This is the script for my video posted on September 16, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Nobles once ruled most of Europe, and though most of those countries are now democratic states, the nobility is still around. They've passed down their titles all the way to the present day, even in places where those titles have no formal or legal standing. But in what ways do nobles still affect the affairs of those countries?
The oldest European noble families originally rose to power through military dominance, controlling land, or loyal service to a king after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Traditionally, titles passed down the male line, often to the eldest son, with noble families marrying each other to grow their territory and influence.
And across Europe, even where the state abolished nobility or stripped titles of legal meaning, as Austria and Germany did after WWI, families continue to pass these titles down, along with their often vast inherited wealth and a network of relationships with powerful people. There are a few particularly fascinating cases of this.
As WWII ended, Czechoslovakia was trying to recover from the war and the German occupation, so the government used the Beneš Decrees, a series of orders issued from 1940 onward, to rebuild the state, punish German collaborators, and create an ethnically homogenous nation. Roughly 3m ethnic Germans, and a smaller number of Hungarians, were stripped of their property and citizenship.
The noble House of Liechtenstein lost its estates in the country, including forests, farmland, famous landmarks, and many castles and palaces, all because the state treated the family as German, and only those who had actively opposed the Third Reich were exempt.
The family rules the country of Liechtenstein of course, but its Czech lands were once roughly 10x the size of the principality itself. Thanks to the dispute, Liechtenstein had no diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia, or the Czech Republic after it, until 2009. And the issue remains live. Czech courts have rejected dozens of lawsuits filed by the family's foundation, and in 2020, Liechtenstein's government took Czechia to the European Court of Human Rights.
Liechtenstein's prince holds unusually strong constitutional powers, so one family's private grievance has become a matter of state foreign policy. Liechtenstein may be a micro-state, but it's still sovereign, and it has used diplomatic pressure and often expensive international litigation to keep the dispute alive.
The Habsburgs are another great example. For centuries, the Habsburgs, whose Spanish branch became infamous for inbreeding, ruled many parts of Europe, from Iberia to parts of Poland and Ukraine. The Habsburgs lost their last sovereign power in Europe in 1918 with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of WWI.
But Otto von Habsburg was a member of the European Parliament for Bavaria from 1979 to 1999, and as president of the International Paneuropean Union, he was a co-patron of the Pan-European Picnic of 1989, which opened the first major breach in the Iron Curtain and helped accelerate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Eastern Bloc.
His son Karl von Habsburg, the current head of the House, was president of Blue Shield International for twelve years, sort of the Red Cross for cultural heritage. And Karl’s brother Georg served Hungary as ambassador to France, and now to Spain.
Even more distant Habsburgs like Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen have served important roles, in his case as Hungary's ambassador to the Holy See and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta until late 2025.
The Habsburgs are evidence that dynasties can convert their heritage into soft power. In the minds of many, they are still important, largely thanks to their names and their resulting network of connections. Additionally, in the Habsburgs’ case, the family is woven into Hungarian national-conservative identity politics as we saw under Viktor Orban, so their influence is also an instrument for domestic influence.
Next up is the case of Heinrich XIII Prinz Reuss, who comes from a branch of the House of Reuss, the Thuringian dynasty that ruled parts of central Germany until 1918. In 2022, he was arrested as the alleged ringleader of a plot to storm the German Bundestag, arrest lawmakers, install him as head of state, and impose martial law.
See, prosecutors say that Heinrich is at the center of a domestic terror organization called the Patriotic Union, aligned with the Reichsbürger, or Citizens of the Reich, a movement that rejects the post-WWII German federal republic and claims it's an artificial state installed by the Allied powers. Prosecutors allege that Heinrich heads a right-wing extremist group actively preparing a violent coup. Heinrich denies the charges, and his trial is still underway.
Federal prosecutors said that more than 3000 officers conducted searches at more than 130 sites in 11 of Germany's 16 states. They arrested 25 people, including current and former soldiers. German intelligence estimates the Reichsbürger has around 26k people, with roughly 1 in 10 considered violence-oriented. And though the House of Reuss has publicly distanced itself from Heinrich, the case shows how an aristocratic title can be used to rally people against democracy.
In Bulgaria, meanwhile, we have Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. He reigned as the child tsar of Bulgaria during the Second World War, having inherited the throne at the age of six. But the monarchy ended in 1946 when a communist-backed referendum abolished the crown, and at nine years old Simeon was forced into exile, settling in Egypt and then Spain. He never formally abdicated.
But after the fall of communism, Simeon returned to Bulgaria for a visit in 1996. Then in 2001, he founded a new political party and led it to victory in that year's parliamentary election, becoming the Bulgarian Prime Minister. His government took Bulgaria into NATO and signed its EU accession treaty, and EU membership followed in 2007.
In parallel, he and his sister pursued restitution for the family's losses. They won back the Tsarska Bistritsa palace in 2020 but lost some others. The European Court of Human Rights found in 2021 that Bulgaria had breached their property rights, and later awarded them about 1.6m euros in damages. Those property wins were controversial domestically, but Simeon is still a perfect example of how former royals can remain a symbol long after leaving power, and how this can be compatible with democratic institutions.
When we think of European nobility, we almost exclusively think of King Charles III or one of the Scandinavian royals. But nobles who wield no constitutional power instead leverage their soft power, their influence, and their wealth to compensate. Their weapons are rarely armies anymore, but rather names, networks, and lawsuits.
Keep reading
- Why is Andorra ruled by the French president and a Catholic bishop?
- Why isn’t Italy a global power?
- How does France riot so much without collapsing?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.