Small States and Shelter Theory: Iceland's External Affairs by Baldur Þórhallsson

Author:Baldur Þórhallsson [Þórhallsson, Baldur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138615373
Google: dYdHuAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 40591143
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

On the other hand, Iceland’s public administrative capabilities have increased considerably in the last three decades. Internally, the civil service has gained momentum and its ability to engage in information-gathering and policy-making has increased enormously. It is able to formulate its own policies and skilfully pursue policy objectives. This is in contrast to past periods when the civil service was more dependent on domestic interest groups and on policy-making from the other Nordic states. For instance, the Icelandic foreign service nearly doubled in size, in terms of number of personnel, during a ten-year period from the early 1990s to 2003 (see Figure 4.4) and its ability to produce detailed reports on Iceland’s status and policy choices in Europe and elsewhere has changed fundamentally (Thorhallsson 2002, 2004) – as will be discussed in the following chapter. The number of personnel working in the foreign service dropped somewhat during the immediate aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, but the foreign service has resumed its previous growth phase in the last few years and 293 personnel were working in the foreign service in 2017, as shown in Figure 4.4.

On the other hand, the capacity of the Icelandic foreign service has always been much more limited than the capabilities of its Nordic counterparts. For instance, in 2001 the Icelandic foreign service employed 150 people (excluding locally employed personnel abroad) while the Norwegian and Danish foreign services employed 1,150 and 1,663 people respectively. Luxembourg, a country with a population similar in size to that of Iceland, employed 206 personnel in its foreign service in 2001 (Foreign Ministries of Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Luxembourg 2001). According to these numbers, the Icelandic and Luxembourgish foreign services can be classified in the same category and the Norwegian and Danish foreign services in another. The size of the foreign service in Iceland, as well as Denmark and Norway, is not abnormal in the realm of foreign services. Figure 4.5 shows the number of embassies/missions abroad of the all the five Nordic states, plus those of Lithuania, Luxembourg and Malta, in 2013.

Figure 4.4 Number of Icelandic foreign service personnel, 1945–2017.

Source: Icelandic Ministry for Foreign Affairs 2003, 2017b.

Note

* Including employees of The Directorate for International Development Cooperation after the Icelandic International Development Agency merged with the Foreign Ministry in 2016.

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