From left: Peter Hefele, Marko Milanovic Litre, Harrison Pitt, Hannes H. Gissurarson
The Brussels think tank New Direction held a large conference in Madrid on 20–22 September 2023 where right-wing intellectuals and activists met to discuss issues, as well as to attend the annual Margaret Thatcher Dinner. The speaker this year was Dr. Robin Harris who had been a speechwriter for Thatcher and also written a book about her.
Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, spoke in favour of cooperation between conservatives and liberals. He suggested that there was a conservative branch of classical liberalism which combined the strong case for free trade, private property, and limited government with the plausible conservative intuition that individuals needed a home, the participation in a group, a sense of belonging, some meaning in life.
A speaker at the conference brought up the well-known ‘tragedy of the commons’ where unlimited access to a limited resource led to its over-utilisation. Gissurarson responded that this was a problem which could often be solved by market transactions, citing the example of the Icelandic fisheries system. He pointed out that in Africa where some elephant and rhino stocks were endangered, with one stroke of the pen poachers could be turned into gamekeepers by defining private property rights to the herds of those animals to the inhabitants of villages nearby. This would imply their effective utilisation instead of an unenforceable ban on doing so.
Gissurarson said that he agreed with conservatives that society was not only an amalgamation of unattached individuals. People needed roots, connections, respect for time-tested customs, conventions and traditions. He however rejected the notion expressed by some at the conference that our moral commitments only extended to other people belonging to the same nation. They extended to the whole of mankind although they were quite limited and consisted mostly in leaving others alone.
Dinner 20 September, with Terry Anker, Barbara Kolm, Robert Tyler, and others.
