In the Spring of 2013 I travelled to Iceland with a group of fellow Studienkolleg zu Berlin scholars to Iceland to investigate case studies of digital democracy. We interviewed a series of governmental and civil society actors on their attempts to develop radical (or not so radical) transparency strategies to influence democracy in Iceland and further afield. We talked to the creators of Your Priorities, a web platform that mediates between citizens and city government, recently profiled by the FT and NESTA, representatives of Wiki Leaks, and the then Minister of Education Katrín Jakobsdóttir. Our report on digital political transparency (in German) was published as part of the scholarship programme.
The background to our visit: after a highly destructive financial crisis between 2009 and 2012 the main centre-right party, the Independence Party, resigned and a left-green coalition, led by Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, took power. The left-green coalition, building on momentum created by a series of protests collectively known as the Kitchenware Revolution, carried out a series of consultations with the electorate on constitutional reform, importantly putting direct consultations in centre stage. The consultations took place in part online.
At the same time, Julian Assange wrote a breathless editorial in the Guardian in support of the idea of establishing Iceland as a bastion of digital freedom between Europe and the US, using its highly educated population and cold temperatures to establish server farms as an economic sector to rival the fish and recently collapsed financial services sectors. This idea had been developed by various actors, including the Pirate Party and the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, and was received warmly as a result of the perceived and actual corruption between government and banks that lead to the 2009 financial collapse.
We were very excited by some of the concepts discussed by our interview partners whilst on the island, on the one hand relatively straightforward ideas around digital democracy which had been established and were functioning well, on the other hand radical ideas around creating a safe-haven for whistle-blowers and freedom of speech, with the small progressive nation acting as international guarantors of truth without repressive consequences. Unfortunately for these more radical schemes, shortly after we left the Progressive Party, a conservative agrarian party, won the May 2013 elections and ruled until last year, when the Independence Party ruled in a broad coalition for less than a year. The new draft constitution had already been ratified by the electorate in a national referendum, however, as a result of the new government was not ratified by parliament. Momentum behind more radical transparency programmes also dried up.
At the end of 2017 the government lead by the Independence Party Prime Minister, Bjarni Benediktsson, fell due to the withdrawal of a minor party from the coalition, due to a scandal around the Prime Minister and his father supporting the “restoration of honour” of a convicted rapist. Through a series of very complex coalition negotiations, the left-greens, lead by former education minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, received a mandate to govern in coalition with the right wing Independence and Progressive Parties, despite having fewer members of parliament that the former.
Whilst stability is likely to be the main goal of the current government, it is going to be very interesting to see to what extent the agenda that we investigated back in 2013 can be brought back to life. Whether the tiny island nation can be a guarantor of freedom of speech in a post-truth, digitalised and globalised society remains to be seen; that we need robust and clear safeguards for whistle-blowers and an engaging, strong local democracy is however clearer than ever.