The Icelandic European Debate - Explaining Icelandic attitudes towards EU membership

Abstract: This thesis aims at explaining the Icelandic European debate. It does so by trying to identify the most prominent theme of the debate and to determine if it is characterized by sectoral, national identity or economic arguments. The thesis also aims at determining how the 2008 financial crash and the 2009 decision to apply for EU membership affected the debate. To answer these questions a content analysis was chosen as a research method and 180 news articles were analyzed. The findings of the study indicate that the EU debate is predominantly characterized by economic arguments, the presence of the fishing sector‟s interests and national identity being relatively low. The presences of the themes were not affected much by the financial crash or the decision to apply for EU membership. The findings demonstrate how differently the themes appear in the study compared to existing literature on the attitude of the political elite. National identity is argued as being a key factor in explaining the traditional negative attitude of the Icelandic politicians towards EU membership. Its presence in the findings suggests that it is referred differently in these two communicative spaces.