On: Sovereignty, farming and fishing: Iceland votes on its future with the EU

Reykjavík votes today, and the ballot paper asks about Brussels. The ballot paper is lying. The question actually before the electorate is whether a nation of four hundred thousand souls wishes to manage its affairs within arm’s reach of a power that has lately taken to threatening its neighbours over territory it does not own. Fear of Washington has accomplished what decades of commissioners’ prose could not: it has made the common market sound like shelter rather than surrender.

The fishermen are right to be suspicious. Theirs is a genuine economic interest dressed up, by its opponents, as mere sentiment. Brussels would ration the fish, and the ration would be fixed in a room they do not enter. One may favour the union in general and still notice that the general argument is paid for, in the particular, by a specific and identifiable set of men. The farmer who has lately found his vocation bearable - decent prices, debt no longer an occupational prerequisite - is invited to exchange that for a guaranteed price set by a foreign committee. A guaranteed price is a real thing. So is the committee.

Yet the sovereignty of small nations deserves a colder eye than it receives. Monetary independence for Iceland is the freedom to be ruined alone; the krona demonstrated as much in 2008, behaving less like a currency than a lottery ticket. Political independence, in a world where great powers treat neighbouring territories as inventory, is a similar asset: real on paper, negotiable under duress.

Both campaigns conceal their interests behind economic language. The “yes” side calls membership inevitable; the “no” side calls departure costless. Neither necessity exists. There are only choices, and the people who have already made them. Capital, which votes in every referendum whether or not it holds a passport, began pricing the outcome before the question was printed.