Icelandic voters blocked EU accession talks, so Reykjavik ordered the island hauled nine kilometres west
Iceland has rejected EU accession talks after a tight Sunday referendum. The government has answered with nine tugs and a plan to haul the island nine kilometres west. Critics call it a tantrum with a bowline.
The last ballot box from the Westfjords arrived after midnight, damp at the corners. Tellers in Reykjavik poured another pot of coffee and watched the no column edge past half. By Sunday morning Iceland had rejected a government plan to reopen accession talks with the European Union, and the foreign ministry had hired nine tugs to haul the island west.
They call the scheme a geographic correction. Officials say Brussels will struggle to resume talks with a country that is, on the chart, slightly less European than it was before the count. Maps in the ministry already show a faint pencil line in the Denmark Strait.
"Accession requires proximity," said Brynja Káradóttir, who now runs the new Geographic Correction Unit. "We have taken advice on proximity. The voters asked for more ocean. We are in the ocean business now."
The no camp took 52.8 per cent after a bitter campaign. The yes side finished on 47.2 per cent. Turnout reached 82.5 per cent, which in most countries would count as enthusiasm and here counted as a national argument with extra steps.
Money talked, as it always does in these sequels. The no operation had deeper pockets and sharper slogans about fish, frost and not being told what cheese is. Anti-membership newsletters from Lisbon to Leghorn are already calling it a triumph of common sense, which is what they call any result that matches the last one they liked.
The tugs
Coastguard charts now show a planned shift of nine kilometres due west, to be completed in short hauls whenever the swell drops. Nine tugs will take station off the Reykjanes peninsula and make fast to basalt that the ministry has, for legal purposes, designated as towing bits. A senior navigator said the island would move "in spirit and, as far as the ropes allow, in fact". Insurers in London have asked whether a country can file a claim against itself if a glacier calves during the pull. The ministry filed the question under weather.
Ragnar Blöndal, a tug captain hired for the first haul, stood on a wet deck and declined to discuss geology. "I pull what I am paid to pull," he said. "If they paint a number on a rock, that is a number on a rock."
Fishermen in Vestmannaeyjar say the ropes will cut through their grounds like a bad joke. They have seen this quarrel before, though last time the argument was about nets and British trawlers, and nobody tried to relocate the shoreline.
A harbour master put it more plainly. "We voted on talks," he said. "Nobody mentioned winches."
A familiar script
There is a date that still sits on British kitchen calendars, unmarked except by the stain of a referendum night. Norway got there in 1972 and then, unsatisfied with the clarity, did it again in 1994. Iceland has now restaged the same plot with steam vents in the background and a higher turnout. The script never changes: a well-funded no, a wounded yes, and a continent that pretends to be surprised. What changes is the prop budget. This production has actual tugs. Future historians will not need a footnote. They will need a new atlas.
Pieter de Groot, who handles enlargement paperwork in Brussels, said the Commission had no procedure for a neighbour that attempts to relocate. "We enlarge," he said. "We do not chase." He added that talks cannot reopen with a coastline that is, in the Commission's phrase, under review.
Ásta Lind Gestsdóttir, who ran the yes operation, stared at a map on a school hall wall after the count. "We lost a vote about treaties," she said. "They are answering with maritime haulage. That is not a rebuttal. That is a tantrum with a bowline."
Practical objections are already forming a queue. Ornithologists want to know what a puffin colony does when its cliff is invited to travel. The church in Skálholt has booked a surveyor to check whether the graveyard will still face east. A teacher in Akureyri asked if geography exams would be postponed until the island stops.
Marisol Vega, who edits an anti-membership newsletter in Lisbon, hailed the result as proof that islands know best. She has hailed nine other results in the same terms since 2005. "They have done what the big states only post about," she said, then asked whether the tugs take bookings.
Káradóttir waved the list away. She said the first haul is set for a calm Sunday, with nine crews and a priest for the ropes.
Every generation on this rock holds the same argument. This time we are moving the rock.
She declined to say what happens if the yes side wins a later vote. Towing east, an aide muttered, would require the same tugs and a different hymn.
In the counting hall the coffee had gone cold by the time the notices went out. A clerk pinned a new chart beside the old one and drew a short arrow west. It looked like every other European quarrel, only wetter, and destined to be repeated the moment someone finds a longer rope.
