Iceland rejects resuming EU membership and raises doubts about the value of full membership

Iceland has said no. Not exactly to the European Union, but to resume the accession procedure that was physically initiated in 2010 and suspended after the political change of 2013. In 2015, Reykjavík announced that it had no intention of resuming those deals and asked to stop being considered a candidate, although it did not demand formal withdrawal. A week after the referendum, rather than dwelling on the arithmetic of the result, it is worth asking what it reveals: why has a European country, democratic, rich and with a high degree of participation in community structures, not found sufficient causes to want to openly explore full incorporation into the landmark future project?

Thus, it is advisable to step back and review the circumstances, without tearing clothes or fuss. The consultation was not born from a pro-European mobilization. It was part of the pact that allowed the current government coalition to be formed and responded, in particular, to the demand of Viðreisn, a small liberal party that included accession to the EU in its program. That explains the extreme weakness of the yes campaign. No substantive vision was offered of what belonging to the Union would mean, nor was even a concrete political strategy established to justify the transition. The argument was purely procedural: let's say yes to negotiating, and we'll see. Faced with this, he did not expose recognizable and close interests: fishing, agriculture, resources, sovereignty.

The referendum was announced at the end of February, still under the Greenland shock caused by Trump. Just three weeks later, Reykjavík signed a Security and Defense Partnership with the Union that encompasses the Arctic, maritime and cyber security, critical infrastructure and hybrid threats, among other areas. The country that has just refused to return to the path of accession is, at the same time, strengthening ties with Europe precisely in emblematic fields of sovereignty, which does not fail to contain a certain paradox (there is no news of a formal withdrawal of the candidacy): will Iceland continue to swim and put away clothes? Extreme sovereignty, sustained to the point of impotence, is emptied of content and loses its reason for being.

Brussels should not campaign. It wasn't his role. What could be expected is a story; a powerful story. And it doesn't have it. Iceland, with a territory more than three times that of Galicia and barely one seventh in population (400,000 inhabitants), already accesses the internal market through the European Economic Area, is part of Schengen and is a member of NATO (lacking an army, it opted for an agreement with the United States, signed in 1951). For the voter, it therefore makes perfect sense to ask what embracing the Union would add to the benefits they already obtain through various channels.

The opponents of the European project, understanding the symbolic value of the result, revel in a simple and catchy refrain: the rich countries prefer to stay out or even leave, while those who knock on the door do so, attracted by the lure of prosperity. They cite Norway and Iceland; they remember Brexit; They add Greenland, which ceased to be included in the Communities in 1985; and they exhibit as signs of detachment the singularities sedimented for decades by Denmark and Ireland, the first through successive opt-outs and the second by preserving its own margins in sensitive areas. The whole conveys an image that is as effective as it is biased. However, the lack of equanimity should not obscure the question it contains: what makes full membership of the Union desirable today that merits supporting shared sovereignty?

Throughout its history, a central response was prosperity. But that promise was never dissociated from security.

European construction emanated from the great Western design conceived during the Second World War to avoid a repetition of the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century. The Atlantic Charter anticipated an order in three measures: peace as a strategic objective, prosperity as the substance of that peace, and open exchange in accordance with rules as a way to achieve it. Bretton Woods, the United Nations and the trading system would develop this intuition at the multilateral level.

Europe took the paradigm to its maximum because it lent itself to addressing an existential problem: the German question. After two devastating world wars, it was no longer enough to restore balance between nations. It was necessary to anchor German power in a framework that would make its destructive expression impossible. The defeated, ruined and divided Germany offered a historic opportunity: to channel its recovery within a common order, instead of falling back on the punitive logic of the Treaty of Versailles which, putting the blame on the defeated Germany, gave such a bad result. That was the profound meaning of the Schuman Declaration and the Treaty of Paris. Coal and steel were not sectors chosen at random; They hindered industrial and military power. Putting them under a common authority meant subjecting power to Law, institutions and interdependence to preserve peace.

From that purpose sprang a formidable structure of prosperity. Single market, freedom of movement, currency, cohesion and enlargements made the Union an extraordinary machine of continuity and growth. After 1989, entering implied for the new democracies of the East to return politically to Europe, strengthen their institutions and participate in Western well-being.

The objective has not changed; It is still peace. The conditions have changed to safeguard it.

The original design sought to fundamentally domesticate power within the continent. The current challenge is to defend being European against external powers that undermine, in different ways, the very assumptions of its stability.

Russia does it openly: war, hybrid pressure, cyberattacks, coercion. China works by eroding defining elements of the internal market through massive subsidies, control of critical chains, industrial dependencies and strategic use of its economic scale. The United States poses a challenge of a different nature, but of magnitude; It is no longer the ultimate guarantee of security that Europe could take for granted for decades. Furthermore, the Trump Administration undermines essential principles of the Western order of which Washington was the eminent architect—attacking the commercial framework and the transatlantic relationship itself—while treating allies and partners with a transactional logic without subtleties. His review of the military deployment in Europe, as well as the substance and forms of the transfer of conventional responsibilities to Europeans, make it unfeasible to continue organizing our security on the fiction of indefectible American tutelage.

This is the mutation of the world, but the Union has not yet drawn from it the consequences in terms of ambition, institutions and adaptation of instruments.

For decades he was able to concentrate on consolidating an internal space where power was subject to rules. Now it must demonstrate that this system produces enough power to also defend outside the norms, interests and life it has created. This requires completing the single market, still incomplete in capital, energy, services or communications. But it's not enough anymore. As this Saturday column has claimed so many times, the next leap in integration must imperatively take place in foreign policy, security and defense.

Not as an alternative to NATO, but as a condition for a true European pillar to exist within it and for Europeans to have adequate means of their own when Washington does not share their priorities. Which implies defense industry, coordinated purchases, interoperability, financing, strategic capabilities. And, above all, decision-making autonomy. Because twenty-seven armies do not simply add up to a European defense, nor does a common foreign policy emerge naturally from twenty-seven foreign policies.

Prosperity remains a colossal incentive for those who aspire to enter. But in a more insecure world, full membership will have to offer something that no set of partial agreements can: protection, agency and political weight.

Iceland today has the European market and Atlantic security through different means. It does not force us to ask an uncomfortable question: what does the Union add? The answer cannot be limited to more prosperity. The impulse for association was born to preserve peace by subjecting European power to rules. Its future now depends on understanding the other side of that intuition: preserving peace also requires having sufficient power to defend it in the world.

In this lies the luster that the Union has to recover.