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.
