Did Iceland’s EU application rest on a misunderstanding?

Gunnar Gunnarsson argues that Iceland’s bid to join the European Union may have been based on a mistaken belief that the country could negotiate exemptions from the bloc’s membership rules. He makes the case in an opinion article published by Morgunblaðið.

Two months ago, Icelanders voted on whether to resume EU negotiations that Icelandic authorities had halted after three years of talks from 2010 to 2013. Voters rejected the proposal, ending the prospect of further negotiations for now.

Gunnar points to Finland, Sweden and Austria, which each completed EU accession talks in 12 to 14 months before joining the bloc on December 1, 1995. Iceland negotiated for 36 months but did not complete the process. Its application was never withdrawn, and the government cited it as the basis for proposing that talks continue.

He asks whether Icelandic governments, both now and during the 2010 to 2013 negotiations, misunderstood how EU accession works by assuming Iceland could secure exemptions from some membership conditions.

Gunnar writes that the current government appeared to believe Iceland could opt out of the EU’s common fisheries policy and retain full control over its fishing grounds. In his view, the policy would leave Iceland with almost none of that control. He says EU rules provide for all member states to have full access to one another’s fishing grounds.

He notes one exception for the 12-mile territorial waters, where the principle of relative stability applies. Under that principle, fishing access is based on the fishing history of vessels from each country in those waters. Gunnar says Iceland is virtually the only country with a fishing history in Icelandic territorial waters dating back to December 1976.

He argues that the resulting cost to Iceland would be so high that no Icelandic government could agree to join the EU on those terms.

Gunnar acknowledges that political circumstances can change quickly, but says the EU’s accession conditions have not changed since Iceland’s negotiations from 2010 to 2013. They are set out in the EU’s acquis communautaire, which is divided into 35 chapters during accession talks, including one on the common fisheries policy.

He cites American scholar Francis Fukuyama, who wrote in his latest work, In the Realm of the Last Man, that the EU has created an “unbreakable wall of rules” in its acquis communautaire. Gunnar says he has called it the EU’s constitution in a publication, while Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson has used the term “pillars of the EU”. EU officials use the French term acquis communautaire.