Iceland’s EU referendum

Voters in Iceland have rejected a proposal to reopen EU accession negotiations. Simona Guerra argues the result was not so much a rejection of Europe as a refusal to find out what potential EU membership would involve. On 29 August, with a high turnout (82.5%), 52.8% of Icelanders voted against reopening EU accession negotiations. The result will be widely read as a rejection of Europe, with a narrow majority declining to reopen the accession negotiations the country froze in 2013. Brussels, which had quietly hoped for a rare and quick enlargement success, will register a setback. Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir, who bet political capital on a “now or never” vote and warned that a “No” would put the European question “aside” for years, has lost the gamble. Yet, the rejection may be read in a different way. Icelanders were not asked whether to join the EU. They were asked whether the government should restart talks, a consultative first step, with any eventual accession treaty promised a second, separate referendum, perhaps as early as 2028. A “No” was not a verdict on membership, but a refusal to even find out what membership would involve. That distinction is the key to why the result was more likely than the tight polls implied, and it is where Iceland becomes a telling case for how we study public opinion on the EU. Most referendums on the EU ask citizens to evaluate something they already live inside. Icelanders were in the odd position of being asked to evaluate a relationship they have never had. Through the European Economic Area, in force since 1994, and Schengen, since 2001, Iceland already sits inside most of the single market and implements a large share of EU law, but without having a seat at the table where that law is made. It is, in the phrase long used in the Icelandic and Norwegian debate, “rule-taking without rule-making”: all of the rules, none of the votes. Voting in the dark In my research on attitudes towards the EU in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe, I found what I termed “unconditional support” among those countries that expected to join the EU in 2004. In most of these countries, high expectations, what was named the “civilisational choice” and the relative poverty of the past led to high levels of support for the EU in accession referendums. Yet this support was “unconditional” because there was simultaneously a widespread lack of knowledge about what EU membership actually meant. Any attempt to measure the costs and benefits always leaned toward the potential benefits. Icelandic voters were similarly in the dark. Life under the EEA is a poor teacher of what full membership would entail because the very things membership would alter, such as EU voting rights and concessions in the domains Iceland has always protected – above all fisheries – are those issues that Icelanders have never experienced. Refusing to find out In a contest between curiosity and caution, caution has fundamental advantages. The choice between an unknown future, with an attached cost, and a positive “now” shifts the final choice towards the status quo. This is why uncertainty in referendums frequently translates into a “No” vote, with the “No” side representing the easiest choice of refusing to find out what might not be worth the trouble. This dynamic is not unique to Iceland, but it is unusually strong there. Citizens do not judge the EU in the abstract. They judge it against the national alternative, a logic I explored in my earlier work on Central and Eastern European candidates. The EU can look attractive when the national alternative is perceived as inadequate or institutions are not performing well. Iceland already enjoys single-market access, while keeping its own currency. Its non-membership and independent króna helped the country recover from the 2008 financial crisis faster than several eurozone members. The status quo proved robust, when the case for membership needed it to look inadequate. This added to voters’ concerns about fisheries and agriculture, with the referendum campaign framed in terms of possible future costs. Institutional trust and security Since Baldur Thorhallsson’s work two decades ago, Iceland has been understood as the European country where the political establishment has been more sceptical than the public. The barrier to membership has never been a Eurosceptic electorate, but a cross-partisan elite consensus, anchored in the fishing and farming sectors and running from the Independence Party through the hard Euroscepticism of the Centre Party, declining to advance a project for which there was often some dormant public appetite. Eiríkur Bergmann traces this to a deep national ideology of sovereignty and resource control rather than the migration and identity anxieties driving Euroscepticism. Helga Hallgrímsdóttir and colleagues show that even the post-2008 pro-EU surge came from below, from protest, and was closed down by an elite reassertion of sovereignty. The analysis using the European Social Survey demonstrates how little the mass public fits the sovereigntist frame that dominates elite and media debate. Individual-level trust in the European Parliament is linked to trust in national institutions, and Icelanders who trust their own parliament also trust the European Parliament, with the EU perceived as familiar and not as “the other”. Trust in the European Parliament has, in some years, matched or exceeded trust in the national parliament. National attachment and left/right placement barely structure EU attitudes at all. Generalised institutional trust is the most significant driver of attitudes towards the EU. This means that the marginal victory of the “No” side depended on the perception that the ratio between costs and benefits shifted more towards the costs than the benefits. The “Yes” side won in Reykjavík (56%), but there was significant opposition in the Northwest (62.9%) and Northeast (61.2%), where concerns were high about the possible future costs of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy and Common Agricultural Policy. The capital, which would be less affected by these costs, saw the ratio differently. None of this made the “No” vote inevitable and the tightness of the result shows why. What revived the European question in the first place was not only the economy but also security. Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland and Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine heightened anxiety over the Arctic and the GIUK (Greenland-Iceland-UK) gap. Growing concerns about American reliability reframed the EU as a shelter for a segment of Icelanders, away from the previous economic dimension. That is a real shift, and it is why the polls narrowed to a close contest. While the economic panic of 2009 produced a spike in support for EU membership, this decreased as soon as the national alternative proved robust and the negotiations touched upon the fishery chapter. The sharpest question about 2026 was never whether support had risen, but whether security could do what the economy could not. The narrow “No” vote suggests, once again, that the surge was real but not decisive, a window that opened, and closed, again. Lessons from Iceland As the EU tries to revive enlargement as a geopolitical project, the temptation will be to read Iceland as proof that even favourable geopolitics cannot overcome national reluctance. That reading is too superficial. Icelanders declined to reopen a process, judged against an unusually comfortable status quo, on a question deliberately built to let them defer the harder choice. The lesson is that closer integration does not follow automatically from a friendlier security environment. For the study of public Euroscepticism, Iceland makes clear that attitudes to the EU cannot be reduced to levels of support and opposition, because those levels presuppose that citizens know, with some adequacy, the thing they are for or against. Iceland was asked to decide about a membership it has never experienced and, offered the chance to find out, narrowly chose not to. Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics. Image credit: FatihYavuz provided by Shutterstock.