Blue-eyed sheikhs

Saturday, 9th October 2004

Icelanders are rolling in it, says Daniel Hannan. Why? Because they understand that small is beautiful — and have stayed out of the EU

What I think they mean by this, to be fair, is that Britain has always had global interests. The tiddlers may be able to absent themselves from Europe’s counsels, runs the reasoning, but it would be demeaning for us to do so. Yet even this argument doesn’t stand up. Iceland has hosted state visits from four US presidents, two Russian heads of state and, most recently, the Chinese leader, who stayed for several days. Can Croydon boast a similar record? Switzerland, although lying outside the EU, seems to host most of the big global bodies, including the Red Cross and large parts of the UN. Norwegian diplomats are shaping policy in the Middle East, Sudan, Sri Lanka and South-East Asia. As one of their ambassadors put it to me, ‘Our worst time was just before the 1994 referendum, when everyone expected us to join the EU. I was always being asked to meetings along with my 15 European counterparts, and I often wouldn’t even get to speak. As soon as we voted “no”, people had to deal separately with me again.’ At the risk of stating the obvious, international influence is generally helped by having a foreign policy in the first place.

But the ’philes are on to something when they point out that being small has its advantages. Most of the richest places in the world are bonsai states: Singapore, Brunei, Monaco, the Channel Islands. The one big exception is the United States, which has pulled off the trick of governing itself like a confederation of tiny statelets. The EU’s tragedy, of course, is that it is going in the opposite direction, accumulating more and more power at the centre. That is what puts Icelanders off.

Iceland’s most famous novelist, Halld�r Laxness, won the Nobel Prize with a book called Independent People. That phrase — Sjalfst�tt Folk — has a resonance on the island that is difficult for foreigners to grasp. Icelanders believe that self-government is the natural condition for a sturdy, free-standing citizenry. They understand that there is a connection between living in an independent state and living independently from the state. They have no more desire to submit to international than to national regulation. That attitude has made them the happiest, freest and wealthiest people on earth. Long may they remain so.

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Peter Jukes

October 19th, 2011 8:21pm Report this comment

I can't believe I'm the first to comment on this gem, seven years on. But the passing of time has only made Dan's prescience and insight more telling.

All Daniel Hannan's profound insight into neoliberal economics, the EU, and the relation between wealth and deregulated finance is contained in this piece. And I, for one, cite it again and again and again.

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