It looks as if those folks up in the frozen North are made from sterner stuff than their neighbors to the balmier east in the British Isles.
A little over a quarter million of the tiny island country's voters went to the polls yesterday to decide whether or not they wished to reopen negotiations to join the European Union. It's a pas de deux that has been in progress in some shape or form since the 2009 financial meltdown.
...The country applied to join the EU in 2009 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. A euroskeptic government suspended negotiations in 2013, and the accession process was formally ended in 2015.
It’s already deeply integrated into the European framework, partly through its membership of the European Economic Area, which gives the volcanic island access to the EU’s single market without requiring full membership.
It’s also a member of the Schengen Area, which allows passport-free travel between it and other participating European countries.
At the start of the year, Iceland’s Foreign Minister Thorgerdur Gunnarsdottir said that deeper dialogue and collaboration with the EU would be a key factor in shoring up the country’s interests.
Minister Gunnarsdottir was also doing a bit of fear-mongering, using the 'unsettled state of the world since World War II' to encourage her fellow Icelanders (about 400,000 total) to consider reopening the talks, which would then lead to a referendum to formally approve joining.
Naturally, Trump's on-and-off ambitions with Greenland were used as a wedge, but I've only seen him mentioned once as far as Iceland itself being concerned. That was back in January, when his pick for ambassador to the island, former Mississippi Rep Billy Long, made a stupid joke to his fellow congressmen about the place becoming the '52d state' once he got there.
Of course, the natives were torqued, being already good and primed for a fight with all the Greenland posturing.
Former Rep. Billy Long, who was nominated by President Donald Trump to be ambassador to Iceland, has apologized after privately joking to House lawmakers that the Arctic island would become the "52nd state" with him as its governor.
Long, a Republican who represented Missouri from 2011 to 2023 and served a brief stint as IRS commissioner last year, said he was just joking with his former congressional colleagues.
"There was nothing serious about that, I was with some people, who I hadn’t met for three years, and they were kidding about Jeff Landry being governor of Greenland and they started joking about me and if anyone took offense to it, then I apologize," Long told Arctic Today.
The media did their best in the run-up to the referendum to help frame this vote as another looming rejection of Trump's imperial colonizing ambitions, much as Canada's salty 'elbows up' cry galvanized much of that country into some questionable knee-jerk decisions.
But what happened last night defied the odds-makers.
Icelanders voted to reject resuming talks to join the European Union, as issues such as domestic control over fishing appeared to override geopolitical security concerns.
Broadcaster RUV reported that 52.8% of voters rejected the government’s push to reopen EU membership negotiations, while 47.2% voted in favor.
And for what I think, buried in the different articles dissecting the vote, was for the most important reason of all - independence.
Retaining the 'absolute' freedom to be Iceland.
...But in the end, concern over the potential loss of control over its fishing industry and an erosion of national identity won out over how Iceland might be affected by geopolitical rivalries.
“The ‘No’ side succeeded because it tapped into the most fundamental driver of Icelandic national identity: the demand for absolute self-governance. This is inextricably linked to control over natural resources and fisheries, which forms the very heart of the Icelandic understanding of sovereignty,” said Eiríkur Bergmann, professor of politics at Iceland’s Bifröst University.
This concept of sovereignty has been methodically washed away in every EU member state, and driven nearly all of them to the brink of industrial stagnation and economic malaise, if not outright ruin.
Iceland, on the other hand, still cherishes what is peculiar to its sovereign waters and chooses not to let unelected bureaucrats dictate how those natural national treasures should be shared or administered.
The fish it so prizes. Both the work ethic to harvest and the bounty the seas still provide.
Interestingly enough, the rural areas went 63 percent against reopening negotiations, as did the young voters. Unsurprisingly, the urban vote was for it.
The youngest voters overwhelmingly voted NO - 60-40. Young voters rejected the EU to preserve their future. It was they who swung the referendum as they turned out in huge numbers. Unlike for example in the UK a decade ago where young were pro-EU but did not turn out to vote
— RobtFranklynPerth (@PerthRobt) August 31, 2026
The nays had little faith that the Brussels Borg collective would not eventually force them to hand over control of one of the very things that define their nation. The thought of foreign boats with mandated rights in Icelandic waters was too much.
The mood at the Icelandic ‘no’ camp’s election-night gathering is buoyant. Even before the first results come in, they are already confident of winning the referendum on resuming accession talks with Brussels.
“We’re going to win,” says Salma Björk Önnudóttir, one of the managers of the No campaign. She would ultimately be proven right.
When the first partial results are announced, cheers and chants erupt. The official result — confirmed around 9:30 a.m. local time on Sunday morning — had been in the air for hours.
...In the end, Icelanders’ skepticism about taking even this small step toward the EU proved too strong. “There are simply too many question marks,” says a No voter at the gathering. “I don’t have the trust.” The No camp knew how to speak directly to the long-standing wariness many Icelanders feel toward the EU.
The campaign leaned above all on themes at the core of the country’s national identity. Sovereignty, for one — hard-won over generations, and not to be surrendered in any measure to Brussels. And fisheries, still a mainstay of the Icelandic economy.
The warning that membership would mean losing control over fishing quotas and having to open Icelandic waters to foreign companies was a cornerstone of the No campaign, and one that many voters cited as their reason for rejecting it.
And the Brussels and media campaign to have this successful acquisition reflected as yet another rejection of the American president suffered a fatal blow from what was a fatal flaw to begin with in their calculations - not accounting for national pride.
...In Brussels, the result will land as a disappointment. A move by Iceland toward membership would have sent a signal of European unity to the world — and, amid tensions between the U.S. and Europe and the growing sway of authoritarian powers led by Russia and China, such a signal would have been more than welcome.
A stronger EU presence in the High North would not only have carried real geostrategic value; it might also have injected fresh momentum into the currently sluggish talks with the other candidate countries.
It will remain a might-have-been. In Iceland, the EU question may well be off the table for a generation.
What effect will this assertive 'no' to the blob that is the EU have on those other countries with a toe in the tepid collective water? Would it make any difference to those Labourites pushing to rejoin in the United Kingdom, over the express wishes of British voters to remain a sovereign Britain?
Sliding into communal mediocrity? How dare Iceland reject the prospect!
Be like Iceland. Reject Modernity. Embrace the Volcanic Stone Age 🇮🇸
— Daniel Foubert (@d_foubert) August 31, 2026
While the rest of civilised Europe enjoys the refined continental hobby of funding 40,000 multilingual bureaucrats to debate the standard curvature of a cucumber, Icelanders are stubbornly stuck in the…
Icelanders are stubbornly stuck in the Neolithic era of handling their own business.
Imagine the unmitigated horror.
They have no European Parliament, meaning not a single Icelandic MEP gets to fly back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg once a month like an endangered flock of migratory expense accounts.
Worse still, they have no communal misery. If Iceland wants to make a catastrophically stupid political decision, they have to do it all by themselves on their frozen rock without even the basic luxury of blaming an unelected committee in Belgium.
Who gave these 380,000 cod-obsessed Vikings permission to decide what happens in their own territorial waters anyway? Where is the 600-page annex on mandatory net mesh thread counts translated into 24 official languages?
Absolute anarchists.
Iceland remains tragically condemned to a brutal, primitive existence of dangerously high GDP per capita, an almost sickening lack of crime, and the sheer audacity of powering an entire nation with boiling steam pulled directly out of an angry volcano just because they can.
Their entire macroeconomic model seems to run entirely on wild cod, smelting aluminum, and politely asking an elf for residential zoning permits.
The poor souls don’t even get the modern thrill of receiving a 900-page pan-European directive explaining how to properly tax a hot dog. Instead, they just sit in a geothermal hot tub, chew on a cube of fermented shark just to feel something, and govern their entire society out of what is essentially a glorified coastal coffee shop called Reykjavík.
They apparently haven't realised that sovereign nation-states were supposed to be discontinued after 1999 like dial-up internet and frosted tips.
Reject advanced bureaucratic luxury. Embrace the savage barbarism of deciding things for yourself.
That last line is so beautiful - and has to stick in the unelected Empress of Europe, Ursula Von der Leyen's craw like a chunk of hákarl (lutefisk) with nary a drop of svarti dauði ('black death,' as the national schnapps Brennivín is called) to wash it down.
Disgusting as all that sounds, I am eating it up.
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