On 29 August, Icelanders were asked whether their country should resume accession negotiations with the European Union. By a narrow majority – 52.8% to 47.2% – we said no.
I voted Yes.
Not because I had decided that Iceland should join the European Union, but because I wanted to know what membership would actually entail before deciding whether to support it. Had the eventual terms proved contrary to Iceland’s interests, I might well have voted No.
That distinction lies at the heart of my unease about both the campaign and its outcome.
Iceland applied for EU membership in 2009, in the aftermath of a financial collapse that shook not only the economy but public confidence in the institutions surrounding it. Formal negotiations began in 2010 and were suspended following the change of government in 2013.
For more than a decade, a question of considerable national importance was left unresolved.
What Icelanders were finally asked in 2026 was not whether Iceland should join the EU. We were asked whether to resume negotiations. Any eventual accession agreement would still have had to be put before the Icelandic people.
A Yes vote was not a membership vote. It was a vote to establish what, eventually, we might be asked to join.
Yet as the campaign unfolded, those two propositions became increasingly difficult to distinguish.
A focus on fish – and unknowns
Opposition focused on matters of genuine importance: fisheries, agriculture, natural resources, the currency and, above all, sovereignty. None should be dismissed. For Icelanders, fish are never merely fish. They are livelihoods, regional survival, history and politics. Our twentieth-century struggle for control over Icelandic fishing grounds helped shape a national consciousness in which sovereignty was something hard won.
Political arguments acquire particular force when they attach themselves to collective memory.
There was, however, a peculiar paradox at the centre of this campaign. We were being asked whether to discover the terms of a possible agreement whilst being warned of the consequences of terms that did not yet exist.
Democratic choices, after all, are not made in a vacuum. They are shaped within an information environment in which the power to define the problem – and to decide which risks command public attention – is not evenly distributed.
The language of potential loss is especially potent. Our fish. Our currency. Our sovereignty. Each invokes something familiar, emotionally resonant and apparently under threat. Whatever advantages negotiations might have revealed were inevitably harder to articulate: by definition, they could not be known until negotiations took place.
This is not to suggest that those who voted No were uninformed, or that their concerns lacked legitimacy. Quite the contrary. But democracy is more than the act of casting a ballot. Its quality also rests upon the information environment in which choices are made, transparency about the interests seeking to shape public opinion, and our capacity to distinguish demonstrated consequences from anticipated ones.
Nor does responsibility for that distinction rest solely with opponents of negotiations. If a referendum on whether to negotiate came to be experienced as a referendum on membership itself, the government, the Yes campaign, political parties and the media must also ask how successfully they explained the choice before voters.
If the question experienced by the electorate was not quite the question printed on the ballot paper, that is more than a failure of communication. It is a democratic concern.
The language of sovereignty warrants similar scrutiny.
Already embedded – and understanding sovereignty
Iceland is already deeply embedded in Europe’s economic and political architecture through the European Economic Area and Schengen. We participate extensively in the Single Market and incorporate a substantial body of EU legislation, whilst remaining outside the institutions in which member states formally participate in shaping much of it.
For a nation of fewer than 400,000 people, sovereignty cannot therefore be understood simply as freedom from external constraint. It must also involve the capacity to exercise meaningful influence within systems upon which we already depend.
Nor is sovereignty experienced only between states. It is experienced within them.
The króna occupies a curious place in Iceland’s understanding of itself: both a currency and a symbol of independence. Yet symbols have material consequences. Ten days before Icelanders voted, the Central Bank raised its key interest rate to 8%. For households servicing mortgages, paying rent or simply attempting to plan ahead, monetary sovereignty is rather more than an abstract constitutional virtue.
Its costs are not necessarily distributed evenly. A household whose income, savings and debts are denominated in krónur does not experience monetary independence in quite the same way as an internationally oriented company earning substantial revenues in euros or dollars and equipped to manage currency risk.
When we speak, then, of protecting our currency, the possessive deserves some scrutiny.
So, too, does the phrase national interest. The interests of a major fishing company, a family in a fishing community, a young couple trying to buy their first home and a pensioner on a fixed income may intersect, but they are not interchangeable.
Economic power inevitably enters the picture. The ability to present a particular interest as the national interest does not make the two synonymous.
Small states are understandably preoccupied with power exercised over them from beyond their borders. We might pay rather more attention to the power exercised within them.
None of this demonstrates that the euro would serve Iceland better, or that EU membership would better safeguard our fisheries. It is not intended to.
That is precisely the point.
These are questions to be tested against evidence and actual negotiated terms, rather than settled through assumptions about an agreement that does not yet exist. And we are no longer making that choice in the Europe of 2009.
The Europe of 2026 faces war, geopolitical instability and growing strategic interest in the Arctic and North Atlantic. For small states, international co-operation is not merely an ideological preference; it forms part of the practical architecture of security, economic resilience and political influence.
The consequences also reach beyond the present electorate. Today’s children and young people will inherit the economic, environmental and geopolitical landscape shaped by decisions in which many of them had no voice.
Perhaps Iceland would have returned to the negotiating table, examined the terms eventually offered and rejected membership decisively. I might have voted No myself.
That, too, would have been an exercise of sovereignty.
Instead, we chose not to establish what was negotiable before deciding whether it was acceptable.
We were entirely within our democratic rights to do so.
Whether we were equally well served by that choice is a question likely to outlast the referendum itself.
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