The old Icelanders gathered here in the uninterrupted light at midsummer every year, and the lögsögumadr, or law speaker, recited one-third of the nation’s laws, so that the whole code would be declaimed every three years. Courts met to deliberate transgressions, and new laws were made. Informal lawyers negotiated, and judges settled the penalties for unlawful violence, theft, and other crimes—fines were levied for most offenses and exile imposed for the worst. No one was imprisoned.
I was reading Njal’s Saga when I visited, which chronicles several generations of feuds that were occasionally resolved by the lawyerly Njal’s visits to the Althing. The sagas written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are the great literary patrimony of Iceland, where the language has changed so little that modern Icelanders can still more or less read them. Njal’s careful legal deliberation, though, was an odd contrast to much of the saga’s grisly violence, as though Black’s Law Dictionary had been spliced into Grand Theft Auto. At one point, Njal notes the importance of the rule of law—“With laws shall our land be built up but with lawlessness laid waste”—and not many pages later, his eldest son catches sight of his enemies on an ice sheet beside the river and, in a celebrated passage, decides to make the most of the opportunity:
Skarp-Hedin made a leap and cleared the channel between the ice-banks, steadied himself, and at once went into a slide: the ice was glassy-smooth, and he skimmed along as fast as a bird. Thrain was then about to put on his helmet. Skarp-Hedin came swooping down on him and swung at him with his axe. The axe crashed down on his head and split it down to the jaw-bone, spilling the back-teeth on to the ice.
These mostly Norse settlers were land-hungry but also monarch-weary, and they wanted to do what had not been done in Europe since the time of the Roman republic: maintain order without overlords. This sounds like a remarkable concept, but if you consider the early Icelanders as a people akin to, say, the Algonquins or the Mohicans, who governed themselves quite nicely without crowned heads and tax collectors, the achievement finds its place in a long history of small self-governing societies that didn’t generate fixed hierarchies or bureaucracies. Farmers allied themselves with chieftains who had decision-making power at the Althing, but the farmers could switch their allegiance: they were not vassals bound to a lord, and the chieftains were themselves farmers. The family unit was important. It still is.
Jared Diamond has written that these self-governing Icelanders were “too poor to afford a government,” and they did indeed struggle to survive in the country’s harsh climate—they cherished the right of “driftage,” or the right to collect all the driftwood and debris on a given stretch of coastline. But they also had splendid horses, much land, herds of cattle and sheep, all the fish they could catch, a voice in their own affairs, and a great deal of freedom. It wasn’t a feminist paradise, but women retained meaningful rights and roles, a big difference from the celebrated democracy of ancient Athens, where women were largely housebound and hushed up. In Iceland: The First New Society, the historian Richard F. Tomasson grumbles that Iceland “suffered from the fatal flaw of the old Germanic polity,” which was “an inability to develop any ordered and regular hierarchy of authority.” This “flaw” was hardly fatal, though. The old Icelandic society lasted more than three hundred years, until internal feuding made it vulnerable to a takeover by the king of Norway in 1262. Not a bad run.
William Morris, the great Victorian artisan, writer, and revolutionary, derived such inspiration from the Icelandic sagas that he traveled through the country by pony for several weeks in 1871. His taste for the old stories was partly romantic enthusiasm for a world of fierce, fearless characters and partly an appreciation for lean prose. But the firsthand experience of the visit—“Awful looking are these Icelandic wastes,” he wrote, “yet beautiful to a man with eyes and heart”—occasioned a far more specific epiphany, which was that “the most grinding poverty is a trifling evil compared with the inequality of classes.” The trip was a turning point in his life.
Iceland past and present confirmed in Morris his own radically democratic desires, and he afterward devoted much of his life to bringing about his vision of utopian anarchism. In Morris’s novel News from Nowhere, a protagonist much like the author falls asleep after a rancorous meeting of various left-wing activists: “There were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent Anarchist opinions.” They have been talking about what would constitute the ideal society after the revolution, and the protagonist wakes up the next morning in twenty-first-century London, a world that is Morris’s own vision of what a postrevolutionary nation could become. One of Morris’s guides shows him the Houses of Parliament, now used to store manure. “‘Now, dear guest, let me tell you that our present parliament would be hard to house in one place, because the whole people is our parliament,’” he explains. “‘I must now shock you by telling you that we no longer have anything which you, a native of another planet, would call a government.’” The guide then jokes that what can be said of politics in this country is what was once famously (and truly) said of snakes in Iceland in the very short chapter of an eighteenth-century natural history: “There are no snakes in Iceland.”
In Morris’s utopia everyone participates in governance and no one is a politician; it is direct rather than representative democracy—and a fantastic vision only in that it requires the existence of a passionately engaged civil society. Such direct democracy has been deployed by the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War; by the Zapatistas, who withdrew from the Mexican government in 1994 and have governed themselves ever since in the state of Chiapas; by traditional peasant cultures, such as the Regantes of Bolivia; and by much of the direct-action movement against corporate globalization at least since the Seattle World Trade Organization shutdown in 1999. I bring up Morris’s vision not to argue that Iceland—or, for that matter, the United States—is ready to become a direct democracy but only to remind us that, as the chant goes, this is what democracy looks like. The sign at a Zapatista village I visited late last year declares, “Here the people govern and the government obeys.” In Iceland, as in most representative democracies, neither claim is true, at least most of the time.
Like Ólafur Grímsson before him, Svanur Kristjánsson is a political science professor at the University of Iceland. Whereas Grímsson’s focus was on theories of power, however, Kristjánsson has specialized in the theory of democracy, which means that he notices the practice is not ideal in most places, including his own country. Kristjánsson is rumpled and fair-haired, with sad eyes and English polished at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in the 1970s. When I met him at his book-filled office in an ugly modern campus building, he told me that being small hadn’t done much for Iceland. Indeed, he noted as much in a 2004 paper in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies:
The positive aspects of the Icelandic political tradition still reflect the assumption, often unspoken, that democracy means citizen control. In the republic of Iceland, tradition has it that the people alone should hold sovereign power. This golden past stands in sharp contrast to the present state of affairs, which can best be described as muddling through in the search for democracy. . . . The Icelandic system of governance has become a rather messy and complicated political arrangement, resembling the situation in other modern democracies.
I asked him what had happened. “You can run into your prime minister at the store,” he said. “You know the minister, the president—you can make an appointment with the president.” But at the same time, there is “an incredible lack of civic courage” within the governing class, “a lack of people standing up and telling the truth,” and this vacuum was quickly filled by action from others—from aluminum companies, from international investors, from Iceland’s new class of the super-rich. Which is to say that representative democracy fails wherever its citizens let it fail, even on a charming island with a thousand-year democrati
c tradition.
Kristjánsson gave two cases in point. The first took place a quarter century ago, when the government devised a fishing-quota system, ostensibly to protect Icelandic waters from overfishing. This seemed like a good idea—the fish stock really was being depleted—but the government had also come under the sway of fashionable ideas about privatization. Owners of fishing vessels were given quotas based on their current catch, but those quotas could be sold and compounded, and so the big trawlers soon began to amass permits, and the small fishermen began to go extinct. The fish, Iceland’s patrimony and its richest asset for centuries, became private property, and the villages themselves faced extinction. Now dozens of boats sit ashore in old fishing towns like Stykkishólmur, the rows of permits in their windows not renewed since the 1990s. “Those who owned the quota, they sold it and then they moved away,” Kristjánsson said, his voice catching at the memory. His father was a fisherman too, he said, and he saw that sell-off as a betrayal.
Then Kristjánsson told me about an older, less acquiescent approach to dealing with change. In 1970, the government decided to dam the Laxá River. “It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world,” he said, alight again with the passion many Icelanders have for their countryside. Farmers in the valley behind the dam, threatened with the loss of their land and their livelihood, tried every legal means to stop construction, with no success, and so they decided to take another, more direct approach. On the appointed night, more than two hundred citizens gathered at the construction site. Some of them manned tractors to dig a hole in the earthen dam, others placed dynamite in that hole, and a third group set off the dynamite. “The people went there and they blew it up,” Kristjánsson said. “They blew it up.”
When I later read about the incident, I saw that the outcome was even more surprising. “It is evident from the documents from the hearings that everyone was proud of his act,” reports Haraldur Olafsson in a 1981 article in Environmental Review, “and through interviews and other sources I find that many more than were prosecuted would have liked to have been in the group that was judged.” Only sixty-five were convicted and fined, and the Supreme Court ultimately overturned even the fine itself. One of the participants remarked to another reporter, “We ought to earn the Nobel Peace Prize, since we actually used Nobel’s invention to re-establish peace between man and nature.”
Listening to Icelanders, I felt like I was hearing a fairy tale told backward, a tale in which they had been dispossessed of their great gifts and birthrights. First the right to fish was privatized, the fish were made into an alienable commodity, and the small coastal villages began to wither. Then, in 1998, the medical data and extraordinarily extensive genealogical records of everyone in the country were—famously, absurdly—sold to a private corporation, which retained the exclusive right to benefit from discoveries made from studying this homogeneous population’s most intimate genetic secrets. Simultaneously, the wilderness, or at least a major chunk of it, was sacrificed to produce cheap power for Alcoa’s smelter, and the other rivers were offered up soon thereafter. It was a tragedy of privatization and of acquiescence.
Icelanders are aware of the problem and yet seem unable to fix it. In Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation, Iceland’s best-selling book in 2006, Andri Snær Magnason writes, “It is not overstating the case to say that Iceland’s greatest natural treasures have been on clearance sale for the last thirty years, without the nation ever having had it explained to them what was on sale.” This sentence, with the people it mentions sounding so strangely passive, could be rewritten to say that Icelanders had not demanded explanation with sufficient force. Iceland had been, Magnason remarked to me in an anarchist-collective café in downtown Reykjavík, living in “an end-of-history era” until the dam and smelter plans shattered the contentment. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, Björk was becoming Iceland’s first major celebrity export, everyone was planting trees, the fisheries seemed well-managed, and the country had the world’s first democratically elected female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. But this paradisiacal state didn’t last. Iceland’s deep attachment to place is clashing with its fantasies about becoming rich, and fighting back is not easy for everyone to do. Magnason joked, “We talk about our Viking heritage, but we always skip the fact that 50 percent of the settlers were slaves. We talk about our businessmen and their Viking mentality, but we also have a slave mentality.”
The day that Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson gained his fourth term as president of Iceland, the sun rose over Reykjavík as it usually does on June 28, less than three hours after the official sunset at midnight and after another night without real darkness. There had been no media circus, no polls, no fund-raising, no competing claims, no placards, no debates, no scandals, and, of course, no campaign and no election. No one had bothered to run in token opposition, even as a single-issue nut.
There was no election, but there was, coincidentally, a free public concert featuring Björk and Iceland’s new international superstars, Sigur Rós, the stated purpose of which was to “raise awareness for environmental issues in Iceland.” I had hoped that the “eco-concert,” as its organizers had called it, might engender some sort of upsurge of passion and engagement, a sort of latter-day Althing, or at least launch grassroots dissident activity with consequences. And, in fact, nearly 30,000 people—about a tenth of the population of Iceland—gathered in a Reykjavík park on a golden summer evening when the temperature was in the mid-forties. The music, particularly Sigur Rós’s majestic, fey meandering, was spectacular. Images of those distressed birds on nests lapped by floodwater were projected on the giant video screen, but no one said anything about the environment until the very end, when Björk, after shouting out her anthem, “Declare Independence,” chanted, “Náttúra, náttúra, náttúra, náttúra!” (Nature, nature, nature, nature!) And that was that. The next morning I ran into Magnason, who had helped organize the event, and asked him why at a concert for the environment no one had said anything about the environment, or politics, or democracy, or dams, or actions people could take to make a difference. “They didn’t want to preach,” he said firmly, as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world.
2008
THE VOLCANO ERUPTS
Iceland in Upheaval
In December, reports surfaced that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pushed his Wall Street bailout package by suggesting that, without it, civil unrest in the United States might grow so dangerous that martial law would have to be declared. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned of the same risk of riots, wherever the global economy was hurting. What really worried them wasn’t, I suspect, the possibility of a lot of people thronging the streets with demands for social and political change, but that some of those demands might actually be achieved. Take the example of Iceland, the first—but surely not the last—country to go bankrupt in the current global crash.
While the United States was inaugurating its first African-American president, Icelanders were besieging their parliament. The YouTube video of the scene—drummers pounding out a tribal beat, the flare and boom of teargas canisters, scores of helmeted police behind transparent plastic shields, a bonfire in front of the stone building that resembles a country house more than a seat of government—was dramatic, particularly the figures silhouetted against a blaze whose hot light flickered on the gray walls during much of the eighteen-hour-long midwinter night. People beat pots and pans in what was dubbed the Saucepan Revolution. Five days later, the government, dominated by the neoliberal Independent Party, collapsed, as many Icelanders had hoped and demanded it would since the country’s economy suddenly melted down in October.
The interim government, built from a coalition of the Left-Green Party and the Social Democrats, is at least as different from the old one as the Obama administration is from the Bush administration. The latest prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, broke new ground in t
he midst of the crisis: she is now the world’s first out lesbian head of state. In power only until elections on April 25, 2009, this caretaker government takes on the formidable task of stabilizing and steering a country that has the dubious honor of being the first to drop in the current global meltdown. (In fact, Sigurðardóttir and her party were in power until May of 2013.) Last week, Sigurðardóttir said that the new government would try to change the constitution to “enshrine national ownership of the country’s natural resources” and to “open a new chapter in public participation in shaping the structure of government,” a 180-degree turn from the neoliberal policies of Iceland’s fallen masters.
Iceland is now a country whose currency, the króna, has collapsed, whose debt incurred by banks deregulated in the mid-1990s is ten times larger than the country’s gross domestic product, and whose people have lost most of their savings and face debts and mortgages that can’t be paid off. Meanwhile, inflation and unemployment are skyrocketing, and potential solutions to the crisis only pose new problems.
The present government may differ from the old, but not as much as the Icelandic people differ from their pre-October selves. They are now furious and engaged, where they were once acquiescent and uninvolved.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Page 20