The Stockholm Network

I got a call yesterday from Tim Evans of CNE saying that the Libertarian Alliance is now listed at the Stockholm Network website. For a brief few hours yesterday afternoon, if the LA’s hit counter is to be believed, the LA was getting more hits than Samizdata. So this is a plug for the Stockholm Network website. Thank you guys. If you want to learn about all those Free Market Institutes which now abound throughout Europe, this is the cyberplace to go.

Founded in 1997 in London and Stockholm, the Stockholm Network is a dynamic working group of European market-oriented think-tanks. We have two primary objectives: to build a wide network of pro-market policy specialists within Europe and to use that network to influence the future direction of European policy-making on issues of pan-European importance.

And that’s what they are doing. The blogs are a very different proposition from operations like the Stockholm Network. People don’t read the blogs to learn about Institutes, and to be steered towards amazingly long publications only in Acrobat format about European Fish Stocks – The Way Forward. They read blogs for fun, for daily ego massage and navel tickling. Nevertheless, if you want to spread ideas among the suit-wearing, fun-avoiding, core value adhearing, mission statement stating, movers, shakers, policy makers and action planners, this is all part of how you do it. You create virtual shopping malls of ideas and idea-mongers like this one, and help people to find whatever they want. I believe I’m right in saying that the Stockholm network is an operational offshoot of Timbro, and I particularly recommend that you take a look at the Timbro publications page.

Timbro releases about 25-30 different publications every year. More and more of our publications are being translated into other languages and made available also to an international audience.

The libertarian movement has been building and building throughout Europe during the last few decades, and it has received a massive boost from the internet, in other words from websites like that of the Stockhom Network. And remember, if you are a libertarian in Europe, you are swimming against the statist tide, and you have to be good and to think it through. In France in particular, there are hundreds of excellent libertarians. They’re not yet very good at coordinating their actions at the policy and publicity level, but they can already think up a storm. In Spain, thanks to its anarchist past, there are now lots of anarcho-capitalists.

I’m still sorting out in my mind the difference between blog readers and the sort of readers who are most influenced by operations like the Stockholm Network (and for that matter by the Libertarian Alliance). It’s something to do with the fact that the most important SN-ers (and LA-ers) are people who are finding out about all these ideas for the first time, and have the time to plunge into them in serious depth. Basically students. They want above all to learn. What’s the libertarian line on the environment? What do you do about defence? How are the very, very poor to be looked after if there’s no welfare state? How to get there from here? What is the role of political parties? Should there be state education? If not, what are the alternatives? What about US foreign policy “in the meantime”, or for that matter Norwegian or Belgian or Spanish or (now) EU foreign policy in the meantime? What do you do about fish stocks? What is the correct philosophical foundation of libertarianism?

Entertaining chitchat about, I don’t know, dog-training … frankly, that kind of stuff can wait.

People in this state of mind are probably not as numerous as the ones who merely want to be stimulated, informed, entertained and spared the cost of a daily newspaper. But these free market fundamentalists are what the future is made of.

And the other target group – see above – is journalists and policy makers, who likewise don’t care about dog-training, unless that happens to be the story they’re researching.

I’d have to say that the full diversity of classical liberal and libertarian thinking in Europe is yet to be fully reflected at the Stockholm Network site. But there’s no reason why that can’t change. The point is: links to new and already existing classical liberal and libertarian operations can easily be added in the months and years to come, but that hit surge that the Libertarian Alliance got as soon as it was mentioned, and which every new name added can also expect to get, is already an accomplished fact. People already go to this site in large numbers and follow its lead.

Impressive.