In recent years, the figure of the British sovereign has returned to the center of the international stage not only for dynastic reasons, but also because of the communicative role assumed in relation to foreign parliaments. The speeches delivered by King Charles III to the Italian Parliament in April 2025 and to the United States Congress one year later, in April 2026, offer a privileged vantage point on this transformation. While both fall within the register of the “high” representation typical of parliamentary monarchies, they reveal a deliberate use of the royal word in relation to foreign, environmental, and security policy issues, which traditionally fall within the political responsibility of the government.
This article will examine these speeches, namely the institutional context in which they are situated; the substantive content relating to alliances, conflicts, and global crises; and the way in which, by appealing to shared values and memories, the sovereign contributes to building a consensus “beyond politics” around the main directions of British foreign policy. What emerges is the image of a head of state who is formally neutral yet, without overstepping the boundaries of his political irresponsibility, is nonetheless capable of intervening in the processes by which governmental choices are legitimized on the international framework. In this perspective, the speeches analyzed here may be framed within the broader category of constitutional soft power. This recalls, albeit in an updated form, the classic notion of the pouvoir neutre, reinterpreted in contemporary constitutional scholarship as a function of integration and stabilization of the political system.
Institutional Context
The first element to consider is the different institutional placement of the two interventions. The speech delivered by King Charles III to the joint Chambers of the Italian Parliament in 2025 formed part of a state visit marked by strong historical and symbolic significance: it was in fact the first time that a British sovereign had addressed the Parliament of the Italian Republic. The event was presented as the culminating moment of the visit, with a ceremonial designed to highlight both the bilateral dimension of Italo-British relations in a broader sense – as the state visit also saw King Charles III visit Vatican City and San Marino – and the by no means obvious invocation of common European historical and cultural roots. Moreover, the choice to open the speech in Italian and to conclude it with a Dantesque reference, drawing applause from the entire parliamentary hemicycle, can be seen as further reinforcement of the dimension of mutual recognition between legal orders and political communities.
The context of the speech to the United States Congress is different. Here it is not a unicum: the sovereign spoke before the two Houses in joint session, in accordance with a well-established practice for heads of State of countries regarded as Washington’s “key allies.” The address explicitly situated itself in the tradition of the so-called Anglo-American special relationship and was presented as an opportunity to reaffirm the exceptional nature of the bond between the two democracies. Once again, this was formally a speech external to the dynamics of US domestic politics; however, the timing (during the Ukraine war and a highly polarized electoral cycle in the United States in the run-up to mid-terms) endowed the intervention with heightened political density. In substance, the King reaffirmed the continuity of the Atlantic alliance in a context of growing uncertainty, making visible the convergence between London and Washington on certain fundamental priorities.
In both cases, therefore, the sovereign’s word is conveyed through forms of ceremonial parliamentarism that lie at the margins, but not outside, the democratic circuit: representative assemblies lend their symbolic authority to a message that helps to define the horizon of meaning within which the foreign-policy choices of the respective governments are inscribed. From a comparative perspective, the possibility for a non‑executive head of state to address foreign parliamentary assemblies is not unique to the British case, yet it remains relatively rare and unevenly distributed. Presidents of parliamentary republics such as the German Bundespräsident or the Italian President of the Republic do engage in forms of international parliamentary diplomacy, but typically within more restrained communicative frameworks and with a stronger emphasis on strictly constitutional language. The British sovereign, by contrast, benefits from a combination of historical prestige, personal continuity, and global visibility that amplifies the reach and political resonance of such interventions.
Political Substance: Alliances, Wars and Global Crisis
If we focus on the substance, both speeches revolve around certain common axes: the defense of peace, the invocation of the memory of twentieth-century conflicts, and the centrality of Western alliances in managing contemporary crises. In the address to the Italian Parliament, these themes emerge through a strongly historical and value-laden lexicon: peace is presented as a good never definitively secured, to be safeguarded in the light of past tragedies; friendship between Italy and the United Kingdom is described as the product of a shared trajectory passing through moments of conflict and reconciliation; Europe itself is evoked more as a historical-cultural space than as the object of contingent political choices. In this way, references to the international situation (from the war in Ukraine to tensions in the wider Mediterranean) are filtered through a long-term narrative, which allows the sovereign to speak of security and cooperation without intervening directly in the domestic political debate in Italy.
In the speech to Congress, the political dimension appears more explicit. The centrality of the Atlantic Alliance is affirmed as the cornerstone of the Euro-Atlantic security order; support for Ukraine is presented as a shared duty of Western democracies, called upon to show “unwavering determination” in defending an international order founded on law rather than force; the major global challenges – from climate change to artificial intelligence, from pandemics to energy crises – are described as problems that “no nation can tackle alone”, thereby legitimizing a form of multilateralism effectively led by the Anglo-American axis. Here Charles III casts himself as the interpreter of a clearly defined foreign-policy line, which largely coincides with that of the British government, while in certain respects implicitly diverging from positions associated with the political stance of the president of the United States, Donald Trump. This, precisely, raises significant questions about the possibility for a head of state who is politically irresponsible to support, before foreign parliaments, foreign-policy options liable to divide domestic political forces.
The Monarch’ Speech: A Symbolic Political Power
The two speeches invite reflection on how the British parliamentary monarchy today exercises a distinctive form of “neutral power.” The sovereign’s neutrality does not coincide with silence, nor with the mere repetition of governmental messages. On the contrary, Charles III appears to assume the role of long-term interpreter of the United Kingdom’s relations with its principal partners, placing contingent foreign-policy choices within a broader historical and value-based framework. This function can be read in the light of the classic categories of European constitutionalism. The sovereign does not exercise decision-making power in foreign affairs, nor is he politically accountable for the lines pursued by the government; yet he contributes to legitimizing those lines, both domestically and externally, by mobilizing a symbolic capital that does not belong to the executive as such, but to the very form of state. Thus, when he speaks before the Italian Chambers or the United States Congress, the King does not merely represent the British legal order in its entirety but a form of precise soft power.
This brings the sovereign’s position closer to that of heads of state in other parliamentary democracies. In such cases, the head of state’s word operates along a delicate ridge: on the one hand, it must remain sufficiently general not to be perceived as interference in partisan contestation; on the other, it must be concrete enough not to lapse into pure rhetoric.
Final Remarks
The joint analysis of King Charles III’s speeches to the Italian Parliament and to the United States Congress makes it possible, in conclusion, to discern a broader trend: in mature parliamentary democracies, non-elected heads of state are regaining a non-marginal role in the processes of legitimizing major foreign and security policy choices. They do not decide, nor are they politically accountable; yet, through speeches with high symbolic density, they help to place those choices within a long-term narrative grounded in historical memories, shared values and “special” friendships between states and peoples.
In the British case, this function builds on a monarchical tradition that accords the sovereign strong international visibility and considerable symbolic capital. The speeches considered here show how that capital can be placed at the service of a diplomacy which, while remaining formally a governmental prerogative, is accompanied and reinforced by a voice perceived as external to political conflict. In this intermediate space between formal diplomacy and political communication, the King’s word emerges as one of the instruments through which consensus, both domestic and external, is constructed around the main directions of British foreign policy. For constitutional scholars, this invites a reconsideration of well-established categories – neutrality, irresponsibility, representation – in the light of an increasingly sophisticated use of the symbolic dimension of power.
