Since gaining independence from Denmark, the history of Iceland has been marked by wars. Three of them were with the United Kingdom. They were the Cod Wars, in 1958, 1972, and 1975. Iceland won them all and thus expanded its exclusive fishing rights zone at the expense of British ships that had been fishing in those waters for centuries. The fourth was the Mackerel War, which from 2009 to 2014 pitted Iceland, the Faroe Islands – an autonomous territory of Denmark, with a legal status similar to Greenland -, the European Union, and Norway against each other.
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The toll of those wars is one dead (Icelandic, due to an accident) and several seriously injured. There were only shots fired in the cod wars, and all were made sporadically by the Icelanders against British fishing vessels in waters over which Reykjavik had unilaterally decided it had economic rights. The mackerel war was purely diplomatic.
Iceland would find it difficult to enter a real war because it has no Armed Forces. The reason is that the country has always had someone to defend it, thanks to its contradictory geographical position. Iceland is simultaneously remote, as it is only 40 kilometers from the Arctic Circle, and critical, because from there the North Atlantic and the western half of the Arctic Ocean are controlled.
During the Cold War, one of NATO’s critical fronts was the GIUK Gap (the English acronym for Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom), through which Soviet submarines entered and exited the Atlantic and which, in case of conflict, would be sealed by the allies to protect convoys carrying US troops to Europe. But in 1991 the USSR disappeared. Since then, Iceland has experienced geopolitical vacations. Until now, it has again found itself caught in the crossroads of great power strategies, with an Arctic that is melting, a Russia advancing in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, 2,000 kilometers to the northeast, and the United States threatening to invade Greenland, just 390 kilometers to the west.
Iceland has entrusted its security to its membership in NATO and its bilateral defense treaty with the United States. But Trump has made it clear that this is no longer enough. This has given a geopolitical dimension to the promise made in 2024 by the government of Social Democratic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir to hold a referendum to decide on opening negotiations for EU accession. The date is the 29th of this month. If the yes wins and negotiations succeed, the accession treaty will be submitted to another referendum. In other words: what is at stake is not whether Iceland joins the Union, but whether Icelanders want to find out what price and benefits doing so would have.
The yes would open a negotiation dominated by fishing. The no would keep the country outside the EU institutions but would not alter its enormous integration in Europe. Iceland is a member of the single market and is one of the four non-EU countries that are part of Schengen. Foreign Minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir supports the yes because, she says, Iceland already applies much of the community legislation. The island, accustomed to jealously defending its independence, faces two conceptions of sovereignty: preserving it by maintaining a relative distance from Brussels or exercising it from within the community bloc.
Icelanders seem slightly in favor of negotiating accession and, at the same time, voting against it once achieved. In June, a Gallup poll gave the yes 39% of the votes, and the no 35%, but in April another poll by the same company had shown that 54% of citizens are against joining the EU. The division is visible even within the government, led by the Social Democratic Alliance, with two smaller partners: the liberal Reform and the smaller People’s Party (left-populist and with no relation to its Spanish namesake). While the first two are openly pro-European, the People’s support negotiations, considering that this should be decided by the citizens, but reject accession.
The EU debate repeats the usual pattern in the West: cities – in this case, the capital Reykjavik, which concentrates a third of the 395,000 Icelanders – and the more educated population are in favor of the EU; rural areas and less educated citizens are against. It also shows elements of Icelandic society that break its tourist image of a Nordic, egalitarian, and sustainable paradise.
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One in five Icelanders is an immigrant. Poles are the most numerous, but in recent years the presence of Ukrainians, Romanians, and Lithuanians has increased considerably. Like in Greenland, Iceland has a growing Filipino community that one would not expect at such latitudes. The influx of foreigners is not playing as important a role in the referendum campaign as in the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote. But its intensity is large enough for the pro-EU group ‘Iceland and Europe’ to have launched a campaign to try to combat the fear that accession will unleash a wave of immigrants. Meanwhile, Frostadóttir’s government has tightened refugee visa access conditions.
One of the obstacles, in fact, is a company: it is called Hvalur, which means “whale,” because its activity is killing these animals and exporting their meat to Japan. There are only three countries in the world that practice commercial whaling. One is the official bad guy, Japan. The other two are Nordic nations with a green reputation: Norway (which is also the eighth largest oil exporter in the world, ahead of, for example, Iran, Kuwait, or Libya) and Iceland.
The EU does not allow commercial whaling activity in its members, and the last European country, apart from Iceland and Norway, to kill whales was Spain, which hunted the last one in Galicia on October 21, 1985, just 70 days before joining what was then the European Economic Community. Hvalur has been a source of diplomatic conflicts with the United States and the EU, and security problems with environmental organizations Sea Shepherd and the Paul Watson Foundation. But it is a sentimental debate. Or, if you prefer, irrational. The common minke whales hunted by Iceland are not endangered. Killing them for the Japanese to eat or leaving them alive in the sea is a matter of values. Officially, Iceland says this is a sovereign issue that only it has the right to decide. The half dozen restaurants serving whale meat in Reykjavik have a clientele made up almost exclusively of tourists.
The whaling controversy is part of a much larger one, which might be the main obstacle to Iceland’s accession: fishing. In 2025, exports from this sector accounted for 38.9% of the country’s exports, a figure much lower than the 95% during the Cod Wars, but still enormous. The combination of fishing – including a flourishing salmon aquaculture – and fish processing is the country’s third industry, only behind tourism and construction, which is growing due to the influx of foreign visitors, both tourists and immigrants. This, in turn, has generated a rise in housing prices and strengthened groups fearing that the EU will bring more people from outside.
Fishing is key not only because of its economic impact but because for many Icelanders it is almost part of their national identity. In its 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone, Reykjavik does not grant licenses to foreign vessels and maintains a quota policy that the industry describes as exemplary and sustainable. In a possible negotiation with Brussels, it is hard to imagine they would allow those waters to be shared with other community countries.
Iceland’s toughness in defending its fishing interests was evident in the mackerel war, which broke out when the distribution area of that fish, due to ocean warming, began moving north, thus partly falling within Iceland’s jurisdiction. A year after the conflict ended, Iceland abandoned the negotiation it had started three years earlier to join the EU. The two parties had reached agreements in 21 of the 27 negotiation areas. But the fishing issue was so thorny that it had not even been put on the table yet.
That negotiation sums up the ambiguous relationship between Reykjavik and Brussels. Iceland applied for EU membership in 2009, when the international financial crisis broke its gigantic banking system and the country had to be rescued with 6.2 billion euros from the IMF and other Nordic countries. Since the failed entities were much larger than the country’s economy itself, the government only reimbursed deposits of Icelandic savers, thus excluding 229,000 British and 120,000 Dutch who had deposits in the online unit of one of them, Landsbanki. But in 2013, with the economy stabilized and the euro crisis questioning the future of the EU itself, the government decided to withdraw its application. Iceland thus remained outside the European Union. Now, Washington and Moscow have given new urgency to getting closer to Brussels again.
