The Guardian Debates the Creation of a Proper Government

LSE scholar John Gray argues that the best forms of government today are relics of monarchy and imperialism and that a stern despot is the safest government. I think Machiavelli would be proud.

The comment section and its rebuttals are even better...

Excerpt
The point about the bloodiness of nation building is well made. It is a process which has often had little to do with democracy in its early days. The type of monarchy Gray is referring to here, I think, is composite monarchy, whether under the Habsburgs, Britain, or Spain, where a visible central crown diverts attention from ethnic rivalries and competition. Monarchy, when limited, is not incompatible with democratic institutions, as has been obvious to British liberal thinkers from Locke to Mill. It certainly is no less a guarantor of democratic government than republics, as the Dutch, Swedish and Danish will testify.
There have, however, been successful models for incorporating multiple identities outside monarchy, and it is not quite true to state that attempts to frame written constitutions inevitably come unstuck. The United States is perhaps the most obvious model of a durable system, though, as Tocqueville noted, it is probable that the success of democratic models over such a large territory owed much to the separation of religion from government. Switzerland is a more ancient example, where a federal system has provided remarkably stable, but one could argue that this was a result of geopolitical situation in which the component cantons were surrounded by much larger potential enemies.

Excerpt
Well, it could be argued that monarchs are in fact the reason why these "national conflicts" continue in Spain and the UK. There are as many "nations" in France as in Spain (Basques, Gascognes, Occitanes, Bretonnes, Corsicans, Alsatians). France even has the largest Jewish community in Western Europe, a nation in itself. National problems there are politically irrelevant though. "La Republique" has been more successful than any monarch to unite them all as FRENCH.
A better case is the Italian, where "nations" can be found as well. The German speaking Sudtirol, the Greek Speaking Taranto, Sicily, etc. have a "national" character of their own (they eat differently, speak a different language, have a very diverse political history and customs). They even have a nationalist separatist party (Lega Nord), which is politically laughable in comparison to the Spanish nationalist parties or its Scottish and Welsh counterparts.