As someone fond of cross-cultural historical comparisons, I have always been struck at the different attitudes toward power and position among different societies. Some societies take the divide between ceremonial power and actual power to extremes, and it isn’t necessarily across an East-West divide either. Rather, the picture is more complicated than that.

In Great Britain, for example, there has been an often popular and very wealthy royal family that has not held a great deal of political power since the 1600’s. For whatever reason, the British did not like their brief experience as a republic during the time of Oliver Cromwell (who basically acted like a king without a crown) and despite not desiring absolute monarchy in the French tradition have also not wanted by and large to do away with their monarchy. For whatever reason there is a love of ceremony (shared by many Americans, it must be admitted) separated from a love of power.

Across the English Channel the picture is very different. France is a nation whose inability to accept ceremonial leaders and a demand for strong executives has become notorious throughout history. In the early Middle Ages, for example, the son of Charles Martel overthrew the Merovingian dynasty with the support of the Papacy because he was unwilling to continue to be the Mayor of the Palace for an incompetent monarch who got all la glorie. When a “puppet king” of the Capetian dynasty was chosen to rule France because of his weakness, his descendants spent a couple of centuries making that power real, unable to accept the existence of more powerful subordinates. Even after getting rid of their kings, several times, France has long had a love affair with Napoleonic dictators and strong presidents, even if they can’t stick with a constitution for more than a few decades.

In stark contrast to this, the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire were quite content to have powerful kingmakers who were generals without any desire for the kingship. Despite there being insecure emperors like Justinian who treated apolitical generals like Belisarius and Aetius with contempt and paranoia, what stability existed in such empires was largely due to the fact that many of the Roman and East Roman Empire’s military leaders were content to fight against the Empires’ many foes and leave the ceremonial duties of rulership to much weaker but more devious rulers. In fact, the most successful dynasty of the history of the Byzantine Empire, the Macedonian Dynasty, which reigned from the 8th to the 11th century AD, had a complicated system of co-emperors where a dynasty of emperors had a corresponding militaristic “co-emperor” who held the real power connected by marriage to the “legitimate” emperor’s female relatives, connecting de facto and de jure power in an unusual way to ensure the stability and legitimacy of the empire’s power structure. As quirky as that system may be, it worked for about three century’s and was the most successful period of the long history of the Byzantine Empire.

In stark contrast to this, the history of the American Republic is very similar to that of France. Even though the United States (thankfully) has had a far more stable constitutional situation than France, both France and the United States share an attraction to more powerful executives and less tolerance for ceremony without genuine power to back it up. Not surprisingly, generals have fared well in the United States, as winning wars has been a ticket to the highest office for popular presidents like George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower, only two of whom failed to be re-elected, because they died in office. Even among those presidents that did not come from a military background, there is a marked preference for strong presidents who imposed their will through office rather than weak presidents who let Congress have their way, even if those strong actions were at times unconstitutional.

The nation that takes a separation of power and ceremony the furthest, though, is probably the Japanese. The Japanese have a tradition of thousands of years of rulership by a single royal family, which has never been overthrown despite dramatic losses such as World War II and sometimes very lengthy and very bloody civil wars throughout Japanese history. Japan has long divided power between ceremonial emperors whose throne and its conduct is based on excessively complicated royal protocols with the nearly total absence of real power and shoguns/prime ministers with a great deal of real power but often little ceremonial prestige, except those titles granted by a grateful monarch to a powerful and loyal subject.

Japan’s division of power and ceremony reached such a level during the times of the Ashikaga shogunate that powerful generals like Oda Nobunga sought to be the real power with the shoguns as ceremonial figures themselves. Even the dignity of the shoguns, who were themselves merely (originally) the de facto rulers in an arrangement, was sufficient for even ambitious Japanese generals to frown upon overthrowing them, such was the respect generally possessed for office and authority in Japan. It took great crises for shoguns to be overthown, including the crisis of the loss of face of Japan due to American entry into Japanese trade in 1853.

It would seem as if attitudes toward ceremony and real authority may be related to other aspects of cultural temperament. For example, those cultures that are more direct and blunt and have less distance between genuine feelings and outside expressions (the Americans and French would be two strong examples of this) not surprisingly tend to have the least distance between cultural patterns of actual power and ceremonial title. An intolerance of personal distance would seem to correlate to an intolerance of seeing incompetent courts hold important titles when those who hold the real power are shunted off to the side.

In stark contrast, those cultures that prize civility regardless of genuine feelings, who have a stiff upper lift and rigid social protocols that are often very traditional and very hierarchial, often have a much greater tradition of stark divides between those who hold titles and those who hold power. I am someone myself who has a great deal of problems with fancy ceremony or rigid social protocols. I’m a fairly blunt and candid speaker who does not think my rank or status ought to prevent me from telling necessary and sometimes painful truths to the powers that be. Those who spring from a different cultural mindset would strongly disagree. It would be interesting to see more research along these lines, to see what sort of correlations and influences relate to our personal preferences both for politics and for our own personal behavior, to better understand ourselves as well as others who may be very different.