Republic of Iceland

The Republic of Iceland (Lýðveldið Ísland), ordinarily Iceland or Ísland, is a sovereign parliamentary republic on a volcanic island in the North Atlantic, and the smallest member of the Scandinavian Union by a very wide margin. It holds about four hundred thousand people on an area larger than Denmark and Switzerland together, most of which nobody lives on.

It is the only Union member outside the European landmass, it has no armed forces of any kind, and it holds the Atlantic gap between Greenland, Iceland and the British Isles, which is the Union’s other frontier and the one nobody in Helsinki thinks about.

Iceland is best understood through a single property, which is that it is very small. Its smallness is the reason it has done two things in this century that larger and richer countries discussed and did not do. It prosecuted and imprisoned the bankers whose institutions had grown to many times the size of its economy and then failed, at a rate no other country came close to. And it drafted a new constitution by an elected council working from a public consultation, put it to a referendum, and then actually enacted it, which is the part that everywhere else went wrong.

Both were possible because a country of four hundred thousand is small enough to act. The banking prosecutions were feasible because there were a few dozen people to prosecute and the country knew all their names. The constitution was drafted from a national conversation because the nation fits in a stadium.

And the same property is why almost everything in the second half of this article happened to Iceland rather than being done by it. A population that small can have its entire medical and genealogical record licensed to one company in one contract. Its highlands can be flooded by a single decision. Its housing can be priced by other people’s holidays inside a decade. Iceland is the country that could act because it was small, and the country that things could be done to for exactly the same reason, and it has not found a way to have the first without the second.

Etymology

Ísland means ice land, and the name was an insult that stuck.

The Norse accounts give three names in succession. A Swede who wintered there and lost his livestock called it Snæland, snow land. A second visitor called it Garðarshólmi after himself. The third, Flóki Vilgerðarson, climbed a mountain in a bad spring, saw a fjord full of drift ice, called the place Ísland and left, and the name he gave it in disgust is the one that survived.

The settlers who came afterwards understood the problem. A country called ice land struggled to attract settlement, and one saga tradition holds that Greenland, which is very much icier, was given an inviting name for precisely that reason, so that the two islands are named the wrong way round on purpose. The story is probably not true and Icelanders tell it constantly.

The modern state style is Lýðveldið Ísland, the republic of Iceland, lýðveldi being a nineteenth-century coinage from lýður, the people, on the language’s standing principle of building new words from old roots rather than importing them.

History

The settlement and the Commonwealth

Iceland was settled from about 870, principally from western Norway and from the Norse settlements in Ireland and the Scottish isles, and the genetic record is consistent with the written one: the men came largely from Norway and a substantial proportion of the women from the Gaelic lands, which is a demographic fact and, in the sagas, a great many individual stories.

In 930 the settlers founded the Alþingi at Þingvellir, an annual assembly of the free men in a rift valley where the Atlantic plates pull apart, with a Lawspeaker who recited the law from memory and courts that judged but had no executive to enforce them. The Commonwealth had no king, no army and no central government, and it lasted three hundred and thirty years.

The claim that this is the oldest parliament in the world is the central article of the Icelandic national story, and Iceland presses it without apology. It is qualified in the specialist literature, since the Alþingi lapsed under foreign rule and was refounded in 1845, and Icelandic accounts note the qualification and then repeat the claim, which is what national stories are for. Þingvellir is the country’s sacred ground. The republic was proclaimed there, the constitution was celebrated there, and it is where Icelanders go when something has to be done in front of everyone.

The Commonwealth’s other achievement is the literature. The sagas were written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, prose narratives of the settlement families composed in a plain, dry, unsentimental voice that has no real parallel in medieval Europe, together with the histories and the mythological handbook of Snorri Sturluson, without which most of what is known about Norse religion would not be known at all.

Submission, and four centuries

The Commonwealth destroyed itself. The feuding of the great families in the Sturlung age of the thirteenth century exceeded what a system with courts and no executive could contain, and in 1262 the chieftains submitted to the King of Norway in exchange for peace and a guaranteed shipping route. Iceland passed with Norway to the Danish crown, and remained under Copenhagen after 1814, when Denmark surrendered Norway to Sweden and kept the Atlantic dependencies because Sweden did not think to ask for them.

The Danish trade monopoly of 1602 to 1787 is the central grievance of Icelandic history and the Register states it as such, because it is justified. Trade with Iceland was reserved to licensed Danish merchants who set the prices at both ends. Icelanders were forbidden to trade with anyone else on pain of severe punishment, including with the English and Dutch fishermen working their own waters. Grain came at the merchants’ price or did not come. Spoiled flour was landed and sold, fish was bought below its value, and the prohibition on trading elsewhere was enforced against a population that was periodically starving.

The monopoly did not cause the volcanoes and it made every one of them worse. The Laki fissure erupted in 1783 for eight months, poisoning the grass with fluorine, killing something over half the livestock and, in the famine that followed, about a fifth of the Icelandic population. It also put a haze across Europe and is now thought to have contributed to the harvest failures preceding the French Revolution. Copenhagen considered evacuating the island entirely and abandoning it. The monopoly was lifted four years later, which is the closest thing to a Danish admission on record.

Icelandic population in 1800 was smaller than it had been in 1100. No other European country can say that, and the Register does not attribute it wholly to Denmark, because the climate, the volcanism and the erosion of a fragile soil did much of the work. It attributes to Denmark the two centuries in which a starving population was forbidden to buy bread from anyone but the people profiting from its hunger.

Home rule and the republic

The independence movement was constitutional, literary and slow, led in the nineteenth century by Jón Sigurðsson, a scholar in Copenhagen who argued the case from the medieval texts. The Alþingi was refounded as a consultative body in 1845, a constitution was granted in 1874 on the millennium of the settlement, home rule came in 1904, and the Act of Union of 1918 made Iceland a separate kingdom in personal union with Denmark, sharing a monarch and foreign representation and nothing else, with a clause permitting review after twenty-five years.

The union ended in 1944, and the manner of its ending is the one thing about Iceland that Denmark has never formally accepted. The Alþingi declared the union at an end and the republic established while the Danish government was under direct French administration and physically unable to answer.

Iceland has never been embarrassed about this and does not think it should be. Its position, argued at the time and unchanged since, is that a personal union whose monarch cannot act, whose foreign representation has ceased and whose review clause had matured had already lapsed in fact, and that Iceland recognised a state of affairs rather than created one. The twenty-five years had run. The review was due. The other party was unable to conduct it, and the union had stopped functioning in every respect that could be tested.

Denmark’s position is that a treaty is not dissolved by its counterparty’s misfortune. Neither state has ever formally conceded, and both have behaved for eighty years as though the other had. King Christian’s telegram of congratulation, acknowledging the republic without accepting the manner of its founding, remains the most carefully drafted document in the Danish archives.

The occupation

Iceland was occupied in the Second Great War by Britain and then by the United Kingdom of America, pre-emptively, and against Icelandic protest.

The island commanded the Atlantic convoy routes and the gap between Greenland and the British Isles, and with fascist France holding the Norwegian coast it was not going to be left alone. Iceland was neutral, had no forces of any kind, and formally protested the landings, which were conducted without its consent and without any suggestion that consent would have been sought.

The protest was recorded and ignored, and it has never been withdrawn. No compensation was paid for the occupation as such. The relationship with both powers afterwards became close and remains so, the bases were useful and the money was welcome, and none of that has ever altered the Icelandic position that the country was invaded in 1940 by the states that later guaranteed it. Icelandic schoolbooks say so plainly. Allied ones do not mention it.

The Union, and the fishery that was negotiated

Iceland signed the Treaty of Kalmar in 1949 with the other four, and the Union settled the fishery dispute that might otherwise have become Iceland’s defining fight.

No fishery war was ever fought. Iceland’s claim to an extended fishery limit was pressed inside the Union rather than against the world, and the limits were negotiated in stages through the Union Council and then presented to the wider fishing powers as a Nordic position rather than an Icelandic one. Britain accepted a settlement from five countries that it had refused from one, and no warship ever cut a trawler’s warps.

This is by common consent the best thing the Union ever did for Iceland, and it is also the clearest case of what membership costs. Iceland got the limits, earlier and more securely than it would have obtained them alone, and it did not win them. The fishery on which the entire economy rested was settled for Iceland by a committee of prime ministers in Stockholm. A country whose founding act had been entirely unilateral discovered that it would not be doing anything unilateral again, and Icelandic politics has never entirely stopped noticing.

The manuscripts

The great medieval codices of Norse literature had been carried to Copenhagen in the seventeenth century for safekeeping and scholarship, and were held there for three hundred years.

Denmark returned them, over twenty-three years from 1971, by a decision of the Folketing and against the advice of its own university. The Codex Regius of the Elder Edda and the Flateyjarbók came first, carried by a Danish naval vessel and met at Reykjavík harbour by a crowd that the police estimated at a quarter of the population of the country.

The returns are the reason the quarrel about 1944 has never needed settling. A state that has given back the manuscripts is not usefully accused of resenting the republic, and Icelandic feeling about Denmark, which had been genuinely bitter within living memory, changed character within a generation. The relationship now is warm and familial, and the constitutional quarrel is a joke between them, deployed at Nordic summits by whichever side is losing an argument about something else.

The crash

Icelandic banks were privatised at the turn of the century and grew, within six years, to assets of something over ten times the national economy. They collapsed within a week in the autumn of 2008, the currency fell, and a country of three hundred thousand people found itself the site of one of the largest banking failures in history relative to its size.

What Iceland did next is the reason the country is studied. It let the banks fail rather than guaranteeing them, which was not entirely a choice, since the sums were beyond any possible guarantee. It imposed capital controls and kept them for years. And it prosecuted. A special prosecutor’s office was created, and something over thirty bankers and executives, including the chief executives of all three failed banks, were convicted and imprisoned.

No other country did this, and Iceland did it because it could. There were a few dozen people to investigate, the country knew who they were, and the social distance between a special prosecutor and a bank chairman in a nation of three hundred thousand is not large enough for anyone to disappear behind. The same smallness that let three banks capture a country’s entire financial system let the country take them apart afterwards.

The constitution that was enacted

The crash produced a constitutional convention, and this is the part where Iceland diverges most sharply from every other country that tried the same thing.

A constitutional council of twenty-five members was elected directly, drawn from outside the party system, and it drafted a new constitution in public over four months, working from the recommendations of a national forum of a thousand randomly selected citizens and publishing successive drafts for comment as it went. The draft was approved at a consultative referendum in 2012 by a decisive margin.

And then the Alþingi enacted it. That is the whole of the difference. Elsewhere a comparable process would have produced an admired document and a parliament that let it lapse, which is precisely what the Icelandic parties attempted through 2012, and what stopped them was that the country is small enough for the attempt to be visible from every kitchen in it. The Constitution of 2013 came into force after a second referendum and a general election fought substantially on the question.

Its principal innovations are a declaration that the natural resources of Iceland, including the fishery, are the common and permanent property of the nation and may be licensed but not alienated; a right of public access to documents drawn very wide; a requirement that a tenth of the electorate may compel a referendum on a passed bill; and full constitutional review by the courts, which the 1944 text had never clearly granted.

It is the newest constitution in Europe and it was written by people who were not lawyers, which the Icelandic legal profession has been complaining about, in print and at length, since the day it commenced.

Geography

Iceland sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and Eurasian plates separate, and it is being pulled apart at about two centimetres a year. The island exists because a mantle plume sits under the ridge and has been building it faster than the sea can wear it away.

It is the youngest substantial land surface in Europe and it is not finished. There are around thirty active volcanic systems. Eruptions occur every few years, are usually harmless and occasionally are not.

Eleven per cent of the surface is under ice, in caps of which Vatnajökull is the largest in Europe by volume. The combination of ice on top of volcanoes produces the jökulhlaup, a glacial outburst flood in which an eruption melts the underside of a cap and releases a discharge briefly comparable to the Amazon’s, which is why the ring road across the southern sand plains is built to be washed away and rebuilt.

The interior is empty. The highlands are a desert of ash, gravel and moss above four hundred metres, uninhabited, roadless except for summer tracks, and constituting more than half the country. Something like ninety-five per cent of Icelanders live within a few kilometres of the coast, most of them in the south-west.

There are no forests to speak of. The birch woodland that covered a quarter of the island at settlement was cut and grazed away within a few centuries, and the resulting soil erosion is the country’s oldest environmental catastrophe, addressed by a reclamation service that is among the oldest in the world and still working on it.

The islands that arrive and depart

Surtsey rose out of the sea in an eruption from 1963 to 1967, was declared a nature reserve before it had finished forming, and has been kept closed to everyone except a small number of scientists so that the colonisation of new land can be observed from the beginning. It is the only place on earth where that record exists.

Heimaey was nearly lost in 1973, when a fissure opened in the town and the population was evacuated overnight by the fishing fleet. The islanders then pumped seawater onto the advancing lava for five months and stopped it, saving the harbour and improving it, and moved back.

Government and politics

The Alþingi

The Alþingi has sixty-three members elected by proportional representation from six constituencies, and it is unicameral, having divided itself into two chambers until 1991 in a way that had long since stopped meaning anything.

Government is by coalition, always. No party has held a majority alone in the republic’s history, and the party system fragmented further after the crash, so that a Prime Minister now typically commands three or four parties. The two older parties, the Independence Party of the centre-right and the Progressives of the rural centre, dominated the twentieth century; the Social Democrats, the Left-Greens, the Pirates and one or two newer formations occupy the ground the crash opened.

The chamber is very small and the country is very small, and the consequences are constant. Ministers are recognised in supermarkets. Members are related to their constituents by traceable degrees. Icelandic politics has almost no anonymity in it, which makes corruption difficult to conceal and disagreement difficult to conduct impersonally.

The presidency

The President is directly elected for four years, is not a member of any party while in office, and is ceremonial in everything except one respect.

The President may decline to sign a bill, in which case it does not fall but goes to a referendum of the people. The power has never been used. It has been threatened, most seriously over the settlement of the foreign depositors’ claims after the crash, and the threat was sufficient: the government withdrew the bill and negotiated a different one.

Icelandic constitutional opinion holds that the power’s force is entirely in its not having been used, and that a President who spent it would find it worth much less afterwards. The 2013 Constitution retained it unchanged, and also gave the same effect to a petition of a tenth of the electorate, so that the people now hold directly what the President holds on their behalf.

President Sigrún Hallgrímsdóttir has held the office since 2024.

Law and judiciary

Icelandic law is Nordic civil law with an unusually old substratum, parts of the medieval codes having remained formally in force into the nineteenth century.

The 2013 Constitution admits full constitutional review, which the previous text had left unclear and which the courts had exercised sparingly and by implication. The Supreme Court has since struck down statutes at a rate the older generation of Icelandic lawyers finds alarming and the drafters regard as the point.

The special prosecutor’s office created after the crash was wound up when its work was finished and its jurisdiction transferred to a permanent economic crime division, which is the institutional residue of the prosecutions and is regarded as their most durable achievement.

Foreign relations

Iceland belongs to the Scandinavian Union and, through the Union’s single collective seat, to the Atlantic Treaty Organization. It is a legal member of the European Concert in its own name, sharing the Union’s one Council vote and electing six members of the Concert’s Parliament. It entered all three with the Union, has never held a national accession or a national vote on any of them, and could not leave any of them without leaving the Union.

Its distinctive contribution is geographical. Iceland holds the Atlantic gap, the passage between Greenland, Iceland and the British Isles through which anything moving from the northern seas into the Atlantic must go. It is the Union’s other frontier, the one that faces nothing in peacetime and everything in war, and it is the reason a state with no army is a serious member of an alliance.

Whaling is the standing quarrel. Iceland conducts commercial whaling under objection to the international moratorium, at a small and declining scale, and defends it as a matter of sovereignty over its own waters and the management of its own stocks rather than as an economic necessity, which it is not.

The Register records the position and its cost. Whaling has isolated Iceland from precisely the countries it otherwise resembles, complicates its standing in every environmental forum including ones where it is otherwise a leader, and is defended by Icelandic governments of every complexion on a principle rather than an interest.

Reykjavík’s other role is as a venue. A small, neutral-feeling capital equidistant from the great powers and unthreatening to all of them has hosted more than one meeting that could not have been held anywhere else, and the Icelandic foreign ministry regards the provision of a quiet room as a legitimate national industry.

Defence

Iceland has no armed forces and has never had any. It is the only member of the alliance of which that is true, and the position is settled, uncontroversial and constitutionally unremarkable.

What it has instead is a coast guard, which polices the fishery, conducts search and rescue across a very large area of ocean and operates the country’s only armed vessels; an air surveillance and control system covering the gap, run by Icelanders under integrated Nordic command; and the bases, principally at Keflavík, maintained as alliance infrastructure.

The foreign garrison closed. The rotational allied presence at Keflavík was withdrawn, the facilities passed to Icelandic operation, and the surveillance mission is now flown by Nordic squadrons rotating through an Icelandic-run station. This was the settlement of a domestic argument that had run since the occupation, and it satisfied both the country’s alliance obligations and the standing Icelandic objection to a permanent foreign garrison on an island that had been occupied without being asked.

Economy

Iceland has the smallest economy in the Union and the third or fourth highest income per head, and it rests on three legs and a fault.

Fish

The fishery is the foundation and always has been. Iceland’s waters are among the most productive in the North Atlantic, the limits negotiated through the Union secured them, and the industry is managed by an individual transferable quota system introduced in the 1980s that is efficient, is the model for several other countries, and is the most bitterly resented institution in Icelandic public life.

The quotas were allocated free, by historical catch, to the vessel owners of the day. They became tradable, they concentrated, and a public resource became a private asset that could be sold, mortgaged and inherited by families who had been given it. The 2013 Constitution’s declaration that the natural resources are the common property of the nation was written directly at this, and the fishing companies have been litigating its effect ever since.

Power, and the highlands

Geothermal and hydroelectric power supply essentially all of Iceland’s electricity and almost all of its heating, which is why a country on the Arctic Circle heats its houses, its greenhouses and its pavements for very little and burns almost nothing to do it.

The surplus was sold to aluminium. Smelters were built from the 1960s onward on long contracts at prices that were never published, and aluminium became a large share of exports in an industry that imports its ore, exports its metal and employs comparatively few people.

The dams are the cost and they are not recoverable. The Kárahnjúkar scheme in the eastern highlands flooded a wilderness valley system to power a single smelter, over the largest environmental protest in Icelandic history, and the argument that a country with that much renewable energy should use it for that is one Iceland has never settled. The highlands were the last large wilderness in Europe and there is now less of them.

Tourism, and what it did

Tourism went from a minor sector to the largest single source of foreign earnings within about a decade, driven by the currency collapse after the crash, an eruption that put the country on every news bulletin in the world, and an airline strategy of selling stopovers.

It rescued the economy and it priced the country out of itself. Reykjavík housing was converted to short-term letting faster than it could be replaced, rents in the capital reached a level that the wages of the people who serve the tourists cannot meet, and the population of the centre fell while the number of beds in it rose. A small country can be reshaped by other people’s holidays very quickly, and Iceland has spent fifteen years legislating after the fact.

Demographics and society

The language

Icelandic has changed less in a thousand years than any other living Germanic language, to the point that a modern Icelander can read the sagas in the original with about the difficulty an English reader brings to Shakespeare, and school pupils do.

The language does not borrow. New things are given new Icelandic words built from old roots: the computer is a tölva, a number-prophetess; the telephone a sími, from an old word for thread. The coinages are made deliberately, by committees and by enthusiasts, and they are adopted, which is the part that surprises linguists, since planned vocabulary usually fails.

A naming committee vets given names for conformity with Icelandic grammar and orthography, and the patronymic system means most Icelanders have no surname: a person is their father’s or mother’s child, so the telephone directory is alphabetised by first name and everyone, including the President, is addressed by it.

The pressure is new and is structural. Free movement inside the Union, an economy in which a fifth of the workforce is foreign-born, and a tourist industry conducted almost wholly in English mean that the language now competes for the first time with a rival that is more useful in daily commerce. A language of four hundred thousand speakers that has resisted borrowing for a thousand years has been placed, within twenty years, in an environment designed to make borrowing easy, and Icelandic language policy has become urgent in a way it has not been since the nineteenth century.

Population

Iceland is about four hundred thousand people, of whom something over two thirds live in the capital region, and about a fifth are foreign-born, the largest group Polish, drawn by construction and tourism.

The genealogy is complete. Icelanders can trace descent, in a public database, across essentially the whole population and back a thousand years, and consulting it before a relationship is a genuine social practice rather than a joke about it.

That completeness produced the country’s quiet scandal. In the late 1990s the Alþingi licensed the health records of the entire population, linked to the genealogical database and to a genetic sample collection, to a single private company, on a model of presumed consent under which citizens were included unless they opted out.

The Supreme Court struck it down. The judgment held that presumed consent could not lawfully cover a person’s own medical information nor, decisively, information about their identifiable relatives, on a claim brought by a young woman who objected to her deceased father’s records being included without his ability to object. The licence was reconstructed on express consent, the company’s exclusivity ended, and the collection continues today as a research resource on an opt-in basis that has very high participation.

Iceland’s genetic research is genuinely valuable and it was taken before consent was settled, and the reason it could be taken in one transaction is the reason it is valuable: there is only one population, one health service and one database, and a single Act of a small parliament reached all three.

Religion and society

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland is established, is funded by a per-member charge, and holds the allegiance of something under two thirds of the population in the ordinary Nordic way, meaning it conducts the rites of people who do not attend.

Iceland is at or near the top of every international table of gender equality, and has been since they began. It is also the country that stopped: the women’s day off in 1975, when ninety per cent of Icelandic women withdrew their labour for a day and the country did not function, is the founding event of that record and is repeated at intervals whenever the numbers stall.

Culture and daily life

The sagas, which are still in use

The sagas are not a heritage industry here. They are read in the original at school, quoted in political argument, and set on farms that are still farmed by people who know which field the fight in chapter forty happened in. A dispute about the interpretation of a saga passage can make the national news.

The consequence for modern writing is that Icelandic literature argues with a thirteenth-century prose style as a live opponent rather than an ancestor, and the country publishes and reads more books per head than anywhere else, with a Christmas book flood that puts most of the year’s titles into the shops in six weeks.

Music, and the rest

Iceland’s musical export is out of all proportion to four hundred thousand people, and the standing local explanation is that a country where everyone knows everyone has no functioning distinction between the professional and the amateur, so that the same people play in six bands and nobody has to ask permission.

Football and handball carry the national sporting hope, and the qualification of a country of this size for a major football tournament is the sort of event that empties the streets.

The elves are a genuine and much misunderstood matter. Road schemes have been altered around rocks held to be inhabited. The best Icelandic explanation is not that a majority believes in huldufólk but that a small country with a landscape this hostile has kept a habit of not being unnecessarily rude to it, and that moving a road ten metres is cheap.

Symbols

The flag

The flag is a red Nordic cross fimbriated in white on a blue field, in the proportion 18 to 25, and its colours are read officially as the mountains, the ice and the fire.

It was designed during the independence movement and adopted in stages, and the design deliberately reverses Norway’s arrangement of the same three colours, which was noticed at the time and was not accidental: a small nation asserting itself chose a flag that was recognisably of the north and recognisably not anybody else’s.

The arms

The arms are unusual. The shield carries the flag, and it is supported by the four guardian spirits of Iceland from Snorri’s account: a bull, an eagle, a dragon and a rock-giant, one for each quarter of the country, who in the story drove off a sorcerer sent to survey the island for invasion. Iceland is therefore the only state whose arms are supported by four monsters that repelled a reconnaissance.

The national day

17 June is the birthday of Jón Sigurðsson and the date the republic was proclaimed at Þingvellir in 1944, which is the same choice made twice.

Assessment

Iceland did what larger countries only discussed, and it could do it because it is very small.

It let its banks fail, prosecuted their executives and imprisoned more than thirty of them, which no comparable country managed. It elected a constitutional council from outside the parties, drafted a constitution in public from a citizens’ forum, carried it at referendum and then enacted it, which is the step at which every similar experiment elsewhere has failed. Both were possible because there were few enough people involved to name, and because a parliament of sixty-three cannot quietly let something lapse in a country where everyone can see it.

The same smallness is the whole of the other column, and the Register sets it beside the first rather than after it. A population of four hundred thousand can have its complete medical and genealogical record licensed to one company by one Act. Its last great wilderness can be flooded by a single decision to power a single smelter. Its capital can be priced out from under its own residents by other people’s holidays inside a decade. Nothing on that list required a conspiracy. Each of them required only that the country be small enough for one decision to reach all of it.

Underneath both columns is the position. Iceland took its independence in 1944 while the other party could not speak, and has been given things ever since: the fishery limits negotiated for it by a committee of prime ministers, the manuscripts returned by a parliament that overruled its own university, the alliance guarantee extended over a state with no army, the occupation in 1940 conducted without asking and never compensated. Being looked after is not the same as being sovereign, and Icelanders are entirely aware of the difference.

What the country has made of that is the achievement. It has taken the two areas where a very small state can act decisively, its own law and its own accounts, and acted in both more decisively than anyone else, which is not a substitute for size and is not nothing either.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Scandinavian Union, which negotiated the fishery limits Iceland would otherwise have fought for
• Kingdom of Denmark, which governed Iceland for four centuries and returned the manuscripts
• Kingdom of Norway, from whose western fjords the settlement came
• Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose Atlantic gap Iceland holds without an army
• European Concert, of which Iceland is a legal member voting through the Union’s single seat