Iceland and Images of the North

Staging the Nation: Performing Icelandic Nationality during the 1986 Reykjavík Summit

Heiða Jóhannsdóttir, “Staging the Nation: Performing Icelandic Nationality during the 1986 Reykjavík Summit,” in Iceland and Images of the North, ed. Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson with the collaboration of Daniel Chartier, Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, “Droit au Pôle” series, and Reykjavík: ReykjavíkurAkademían, 2011. Staging the Nation: Performing Icelandic Nationality during the 1986 Reykjavík Summit Heiða Jóhannsdóttir University College London (United Kingdom) Abstract – The 1986 Reykjavík Summit, where U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev held an impromptu meeting to discuss nuclear disarmament, suddenly thrust Iceland, a small marginalized island nation, into the world media spotlight. This article examines the way in which the summit as a global media event became a platform for a tremendous promotional effort where Icelanders, determined to make optimal use of this unique opportunity, performed and staged a variety of national narratives, emphasizing images linked to their heritage, their perceived exoticism, and uniquely Nordic and Northern traits. The article furthermore reviews the opportunistic mode and commercial imperative of the summit as a media event and analyzes a number of the conceptual configurations that the foreign press employed to encapsulate and represent Iceland as a symbolic host country for the peace negotiations of the summit. Keywords – Reykjavík Summit, images of Iceland, nationalism, media representations, geopolitical worldview Setting the 2008 banking and economic collapse aside as an unexpected negative manifestation of a nation’s aspiration towards international media exposure, few moments in Icelandic history have produced such a sudden, unprecedented, and welcome opportunity for national promotion as the Reagan–Gorbachev nuclear arms control summit, which was held on less than two weeks’ notice in Reykjavík in the autumn of 1986. While the event proved to be an important steppingstone in the history of Cold War superpower relations, its implications for Icelandic history were of an entirely different order, involving signification associated with national promotion. ICELAND AND IMAGES OF THE NORTH [ 436 ] After the announcement of the summit, Iceland was thrown overnight into the centre of the world stage, where the attention of the international media was to remain fixed on the nation and its inhabitants during the summit, as well as the days leading up to it. News organizations from around the world covered the event, with close to 3,000 media personnel arriving in Iceland as the summit approached.1 In terms of media exposure, global political importance, and complexity of preparation, the summit was unmatched by anything else taking place in Icelandic politics and culture at that time. The problems involved in hosting the event on such short notice were considerable, but the opportunity to present the nation to a world audience presumably curious to know more about the place chosen by the United States and Soviet leaders for their unexpected additional round of discussions also provided unmistakable advantages. A brief recount of the historical context that preceded the decision to organize a summit in Iceland is called for here. When Gorbachev came to power as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was marked by a deep rift and mutual suspicion. His first meeting with Reagan on arms control in Geneva in November of 1985 turned out to be inconclusive, and Reagan’s subsequent threat to withdraw from the SALT II treaty, which placed limits on strategic arsenals, was seen as a provocative gesture by European states. The ensuing geopolitical situation, with the Soviets still in Afghanistan and the two superpowers hardly on speaking terms concerning the nuclear threat, was regarded as having reached an extremely dangerous point.2 Gorbachev, who had initiated the disarmament talks, saw the growing European anxiety over nuclear arms as an opportunity to mend relations with the continent. He thus began to give talks where he openly spoke of the impossibility of defending against nuclear arms. He insisted that the only security lay in political settlements. Partly due to the success of Gorbachev’s publicity push, Reagan agreed to the Reykjavík Summit, while also believing that flaws in their economy rendered Soviet power tenuous and their ambitions less than global. Reagan’s tendency to personalize politics, and the fact 1 Magnússon 1986: 17. 2 Graebner, Burns, & Siracusa 2008: 91. STAGING THE NATION: PERFORMING ICELANDIC NATIONALITY [ 437 ] that he found Gorbachev personally...