Marek Mutor, President of the Platform.

The Platform of European Memory and Conscience held its annual Council of Members on 11–13 November 2021 in Prague, alongside an international conference on the year 1991 in retrospect. The keynote paper at the conference was delivered by Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH Academic Director, who argued that the failure of the Russian Revolution was not because the wrong people had made it, but because the Marxist project was unrealistic and therefore bound to fail. The reason was that without a capital market there was no way of making rational decisions about the utilisation of capital goods. The heroic Prometheus seizing fire from the gods, in Marxist mythology, therefore inevitably turned into the vicious Procrustes trying to force all his guests to fit in the same bed. Gissurarson recalled the failed coup attempt in the Soviet Union in August 1991 which provided an opportunity for the Baltic nations to reaffirm their independence after decades of occupation. Prime Minister David Oddsson of Iceland, long a firm anti-communist, used the occasion to resume diplomatic relations with the Baltic countries. Gissurarson emphasised that even if the Marxist project was bound to fail economically, it was by no means certain that communists would relinquish political power peacefully, as the coup attempt indeed showed.

At the meeting in Prague Marek Mutor, Director of the Remembrance and Future Centre in Wroclaw, Poland, was elected President of the Platform, and five organisations were admitted as full members: the Twentieth Century Memorial Museum (Czech Republic), the Georgian National Museum, the Jože Pučnik Institute (Slovenia), the UIPN State Archive (Ukraine), and the Museum of Communist Terror (United Kingdom). The Platform was the official partner of a film festival in Prague on twentieth century totalitarianism in Europe, held at the same time as the conference. Peter Rendek is the Managing Director of the Platform which has its main office in Prague. The Executive Board of the Platform has six members, Dr. Andreja Valič Zver from Slovenia, Toomas Hiio from Estonia, Dr. Wolfgang-Christian Fuchs from Germany, Professor Antoine Arjakovsky from France, Zsolt Szilágyi from Romania and Dr. Paweł Ukielski from Poland. The Board of Trustees includes Professor Stéphane Courtois and former MEP Tunne Kelam (who have both spoken at RNH events), former Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis and Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša.

Gissurarson Slides in Prague 12 November 2021

In a paper which Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson read to a meeting of the Danube Institute in Budapest 10 November 2021, he argued that Margaret Thatcher, Leader of the Conservative Party in 1975–1990 and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979–1990, was a conservative liberal, or what some (mainly left-wing) scholars call a neoliberal. Thatcherism meant support for the free market, but also for a strong state, albeit a limited one. Thatcher was not bent on imposing an abstract model on British society: she was rather trying to remove barriers to the spontaneous development of the economy, including breaking up monopolies, not only in heavy industry, but also on the labour market. To reinforce his argument, Gissurarson quoted Edmund Burke, regarded by many conservatives as their founding father: ‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risque the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.’ What Thatcher did, Gissurarson said, was to reform in order to preserve. She wanted to defend the traditional liberties of the British people, gradually eroded for almost a century. For this she needed a strong state which was able to protect those liberties against militant monopolists such as Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Miners and against foreign aggressors such as Leopoldo Galtieri of the military junta in Argentina. But Thatcher not only won the Falklands War, but also, with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, the Cold War. She was, Gissurarson submitted, a world-historical figure in Hegel’s sense. The meeting was chaired by John O’Sullivan, a friend of and a speechwriter for Thatcher during her tenure as Prime Minister. A lively discussion followed Gissurarson’s lecture.

Gissurarson Slides on Thatcherism 10 November 2021

From left: John O’Sullivan, Gissurarson, Ferenc Hörcher and David L. Dusenbury.

RNH Academic Director Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson presented his recent book in two volumes, Twenty-Four Conservative-Liberal Thinkers, on 8 November 2021 in Budapest, at a seminar organised by the Danube Institute, led by John O’Sullivan. In his introductory talk, Gissurarson said that he regarded John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith as the founding fathers of the conservative-liberal tradition with their defence of commercial society, spontaneously developed and based on free trade and private property. However, conservative liberalism as a separate tradition was only clearly articulated with the negative response to the French Revolution by Edmund Burke, Benjamin Constant, and Alexis de Tocqueville. The British Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 were made to preserve and expand existing liberties, whereas the French Revolution of 1789 and, much later, the Russian Revolution of 1917, were attempts to reconstruct society according to the ideas of Rousseau and Marx, respectively. Such attempts were bound to fail, as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek cogently argued.

Gissurarson said that perhaps Hayek was the most distinguished modern representative of the conservative-liberal tradition. His theory of spontaneous order described how coordination without commands was possible and indeed indispensable, utilising both the price mechanism and time-tested practices. Another intriguing conservative-liberal thinker was Michael Oakeshott who argued that modern man had acquired the will and the ability to make choices and that accordingly the society fit for modern man was that in which government only enforced general rules enabling different individuals to live peacefully together.

Professor Ferenc Hörcher and Dr. David L. Dusenbury commented on Gissurarson’s presentation. They both criticised it from a conservative point of view, although they supported the suggestion that conservatives and liberals should stand united against socialism. It seemed to Hörcher that Gissurarson was really presenting classical liberalism rather than any kind of conservatism. What was lacking in classical liberalism was however a sense of community, an awareness of the many ties and commitments people had by virtue of their identity rather than their choices. In response, Gissurarson pointed out that especially Burke and Tocqueville were very much aware and in favour of such ties and commitments: they envisaged a vibrant civil society, not only an almighty state confronting separate and therefore powerless individuals. It was true, Gissurarson conceded, that commercial society destroyed or at least challenged some traditional communities, but at the same time it facilitated the formation of new communities. The best example was the family: there comes a day when you leave your old family and form a new one. Even in what appears to be a concrete, heartless jungle, for example New York City, there are many active communities, spontaneously formed, although not always visible at first sight.

Gissurarson Slides Budapest 8 November 2021

At the Austrian Economics Conference in Vienna 4–5 November 2021 it was announced that this year the Hayek Institute in Vienna, led by Dr. Barbara Kolm, was giving the Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award to Professor Veselin Vukotić, Rector of the University of Donja Gorica in Montenegro, ‘for his tireless efforts and being a pioneer in promoting Austrian Economics during transition, his advancement of economic understanding and for raising the general level of economic education in Montenegro, the Balkans, and abroad’. Previous recipients of the Award include Professors Niall Ferguson, Deirdre McCloskey, and Arthur B. Laffer, the Nobel Laureate in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. It was Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH Academic Director, who gave the Laudatio for Professor Vucotić, while the Award was presented to him by Dr. Robert Holzmann, Governor of the Austrian National Bank.

At dinner in honour of Prof. Vucotić. From left: Barbara Kolm, Ferdinand Wenzel, Richard Bolton, Gissurarson, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, and Steven Heinz.

RNH Academic Director Hannes H. Gissurarson gave a keynote paper at the Austrian Economics Conference in Vienna 4–5 November 2021 on ‘Menger’s Political Significance’. He pointed out that Carl Menger’s contribution to economic analysis was in many ways as seminal as that of Adam Smith. What Menger did was to break economic goods up into units, and then to find how many units of each good could equally satisfy human wants: this was the crucial concept of marginal utility. He treated all goods according to their potentiality for satisfying human wants, not according to their history, for example cost of production. This meant that two political ideas, or rather dogmas, of the late nineteenth century became irrelevant, Georgism and Marxism. Georgism ascribed special significance to land because its supply was more or less fixed, but for Menger it was just another good, to be valued and priced according to its marginal utility. Marxism ascribed special significance to labour because it was supposed to have created all value, whereas Menger regarded it as a good to be priced according to its marginal utility. It was not labour that created value: it was the potentiality of labour inputs or units to satisfy human wants which created the value of those inputs. But Menger’s insight not only disqualified Marxism, but also government redistribution of income such as John Rawls and Thomas Piketty demanded. Such redistribution distorted the information provided in an effective labour market on how different units of labour—individual skills, talents, and abilities—could best be employed to satisfy human wants.

Gissurarson pointed out that nevertheless the spectres of Georgism and Marxism still haunted Europe. For example in Iceland, there was widespread agitation for a special tax on fish stocks, a resource rent tax, which was based solely on the false premises of Georgism. More generally, both radical feminism and ecofundamentalism had much in common with Marxism. Radical feminists believed that women were exploited by the ‘Patriarchy’, paid wages below their real value (marginal price). But if true, in a competitive economy this would provide profit opportunities for those who wanted to run companies solely staffed by women. Why was this not done? Ecofundamentalists believed that nature was exploited far beyond what was reasonable. But over-exploitation of natural resources could only occur if they were not correctly priced, at the margin, and this was usually because private property rights to them had not been developed. For example, elephants and rhinos were endangered and lakes and rivers were polluted if and when nobody owned those goods. In most cases it was quite feasible to define private property rights to such goods, take them into stewardship, appoint their protectors.

Gissurarson Slides Vienna 5 November 2021

Tatała, Gissurarson, and Stodolak.

RNH Academic Director Hannes H. Gissurarson presented his new book, Twenty-Four Conservative-Liberal Thinkers, in two volumes, in Warsaw 2 November 2021, at a meeting sponsored jointly by the Civil Development Forum (FOR), the Warsaw Enterprise Institute and the Economic Freedom Foundation. The meeting took place in the Freedom Lounge appropriately located in the former headquarters of the Polish Communist Party. Sharing a panel on the book with Gissurarson were Marek Tatała from the Economic Freedom Foundation and Sebastian Stodolak from the Warsaw Enterprise Institute. Stodolak also interviewed Gissurarson for the Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and recorded a podcast with him. In his introductory talk, Gissurarson pointed out that in the chapter on Milton Friedman in the second volume there was a brief account of the process in which the Poles and other Central and Eastern European nations, inspired not least by Friedrich von Hayek and Friedman, returned to normalcy in the 1990s, after having had socialism forcibly imposed on them for more than forty years. Gissurarson said that the conservative liberalism he identified in his book could be encapsulated in four terms: limited government, free trade, private property, and respect for traditions.

In the lively discussion following the introductory talk Gissurarson emphasised that environmental problems usually were caused not by capitalism but by the absence of private property rights. Elephants in Africa were endangered because there were no owners to care for them, whereas privately-owned sheep in Iceland were plentiful. In just one stroke poachers in Africa could be turned into gamekeepers if their communities would be given property rights to the elephant stocks. The same applied to polluted lakes and overfished rivers: Environmental protection required protectors who had a private and personal interest in the maximum long-term profitability of natural resources, be they land, fish stocks, oil wells or forests. In the case of the environment, as elsewhere, the best remedy for freedom was more freedom.

Asked about the bank collapse in Iceland, Gissurarson pointed out that in 2008 the assets of the Icelandic banks were probably as good on average as the assets of banks in neighbouring countries, although the Icelandic bankers should definitely have been more cautious in expanding their activities. The difference was that Iceland was denied the liquidity assistance from the United States Federal Reserve Board which the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland received, enabling those countries to rescue banks which otherwise would have gone under, such as Danske Bank in Denmark and UBS in Switzerland. Moreover, the British government, led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling, closed down Icelandic-owned British banks at the same time as they rescued all other banks in the United Kingdom, invoking moreover an anti-terrorism law against Iceland, a longtime friend and ally that did not even have a military of her own. Their unprecedented action was, Gissurarson suggested, motivated by their desire to demonstrate to their Scottish voters the perils of independence. Iceland’s rapid recovery after the collapse bore however witness to the soundness and success of the comprehensive liberalisation of the economy in 1991–2004.