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The fol­low­ing is inspired by my vis­it to Ice­land, but will draw on oth­er expe­ri­ences as well. I still have a bot­tle of Ice­landic Schnapps (“with the good­ness of lichen”), which nobody else I know here in Toron­to is will­ing to drink. I will take a small nip of it every time I fin­ish a paragraph.

I vis­it­ed Ice­land because I had long been fas­ci­nat­ed by its pecu­liar his­to­ry. Its medieval sta­tus as a non-aris­to­crat­ic repub­lic, with unique elec­toral and judi­cial fea­tures, far dif­fer­ent from the urban republics of Italy, com­mends it to any his­to­ri­an of democ­ra­cy. Var­i­ous fea­tures of mod­ern Ice­land are equal­ly inter­est­ing. Con­se­quent­ly, I had been read­ing about Ice­landic his­to­ry and cul­ture for decades before I set foot in the place. One of the rea­sons I was attract­ed to study­ing the his­to­ry and soci­ety of Ice­land was its les­son that a coun­try with a pop­u­la­tion as small as 300,000, blessed with few nat­ur­al resources or strate­gic advan­tages, can pro­vide its cit­i­zens with pret­ty much any­thing they would need in the mod­ern world. While it can­not offer its cit­i­zens air­craft car­ri­ers or lin­ear accel­er­a­tors, it can eas­i­ly pro­vide most of the things that peo­ple in this cen­tu­ry con­sid­er nec­es­sary for a good life. Most of these bless­ings are patent­ly trace­able to its com­mit­ment to, and expe­ri­ence with, effec­tive demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. This les­son is a very impor­tant one for peo­ple in small nations, espe­cial­ly post-colo­nial ones, who yearn for both eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment and the estab­lish­ment of sol­id demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. Ice­land spent many cen­turies as a colony, and many cen­turies in pover­ty. It’s com­plete inde­pen­dence arrived only in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. It’s achieve­ments since then have, on the whole, been very impres­sive. Read more »