Iceland Votes On Closer EU Ties Amid Sovereignty Fears

This is what democratic societies do to themselves when a question of sovereignty is handed to the same instrument that flattens every other question: the referendum, that device by which a nation persuades itself that a single afternoon of ballots has settled what generations must actually live out. Iceland proposes to ask its citizens whether to draw nearer to the European Union, and the farmers of that island, a class small in number but ancient in habit, find themselves weighed in the same scale as abstractions like “the economy” and “the future,” as though a fishing quota and a moral inheritance could be reduced to the same arithmetic.

The Icelandic farmer, standing before his flock in a valley his family has worked since before there was a Reykjavik worth naming, is asked to render a verdict on tariff schedules and fisheries directives framed in Brussels. He does not experience this as participation; he experiences it as exposure. The distance between the vote he casts and the regulation he will eventually obey is so great that his voice, though counted, scarcely feels his own.

This is the paradox of the plebiscite in small nations facing large unions: the vote appears to be the ultimate exercise of self-government, yet it often marks the last moment at which self-government is exercised directly, before the daily business of governing passes into the hands of a bureaucracy several capitals away, answerable to no assembly the farmer will ever address. The referendum flatters the citizen’s sovereignty at the very instant it prepares to transfer it.

What strikes me most is that the stakes are framed as security against geopolitical threat - a reasonable motive, for a nation of some three hundred thousand souls cannot easily stand alone against larger powers stirring in the North Atlantic. But observe the mechanism: fear of the outside world is answered by dissolving the very local institutions, the fishing cooperatives, the agricultural guilds, that have historically taught Icelanders to govern themselves in miniature before governing themselves at large. Trade the small association for the large union, and one gains protection while losing practice.

The farmer’s sheep still graze the same slopes regardless of which flag flies over the customs house. But the habits of self-rule, once surrendered to a distant and orderly administration, are not so easily called back to the valley.