Iceland rejects reopening talks on EU entry
ft.com
ft.com
My own yes was because I would have liked to see the strategy and what EU could have on the table. Even if timeconsuming and costly.
And it would have been worth it just to scare the living daylights out of the few mafia families in Iceland that currently hold the fishing quota and treat it as their private playthings.
But I respect the choice of my countrymen and (hope) perhaps in another decade when we are hypothetically rid of Ursula Leyden and possibly Swedens and Denmarks terrifying need to peak into everones private lives, Iceland can look at negotiations again.
Europe (and Iceland) have many, many challenges and we absolutely need something like the EU to effectively tackle them.
The EU has tremendous potential but a lot of it's current focus seems to be misguided at best, downright evil at its worst.
Let's see if it the EU can tackle the energy and immigration crisis (I'm pro immigration but even I have to admit that the current system is deeply flawed and unsustainable), if it does it would win my respect. Bonus points if we do finally get a (real) single (capital) market.
(This was an option for the UK, and is actually pretty much what a lot of the yes campaign was pushing, but is very much not where the UK ended up.)
However their island is somewhat reliant on import (e.g. if you need wood to build something, there is no really useful amount of wood growing there). That means export is really important. And that for many people means fishery.
I could imagine that many young people in Reykjavík have a different experience as many of them can earn a living selling online services internationally.
As a EU citizen I don't see this as a Brexit-like event, it is clear that our Icelandic friends are EU-friendly and aligned with many of our laws and regulations already. The fact that they don't want in does not change that there are existing deep ties to the continent.
If Remain had won 52% to 48%, you can bet that no second confirmatory vote would have been suggested. Can you think of an example where the pro-EU side won but the result was so close that it was felt a a second vote was needed? That is my point.
EU treaties were voted against by referendum in Denmark (1992) and Ireland (2001 and 2008). There were second votes where the treaty was subsequently passed in all three cases.
You can bet that it would have: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/14/dominic-cum...
How many of the elections you're referring to were contested, called illegitimate or had similar tactics used to effectively call for the same thing? Maybe you can show me that there are a bunch of examples without anything like this, but the way this tactic spread throughout the political right all over the globe in the last ~10 years makes the assumption quite reasonable IMO.
The examples I gave in Denmark and Ireland were of real re-runs of ballots organised by the state where the outcome was changed. Beyond the treaties of Nice, Lisbon and Maastricht I could have also mentioned examples in France and the Netherlands where the pro-EU lobby had a second bite of the democratic cherry by being able to make amendments to treaty proposals before organising a second ballot relatively close to the first. This is not something that usually happens after a referendum, which is why people link the EU with “keep voting until you get the right answer”, which I personally think is profoundly anti-democratic.
Either way, of course you won't find counter-examples if you conveniently define things so the requests made by the anti-EU side simply don't count.
The telling sign is that the capital Reykjavík voted in favor of negotiations, but rural areas voted against.
The EU needs to get better at marketing it self.
The main downside and likely what steered the vote to no are conflicts with Iceland's fishing industry x EU regulations and becoming more vulnerable to foreign ownership and fishing rights.
Fishing represents 40% of Iceland's total exports according to Wikipedia.
My guess is most voters in Reykjavik have near zero exposure to fishing as an industry.
Iceland would also benefit from trade deals with non EU countries (currently it is excluded).
It also would have joined the Agricultural policy, which would have meant better access for its farm produce.
Strictly speaking, Iceland could do this unilaterally, anyway; Kosovo and Montenegro have done so, and Denmark and a bunch of African countries peg their currency to the euro.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland :
>Iceland's economy depended heavily on fishing, which still provides ~20% of export earnings and employs 7% of the workforce.[77][152] [...] Iceland's economic dependence on fishing is diminishing, from an export share of 90% in the 1960s to 20% in 2020.[153][152]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iceland :
>[The fishing industry] provides 40% of export income and employs 7.0% of the workforce; therefore, the state of the economy remains sensitive to world prices for fish products.[
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn45vdxyvvlo :
>its fishing and marine industries make up almost 40% of exports.
Note bbc says fishing _and_ _marine_ industries
only god knows what the truth actually is
"Á Ísland að hefja á ný aðildarviðræður við Evrópusambandið?" Já/Nei
A very literal English translation is:
"Should Iceland resume accession negotiations with the European Union?" Yes/No
That is the wording formally approved by the Althing (Parliament) on 28 May 2026 and published by Iceland’s National Electoral Commission.
Seems like Iceland didn't want to even waste the government's time looking into this... I quite like their government treated everyone like adults.
Do you want us to burn a huge amount of time and effort on this. Or would you prefer us to focus on other problems?
It certainly is, but unfortunately not at very many actually positive things.
When it comes to wasting money and being completely ham-fisted with regulation though, I agree with you 100%
Because when it comes to "hey, what if we make the market actually more open, and easier for Spanish companies to sell in Hungary and viceversa?", we get into:
"nope, in Hungary you need to abide to Hungarian laws for shipping. In Hungary you need to abide to Hungarian safety laws. In Hungary you need to register this products with all of this documentation and yada, yada, yada".
You can swap Spain and Hungary with most other countries.
And the same applies at every level. Data and privacy protection? Nope, each country overrides with its own rules.
Sadly, it's very easy for politicians to play the "EU won't tell us how to do X" card, and at the same time "EU don't work!".
Uneducated fools, especially those not involved with scaling across EU, whether with physical goods or services simply don't understand those things.
It's mini-Brexit-like nonsense all of the time.
I see it very vividly as a Polish Italian seeing the same non sense narratives in both countries, while working for a German company that attempts to scale across borders.
By the way:
1. trust in EU is generally higher than distrust.
2. economic growth is lackluster in most of the world. Sadly EU has always been fixated on being an export economy so it now pays especially high both energy prices and better competition. It should've been focused instead of creating a strong internal market instead.
I think vetos accomplish exactly what they need to accomplish: unanimity.
Majority arguments are dangerous if then you start to get different factions and tear the EU from the inside. Veto rules are simple and effective.
What I'd like instead is for a proper reform of what can be delegated (and thus not vetoed at all) and what can.
I think, e.g., there should be a larger push to delegate foreign affairs and military to the supranational entity. And it should be achieved in small but decisive, non vetoable steps.
At best the Yes vote was weakly pro by numbers in the city. Nothing like overwhelming.
Probably, very strong influence of the fishing industry, both from sentiment and as a lobby: the EU would have permitted non IS boats into their economic zone, and there would be concerns in the fisher industry community at large about that economically.
I think the city thing reflects Youth attitudes to pan-europeanism.
Also, "No" just had to say "but our fishing zone" so like "take back control" in Brexit, very simple message. "Yes" had to soft sell positives which were at best nebulous. Unlike brexit I think this has less downsides. The future may change that but for now, I think it won't alter much given that Iceland is already in NATO, already in Schengen, already has security guarantees, has full energy independence. As a complete outsider who has visited recently, I would have loved it to be in the EU but thats an externally driven sentiment view.
Good for them.
Joining the EU, given the very sorry state that institution is currently in would basically be a pair of concrete shoes at the bottom of the river for Iceland.
They have the benefit of seeing the situation in the EU and the direction of travel so it is quite clear that any debates on joining the EU is a debate between continuing as an independent country or being absorbed in a federal EU. A very, very big decision to make.
Joining the EU would be a no-brainer if it didn't micromanage and meddle so much.
There is no way to sugarcoat it. It is no longer the 70s or even 90s when you could claim that this wasn't the situation and aim. So whether people are in favour or opposed to that it has the merit of being clear.
The sovereign remains the same, the people.
There's also the added wrinkle that Iceland already is in the EEA, so already has the primacy of EU law in a lot of areas. How is it more sovereign to have to follow laws you don't get to decide? Your setup is taking away power from the sovereign that is the people. Or are you advocating exiting the EEA as well? You are aware that would be economic suicide?
Iceland is in the EEA (and indeed that's already a loss of sovereignty) not in the EU and a key reason is indeed to maintain sovereignty on key issues and industries (especially fishing, which is excluded from EEA), which they would lose by joining. So again it is very unclear to me what they would gain by joining.
If we read Rousseau's Social Contract, we see that the sovereign is the people, not the executive power at their service.
The people wouldn't stop being the sovereign just because they change the administrative details of executing their sovereign will.
You haven't made a successful case to counter this point, instead you've gone to attacking me personally with loaded language ("clutching at straws") to defend your insularism.
A country, EU member, Euro, Schengen, etc. does not control its foreign trade, has no currency, does not control its monetary policy, does not control its borders (Iceland is a remore island so possibly less of a practical issue and indeed they are in Schengen), does not control its laws. That's the way it is. This includes the people as citizens of that country.
I think you are trying to say that they are still "sovereign" at EU level but obviously that's fallaciously ignoring the whole actual issue of national sovereignty vs. the EU, which isn't just a "change of administrative details", obviously...
Interestingly, with your argument they could equally join the US and as long as they have full voting rights they would still be "sovereign", which I don't think many would agree they would be because the whole point is obviously being sovereign as Iceland and Icelandic, not as citizens of whatever other country.
That's the issue with discussing the EU within Europe at this point, it has become a religion and it is not possible to discuss religion with religious people.
That is not the EU passing bad laws that members are forced to adopt, it's every member state individually deciding that they don't care about microbusinesses that can't even afford the registration fee for their national packaging waste disposal system.
Generally, the EU is a platform for coordination and negotiation between member state governments. So the danger for Icelanders wouldn't be that the Icelandic government is overpowered by the rest of the EU, but that they voluntarily sign up to a deal that benefits some constituencies at the expense of others, and that can't be changed easily anymore because it's now part of an international agreement. That the referendum was rejected is also an indication that Icelanders don't trust their government to negotiate on their behalf.
It is kind of hard to take countries without standing armies talking about sovereignty seriously.
There's no natutal resources, no anything other than fish and 400,000 human population.
Moreover, this whole narrative of defense is so childlish and asinine, generally spread by people of countries that are always on the attacking side like Americans.
It reminds me of the elementary kids in a local school that started to bring knifes to school because others had knifes too.
They got their independence after WW2, they have been either annexed or colonized by other powers since 1262.
It's either join democratically into a slowly federalizing EU or be eaten up by American imperial ambitions at this point - and I have my doubts the latter option will include the same right to self-determination, considering the Puerto Rico precedent.
The Greenland campaign shows these concerns aren't hyperbole - they're just next in line.
But in reality Iceland is no more at risk of invasion now than it was during the Cold War and is doing extremely well on its own so why give up? I must say I don't follow Icelandic politics but from here it is not clear what they would gain by joining the EU, especially considering that fishing is one of their main industries.
Greenland wasn't at risk of invasion either, until the US explicitly started threatening it.
It's not the Russians these places need to worry about. Sovereignty will go away either way. The question is whether democratic rule will stay or not. It would as part of the EU. The US has precedent not granting it.
Your point of view is fundamentally anchored to the world of yesterday, when the global landscape looked significantly different and the US was a guarantor of security to Western states, not a threat model. The world has changed since. Old assumptions no longer apply.
Sadly, the voters have spoken and so they'll have to continue doing what they do now.
Iceland ranks 5th globally in nominal GDP per capita, 1st in Europe for average wage, 1st globally for HDI. I think it is a fair assessment to say that they are doing extremely well..
> either misinformed or disingenuous
That was uncalled for...
Iceland is in the EEA. It already has to comply with pretty much all EU regulations (with some exemptions, such as their fishing thing). It is also a part of Schegen, freedom of movement, etc.
Unlike other countries, it doesn't get to vote on those regulations, so it doesn't even get the veto power.
I honestly think it may make more sense for Iceland to not be a full EU member, the fishing industry may be too important for a fairly small island nation, etc.
But it has nothing to do with the reasons you fantasized about.