‘dark side’ (Bejan, 2017: 9). But what does this dark side refer to?

There is a long-standing tradition in the study of civility as politeness that views the latter as a potential vehicle for oppression, silencing and exclusion (Elias, 1969; Freud, 2004) and – relevant to this paper – as preserving a particular form of colonial order through norms of gendered behaviour (Enloe, 2014 [1989]: Ch. 3). Politeness norms, this argument goes, often emerge in contexts characterised by unequal and unjust power structures and therefore become ‘irremediably imbricated with colonialism and empire . . . a covert demand for conformity that delegitimizes dissent while reinforcing the status quo’ (Bejan, 2017: 9). And, sometimes, the social sanctioning and ‘policing’ of civility may be done in a relatively polite way by people who may in other circumstances have rather ambivalent feelings about established norms and institutions (such as the British monarchy). When some actors deliberately adopt impolite behaviour to challenge the legitimacy of established norms, structures and institutions – what is sometimes called ‘critical impoliteness’ (Bardon et al., 2023) or ‘incivility as dissent’ (Edyvane, 2020) – they are often accused of being uncivil in order to silence their de-legitimising critiques. This was witnessed in response to the Queen’s death and the coronation of the King, when norms of civility were sometimes deployed to silence critics of the British monarchy.

Critical impoliteness in the United Kingdom, the Caribbean and Australia

One example of civility controversies during the royal transition period took place around the memory of Anglo-British colonialism in the island of Ireland, an important pillar of Irish republicanism that finds expression and support in parts of the UK. A highly visible expression of this republicanism was on show at a Glasgow Celtic’s game against the Glasgow Rangers on 30 April 2023, where Celtic supporters – traditionally Irish or Scots with Irish descent – repeatedly sang derogatory words about the King’s coronation (Mahony, 2023). In a previous incident following the Queen’s death in September 2022, Ireland football fans had mocked the Queen’s death by chanting ‘Lizzy’s in a box’ during a game in Dublin (Farberov, 2022). In the context of Irish republican critiques of British imperialism in Ireland and the monarchy, the latter has long been seen as a symbol of violent oppression, and hence of moral incivility, as well as a direct target of republican violence, as when Lord Mountbatten was assassinated in 1979. Glasgow Celtic and Ireland supporters’ use of impolite chants to criticise and mock the British monarchy could therefore be understood as instances of ‘incivility as dissent’ (Edyvane, 2020) or ‘critical impoliteness’ (Bardon et al., 2023). The fans deliberately used incivility as impoliteness to call attention to the alleged moral incivility of the monarchy and its colonial past, thus promoting what they viewed as more representative and legitimate governance guided by self-determination. Glasgow Celtic and Ireland supporters were criticised for their impolite behaviour in the British press (Rumsby et al., 2022), which was and is overwhelmingly pro-monarchy. Yet the response was different in Ireland itself. Some observers responded to these criticisms by pointing out that ‘[y]ou can’t expect the oppressed to mourn the oppressor’ (The Celtic Star, 2022), a statement that clearly intended to highlight the ‘dark side’ and the potentially oppressive nature of civility expectations given the memories and experiences of British rule in Ireland.

Instances of incivility as dissent or critical impoliteness advancing a decolonial project could also be found in other parts of the former British Empire where, as in Ireland, they were deployed to challenge power structures tied to the legacy of British colonialism – of which the monarchy was the most publicly visible contemporary institution – and aim to advance moral civility by completing a process of decolonisation that had, according to its advocates, only been partial. Moreover, because the monarchy is often presented by its supporters as an institution that is ‘above politics’, the inherent re-politicisation of it around questions of the legacy of colonialism leading to republican positions could be deemed impolite just by raising the issue of a republic at the time of the death of the Queen and the subsequent coronation of the new monarch. This was particularly the case in the Caribbean and West Indies, where decolonial critiques had focused on the path dependencies created by the history of slavery and colonisation in the region. This led to increased momentum for reparations, including from the British Crown whose involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade is becoming better-known as part of a wider movement for reparatory justice for the ongoing effects of slavery. On a date replete with significance, the United Nations (UN) concluded its International Decade for People of African Descent on the International Day of Remembrance of the Vicitms of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade on 25 March 2024, the anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa in 1960.

Pan-Africanist, anti-colonial and civil rights activists have long advocated for forms of reparatory justice for enslaved peoples and their descendants. For much of the early decolonial period this view was not mainstream, either in the UK – where successive governments resisted any discussion of the topic (BBC News, 2024) – or among newly independent Caribbean governments. This was partly out of what Salamishah Tillet (2012: 17) refers to as ‘the purposeful and polite national amnesia around slavery’, a collective amnesia that facilitates post-imperial nostalgia at the former Empire’s core (Rosaldo, 1989; Sanghera, 2021: 192). Since 2013 the call for reparations has become more vocal, in part because of advocacy and research efforts, but also due to the steady erosion of the post-colonial economic model and impending climate crisis that have heightened awareness of the legacy and ongoing impact of colonial exploitation (Beckles, 2013). The Caribbean’s preeminent regional organisation, CARICOM, launched the CARICOM Reparations Commission in 2013, furthering debate on this topic. As momentum has built, the United Kingdom and the Crown have felt compelled to respond. When opening the June 2022 CHoGM meeting in Rwanda – a country then at the heart of the UK Government’s attempt to maintain control of the movement of migrants into the United Kingdom – Prince Charles noted the salience of the issue of the historical impact of slavery (BBC News, 2022). Charles’ speech followed the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s misguided tour of the Caribbean earlier that year, during which the two royals had endeavoured to tame – while in fact accelerating – anti-monarchy sentiment in the region (Hall and Gentleman, 2022).

The call for reparations is linked to republicanism, both because the Crown is synonymous with British colonialism and because of its direct involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. The governments of Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, and Belize all used the historical moment represented by the Queen’s death and the King’s coronation to open up discussion of the possibility of a transition to a republic for each of their already independent states. In the case of Belize, this was explicitly linked to the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s refusal to apologise for slavery when prompted in Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) (Adu, 2023). In addition – and along with people from Aotearoa-New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Papua New Guinea – people in Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines signed an open letter to Charles III calling for an apology for slavery and colonialism, and restorative justice in the form of reparations (Australian Republican Movement, 2023). Calling for the removal of the British head of state from the political systems of these states, especially at a time such as the royal transition period, could be considered as an instance of impoliteness but, once again, one driven by the desire to advance moral civility.

Consider now a third case, where the Queen’s death prompted questions about the future of the monarchy in Australia. Following the defeat of the republican referendum in 1999, one-time leader of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had said that Australia should next consider the issue of monarchy (and of Australia’s head of state) when Charles would become king (The Economist, 2023). This remained the ARM’s position from 1999 to 2022, and avoided the personalisation of the republican issue as one in which the desire to have an Australian citizen as head of state could be seen as a direct criticism of the (popular) individual Elizabeth Windsor who happened to be wearing the Crown. Therefore, it was not a surprise that the republic issue was only raised after the Queen’s death and funeral, although it was somehow surprising that it was raised so soon after these events during a period of mourning.

However, allegations of impoliteness were again deployed to counter the republican critique. When the recently-elected Labour Premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, refused to illuminate the Sydney Opera House for the King’s coronation, the leader of the Australian Monarchist League (AML) criticised Minns for this (in)action, deeming the decision ‘based on Mr Minns’ republican sympathies’ (Lewis, 2023) and hence in breach of the politeness and decorum norms required for the coronation moment. This was not the first time that Australian leaders had been deemed impolite in their relationship to the monarchy and a monarch. In 1992 Prime Minister Paul Keating had been dubbed the ‘Lizard of Oz’ (McGeough, 2022) for touching the person of the Queen and for raising the spectacle of Australia becoming a republic in the Queen’s presence at an official dinner.

However, decolonial critics of the monarchy placed moral civility above politeness. The Australian government had declared an official day of mourning for the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 22 September 2022. Protests against the official day of mourning were held in Australian capital cities, organised by the group Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR). At the protest in Melbourne, WAR issued a statement that read: ‘While they mourn the Queen, we mourn everything her regime stole from us: our children, our land, our loved ones’ lives, our sacred sites, our histories’ (cited in ABC News, 2022). Speaking at the Brisbane protest, WAR organiser Ruby Wharton said that Australians ‘need to ask themselves why our Head of State doesn’t even come from this country. And how the head of state [sic] got to this country, that’s through murder, through pillaging, through [the] dispossession of lands and First Nations people and that’s a continuing, ongoing project’ (cited in Williams et al., 2022). Stan Grant, Australia’s highest-profile Aboriginal journalist, noted that around the Queen’s death politeness was supposed to subordinate moral civility: ‘we aren’t supposed to talk about colonisation, empire, violence, about Aboriginal sovereignty, not even about the republic’ (Grant, 2023b). Attacking the silence that politeness demanded, Grant argued that ‘[t]o take this coronation seriously would be to try to make sense of an Australian prime minister pledging his allegiance to a Crown that tried to exterminate my people’ (Grant, 2023a). This line of critique – impolite, but morally civil – was advanced by Senator Thorpe, who was one of the signatories of an open letter to the new King from fourteen countries affected by the legacy of colonialism demanding an apology, recognition of genocide, and reparations for stolen goods (Butler, 2023a).

Grant’s public interventions about the silence and political quiescence demanded of Aboriginal people by the politeness norms associated with the death of Elizabeth II and the coronation of Charles III occasioned the clearest examples of the dark side of civility in Australia. If Elizabeth II was the ‘world’s Queen’, then the genealogy associated with this title included continuing links to the British Empire. In this sense, the monarch was not just the dignified symbol of Britain’s constitutional system but also the symbol of Britain’s empire and all the ideas and practices that went with that – including the ongoing race-based oppression of Indigenous peoples and what Billig (1995) would call a ‘metonymia’ of nationalism. As Aboriginal leader Lynda-June Coe argued in relation to the proposal for people in the Commonwealth to make a personal pledge of allegiance to the new King: ‘I think it is absurd that there is an expectation for our mob, and colonised peoples globally, to pledge allegiance to the head of an institution which represents the theft of our lands and demise of our communities. I will not be participating in my own cultural erasure in this way’ (cited in ABC News, 2023).

Grant, along with pro-monarchy MP and the co-leader of the Australian Republican Movement Craig Foster, was involved in a panel discussion as part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) coverage on the day of the coronation. Grant raised the decolonial perspective again as part of that panel discussion, but was soon criticised for impolitely airing these perspectives at a moment that was deemed inappropriate. Speaking on behalf of the pro-monarchist community in Australia, the head of the AML, Philip Benwell, called the ABC’s pre-ceremony coverage not only ‘biased’ but also ‘despicable’ (Butler, 2023b). Others in traditional and mainstream media took the same line and went even further. As the ABC’s Director of News Justin Stevens described in an official statement, Grant was subjected to ‘grotesque racist abuse, including threats to his safety, which had become particularly virulent since he appeared as part of the ABC’s Coronation coverage’ (ABC News, 2023). The attacks on Grant and his family in mainstream and social media were so intense that Grant stood down from public life three weeks later. Grant’s attempts at public expressions of moral civility or, as he put it, speaking with ‘Yindyamarra’ (i.e. with love and respect) to challenge the history of colonialism and its ongoing legacies for Aboriginal people (Hall, 2023), were silenced by those who highlighted the alleged inappropriateness and impoliteness of the sharing of his perspectives. This episode, like the previously examined cases concerning the United Kingdom and the Caribbean, illustrated an instance where calls for civility and decorum resulted – intentionally or otherwise – in the silencing of alternative perspectives that might be considered morally civil.

(In)civility and responsible government

Each of the three cases examined in the previous section reveal how civility – and civility as politeness in particular – can be used to silence critical perspectives via certain norms of decorum and etiquette, and thus preserve unjust morally uncivil structures and institutions. For this very reason, those who are committed to social and political change will find instances of critical impoliteness or incivility as dissent permissible, even desirable. Yet, if we examine the royal transition period more closely, we will find a more complex picture that cannot be reduced to the simple dichotomy ‘moral civility vs. civility as politeness’. To understand why, it may be useful to analyse the behaviour of some prominent politicians in two of the contexts just examined, that is, the UK and Australia.

Consider, first, Michelle O’Neill, the Vice President of Sinn Féin, an Irish republican political party active in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. O’Neill decided to attend Charles III’s coronation in what arguably represented a suspension of political principles for a moment of civility. The political context is important here, because O’Neill had been elected as the First Minister of Northern Ireland in 2022, although her assumption of the role was pending the resumption of power-sharing government at Stormont (O’Neill was only formally appointed First Minister of Northern Ireland on 3 February 2024). Thus, her attendance at the coronation was ostensibly a means of not inflaming political divisions within her new political community of Northern Ireland, as opposed to being the foremost representative of Irish republicanism in the province. In an official statement published on the Sinn Féin website, O’Neill declared: ‘I am an Irish republican. I also recognise there are many people on our island for whom the coronation is a hugely important occasion’, describing her role as ‘being a First Minister for all, representing the whole community, building good relations between the people of these islands, and advancing peace and reconciliation through respectful and mature engagement’ (Sinn Féin, 2023).

Similarly, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a committed republican, downplayed his own political principles in the lead-up to the coronation, which he also decided to attend. ‘I want to see an Australian as Australia’s head of state’ he told the ABC, but added:

That doesn’t mean that you cannot have respect for the institution, which is the system of government that we have . . . I believe as Australian prime minister, I have a particular responsibility to represent the nation in a way that respects the constitutional arrangements which are there, and I certainly will undertake that (cited in Cannane and Howard, 2023).

The coronation and the physical presence of the monarch meant that politeness norms were particularly salient in the cases involving O’Neill and Albanese, both of whom attended the coronation in person. The two leaders’ decision to abide by those norms arguably operated as a means to preserve existing power relations – or, at least, that is what some critics pointed out. Australian Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, for example, described Albanese’s decision to attend the coronation as ‘disgusting’, and criticised the Australian Prime Minister in the following way:

At the very least Albanese could have shown leadership and sent a strong message by agreeing to remain silent when invited to pledge allegiance to the new monarch . . . Now would be the perfect time to announce we were pushing forward with a republic, but instead Albanese is signing us up to an outdated system (cited in Tamer, 2023).

Indeed, civility as politeness, we have seen, can be used to preserve unequal and unjust power structures, which are themselves instances of moral incivility. However, one could also read O’Neill’s and Albanese’s words differently. Their position could be interpreted in the following way: while acts of uncivil (impolite) dissent may sometimes be justified when they challenge morally uncivil values and institutions, politicians and public officials occupying key roles also have a duty to act in ways that avoid fostering divisions (and, potentially, hatred and violence) within their political community. Ensuring this kind of stability is, also, a way of promoting moral civility. Therefore, even when politicians and public officials are critical of certain institutions (which they may consider expressions of moral incivility), they may still choose to abide by the norms of politeness and decorum that are associated with their role. They may do so because they think their actions will help promote moral civility in a different way, and because they have voluntarily chosen (sometimes under oath to the Crown) to undertake that role and its obligations. In other words, both O’Neill and Albanese understood the positional duties associated with their roles as coming with an obligation to abide by inherent norms of politeness and decorum, the abrogation of which on a point of political principle (through an act of impolite dissent aimed at advancing moral civility) could have potentially led to negative (and morally uncivil) outcomes. Establishing the real motivations behind O’Neill’s and Albanese’s behaviour is an empirical question. Yet, the civility lens offers a useful conceptual and normative tool for formulating different interpretations of the two political leaders’ behaviour in this respect.

Of course, one might argue that office-holders have (weighty) positional duties of politeness even where discharging them does not promote moral civility (or prevent moral incivility). Think, for example, of greetings etiquette or dress codes. However, our key point is that when positional duties of politeness do have implications for moral civility, office-holders should take that into account in their actions. This might sometimes entail abiding by politeness norms (as in the cases we examined) but, in other cases, it might require instead breaching those norms, e.g. as when a head of state refuses to congratulate a newly elected leader of another country who has been responsible of war crimes or other atrocities.

Conclusion

This paper has offered a new perspective on the British monarchy in transition and the tone of the public debate about legacies of colonialism that this period occasioned. The civility framework offers a critical lens for evaluating the complexity of (un)civil behaviour in international politics, in this case republican and decolonial critiques of the British monarchy from within the Commonwealth and Irish politics. Calls for civility as politeness, we have argued, can be used in an oppressive way, while uncivil behaviour in the form of impoliteness can sometimes be permissible or even desirable, and help to foster civility in a deeper sense (i.e. moral civility). This, it should be noted, is a normative rather than empirical claim. That is, if an actor’s intention is to advance morally civil goals via impolite acts, then their conduct can be considered permissible or even desirable. Yet, despite their good intentions, an actor’s impolite act can cause a backlash that can hinder rather than promote the realisation of the morally civil goals they aimed to achieve. These unintended effects, and the likelihood that they may occur, are an empirical issue that we do not have the space to address here.

However, we also explained, political leaders can sometimes find themselves torn between expressing their dissent from morally uncivil institutions via impolite uncivil acts and abiding by polite civility norms in order to fulfil their positional duties and preserve peace and stability within their political community, a goal that also helps to realise moral civility. This reveals the importance of contextualising civil and uncivil behaviour, taking into account the distinctive social and political contexts and roles in which different actors operate. In this sense, the civility framework also allows us to understand the operations of the soft power of the monarchy.

This was particularly evident during the period of 2022-23 that covered the funeral for Elizabeth II and the Coronation of Charles III, and gave salience to questions of civility and incivility in relation to memories of Britain’s imperial past. This empirical dimension of our analysis that drew on anecdotal evidence across three cases – evaluated through our civility framework – has allowed us to make a novel contribution to understandings of Global Britain and the politics, both domestic and international, that flowed from such imaginaries of the UK’s place in a changing regional and world order.

Two potential criticisms could be raised against our analysis. First, one might argue that the paper risks becoming complicit in the oppressive function of civility, as it may inadvertently reproduce normative claims that Indigenous activists and republicans (and other critics of the British monarchy) are uncivil or impolite. In other words, the critic might point out, the examples of ‘uncivil’ behaviour that we discuss are only deemed uncivil if we accept the very colonial framework of ‘civility’ and its ‘dark side’ that the paper itself critiques. This is an important criticism which, however, we do not think undermines our analysis. For a start, the key point in our analysis is that critics of the British monarchy who breach norms of civility as politeness are impolite but morally civil, i.e. they aim to advance a deeper and more fundamental dimension of civility than the mere compliance with norms of etiquette and decorum (which they breach). Furthermore, although one might assume that fighting an oppressive power entails challenging the norms of civility as politeness that that power may deploy to perpetuate its oppression, that is not always and necessarily the case. In fact, members of oppressed groups often deliberately choose to be uncivil (i.e. impolite) precisely because that incivility (as impoliteness) will help them communicate the deeper moral civility message that they aim to advance. In other words, the social legibility of their uncivil (i.e. impolite) acts is what often allows them to be more effective in advancing moral civility, and that legibility would be undermined if they were to contest instead the very norms of civility as politeness that renders their actions socially legible.

Second, a critic might also observe that by simply applying the well-known ideas that civility can sometimes be oppressive and incivility desirable to a new case study our analysis does not add anything substantial to existing debates. We resist this criticism. What our analysis shows, and previous ones do not, is that both civility and incivility can be tools of oppression and contestation under each of the three dimensions of civility. So while standard accounts of the ‘dark side’ of civility tend to argue that civility is normally wrong, we argue instead that it depends on what kind of civility it is. While morally civil acts are normally desirable (although they can too sometimes be used to undermine moral civility in other ways, as when far-right groups appeal to gender equality or free speech in order to undermine the free and equal status of members of certain religious and ethnic minority groups), civility as politeness and justificatory civility may often not be, when they are deployed to undermine moral civility itself (Bardon et al., 2023). Our multilayered civility concept, and its application to the analysis of the British monarchy and the royal transition period, is what makes our account novel.

Our analysis opens up new avenues for future research. First, it provides an example of how the normative political theory analysis of civility can be applied to real-world instances of contentious politics. While our focus, in this paper, was on the UK royal transition period, one could imagine a similar analysis being applied to other similar instances of contentious politics within and across states, either via single case studies or through comparative investigations. Second, and relatedly, the paper reveals the importance of conducting more work on civility and incivility at the international level, for two reasons. One is the key role that norms of civility and etiquette play in the relationship between states and individual public officials, and the way in which compliance with such norms (or lack thereof) can be strategically deployed by these actors to signal a deeper commitment to morally (un)civil causes. The other is the importance of analysing civility and incivility beyond the narrow boundaries of Western liberal democracies, placing countries and actors from the Global South at the centre of these analyses. Both research avenues have been relatively unexplored so far and future work could make important additions to research in these areas. Third, and finally, our paper opens up new perspectives on the emerging debates on Global Britain, and we hope that it will stimulate novel analyses of the role that Britain’s monarchy plays in global politics.