The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (26 page)

Grímsson himself is an imposing man, exceedingly proper and courteous. He speaks formal English in full paragraphs. When I said to a friend of his that he seemed a bit wooden, she laughed at my caution and said, “He’s wooden all the way through!”

At sixty-five, Grímsson is a year older than his republic (until World War II, Iceland was a possession of Denmark), and his hair is brushed over in an orderly white-blond wave. He grew up in a fishing village on the wild and remote Westfjords peninsula, received a Ph.D. in political science in England, from the University of Manchester, and taught for several years at the University of Iceland before venturing into politics. When we met, he was wearing huge cuff links and a tie patterned with tiny feathers, and he showed me to a small study. The president sat in a high-backed armchair, upholstered in worn tapestry. I sat in an armless version, and for the next ninety minutes we spoke at cross purposes.

“I think the twenty-first century will be a fascinating period,” he said, a period in which we will “see the relevance as well as the renaissance of small states.” But the vision he described as we ate our catfish and salmon seemed decidedly mainstream, even American. He celebrates small states mostly for how they function economically and in the international society of states. Small states move in a more flexible way, he said, which makes it easier for them to solve problems. He gave me an example. He had just come from the tiny, oil-rich nation of Qatar, whose government had hosted a conference, involving diplomats from such similarly tiny neighbors as the United Arab Emirates, that had put a temporary stop to the escalating violence in Lebanon. “They said to me very openly, ‘The reason why we could do it is that we were small Arab countries, we were friends with everybody—we didn’t have any vested interest, we didn’t have any ulterior motives, we did not have any long-term military strategy—so we could talk to everybody on a faithful basis.’” Of course, Qatar is ruled by a hereditary emir. Small may give leaders the flexibility they need to make deals, but it is not necessarily democratic.

Such contradictions left Grímsson unfazed. He began his first presidential campaign, he said, by traveling to every town and village in Iceland,
“except two or three very small and remote ones,” to meet with the electorate, and this journey had more profoundly informed his thinking on participatory democracy than even his years as a professor of political science. “Constitutions and formal democratic rules—of course they are necessary and they are essential,” he continued, “but the great force of democracy, especially in modern times, is what we have called the will of the people.” This will, he said, was not always expressed through such traditional means as voting. “There are strong democratic pressures almost in the air without them necessarily having to be organized in a systematic way.”

Indeed, Grímsson may well be a principal beneficiary of the unsystematic way. He stood unopposed in the upcoming election—Icelanders, as one small-town librarian told me disapprovingly, have come to believe that it is “impolite” to run against a sitting president, and it has become customary to let them stay in office as long as they like. And so while Americans were absorbed in another electoral horse race, Iceland had no race at all.

The exquisite rhubarb crisp that ended my meal at Bessastaðir reminded the president of boyhood days helping his grandmother put up jars of rhubarb preserves. Nearly every autumn saw a flurry of activity to dry enough fish and salt enough lamb to avoid starvation during the dark and isolated winter, he said, and people who come here now, “who see this ultramodern society,” fail to understand that it has been only a very short time since Iceland was a poor country, “almost a developing country.”

Iceland is marked, maybe even scarred, by several hundred years of such poverty. It began to lessen only after 1902, when Iceland got its first motorized boats, bringing a wave of modest prosperity to the country’s fishermen, who still produce more than half of its exports. World War II brought the next and larger wave: as the Nazis occupied Denmark, Iceland fell under the protection of Allied troops, thereby allowing the nation to liberate itself from centuries of colonial rule and become an independent republic, although the American military continued to maintain a base there from which to monitor the Soviet Union. In 2006, the United States discovered that it had other priorities, recalled its fighter jets and military personnel, and closed the base.

Long before the U.S. military presence ended, the ruling Independence Party began to cast around for something new to pump up Iceland’s economy. The nation had for decades harnessed the turbulent landscape to produce “clean” energy, though geothermal power and hydropower are not quite as green as we would like to think. They take a toll in the form of toxic emissions and the destruction of wild places, though most of Iceland’s postwar energy developments were small in scale and impact. In the mid-1990s, however, the government decided to offer up Iceland’s vast natural resources to energy-intensive industries such as aluminum production, which also generates significant pollution, in a scheme that involved damming virtually every major river in the country. This willingness to sacrifice Iceland’s wilderness to foreign corporations reflected Iceland’s image of itself as a new player on the world stage, as “modern” (even if giant dams are rather old-fashioned icons of progress) and “high-tech” (even though it still exports more fish than aluminum). One popular claim was that Iceland would become “the Kuwait of the north.”

Many Icelanders have been troubled by the decision to sell off the landscape. The signature such debate took place over the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project, which involved building several dams along two major glacial rivers, a series of deep tunnels to carry water to hydropower stations, and a new electrical infrastructure to connect those stations to a coastal smelter. The measure became increasingly unpopular as Icelanders got to know something about the massive amount of remote wilderness that would be—and now has been—drowned; about the reindeer that calved there and the pink-footed geese that nested there; about the serious pollution the hydropower smelters would emit, even if the electricity itself was emissions-free; and about the scandalous economics of the deal, whereby the citizens would pay billions for the infrastructure and the U.S.-based aluminum manufacturer Alcoa, which would most benefit from Iceland’s increased smelting capacity, would provide only a few hundred jobs to locals in return. In a country the size of Iceland, a few hundred jobs outside the capital count, and there has been a ripple effect on the declining eastern economy and population—but at a cost many think is too high.

To hear ordinary citizens speak about the dams, you’d think they lived
under a vast tyranny; they speak of powerlessness, secrecy, intimidation, and loss. And yet little in the way of actual political protest has emerged. Icelandic presidents are barred from party membership, but before he took office, Grímsson was a member of the Peoples’ Alliance Party, which in 2000 joined Iceland’s three other center-left parties to become the Social Democratic Alliance. The hope was that the coalition could gather enough seats in parliament to defeat the ruling Independence Party, whose website announces its principles as “the freedom to work and freedom of the individual, abolition of any kind of restraints,” and “a dynamic and open economy.” Despite offering a fairly tepid version of Clintonian moderation, the Peoples’ Alliance effort thus far has not succeeded. Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, a member of parliament who co-directs the Left Green Party—founded in 1999, in part to oppose the dam projects—suggested that this conservative streak was just a part of the national character. “It is difficult to get people to join political parties. It is difficult to get people to join the associations and ad hoc groups that are working on these issues,” she said. “We would be much stronger if we had more people. But they are not willing to come.”

There have been few petition drives and no national referendums on the dams. Indeed, the only concerted campaign has come from a small organization named Saving Iceland, which is run, according to its website, not by Icelanders but by “a network of people of different nationalities.” The most dogged and potent local opposition has come from artists, who began protesting outside the parliament building almost as soon as the proposals were aired. For a 2003 TV documentary about a site soon to be submerged by a dam, the photographer-naturalist Guðmundur Páll Ólafsson tore out the pages of his book on the region to demonstrate what was being done to the landscape itself. At an exhibition in downtown Reykjavík this summer, the artist Rúrí mounted a video installation, called
Flooding/Nature Lost,
that featured footage of geese and other birds sitting on their eggs until the rising waters of Kárahnjúkar’s reservoir dissolved the nests and washed away the eggs. The birds walked away, puzzled and pathetic. Rúrí, a kind, spiky-haired woman in her fifties, has devoted much of the past decade to creating a mournful video catalogue of Icelandic waterfalls, particularly those already or potentially lost. Of the dam projects, she said, “This is sad
and ridiculous in a democratic society, especially one that claims to be the oldest in the world.”

Iceland’s national parliament, or Althing—the word for “assembly” being, in Icelandic,
thing
—was formed in 930 AD, about sixty years after the first settlers came over from Norway. They met at a site whose name, Thingvellir, “the plain of the
thing,”
still commemorates this ancient annual gathering, which was a combined parliamentary session, court review, and country fair. I visited it on a pleasant May day when a down jacket and lined gloves were the right attire, and wild ducks and geese called overhead. I was driving in my rented car across a high plain strewn with volcanic debris—big, twisting, dark boulders upholstered in pale, thick moss that disguised jagged edges and crevices—when suddenly half the landscape dropped away and I began a descent into the wide valley created by the meeting of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. A long ledge of dark gray stone eighty or a hundred feet high ran along the far end, and the Axe River dropped off this ledge (in a foaming waterfall that in another country might itself be a big tourist attraction) and into the grassy valley below, where other streams braided together to create a web of estuaries and tiny islands. On the far side of this riparian oasis was a series of long stony fissures, from a few feet to perhaps twenty feet wide, filled with astonishingly clear deep-blue water, a canyonland in miniature with its own flora of mosses, grasses, and stunted trees. The Thingvellir region, like much of Iceland, is as lush as Ireland and as harshly grand as Utah.

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.