[toyg]

You can eventually "sublimate away" a hereditary ruling family; that's what lots of European countries have done. In some cases (like Pinochet or Franco), the ruling dictator simply accepts there is no point in continuing and just dies away without bestowing the country on his children.

People tend to forget that Middle-Eastern countries are all pretty young from an institutional perspective. Before the mid-XX century they did not exist in forms resembling the current ones. Ottoman collapse, Arab consolidation and general decolonisation were fluid processes that sprung (or were forced to spring) very complex entities with all sorts of growing pains.

[euyyn]

> In some cases (like Pinochet or Franco), the ruling dictator simply accepts there is no point in continuing and just dies away without bestowing the country on his children.

Yeah that's not what happened in Franco's case. He appointed Juan Carlos to succeed him as King of Spain. Juan Carlos was crowned after Franco's death, and decided to turn the country into a democracy. So we got lucky in that sense.

[toyg]

For all of Franco's troubles, the conclusion was basically foregone when he appointed as heir a member of the royal family. Juan Carlos's father had long accepted an evolution into a constitutional monarchy should he ever regain the throne, as an inevitability; any smart person in JC's shoes would have seen the writing on the wall and would have acted in the same way, imho. I don't think it was luck, the forces in motion were already there; in a Cold War setting, a Franco-less Spain would have been subject to infighting between different franchist groups and would have suffered infiltration from Washington and Moscow, with the risk of a new civil war. A transition to a more legitimate government was the only way to reduce instability, it simply couldn't be done with Franco alive. South-American countries went through similar transitions at one point or the other.

[euyyn]

> any smart person in JC's shoes would have seen the writing on the wall and would have acted in the same way, imho

I disagree. As evidenced in the 23-F coup, the armed forces were either opposed to democracy, or loyal to the king. If Juan Carlos had wanted to remain an absolute monarch, all the machinery of the state would have kept turning as usual. The same way it did during 30 years of dictatorship during the Cold War.