Iceland Votes On Closer EU Ties Amid Sovereignty Fears

The Ministry of Fisheries and Rural Harmonisation, in preparing its briefing ahead of the referendum, has done the nation the courtesy of taking seriously what its own government has so far only hinted at. If Iceland is to take a step closer to Brussels as a hedge against the present geopolitical weather, then the logic of the step is plain enough to finish walking. A step is not a destination one can retract by degrees; it is a commitment to arrive. The Ministry therefore proposes, in the interest of administrative honesty, that the fishing quotas and farming subsidies at issue be transferred to Brussels management in full and at once, sparing everyone the referendum’s pretence of partial sovereignty, which is rather like being partly married.

The Icelandic farmer, whose sheep have grazed volcanic ash for centuries without once consulting a common agricultural policy, presents the harder case. Under harmonised quota, his herd will not survive contact with continental competition; this is not disputed even by the referendum’s proponents, who speak of “adjustment” the way a surgeon speaks of “recovery.” The Ministry’s innovation is to recognise that the farmer need not vanish along with his livelihood. He may instead be repurposed. Where sheep-farming ceases to be viable, the farmer himself becomes viable as an exhibit - a living demonstration of pre-accession rural life, subsidised not as agriculture but as heritage tourism, his lambing season restaged annually for coach parties from Frankfurt who will pay handsomely to watch a sovereignty that no longer exists being performed with total conviction. Brussels, ever alert to cultural preservation, will find this considerably cheaper than actual agricultural support, and considerably more photogenic.

The fishing grounds present a cleaner case still, since a quota administered from a distance is, after all, simply a quota administered, and the distance is the only variable the referendum proposes to change. One is not asking Iceland to surrender its cod; one is merely asking it to accept that the cod’s management will henceforth be conducted by people who have never seen the cod, which the Ministry notes is already the case for most domestic policy conducted by people who have never seen a fishing boat.

There remains the matter of the geopolitical threat that occasioned this referendum in the first place - the vague continental unease that a small North Atlantic nation, all volcano and no army, finds it prudent to shelter under someone else’s roof. Here the Ministry’s proposal reaches its natural conclusion: if security is to be purchased with the coin of farming and fishing autonomy, then the transaction should simply be made explicit, priced, and formalised, rather than conducted through the slow attrition of quota by quota, step by step, referendum by referendum, until the farmer discovers his sheep are gone and the fisherman discovers his grounds belong to a committee, and both discover that the threat they were sheltering from has been replaced by the shelter itself.

The volcano, at least, will remain entirely Icelandic, there being as yet no directive covering geological features, though the Ministry does not rule one out.