Gissurarson giving his talk in Berlin. Photo Marek Tatala.

At the 4th annual European Students for Liberty conference in Berlin, 10–12 April 2015, Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH Academic Director was one of the speakers. The title of his lecture was “Three Modern Masters: Hayek, Popper and Friedman. Personal Recollections.” Professor Gissurarson recalled that he first met Friedrich von Hayek in April 1980 when the Anglo-Austrian economist and Nobel Laureate visited Iceland. In the following years, he met Hayek frequently, both at meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society meetings and in Oxford, where he was working on a doctoral dissertation on Hayek’s political theory. An Austrian aristocrat by birth, and a scholar by temperament, Hayek never ascribed base motives to his opponents and always sought to meet their arguments on their own merits. He told Professor Gissurarson that he was delighted that young people were interested in ideas, but that he did not want them to become Hayekians; they should exercise their critical minds.

During his Oxford years, Professor Gissurarson was also able to visit Karl F. Popper at his house in Penn, Buckinghamshire, and to discuss philosophy and politics with him, for example whether Popper’s analyses of Hegel and Marx were entirely fair. Professor Gissurarson first met Milton Friedman in the autumn of 1980, and many times after that, both at meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society and at Stanford University where Friedman was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Gissurarson a Visiting Fellow. Friedman also visited Iceland in 1984 and participated in a memorable television discussion with three Icelandic socialists. Here is a very short part of it:

Comparing these three thinkers, Professor Gissurarson submitted that Hayek was the most profound, with his insights that dispersed knowledge required dispersed power and that individuals could overcome their inevitable ignorance in and through the free market and spontaneously developed practices and traditions. Popper was perhaps the most reasonable or moderate, with his contention that man should aim at minimising identifiable evils rather than trying to maximise contestable ideas of happiness. Friedman was the sharpest in debate, quick to strike as a lightning, and also a very serious and original scholar.

Other speakers at the conference included Sam Bowman from the Adam Smith Institute in London who described the benefits of immigration, Professor Pierre Garello from France who discussed globalisation and its discontents, Danish journalist Flemming Rose who defended press freedom, Dr. Tom G. Palmer of Cato Institute in Washington DC who gave a summary of his forthcoming book on liberty, and English MEP Daniel Hannan, Secretary-General of the AECR, Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, who argued that classical liberals should be eurosceptics. Five Icelandic students attended the conference, free-lance journalist Asgeir Ingvarsson, economics student Thorsteinn Fridrik Halldorsson, chairman of the Libertarian Society of Iceland, law student Ingvar Smari Birgission, chairman of Heimdallur in Reykjavik, law student Markus Arni Vernhardsson and business administration student Jon Axel Olafsson. Professor Gissurarson’s lecture formed a part of the joint RNH-AECR project on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism.” Here is a tape of his lecture and the slides he used:

Berlin Slides of Gissurarson

Prof. Gissurarson giving his talk. Photo: Ann-Kari Edenius.

Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH Director of Academic Research, gave a paper at a morning seminar conducted by the Ratio think tank in Stockholm, Sweden, Thursday 9 April 2015. The paper was about Swedish-Icelandic relations through the centuries. Professor Gissurarson pointed out the little-known fact that Iceland was in a personal union with Sweden, and neither with Norway nor Denmark, in 1355–1364 under King Magnus smek who had been driven out of Norway. In 1814, when Sweden received Norway after the Napoleonic Wars, as a substitute for Finland, the King and his ministers did not want with it Iceland or the other old Norwegian dependencies in the North Atlantic. Professor Gissurarson recalled that the first leader of the liberal-conservative Independence Party in Iceland, Prime Minister Jon Thorlaksson, was much influenced by renowned Swedish economist Gustav Cassel. The history of Nordic liberalism remains to a large extent untold, the Professor submitted. The success of the Nordic countries was not least because of economic freedom in late 19th and early 20th Century and a strong tradition of the rule of law, rather than because of redistribution imposed by Social Democrats.

Professor Gissurarson also discussed the 2008 Icelandic bank collapse where the Swedes behaved better than the other Nordic countries by providing liquidity to Swedish banks owned by Icelanders, whereas both the Norwegian and Finnish authorities forced a “fire sale” of Icelandic bank assets to local businessmen. Sweden had however, and unfortunately, supported the United Kingdom in the Icesave dispute in 2008–13. This was mostly evidence of the fact that the smaller nations in the European Union such as Sweden did not have much scope for independent decision-making. They had to follow the dominant nations such as the United Kingdom, Germany or France.

It could be argued, Professor Gissurarson added, that the Swedes had reached a reasonable conclusion in 1814 when they decided that Iceland did not belong to continental Europe. While the Icelanders should remain friends with the Swedes, the Germans and other European nations, they ought to forge closer political relations with the North Atlantic nations, Norway, Great Britain, Canada and the United States. His lecture formed a part of the joint RNH-AECR project on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”.

Stockholm Slides by Gissurarson

Vargas Llosa giving his speech at the MPS meeting.

RNH was represented at the Mont Pelerin Society regional meeting in Lima, Peru, 22–25 March 2015 by Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson, a MPS member since 1984. Professor Gissurarson organised, with Professor Harold Demsetz, a MPS regional meeting in Iceland in 2005. The 2015 Lima meeting was devoted to “Liberty: Theory and Practice”. The keynote speaker at the opening ceremony was Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel Laureate in literature and a MPS member. Vargas Llosa said that classical liberalism was for him grounded on tolerance, the awareness of human fallibility. The MPS President, Professor Pedro Schwartz from Spain, argued in his address to the meeting that the objective of liberals should be freedom of opportunity, not the equality of opportunity. Lecturers at the meeting included Professor Arnold Harberger from the US and Professor Rolf Lüders from Chile, who both analysed the success of the Chilean economic reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many other distinguished men of letters participated in the meeting. Chilean writer and philosopher Arturo Fontaine discussed the prospects of Chile and the battle of ideas in Latin America. Flemming Rose, editor of Danish daily Jyllandsposten, spoke in defence of press freedom: he has received death threats from muslim fanatics because of cartoons published in his newspaper. Professor Gissurarson participated in a discussion group on natural resources and property rights, where he explained the workings of the Icelandic system of ITQs, Individual Transferable Quotas, in the fisheries. The meeting was ably organised by Peruvian lawyer and writer Professor Enrique Ghersi. The next meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society will be the 2016 general meeting in Miami, Florida.

Part of the audience. Photo: Haraldur Gudjonsson.

Gudni Th. Johannesson, Associate Professor of history at the University of Iceland, and Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor of Politics at the UI, both agreed that new evidence was to be found on the 2008 Icelandic bank collapse, at a meeting held by RNH and the Icelandic Association of Political Scientists Wednesday 14 January 2015. Johannesson has analysed documents from Wikileaks and obtained documents from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO, by invoking the British Freedom of Information Act. In his paper, he said that the evidence available to him suggested that a loan from Russia to Iceland, discussed before the bank collapse, had been a real possibility. Also, a much-debated television interview with the Governor of the Central Bank of Iceland, David Oddsson, did not bring about the use of British anti-terrorism law against Iceland, as was sometimes alleged. The documents from the FCO however had limited value because so much was redacted out of them. They nevertheless showed that the British Treasury had, in the autumn of 2008, directed negotiations with the United Kingdom, and not the FCO. Johannesson said that he doubted the “insurrection theory” about Iceland in the financial crisis maintained by Styrmir Gunnarsson and Hannes H. Gissurarson. Johannesson also discussed, in general terms, the historical significance of documents and the demand for impartiality in history. He published a paper in the historical journal Saga on these issues in the autumn of 2014.

Gissurarson giving his talk. Photo: Haraldur Gudjonsson.

Professor Gissurarson pointed out that 7 January 2015, minutes of the Court of the Bank of England from 2007–9 were published online. At a meeting on 15 October 2008, the Court expressed its view that attempts by individual nations to become financial centres should be strongly discouraged. Iceland was taken as a specific example. Gissurarson agreed with Johannesson that a loan from Russia had been a real possibility. He quoted Tryggvi Thor Herbertsson, then the economic adviser to the Prime Minister, who had received a phone call from the Russian Ambassador in the morning of 7 October 2008, immediately after Governor Oddsson had received a call from the Ambassador. The message to both was unequivocal: Russia had decided to issue a loan to Iceland. The Russians had however second thoughts later in the day when somebody informed them that the International Monetary Fund, IMF, was trying to have a programme for Iceland being accepted. After this, Iceland had been entrapped by the IMF which turned itself into a bounty collector for the British, refusing to negotiate until Iceland assumed responsibility for the failed banks’ obligations. If Iceland had, in the midst of the financial crisis, been able to make a currency swap deal or establish a credit line of $5–10 billion, either with Russia or the US, then there would not have been a run on the banks and a massive cancellation of credit lines to them: then, the government could have taken the “Swedish option” which was to keep operating the banks, dividing them up between a “good” part and a “bad” part, with bank shareholders losing most or all of their equity. Then a foreseeable downturn would not have become a total collapse.

Dr. Eirikur Bergmann commented on the two papers. He criticized Professor Gissurarson’s distinction between “good” and “bad” capitalists. He also said that it remained to be explained why the British government had been so brutal towards an old ally and friend. It seemed that it thought that it had been promised a full guarantee of the banks’ obligations in the UK, and that this promise had been broken. Nobody knew however who would, or could, have given such a promise. The meeting which was held at the University of Iceland was very well-attended. A lively discussion followed the papers by Johannesson and Gissurarson and the comment by Bergmann. Dr. Tryggvi Thor Herbertsson confirmed the account given by Gissurarson on the discussion of the Russian loan. The meeting formed a part of the joint project by RNH and AECR, Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”. Vidskiptabladid, the Icelandic business weekly, recorded the whole meeting and published it on its website, as well as a series of photographs of it. Both the Icelandic Broadcasting Service and Station Two interviewed Johannesson and Gissurarson for the evening television news, and also the radio programme “The Mirror” (Spegillinn).

Here are the interviews on Station Two:

Here is the account of the meeting in Morgunbladid:

Here are Professor Gissurarson’s slides:

HHG.Reykjavik.14.01.2015

Here is the account in Vidskiptabladid: