Gissurarson and former Prime Minister Peterle.

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, gave a talk on the conditions of peace at a conference held by the Catholic University of Ljubljana on 23 April 2024 where the audience included Lojze Peterle, the first Prime Minister of Slovenia after the fall of communism. Gissurarson recalled that there were three ways of obtaining from others what you wanted. You could ask for it, pay for it, and seize it. The first way was appropriate for family and friends. The third way was not conducive to peace. The second way was however desirable for the interactions of strangers. You pay for what you want in free market transactions, and you sell to others what they want. Trade was preferable to conquest, a coin better than a sword. Gissurarson recalled a comment by a prominent German free trader of the nineteenth century: If you see a potential customer in somebody, your propensity to shoot at him diminishes.

Gissurarson also quoted a famous observation, often wrongly attributed to Frédéric Bastiat, but. very much in his spirit, that if goods are not allowed to cross borders, soldiers will. A good example was Japan in the fourth decade of the twentieth century. In the Great Depression, her export sector had lost access to many foreign markets, and she had also had found it difficult to obtain the raw materials necessary for her industry. Support for seizing by force what could not be obtained by price hence increased in the country, and Japan went to war.

Gissurarson described a Nordic model in international relations: 1) Peaceful secession, Norway from Sweden in 1905, Finland from Russia in 1917, Iceland from Denmark in 1918. 2) Border change by plebiscite, Schleswig in 1920 when the northernmost part chose to belong to Denmark and the southernmost part to Germany. 3) International arbitration, Sweden accepting the decision by the International Court of Justice that the Aaland Islands belonged to Finland and Norway accepting the decision by the Court that Greenland belonged to Denmark. 4) Cooperation on economic, social and legal integration in the Nordic Council with a minimal surrender of sovereignty, which might, Gissurarson suggested, inspire reforms of the European Union.

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, gave a talk about the proper role of government at a meeting held by the Faculty of Economics at the University of Belgrade in Serbia on 22 April 2024. He recalled the parable of the Good Samaritan. On the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, a traveller had been robbed by some highwaymen, and he lay helpless by the road. When they saw him, a priest and a Levite moved to the other side of the road and passed by, whereas a Samaritan came to the aid of the victim, moved him into a hostel and paid for his necessities. Gissurarson said that this parable illustrated the most important task of government, to keep law and order so that highwaymen would not threaten travellers. It was to make the roads safe.

Three other conclusions could be drawn from the parable: 1) The Samaritan had sufficient time and money to help. This was an argument for people of independent means. 2) The Samaritan had done good at his own expense, unlike leftists who always wanted to do good at other people’s expense. 3) The two intellectuals had passed by, probably thinking like modern leftists that somebody else ought to pay, not themselves.

Gissurarson said that the two uncontested tasks of government were protection against local scoundrels and foreign rogues, which implied the operation of a police force and a judicial system, and a military. The private sector could provide most other goods, although government might finance some of them, such as primary education. However, in the last one hundred years the public sector had taken on many more tasks. The welfare state had grown rapidly, even though the real need for it had greatly diminished with increasing general prosperity, more job opportunities, improved health and more generous pensions. Gissurarson recalled that the American economist and Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan had estimated that probably the state needed only 15 per cent of GDP, gross domestic production, to fulfil its necessary role satisfactorily.

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus in Politics at the University of Iceland, gave a keynote lecture at the Cultural Weekend of ECR Party, European Conservatives and Reformists Party, in Nicosia, Cyprus, on 31 March 2024. He described the relevance today of two remarkable thinkers, the Danish poet and philosopher Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig and the Italian economist Luigi Einaudi. Grundtvig had emphasised national consciousness and active participation in civil society. He sought to turn his fellow Danes into decent citizens of a liberal democracy, and he is still a strong influence in Denmark. Einaudi was a committed free trader who believed that a firmer alliance of states than the League of Nations had been was necessary if freedom and democracy in Europe were to be preserved. He therefore supported the European Union, originally called the EEC, the European Economic Community.

In his lecture, Gissurarson expressed his opinion that the European Union ought to be a federation of nation states, with only the minimum surrender of sovereignty necessary. The Europeans could learn a lot from Grundtvig’s nationalism which had been peaceful and conciliatory, not militant or aggressive. Danish culture, moulded by Grundtvig, should be an inspiration for others. The European Union had for the first fifty years been on the right track, increasing economic freedom and encouraging competition in European markets. Economic integration was desirable. But then the European Union had gone astray. Political integration was undesirable. The unelected and unaccountable Brussels bureaucrats were gradually but methodically trying to construct a powerful, European federal state where their own voices would be heard as a roar, but the voices of the nations as a whisper.

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Icceland, gave a talk in Amsterdam on 12 March 2024 at a conference held by the Austrian Economics Centre and the Nederlands Instituut vor Praxeologie, about the EU in 2030. He recalled that the ‘founding fathers’ of the EU had witnessed the inability of the League of Nations in the interwar years to maintain peace and promote free trade. They therefore wanted a powerful federation and not only a confederation. This federation had to have a military and the power to tax. But after the Second World War the United States, Canada, and Great Britain came to the assistance of the continental European states, enabling them to meet the aggressiveness of Soviet communists. Therefore there was no need for a European military. The task in security affairs was now to ensure cooperation between the European and North American states.

Recently, however, the EU has been on the wrong track according to Gissurarson. It was changing from an open market into a closed state, from a federation of states into a federal state which sought to become a superpower. The proper response was the dispersal of power, as the Subsidiarity Principle prescribed: that decisions were made as close as possible to those whom they affected. This principle had been violated several times in the EU where no democratic constraints seemed to apply to the European Commission, while the European Parliament was a powerless travelling circus, alternating between Brussels and Strasbourg. Moreover, the Court of Justice of the European Union was staffed by ardent supporters of centralisation, and they had greatly extended the power of the European Commission.

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, was a guest in Gisli Freyr Valdorsson’s podcast, Thjodmal, on 4 March 2024. He said that Western universities had abandoned their traditional and proper purpose which was to be a platform for science as the free competition of ideas. They were never supposed to be motivational meetings or choirs singing to one tune only. At present, the universities had become bastions of cancel culture and wokeism, having turned their back on critical thought, respect for people with different ideas and the toleration which distinguished between accepting and allowing other opinions. Gissurarson recalled when he and a few friends of his operated in the autumn of 1984 an illegal radio station in protest against the government monopoly of broadcasting. For this he was convicted and proud of it. Gissurarson also gave an account of his activities for the last couple of years, including lectures and books. In 2020 the Brussels think tank New Direction had published his Twenty-Four Conservative-Liberal Thinkers in two volumes, from Snorri Sturluson to Robert Nozick, where the longest chapters were about Friedrich A. von Hayek and Milton Friedman, both of whom Gissurarson knew personally. Now his major research project was the conservative-liberal heritage of the Nordic nations.

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, first met Antony Fisher (later Sir Antony) in the autumn of 1980 when he invited Gissurarson and other participants at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Stanford to a reception at his house in San Francisco. Fisher and his wife Dorian lived in an elegant flat on the eleventh floor at 1750 Taylor Street. Fisher was in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War when his brother was killed. Consequently, he decided to try and make the world a better place. At the end of the War he read an extract of The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. von Hayek, published in Reader’s Digest. Hayek argued that Hitler’s national socialism and Stalin’s communism were two branches of the same tree, and also warned against central economic planning which would require a police state.

Fisher asked Hayek for advice, as he was eager to become active politically. Hayek told him that political influence was really wielded by those who set the agenda, decided on the premises of political debate as gatekeepers and wordsmiths. Therefore, Fisher should establish a think tank instead of standing in elections. Fisher took his advice, and in 1955 he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in London whose task it is to explore where pricing can replace taxing and where problems can be resolved by spontaneous cooperation and not by commands from above. The IEA had a great impact on the political climate in Great Britain and elsewhere.

Fisher was later to repeat this initiative in other countries, and in 1981 he founded the Atlas Network, an umbrella organisation of free-market think tanks. At present, about 500 institutes in about 100 countries belong to the Network which annually holds the ‘Freedom Dinner’ as a kind of harvest feast. In 2023 the Freedom Dinner was held in New York on 16 November, and it was attended by Professor Gissurarson and also by Dr. Birgir Thor Runolfsson, Chairman of the Economics Faculty at the University of Iceland. The Templeton Prize for the effective operation of a think tank was awarded to the Foundation for Economic Freedom in the Philippinese and the Sir Antony Fisher Prize for individual initiative and leadership was awarded to Temba Nolutshungu of South Africa.