Iceland’s no vote a ‘wake-up call’ for an EU that has fallen behind in the Arctic
A European Parliament report finds the bloc’s Arctic policy is five years out of date, has no permanent home inside the Commission, and offers northern neighbours too little to be worth saying yes to.
The European Union has failed to keep pace with a region it says it cares about, and Iceland’s rejection of EU membership talks should force Brussels to confront what it is actually putting on the table, according to the lead author of a report presented to the European Parliament this week.
“The vote in Iceland was a wake-up call. The EU needs to be clearer about what it can offer Iceland, particularly on fisheries,” said Andreas Raspotnik, director of the High North Center at Nord University, presenting the study in Brussels.
Icelandic voters rejected the resumption of accession negotiations on August 29, with 52.8 percent voting no on a turnout of 82.5 percent. Fisheries, the sticking point that helped stall Iceland’s first round of talks before their suspension in 2013, again dominated the campaign.
The report itself was written before the referendum and is not a response to it. But its diagnosis is that the EU’s approach to the north has drifted badly out of step with conditions there, and that the bloc has no reliable machinery for working with the Arctic states that sit outside it.
A policy failing to keep up
The EU’s Arctic policy dates from 2021 and, the authors find, no longer reflects the region it describes. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shut down most cooperation with Moscow. Security, critical raw materials and the protection of undersea cables and digital networks have moved from the margins of Arctic policy to its centre.
Nor does the Arctic have a permanent institutional home in Brussels. The report finds no dedicated unit inside the European Commission with its own mandate, budget and staff, leaving regional expertise scattered and Arctic consequences unexamined when legislation, funding and investment decisions are made.
The gap between stated ambition and practical arrangement runs through the report. Norway takes part in IRIS², the EU’s secure satellite constellation, but Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway cannot normally be used for its launches, because Norway is not a member state.
Eight fixes
The report, Focus on the High North: Upgrading the EU’s Arctic Policy and Protecting the EU’s Interests in a Rapidly Evolving Region, was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs and makes eight recommendations.
The first is to build that missing Arctic hub inside the Commission, with responsibility for gathering regional knowledge and for checking how proposed decisions would land in the north before they are taken.
Another is a permanent partnership between the EU, Iceland, Norway and Greenland covering maritime security, energy, emergency preparedness, transport and critical raw materials — a route to closer cooperation that does not require anyone to join anything. Canada and the United Kingdom could be invited in as well.
The remainder are more concrete: investment in the Kiruna–Narvik corridor carrying Swedish iron ore to the Norwegian coast; retention of dedicated EU support for sparsely populated regions; and a single unit to consolidate intelligence on threats to cables, networks and other critical infrastructure across the European Arctic.
The authors also warn that projects pushed through without meaningful Sámi and local community co-decision tend to be abandoned, and recommend formal benefit-sharing arrangements.
Alongside Raspotnik, who is also a senior researcher at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, the report was written by Adam Stępień of Nord University and the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland, and Andreas Østhagen, research director for Arctic and ocean politics at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute.
