In Burke’s Footsteps

European Diary: Dublin, September 2024

Ireland has a special significance for Icelanders. According to the Icelandic chronicles and sagas, their remote island was settled mainly from western Norway in late ninth century, after Harold Fairhair in 872 established a kingdom in Norway. But these sources also mention some Irish settlers, mostly unwilling ones, captured by Norse Vikings and enslaved. I am myself the 28th generation from an Irish woman by the name of Melkorka (probably Meal Curcaig in Irish). She was captured in Ireland and sold as a slave girl to an Icelandic farmer. She was beautiful but with the one handicap, the slavers told her buyer, that she was a mute. She bore her master a son named Olav, and one day when he was two years old, the farmer was walking by a stream near his house where he came upon Melkorka talking to their son in Irish. Melkorka had to admit to him that her muteness had only been a pretence. She told the farmer that she was the daughter of a petty Irish king, Muirchertach mac Néill of Ailech in north-western Ireland. (The Icelandic version of the king’s name is Kjartan, and the English version is Mortimer.) Later Melkorka’s son Olav paid a visit to his Irish family. It helped that Olav had been taught Irish by his mother. Incidentally, modern genetic research has confirmed that the Icelanders are descended mainly from Norwegian males and partly from Irish females. Anyone who travels between Iceland and Ireland will also notice the clear family resemblance of people from the two nations. They somehow look alike.

Different Paths

In mid-September 2024, when I was in Dublin, I went on a long walking tour of the city, visiting many historic sites in this pleasant, lively city. ‘Paris is cafe culture, Dublin is pub culture, and that’s the best place to solve all the world’s problems: over a pint! One of the great joys of living, I think. The problems of the world seem to disappear,’ Irish actor Liam Cunningham (who lives in Dublin) once exclaimed. One would need a lot of pints in Dublin to forget the problems of the past. Both Ireland  and Iceland were eventually overpowered by stronger countries. In 1169, the first English invasion of Ireland took place although initially the invaders only managed to conquer Dublin and a strip of land around it, and a few other towns. A century later, in 1262, the Norwegian king forced the Icelanders to plead allegiance to him and to pay an annual tribute in return for a promise that they would keep their old law and that all officials should be Icelandic. Sadly, the English conquest of Ireland was much more savage. By 1542, after several brutal invasions, the English controlled the whole island. They tried to impose protestantism on the Irish, with scant success, but they deprived Catholics of all political rights.

Iceland, on the other hand, passed from the Norwegian to the Danish crown in 1380, and in 1550 the Icelanders accepted, after some resistance, protestantism. Their island has not the same mild climate as Ireland, and the Icelanders were subject to famines, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and cold spells, which had by the early eighteenth century whittled down the population to around 35,000. But liberal reformers, influenced by Adam Smith, gained power in Denmark by the late eighteenth century, and with increased freedom the Icelandic economy grew slowly but surely in the nineteenth century, and so did the population.

In Ireland, however, disaster struck in 1845 with the terrible potato famine which lasted for seven years. More than one million people starved to death, while two million emigrated to North America. The famine intensified the long-standing and widespread hostility in Ireland to the English who repeatedly refused calls for Irish home rule. By contrast, the Danish administration of Iceland was relatively benign. Home rule was granted in 1904, and after amicable negotiations Iceland in 1918 became a sovereign state in a personal union with the Danish king. Meanwhile, in Ireland the British had mercilessly suppressed a rebellion in 1916, executing sixteen of its leaders. They were however forced to grant independence in 1922, except in Ulster, the nort-eastern corner of Ireland, inhabitated mainly by protestants, and remaining a part of the United Kingdom. In the 1990s, finally being able to turn her back on past tragedies, Ireland became an international financial centre, offering low taxes, access to the European internal market, English as a working language, and a stable legal and political environment. In the 1990s, Iceland also liberalised her economy, enjoying sustainable and profitable fisheries and a rapidly-growing financial sector. In the international liquidity crisis of 2007–9, Ireland managed to rescue her banks, but at an enormous cost, whereas Iceland put her banks into resolution and established new banks on their ruins. Both countries recovered however rather quickly. Today, Ireland and Iceland are among the most prosperous countries of Europe.

Burke’s Conservative Liberalism

During my walk in Dublin, I could not but reflect on my Irish ancestors and the very different paths that the inhabitants of the two islands in the North Atlantic Ocean had trod since the Viking Era, not always of their free will. Although the city was originally a Viking settlement, little remains from that period. I was in Dublin to speak at a New Direction Academy on Edmund Burke and the Nordic liberal tradition, and on my walk in the city centre, I had indeed passed the statue of Burke depicted above, in front of Trinity College. At the New Direction event I recalled the Germanic legal tradition which Roman chronicler Tacitus had already described two millennia ago: the popular assemblies interpreted and revised the ‘good old law’ and restrained the power of chieftains and kings. The contrast between the good old law, developed almost spontaneously in the same way as language, and legislation imposed by kings was vividly described by the thirteenth-century Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson in his history of the Norwegian kings. But the ancient Germanic tradition found its stablest and strongest expression in Great Britain where the practices of limited government, private property, and free trade were articulated by John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, the three founders of classical liberalism. Indeed, Montesquieu held that the individual freedom observed in England and resulting, he thought, from the separation of powers could be traced back to the woods of Scandinavia.

I suggested however that this classical liberalism split when confronted with the French Revolution. Burke saw early on that it was quite different from the British revolution of 1688 and the American revolution of 1776, both of which had been made in order to defend and extend existing liberties. The French Revolution on the other hand was an attempt radically to reconstruct society and it was guided by thinkers with no experience in administering affairs and with no sense of moderation. In his eloquent critique of the revolutionaries on the other side of the Channel, Burke articulated what I have called conservative liberalism. He was later followed by Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville both of whom explaining cogently why the French Revolution was a failure. To the three tenets of classical liberalism—limited government, private property, and free trade—Burke added a fourth one, respect for tradition. In the twentieth century, Friedrich von Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Michael Oakeshott, Luigi Einaudi and many others were to develop further this conservative liberalism. The other branch evolving out of classical liberalism was what I have called social liberalism, emphasising open-mindedness, individual self-realisation and generosity with taxpayers’ money. This is the school of Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, L. T. Hobhouse, Benedetto Croce, John Maynard Keynes, and Bertil Ohlin.

Burke’s Words of Wisdom

Burke was of course a Whig, supporting the 1688 Revolution and famously falling out with his constituents in Bristol over free trade with Ireland which he firmly supported. But I cannot resist here quoting one of Burke’s greatest insights in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, on the limits of individual reason:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

As Lord Hannan of Highclere who shared the platform with me at the New Direction Academy pointed out, Burke used the word ‘prejudice’ not in the modern sense, as unsubstantiated bias, but rather as a rule widely recognised.

Grundtvig the National Liberal

In my talk, I identified a nineteenth-century Nordic thinker who is original, powerful and inspiring, but little known outside Scandinavia, the Danish pastor, poet, and politician Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig. He was both a liberal and a nationalist, but for him the nation had to be developed spontaneously. In a famous poem he exclaimed:

Of a ‘people’ all are members

Who regard themselves as such.

He proposed a simple resolution of the Schleswig dispute between Denmark and the German Confederation. It so happened that the Danish king was also Duke of Schleswig, where the northern half spoke Danish and identified as Danes while the southern half spoke German and identified as Germans. Most Danish nationalists wanted to annex the whole of Schleswig, thus creating a German-speaking discontented minority. All German nationalists wanted also to annex the whole of Schleswig, thus creating a Danish-speaking discontented minority. But Grundtvig suggested a division of Schleswig according to the wishes of the inhabitants, where the Danish-speaking region would become part of Denmark and the German-speaking region would become part of Germany. Nobody listened to him, and in 1864 the German Confederation defeated Denmark in a war about Schleswig and the duchy was subsequently annexed by Prussia. However, after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, in 1920 the Schleswigers were allowed to decide where they wanted to belong. The northernmost region chose to join Denmark, whereas the middle and southernmost regions voted for Germany. The border was accordingly adjusted. Grundtvig’s proposal was belatedly implemented. I mentioned in my talk that perhaps this could also be relevant in Ukraine today: why not let the inhabitants in contested regions vote on whether to belong to Russia or Ukraine?

Grundtvig viewed unlimited democracy with scepticism, recalling the mob rule in Paris during the French Revolution. If the people were to replace the king, they had to be educated so that they would become responsible citizens. Therefore he promoted the people’s high schools which provided education for peasants and others of modest means, not least education in how to become a good Dane, appreciating Denmark’s national heritage, literature, and language. Grundtvig’s influence increased greatly after Denmark’s defeat in the Schleswig war. The Danes tried to gain inside what they had lost outside, reaffirming their national identity and making use of their freedom of association to establish not only private schools as Grundtvig had envisaged, but also independent congregations, local communities, societies, clubs, collectives and other intermediate institutions, Burke’s ‘little platoons’. Civil society flourished in Denmark, and so did capitalism, with many entrepreneurs inspired by Grundtvig’s vigorous defence of economic freedom.

Burke and Grundtvig Still Relevant

It is often discussed why in the nineteenth century economic growth was much slower in Ireland than in Denmark, two suppliers of agricultural products to the large and lucrative British market. In my talk, I suggested three explanations. Two of them were ‘Grundtvigian’: 1) Ireland was not a nation state like Denmark. She was governed from afar, by people with little knowledge or interest in her progress. 2) Social cohesion was much greater in Denmark than in Ireland; thus, gainful social cooperation was easier. The third explanation was, I submitted, that Denmark had undergone successful agricultural reforms in late eighteenth century whereby most peasants had been turned into independent farmers. Thus, the structure of property rights was more efficient in Denmark. But the main upshot of my argument in Dublin was that both Burke and Grundtvig are in different ways highly relevant for our time and age.