From left: John Stanley, Kevin Murphy and Ed Feulner. Photo: Alex Chafuen.

The emerging Asia of the last thirty years was the main topic discussed at the 2014 general meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Hong Kong 31 August to 5 September. Hundreds of millions of Asian people have migrated from poverty to at least some affluence in these three decades, by participating in international free trade and by utilising the forces of private property rights and market competition. Economists from Japan, India, South Korea, Hong Kong and China described the economic development in their respective countries. One session at the meeting was devoted to “China and the World”, where two renowned sinologists, Dr. Edward Luttak and Professor Roderick Farquhar, described their attempts at understanding and explaining China where a communist party maintains a monopoly of political power at the same time as it has abandoned common property and central planning. Another session was devoted to inflation and monetary affairs, where the speakers included Professor John Taylor of Stanford University (after whom the Taylor rule is named). One session at the meeting was on the position of the middle class in the West which had, according to some writers, seen its relative share in total income reduced relative to the share of the highest-income group. In this session Professor Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago discussed investment in human capital as a possible explanation of a widening gap between income groups, at the same time as he and other speakers stressed that on a global level the gap (as traditionally measured) had actually shrinked, not least as a result of emerging Asia. Mr. Tung Chee Hwa, the first Chief Executive of Hong Kong as an autonomous region in China, and Mr. Vaclav Klaus, former President of the Czech Republic, shared their experiences and insights at luncheon talks.

Professor Gary Becker chaired the programme committee for the meeting, but sadly he passed away a few months before the event, in the spring of 2014. Professor Richard Wong of the University of Hong Kong chaired the local organisation committee. Three Icelanders attended the 2014 MPS meeting, Gisli Hauksson, Chairman of the RNH Board, Jonas Sigurgeirsson, RNH Executive Director, and Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH Academic Director and the only Icelandic member of the MPS. They joined the other Nordic members and guests at the MPS meeting at a dinner 2 September. Professor Allan Meltzer, one of the world’s best-known monetary economists, stepped down as MPS President, and was replaced by Professor Pedro Schwartz of Spain. The long-serving MPS Treasurer, Dr. Ed Feulner, former Director of Heritage Foundation, also stepped down at the meeting, and was presented with a specially commissioned portrait for his tireless work and contribution to the MPS. The Mont Pèlerin Society was founded in Switzerland in the spring of 1947 by Friedrich von Hayek and many other distinguished economists, such as Frank H. Knight, Ludwig von Mises and the later Nobel Prize laureates Milton Friedman, George J. Stigler and Maurice Allais. The original members also included Anglo-Austrian philosopher Karl R. Popper. The next regional meeting of the MPS will be in Lima in Peru 22–25 March 2015, while the next general meeting will be in Miami in September 2016. In August 2005, the MPS held a regional meeting in Iceland, where the speakers included Professor Harold Demsetz of the UCLA, Vaclav Klaus, then President of the Czech Republic, and five Icelanders, David Oddsson, then Foreign Minister, Dr. Kari Stefansson of Decode and University of Iceland Professors Ragnar Arnason, Thrainn Eggertsson and Hannes H. Gissurarson.

National Librarian Ingibjorg Steinunn Sverrisdottir receives the books donation from Professor Gissurarson. Photo: Olafur Engilbertsson.

In 2009 the European Parliament decided to make 23 August a special memorial day for victims of totalitarianism, nazism and communism. This day was chosen because on that very day in 1939 Hitler and Stalin had made the non-aggression pact whereby they divided Central and Eastern Europe up between themselves, which in turn led to the outbreak of the Second World War. The two dictators took each one-half of Poland, but Finland and the three Baltic countries were to be Stalin’s even if he eventually had to settle for the Baltic countries in addition to his Polish conquests. RNH is a member institute of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience which was founded to keep up the memory of victims of totalitarianism in the 20th Century. 23 August 2013 RNH opened a photo exhibition on “Iceland and International Communism” at the Icelandic National Library, while Dr. Pawel Ukielski from Poland and Dr. Mart Nutt from Estonia described their countries’ totalitarian experience, under both nazism and communism. When the photo exhibition closed 16 September, Slovenian historian Dr, Andreja Valic Zver gave a paper about the need and the duty to remember. At the same time, the National Library’s Manuscripts Department received documents which Professor Arnor Hannibalsson—who had studied in Russia in the 1950s—had managed to find in Moscow after the fall of communism and which Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson had made use of in his 2011 book on Icelandic Communists 1918–1998.

RNH has a joint project with AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, on “Europe of the Victims”. This year, RNH used the occasion of the Victims’ Memorial Day to donate to the National Library of Iceland many books on this subject, including a report from the Investigation  Commission in Estonia on crimes committed under nazism and communism, the two volumes work by Danish Professor Bent Jensen on Denmark during the Cold War and biographies of Czech writer Otto Katz (alias André Simone), German activist Willi Münzenberg and Danish politician Arne Munch-Petersen who all had some contact with the Icelandic communist movement and who all perished, Katz being hanged in Prague, while Münzenberg was killed by Soviet agents in a French forest and Munch-Petersen died of ill treatment in a Moscow prison. On Victims’ Memorial Day this year, 23 August 2014, Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson also published an article in Morgunbladid on the historical significance of the non-aggression pact, describing the misdeeds of Hitler and Stalin in Poland and the Baltic countries, the carefully planned extermination of Jews, mass deportations, arrests and executions:

Gissurarson, Joensuu 16 August. Photo: Jouko Nurmiainen.

RNH’s Academic Director, Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, gave four papers at Nordic conferences in August 2014. At the annual meeting of NOPSA, the Nordic Political Science Assocation, in Gothenburg in Sweden 12–15 August he discussed three topics. One of them was at a seminar on “International Courts and Domestic Politics”, directed by Johan Karlsson Schaffer. There Professor Gissurarson analysed the 2008–13 Icesave dispute between Iceland on the one hand and the UK and the Netherlands on the other hand and discussed the surprising hostility towards Iceland shown by the other Nordic countries in the dispute and the strange role assumed by the IMF, International Monetary Fund, as a bounty collector for the UK and the Netherlands. Professor Gissurarson described the many attempts to reach a deal in the dispute, the final decision of the EFTA Court and the impact of the case on domestic politics in Iceland. The opponent, Matthew Saul, a research fellow at Oslo University, commented that it was surprising how keen some Icelandic politicians seemed to have been to do a deal with the UK and the Netherlands instead of resorting to a court of law.

In the second place, Professor Gissurarson tried to answer the question at a seminar on “International Political Theory” directed by Göran Duus-Otterström why Iceland was, in the 2007–9 financial crisis, left out in the cold. He pointed out that small nations have usually been subdued by bigger ones: in international politics, often might is right. In the 20th Century, Iceland had mostly relied on the UK and the US for protection. However, in the autumn of 2008 Iceland found itself suddenly without any real allies. The US Federal Reserve System made dollar swap deals with the central banks of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, while refusing such a deal to Iceland. The UK government refused to include British banks, owned by Icelanders, in an immense rescue package for banks in October 2008, closing them down instead and even imposing an anti-terrorism law against one of them and briefly also against the CBI, Central Bank of Iceland, and against other Icelandic government institutions. The opponent, Aaron Maltais, a research fellow at Stockholm University, expressed doubts about whether the Icelandic banks could really be defended. They seemed to have been very reckless in their behaviour. Their rapid growth before their collapse had been absolutely unprecedented.

Thirdly, at a seminar directed by Anders Lindbom on “The Nordic Welfare Model in Transition”, Professor Gissurarson discussed the development of the Icelandic welfare state under the 1995–2004 market capitalism and the 2004–8 crony capitalism and then in the post-collapse years. He maintained that welfare benefits had remained generous in Iceland during the whole of this period, while income distribution had certainly become less even under the 2004–8 crony capitalism, characterised by an immense credit expansion. Professor Gissurarson pointed out that in 2004, at the end of the market capitalism era, poverty and social exclusion in Iceland were almost negligible and certainly much less prevalent than in almost all other European countries. His opponent, Stephan Köppe, research fellow at Dundee University, criticized Professor Gissurarson’s paper for not including a thorough description and analysis of the development of the Icelandic welfare system. The three Gothenburg papers formed a part of the joint project by RNH and AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”.

At the 28th Nordic Historians’ Congress in Joensuu in Finland 14–17 August 2014, Professor Gissurarson gave a lecture on the main theme of the Congress, “Crossovers—Borders and Encounters in the Nordic Space”, at a seminar chaired by Finnish historian Jouko Nurmiainen. The paper was on two Germans who both lived in Iceland before the Second World War. One of them, the nazi Bruno Kress, taught German and did research on Icelandic grammar, supported by Ahnenerbe, the SS “research” institute. The other, the Jewess Henny Goldstein, had fled to Iceland with her son and her mother after Hitler’s takeover in Germany and worked as a dressmaker. One of her two brothers succeeded in escaping to Iceland before the War, but the other one was killed at the notorious Natzweiler Camp after experiments that Ahnenerbe did on him and other Jews selected from Auschwitz in the grisly “Skeleton Case”. After the British occupation of Iceland in 1940, the German nazi was arrested and spent a few years in captivity on the Isle of Man, before being sent to Germany by his own choice under a prisoners-exchange programme. After the War, Dr. Kress became a communist in East Germany and was appointed Professor of Nordic Studies at the University of Greifswald. Mrs. Henny Goldstein married an Icelandic journalist, an ardent communist by the name of Hendrik Ottosson, and became an Icelandic citizen. These two—the Jewess who became an Icelander and the nazi who became a communist—met again in 1958, at the 60th birthday of the Icelandic communist leader Brynjolfur Bjarnason. Mrs. Henny Goldstein-Ottoson was upset at seeing again, and on this very occasion, the man whom she remembered from pre-war Reykjavik as a committed nazi. But the incident was hushed up. In mid-1986, Mrs. Goldstein-Ottosson passed away, a few months before Kress was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Iceland. Professor Gissurarson’s paper forms a part of the joint RNH and AECR project on “Europe of the Victims”.

Professor Gissurarson says that while the papers were on different subjects, their uniting theme was that the soft and gentle could survive the hard and violent. In the Icesave dispute, patience and perseverance had stood the Icelanders in good stead, and in the international arena, the totalitarian creeds had, despite all setbacks and disappointments, lost to democratic capitalism.

Gissurarson slides in Gothenburg 13 August 2014

Gissurarson slides in Gothenburg morning 14 August 2014

Gissurarson slides in Gothenburg afternoon 14 August 2014

Gissurarson slides in Joensuu 16 August 2014