RNH is the Icelandic partner of the Remembrance and Future Centre in Wroclaw in Poland. This Centre is now undertaking a project on oral history with special reference to the connections between the Polish and Icelandic nations. In 17–27 August 2015, a workshop was conducted in Reykjavik where Polish scholars and university students interviewed Polish immigrants in Iceland, visited the oral history centre at the National Library of Iceland and listened to two scholars explaining Icelandic history on the one hand and the traditions of Icelandic biography on the other hand. RNH helped the Centre in organising the workshop.

Dr. Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor of Politics at the University of Iceland, gave an outline of Iceland’s history. It was, he said, mainly a story of the nation’s fight against ice and fire until the 20th century. The ancient Commonwealth had been an interesting attempt to resolve conflicts without government. The fishing grounds off Iceland were very fertile, but while the country was a Danish dependency in 1380–1918, the Danish King has in effect conspired with the small Icelandic landowning class to hinder the development of Icelandic fisheries. This had changed in the 19th century and the Icelanders had worked their way from poverty to affluence through the fisheries and free trade. The 2008 bank collapse had been a great shock to the nation, but it had quickly recovered as in former calamities. The nation has until recently been very homogeneous, but this was changing. Polish immigrants had adjusted better to life in Iceland than many other groups.

Dr. Gudni Johannesson, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iceland, discussed the tradition of Icelandic biographies. He told the audience that he had himself written some biographies, including a controversial unauthorised biography of Kari Stefansson, the medical doctor and founder of Icelandic Decode, and a better-received and authorised biography of Prime Minister Gunnar Thoroddsen. Johannesson was now working on three biographies, two of them on prominent Icelanders, with the support of their families, and one about his own father. It was not always easy, Johannesson submitted, to find sources and to evaluate them. An honest historian had to approach his subject matter with sympathy, and yet critically. He had used oral sources in many of his works, but of course they had to be subject to the same critical analysis as other sources.

Gissurarson Slides 19 August 2015

From left: Thordarson, Hannan, Zahradil, Anna Fotyga, Poland, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the UK, and Zafer Sirakaya, Turkey.

Icelandic MP Gudlaugur Thor Thordarson was elected one of the Vice Presidents of AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, at a Council Meeting 22 May 2015 in Winchester in England. RNH cooperates with AECR on two projects, Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism, and Europe of the Victims. Czech EMP Jan Zahradil from the Civic Democratic Forum, ODS, is AECR President. He is an associate of former Czech President Vaclav Klaus. English EMP Daniel Hannan is  AECR Secretary. Hannan, a long-time friend of Iceland, in the autumn of 2008 defended Iceland in The Times when the British Labour government invoked the anti-terrorism law against Icelandic companies and institutions (including the Central Bank of Iceland and the Icelandic Financial Services Authority). Two parties joined AECR at the Council Meeting, a conservative party from Croatia and a reformist party from Montenegro, signing the Reykjavik Declaration, adopted 21 March 2014.

Following the Council meeting, two panel debates took place, on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and on threats to the transatlantic alliance. AECR seeks to promote transatlantic friendship and cooperation. Jim DeMint, Director of Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, attended the AECR meeting and was presented with the Edmund Burke Prize of the Alliance. RNH has enjoyed a good relationship with Heritage Foundation, one of the most active and influential think tanks in the United States.

Daniel Hannan was keynote speaker at the annual conference of the European Students for Liberty, ESFL, in Berlin 10–12 April 2015, arguing that libertarians should be sceptical about further European integration. RNH Academic Director Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson also spoke at the conference. Daniel Hannan runs a popular website, publishing his articles and speeches. He has published a book on the Anglo-Saxon political tradition, Inventing Freedom, which will be the subject of an RNH conference in Iceland in the spring of 2016, where scholars will compare the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic political traditions. Shortly after Gudlaugur Thor Thordarson was elected AECR Vice President, he published, with Swiss MP Thomas Aeschi, an article in the Telegraph, that there was life outside the EU, as Switzerland, Norway and Iceland showed, enjoying the perks of the European market without the burden of the EU.

Professor Gissurarson talking to Sirja Rank. Photo: Meeli Küttim.

When Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH Academic Director, was in Estonia at the end of April, Sirja Rank from the Estonian business paper Äripäev interviewed him on the Icelandic bank collapse. The interview was published 1 May 2015. Ms Rank asked the Professor whether he, as a member of the Overseeing Board of the Central Bank of Iceland in 2001–2009, did not accept partial responsibility for the bank collapse. “The Central Bank of Iceland cannot be held responsible for the systemic error which was encountered—even discovered—in the international financial crisis,” Professor Gissurarson replied. “This was that the Icelandic banks’ field of operations was much bigger than their field of institutional support. In the end, no one supported the Icelandic banks, whereas almost all other banks in Europe were rescued. The US Fed did for example make very high dollar swap deals with the central bank of Switzerland which had just as big a banking sector as Iceland proportionally. If this had not been done, the Swiss banks would have collapsed.”

Professor Gissurarson was asked if the bank collapse had not been brought about by the neoliberalism which he had enthusiastically embraced. “On the contrary,” he replied. “The banks operated under precisely the same legal and regulatory framework as banks elsewhere in the European Economic Area. However, you can argue that the good reputation which Iceland acquired in the “neoliberal” era of 1991–2004 may have had something to do with the incredible speed with which the banks could expand. They had good credit ratings. But we have to make a distinction between the market capitalism of 1991–2004 and the crony capitalism of 2004–2008. In the latter period, a small group of oligarchs practically controlled Iceland. It owned most of the media and greatly influenced commentators, journalists and even judges. This group, led by Jon Asgeir Johannesson, did a lot of things which I am not prepared to defend.”

Professor Gissurarson was asked whether he had modified his libertarian views as a result of the bank collapse. “The main point is that the collapse was a part of the international financial crisis,” he replied, “and a major cause of that crisis was the recklessness of commercial banks, and a major cause of that recklessness was their belief that if in trouble, they would be bailed out, while if successful they could pocket the profit. This was an irrational principle. Banks should operate under the same principle of responsibility for their own actions as do other private enterprises. The common man should not bear the cost of bankers’ recklessness.”

Professor Gissurarson was asked why Iceland had been so quick to recover. “That’s because the country was never bankrupt, even if Gordon Brown claimed it was,” he replied. “The Icelanders are few in numbers, and they hold considerable assets, the fish stocks in the Icelandic waters, energy resources, an alluring country much in demand by tourists, and last, but not least, a lot of human capital. We were knocked down, and we were a bit dizzy and disoriented for a while, but now we have stood up, and we are walking on briskly.”

Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH Academic Director, read a paper to a seminar on “Piketty’s Challenge” at the Centre for Free Economic Thought at the Tallinn Business School in Estonia 30 April 2015. In his widely discussed book, Capital in the 21st Century, French economist Thomas Piketty demanded extensive global redistribution of income, because it had become much more unequal than in the past. Professor Gissurarson pointed out the great difference between the approaches of Piketty and American philosopher John Rawls: Piketty was upset by the fact that some people were richer than most, whereas Rawls was concerned with the problem when many people were poor. Indeed, capitalism was able to create much wealth. It has historically been the mechanism by which people in many countries had gone from poverty to affluence, as the evidence showed. It was interesting, Professor Gissurarson submitted, to compare Australia and Argentina—two large countries in the Southern hemisphere, with vast natural resources, and inhabited mainly by European immigrants—and Singapore and Jamaica—two tropical islands and formerly British colonies—and West and East Germany and South and North Korea. It was also interesting to compare some of the Canadian provinces and the Northernmost states of the United States to the Nordic countries. The conclusion was always the same: wealth was created by economic freedom. Undeniably, measurements showed an unequal income distribution in capitalist countries, but in the United States this was at least partly caused by a steady stream of immigrants entering the country, penniless in the beginning, but slowly and surely advancing economically. Measurements of income distribution by the Gini coefficient (or alternatively by comparison of the 1% highest-income earners and the rest) were often misleading, Professor Gissurarson added, because it showed greater inequality in the case of a relative increase of the numbers of pensionists or graduate students, brought about by longer life expectancy or more time spent on education, whereas both of those social changes were generally thought to be desirable.

Professor Gissurarson pointed out that global income distribution had actually become more equal in the last few years, because hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese had migrated into capitalism. Possibly, however, income distribution had become less equal in the West, and then for two reasons: competition from China and India had stabilised the income of unskilled labour; and individuals with non-reproducible talents or abilities, for example film stars, entertainers and entrepreneurs, now had found themselves operating on the global rather than the local market. When living standards of Western workers were investigated, the fact should not also be disregarded that the quality and diversity of goods had vastly improved. A worker needed much less time nowadays to work for the goods available than he did in the past. Professor Gissurarson then asked whether anything was wrong with an unequal distribution anyway, if it came about as a result of free choice. He took an example. Milton Friedman advertises a lecture, charging $50 per person. The lecture is attended by 500 people. Friedman is now richer by $25,000, whereas each of the people attending is poorer by $50. But everybody is happy. Where is the problem? Professor Gissurarson said that we should be able to sleep even if other people do well.

The seminar at the Tallinn Business School was well attended, with US economist Dr Richard Rahn acting as commentator. Meelis Kitsing, the Director of the Centre for Free Economic Thought, chaired the meeting. A discussion followed after the lecture and the comments. The question was raised whether entrepreneurs needed the astronomical income they were deriving at present. Would they not be just as creative with less income? Professor Gissurarson replied that income should not be regarded as mainly an incentive to contribute, but rather as information provided to the participants in the market process. Income distribution in a free market served as a means of discovering and distributing necessary information about how people could fulfil their own needs as well as those of others. When the flow of information was halted or reduced by government redistribution of income, people were deprived of this information. Professor Gissurarson’s lecture formed a part of the joint project by RNH and AECR on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”.

Tallinn Business School Slides by Gissurarson

Gissurarson giving his lecture on 29 April 2015.

On 24–26 April 2015, Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH Academic Director, attended the annual conference on international affairs in Tallinn, Estonia, named after Lennart Meri, Estonian President in 1992–2001. The speakers at the conference included Toomas H. Ilves, President of Estonia, Radek Sikorski, former Polish Foreign Minister and presently Speaker of the Polish Parliament, Ana de Palacio, former Spanish Foreign Minister, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, former Danish Foreign Minister, Swedish writer Anders Aslund and many government ministers from the Baltic countries. Some of the lecturers have visited Iceland under the auspices of RNH or of similar organisations, for example François Heisbourg and Andrei Ilarionov. The main topic of the conference was the situation in countries on Russia’s border, the Ukraine as well as the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The participation by Professor Gissurarson in the conference formed a part of the joint RNH and AECR project on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”. In the evening of 24 April Professor Gissurarson attended a dinner party given by President Ilves for a few of the conference attendees. During his stay in Tallinn, Professor Gissurarson also paid a visit to Dr Mart Laar, former Estonian Prime Minister and presently Chairman of the Board of the Estonian Central Bank.

On 29 April 2015, Professor Gissurarson gave an address at the Estonian Parliament on the Icelandic communist movement and the Baltic nations. The lecture was sponsored by the Estonian Member of Parliament and historian Dr Mart Nutt. In his paper, Professor Gissurarson provided an outline of the development of the radical left movement in Iceland, from the autumn of 1918 when Brynjolfur Bjarnason—long one of the most influential members of the movement—turned into a communist by witnessing a street riot in Copenhagen, and to the autumn of 1998 when the last action of the People’s Alliance leadership, before the party was dissolved, was to accept an invitation by the communist party of Cuba to visit. The delegation to Cuba included Chairman Margret Frimannsdottir and former Chairman Svavar Gestsson, who had in his youth attended a school for communist cadres in East Berlin. Professor Gissurarson submitted that both the communist party—a branch of Comintern, the Communist International—which operated in 1930–1938, and its successor, the Socialist Unity Party, which operated as a political party until 1956 and after that as a part of a broader electoral alliance, were loyal to Moscow, as amply confirmed by documents found in Moscow archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those two parties accepted significant secret financial contributions from Moscow, enabling them to buy or build four large houses in Reykjavik and to employ several people, making quite a difference in tiny Iceland, with a population in the 1930s  of a little more than 100,000 people. There was only one example of the Socialist Unity Party not towing the Moscow line, and this was that it refused to condemn the communist parties of Yugoslavia and Albania when those parties fell out of favour in the Kremlin.

26 August 1991. From left: David Oddsson, Jon Baldvin Hannibalsson, A. Saudargas, Lithuania, J. Jurkans, Latvia, og Lennart Meri, Estonia.

Professor Gissurarson discussed the Baltic nations in this context. A Latvian woman, Liba Fridland, had toured Iceland in 1923, giving lectures on the Bolshevik Revolution, describing communist despotism in vivid details. As a result, she had been fiercely attacked in the press by communists. A Lithuanian refugee, Teodoras Bieliackinas, had written a series of articles in Morgunbladid in 1946 on the oppression of the Baltic countries. Consequently, he had been condemned by the communist press as a “Lithuanian fascist” despite the fact that he was Jewish (in fact, his father, the distinguished lawyer Simonas Bieliackinas, perished in Auschwitz). When the Public Book Club (Almenna bokafelagid) was established in 1955 to counter the communist influence in Icelandic culture, its first publication was a book by Ants Oras, an Estonian Professor of Literature, on the oppression in the Baltic countries, Baltic Eclipse (Orlaganott yfir Eystrasaltslondum). In 1957, the President of Iceland and the Foreign Minister, both staunch anti-communists, had received the Estonian Prime Minister in Exile, Dr August Rei, despite the protests of the Soviet Ambassador. In 1973, the Public Book Club had published a book by Estonian-Swedish journalist Anders Küng, Estonia: A Small Nation Under Foreign Yoke (Eistland: Smathjod undir oki erlends valds). Describing the enforced Russification of this small nation, it was translated by a young law student, David Oddsson, who was to become Prime Minister of Iceland in 1991. One of Oddsson’s first actions in office was to reaffirm the recognition by Iceland of the sovereignty of the Baltic countries. Iceland had, as most Western countries, never recognised the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries.

Professor Gissurarson also criticized the less than sympathetic coverage of the Baltic nations in a widely-used history textbook in Iceland, New Times (Nyir timar), published in 2006 by two socialist historians, Sigurdur Ragnarsson and Gunnar Karlsson. The two authors wrote, for example (p. 246): “In 1940, the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were annexed [innlimud] to the Soviet Union as member republics.” Professor Gissurarson pointed out that, as the Baltic nations have always maintained themselves, the three countries were in 1940 put under military occupation, and not “annexed”. The two authors also wrote (p. 263): “In Yalta, the West recognised de facto that the Baltic States and the Eastern part of Poland would remain a part of the Soviet Union and that Eastern Europe would remain on the Soviet sphere of influence.” According to Professor Gissurarson, this was never a part of the Yalta agreement. First, the authors disregarded the fact that neither Roosevelt nor Churchill meant by a “sphere of influence” the imposition of a one-party communist police state. Second, neither the United States nor the United Kingdom recognised the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. Then, the two authors wrote on the Soviet “glasnost” period (p. 292): “Increased freedom of speech however woke up old nationalism in many Soviet republics. The nationalist movement was strongest in the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but it was also present elsewhere. Finally the Baltic countries declared their independence and seceded from the Soviet Union as they had actually the right to do according to the constitution.” Professor Gissurarson found this a very misleading account of what happened. No demand for national sovereignty needed to be awakened in the Baltic nations, as they had never accepted the Soviet occupation of their countries and had always wished to remain independent. It was also absurd to speak as if they had had a real right to secede from the Soviet Union which they had subsequently decided to use. This was the Kremlin version of events, not that of the Baltic nations. No decision had been made by the Baltic nations either to join the Soviet Union or to secede from it. Professor Gissurarson’s lecture formed a part of the joint RNH and AECR project on “Europe of the victims”.

Tallinn Slides of Gissurarson 29 April 2015

Hannes flytur erindi sitt í Tartu.

Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH Academic director, gave a lecture on the Soviet influence of the Icelandic communist movement at a University of Tartu seminar  28 April 2015. The seminar was organised by the Department of Politics, and before it, Professor Gissurarson met with the Department Chair, Professor Vello Pettai who sent his greetings to Icelandic friends, having in 2011 attended a conference in Iceland. In the lecture Professor Gissurarson provided an outline of the most important chapters in the history of the radical left in Iceland: the preparations in 1918–1930 for forming a communist party; the operations in 1930–1938 of the communist party, a branch of Comintern, the Communist International; the split of the Labour Party in 1938 and the subsequent formation of the Socialist Unity Party and its operations in 1938–1956; the split of the Labour Party in 1956 and the subsequent formation of the People’s Alliance and its operations after that, first as an electoral alliance in 1956–1968 and then as a political party in 1968–1998.

In his lecture, which formed a part of the joint project of RNH and AECR on “Europe of the Victims”, Professor Gissurarson pointed out that the traditional difference between communists and social democrats had been that the communists were not prepared to work solely within the framework of parliamentary democracy: they did not rule out violence in the political struggle, if needed. Indeed, the Icelandic communist party supported violence both in theory and practice during its lifetime, for example in labour disputes. Later, the socialists also used violence, for example when they laid a siege to the headquarters of the Independence Party in 1946 and when they attacked Parliament House in 1949. The socialists also fiercely defended the regimes of the communist bloc, all of which were established and maintained by violence. They accepted funds from those regimes, and followed instructions from Moscow, with few exceptions. The connections between the Icelandic socialists and the masters in Kremlin only ended with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, after that the People’s Alliance maintained connections with the communist parties of Romania and Cuba, and the last thing the leadership of the People’s Alliance did, before the dissolution of the party, was in 1998 to accept an invitation from the communist party of Cuba for a delegation to visit.

Professor Gissurarson gave an account of disputes between himself and historians Thor Whitehead and Snorri G. Bergsson on the one hand and leftwing intellectuals such as philosopher Jon Olafsson on the other hand, on the interpretation of the historical evidence. For example, Jon Olafsson asserted that the many young Icelanders who attended the Comintern schools in Moscow in 1929–1938, had not received any military training there, whereas this was contrary to the available evidence, both from the young revolutionaries themselves and from numerous other sources. Jon Olafsson also suggested that Comintern had been opposed to the 1938 foundation of the Socialist Unity Party, on the basis of an internal memorandum which a Comintern official had composed; this was however implausible, Professor Gissurarson said, as the relationship between the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party and the Kremlin had been excellent in the following years, and as the new Party had received congratulations from several communist parties at the foundation ceremony. Professor Gissurarson said that in his 2011 book on the Icelandic communist movement he had emphasised, citing many examples, that from the very beginning sufficient knowledge was available in Iceland about the tyranny and squalor in the communist countries. Morgunbladid had for example never tired of printing accounts by victims of communism in those countries, and those accounts had turned out to be more or less accurate, even if they had been contemptuously rejected by the Icelandic socialists.

Tartu Slides of Gissurarson