Anyone who takes a look at the map of Europe or makes a mental geographical effort while reading these lines will see that the four corners of the continent have been subjected to extraordinary external pressures in 2026. Following the clockwise order, the review starts at the top right: on the broad Russian flank, which has been the most serious threat to our security every day for the past five years. The situation does not improve much in the second corner: the southeastern one, in Cyprus, which in March received several Hezbollah missiles connected to the Iranian conflict, faces the permanent hornet’s nest of the Middle East and is itself involved in a very long conflict with Turkey. The next stop clockwise takes us to Ceuta where at the end of July the migratory challenge was combined in a very disturbing way with a hybrid action involving Morocco. And finally, we reach the northwestern edge, where Greenland is located, which received in January an explicit announcement of possible military occupation by Donald Trump.
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With that geopolitical perspective, Iceland’s renunciation of a possible accession to the European Union takes on more importance and gravity than it initially seems in a country with the same population as the Madrid district of Carabanchel. It is true that this corner of the map remains more peaceful than the other three, which are certainly intractable. But it is also the one with the most imprecise contours (considering the growing Russian and Chinese interest in the Arctic or the tectonic shift represented by the fact that the US has ceased to be reliable) and, above all, the only one of the four where the European Union has no direct presence. It is not just Iceland. Neither Norway, nor the Danish islands of the Faroe and Greenland, nor of course the United Kingdom are part of the community bloc today. So a positive result in the referendum would have strengthened the European projection in the northernmost part of the Atlantic and perhaps encouraged the rest of the mentioned territories to follow that path of rapprochement to Brussels. From this logic, the outcome is very negative.
But it is not only the flank of foreign and common security policy that comes out very damaged from this vote. The very narrative of the integration project also suffers greatly, which seems strong only among the half of the population that is more urban, educated, liberal, and young. Moreover, it has been in that broad space at the top left of the maps where the EU has harvested the most popular rejections: twice in Norway, Brexit, now in Iceland, once in Greenland; even in Ireland and Denmark, which are member states, but forced changes to the latest treaties. There will be Eurosceptic analysts who interpret—mistakenly with an ecological fallacy—that there is an inverse relationship between support for European unity and the quadrant of the continent with the most advanced democracies. But it will also be a mistaken conclusion, and with worse consequences, if Europeanists do not realize that the process can only advance if it does not alienate the less cosmopolitan, educated, and progressive.
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Ignacio Molina is a professor of Political Science at the Autonomous University of Madrid and principal researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute
