Nostalgia Is Not a Strategy: Empire-Myths, Monarchy, and the Politics of Looking Back

At Davos, Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney put it bluntly: “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

He was speaking about geopolitics and the collapse of comforting assumptions. But the line travels perfectly into British culture wars—especially where monarchism overlaps with a certain “Empire-without-the-empire” longing that you hear from many Reform and Conservative voters and pundits. In both cases, the past is offered not as history but as a plan.

It isn’t.

Turning an emotion into a programme

Nostalgia is politically useful because it converts a complicated present into a simple story: we were strong, respected, united—then something went wrong—so the solution is to restore what we were. It gives people the relief of clarity without the burden of detail.

That’s why it shows up so reliably in British debates about the monarchy and the Empire. When faced with housing crises, broken public services, low trust, and a fraying union, it’s tempting to reach for symbols that promise continuity and greatness—flags, crowns, uniforms, ceremonies, “the spirit of 1940”, “the world stage”, “when Britain mattered”.

Carney’s warning lands because it punctures the illusion: you can’t rebuild a future using feelings as scaffolding.

Monarchy nostalgia: “continuity” marketed as stability

Modern monarchism often presents itself as sensible pragmatism: “It’s just ceremonial”; “It’s above politics”; “It unites the country.” But underneath is a deeper claim: our national identity needs inherited authority to feel coherent.

That’s nostalgia-as-governance. It treats tradition as a substitute for legitimacy.

And it quietly narrows the democratic imagination. If unity depends on a hereditary family, then civic confidence depends on deference. Citizenship becomes something you perform around the Crown rather than something you own through your institutions.

Carney’s broader argument—stop mourning a vanished order, build strength at home, face reality—maps neatly onto this. When symbolism is used to avoid reform, continuity becomes a kind of political anaesthetic.

Empire nostalgia: prestige without payment

Empire nostalgia isn’t usually argued as a literal desire to recolonise; it’s sold as a mood: pride, global relevance, “we built things”, “we had a backbone”. It promises status —the feeling of being important—without the uncomfortable costs, responsibilities, or truths.

The problem is that prestige isn’t a memory. It’s an output.

You don’t regain influence by reminiscing about when you had it. You regain it through diplomacy, trustworthy institutions, long-term investment, cultural seriousness, and a stable social contract. Nostalgia offers the sensation of greatness as a replacement for the work that produces it.

Why it appeals now: nostalgia as pain relief

The popularity of looking back is often a response to genuine grief: lost security, lost prospects, lost community, lost faith that the system will reward effort. Nostalgia gives shape to that grief. It says: you’re not wrong to feel something has been taken from you.

The danger is what happens next. The story becomes: the answer is restoration. And restoration almost always means restoring hierarchy—more deference, more “natural” ranks, more pageantry, more “knowing your place”—because hierarchy is the quickest way to simulate order.

That’s why monarchy nostalgia and Empire nostalgia can harmonise with certain “Reform” instincts: not because they share identical policies, but because they share a desire for certainty over complexity, authority over argument, and identity over institution-building.

The big parallel with Carney: reality beats ritual

Carney’s line sits inside a bigger message: the old rules and guarantees aren’t returning, and pretending otherwise makes you weaker.

That is exactly the risk of Britain’s nostalgia politics:

Ritual replaces reform. We talk about symbols instead of services.

Pride replaces policy. We defend stories instead of measuring outcomes.

Continuity replaces legitimacy. We call inheritance “stability” and hope it holds.

Myth replaces strategy. We point backwards when people need a route forwards.

A republican alternative that doesn’t sneer at people’s attachment

If we want this argument to win, it can’t sound like: “You’re stupid for liking tradition.” It has to sound like: “You can keep what you love—without what holds you back.”

A modern ceremonial-republic pitch can be simple:

keep civic ritual, but make the head of state chosen and accountable

keep national pride, but separate it from bloodline superiority

keep continuity, but root it in shared rights and reliable institutions

tell the truth about the past, because mature countries can handle it

“Again” is not a plan

Monarchists and Empire-romantics often say, “We just want Britain to be Britain again.”

But “again” is an emotion, not a programme.

A strategy says what we’re building, how we’ll pay for it, who decides, how we measure success, and what happens when leaders fail. Nostalgia says: trust the story, even when it’s obviously not working.

Carney’s line cuts through because it forces the only question that matters: if the old order isn’t coming back—what are we actually going to do now?