The Background: Iceland’s Role in the Arctic

Historically, Iceland’s interests in the Arctic have been overshadowed by those of the North Atlantic—the main source of its abundant marine resources. A national identity projection, espoused by political and cultural elites, mixed nationalist and racial ideas with a portrayal of Iceland as a “developed” European country. A “southern” look toward the European continent always took precedence over territorial aspirations in the Arctic. In this regard, there was no gap between elite and popular perceptions. It had taken Icelanders centuries to escape external stigmas of being primitive and poor, belonging to the northern edges of the inhabitable; it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century that a more positive image emerged of an “educated Iceland” and the notion of the “Hellas of the North,” with references to the medieval saga literature. That also meant that Icelanders did not, in any way, want to be associated with Indigeneity or with the Inuit of Greenland; on the contrary, if they showed interest in the North, it was more about colonial mimicry. Thus, one academic, with some political support, argued in the first half of the twentieth century that Iceland should not recognize Denmark’s colonial control over Greenland and make, instead, a territorial claim to it—a proposition that was based on spurious historical grounds. What gave such a view, temporarily, more weight was Norway’s legal challenge to Denmarkʼs sovereign rights over Eastern Greenland, which the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) eventually rejected in 1933. The Greenland case, to be sure, was never pursued seriously by Icelandic governments in the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, it reflected a persistent chauvinistic streak within Icelandic nationalism.