Reykjavík Grapevine - 14.08.2015, Blaðsíða 24

However, a keen businessman with an
eye for PR stunts seized the opportunity
and offered to host the infamous burger.
Those interested in Iceland’s culinary
history can thus observe the specimen
over at Reykjavík’s Bus Hostel, or view
a real-time feed of the burger’s daily life
at the hostel’s website. Reportedly, a few
visitors have even succumbed to temp-
tation and pocketed some of the accom-
panying french fries, which are said to
remain in excellent condition.
For now, Iceland’s last Mickey D’s
rests in peace, showing no sign of defeat
or decay. It has secured its place in the
limelight, successfully contributing to
the rhetoric so vigorously advocated by
local travel, business and governmental
agencies that wish to depict Iceland as
an “out of this world” destination—most
peculiar, strange and exotic.
Welcome!
The story of Iceland’s McDonalds burger
is interesting for various reasons. The
omniscient fast food chain was present
for the nation’s staggering ascension to
economic prosperity, as well as its sub-
sequent fall from grace. Along with ac-
companying Icelanders through some
tumultuous times, the fast food chain’s
history in Iceland furthermore strangely
embodies their aspirations for belonging
in a rapidly modernizing world.
The opening of Iceland’s first McDon-
ald’s franchise can be taken as a symbol
of the concurrent dawn of neoliberalism
in the nation’s political sphere. McDon-
ald’s opened for business in Iceland on
September 9, 1993, a major event that fea-
tured prominently in every newspaper.
Most outlets opted to run a photo of Ice-
land’s then-Prime Minister Davíð Odds-
son symbolically welcoming McDon-
ald’s by heartily gorging on the chain’s
first Iceland-made burger. Perhaps he
thought the publicity stunt especially ap-
propriate because he was following into
the footsteps of neoliberal icon Margaret
Thatcher, who had similarly opened an
enlarged McDonald’s in Britain in 1989.
Photographs from the opening event de-
pict the smiling faces of the era’s promi-
nent businessmen—almost no women are
visible—besuited in their dark armour,
toasting their triumph.
Hi, modernity!
While McDonald’s has been harshly crit-
icized on various fronts internationally,
the chain was, for the most part, greeted
with open arms in Iceland. Icelanders’
warm welcome marked the beginning
of an affectionate relationship that con-
tinued somewhat smoothly right up until
McDonald’s left the country in 2009, one
year after the nation’s economy collapsed.
As a mother of young children in the
early 2000s, I had to regularly defend,
or at least explain, my lack of interest in
providing them an opportunity to en-
joy McDonald’s’ culinary offerings. The
Icelandic public’s generally positive atti-
tude towards the brand and its products,
I learned, stood in complete contrast to
those shared by many of my friends in
other countries at the time.
To better comprehend Icelanders’
somewhat unusually positive reception
of the infamous multinational fast food
chain, it is useful to consider McDon-
ald’s as a controversial symbol of moder-
nity, rationality and globalization. In the
Global South, marketing professor Elif
Izerk-Bilgin argues, McDonald’s is often
celebrated due to the prestige that mul-
tinational brands carry, even though its
arrival has often been contested as well.
When McDonald’s opened shop in the
Moscow in 1990, for example, its founder
and senior chair George Cohon, later
described it as a ‘statement’ that Russia
was willing to “embrace” the West and
that McDonald’s symbolized a step in the
right direction.
Icelanders’ positive reception of Mc-
Donald’s can be contextualized within
Iceland’s former status as a Danish col-
ony, and their efforts in the early 20th
century to prove that Iceland belonged
as a sovereign, modernizing nation
within “civilized” white Europe. In their
newfound independence, for instance,
Icelanders tended to react strongly to
European discussion concerning them,
wherein travellers and scientists would
regularly publish writing that described
the country as exotic and primitive. As
argued by anthropologist Anne Brydon,
Icelanders continued to find foreigners
incognizant of Iceland’s modernity as on
pair with the United States and Europe,
indicating the long-standing affectivity
to the idea of modernization as well as
anxieties of not being recognized by the
outside world as a fully modernized na-
tion.
Thus, the celebration of the opening of
McDonald’s in Iceland can be ascribed to
its symbolic display of the country’s full
entry into this thing called “modernity.”
The Prime Minister’s big bite becomes a
triumphant exclamation of a society that
has overcome poverty and subjugation,
and finally gained the ultimate sign of
modernization—a McDonald’s franchise.
Bye, modernity!
If McDonald’s was a sign of Iceland fi-
nally entering the world of modernity, it
is also symbolic of Iceland’s monumental
abjection from it.
In 2009, a year after Icelanders suf-
fered a massive economic crash, the local
franchise holder announced with but a
week’s notice that the chain was leaving
Iceland, and that this was a result of the
collapse. He then announced the opening
of Metro where McDonalds’s had previ-
ously been, offering a similar menu with
similar prices. This event simultaneously
symbolized and intensified Icelanders’
sense that all was lost. Even those who
would probably have celebrated the event
under different circumstances saw it as
a reflection of the general state of affairs
in Iceland. Long queues formed at Mc-
Donald’s locations, with locals savouring
their final opportunity to enjoy a McDon-
ald’s hamburger.
The media estimated that between
10-15,000 flocked to McDonald’s for each
day of its last week of operation—the total
attendance representing almost a third
of Iceland’s population. As one person
told me in an interview at the time: “The
closing was symbolic; we are not a nation
among nations. We don’t even have a Mc-
Donald’s here anymore. That is how it is.”
Another person, blogging about the clos-
ing, asked ironically if it shows “that we
are a little corner of the world that is not
worthy of hosting this famous chain?”
These concerns were mixed with famil-
iar anxieties of belonging within Europe,
harking back to the early 20th century,
when Iceland struggled to establish its
status as a “civilized,” “modern” country.
To add to the anxieties and sense of
humiliation, McDonald’s closing also be-
came a major international media event,
dutifully reported by large players such
as Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the
Wall Street Journal and Fox. The editor
of the Wall Street Journal pointed out
that aside from Iceland, only extremely
poor and war-torn countries do not har-
bour a McDonald’s franchise. The in-
terest in McDonald’s’ abandonment of
Iceland was reported on so extensively
that one local newspaper claimed that it
received almost as much coverage as the
collapse of the Icelandic government at
the beginning of that same year, and the
ICESAVE dispute that followed.
Regardless, the ageing hamburger
at Bus Hostel Reykjavík signifies that
McDonald’s is (almost) forever, and that
by its different associations it continues
to articulate dimensions of Iceland as a
postcolonial space. In the present, Mc-
Donald’s has come to serve a new role,
where Iceland is redefined as an exotic
space for the fast-growing tourism sector.
Within contemporary geopolitics,
strongly shaped by neoliberal ideas of
nation branding, exoticism has become
a valuable commercial resource for the
tourist industry. Iceland’s exoticism is
thus no longer contested by the Iceland-
ers themselves—rather it is celebrated in
various acts of self-parody and attempts
to brand Iceland as space of unique ad-
ventures.
The character of the Icelandic people
is one of the key products for sale, and
in that context, the last surviving Mc-
Donald’s resting under a dome in a Mc-
Donald’s-free (or deprived) country fits
perfectly.
Kristín Loftsdóttir is Professor of an-
thropology at the University of Iceland. She
focuses on Iceland’s national identity, as it
has been shaped by its status as a Danish
colony until 1944, and the historical desires
and anxieties of belonging within the space
of Europe.
For further reading:
Kristín Loftsdóttir (2014). Iceland, Reject-
ed by McDonald's: Desire and Anxieties
in a Global Crisis”. Social Anthropology,
22(3):340-352.
An Aging
McDonald’s
Hamburger
At The Edge
Of The Arctic
Kr is t ín Lof tsdót t i r d i scuss-
es the restaurant McDon-
a ld ’s as ongo ing symbol
for Ice land ’s s tatus as a
postco lon ia l space . K r i s t ín
has focused on Ice land ic
nat iona l ident i t y in past
and present as shaped
by Ice land ’s pos i t ion as a
Dan ish co lony unt i l 1944 ,
and the h is tor ica l des i res
and anx iet ies of be long ing
wi th in the space of Europe .
Earlier this year, local media feasted on a story about
Iceland’s last surviving McDonald’s hamburger, report-
edly purchased the day before the fast food chain closed
shop in 2009—and still looking good as new. The burger’s
owner claimed that he had tried to gift it to the National
Museum of Iceland, which he said showed little interest in
the prospect of displaying an ageing fast food meal.
Words Kristín Loftsdóttir
Photo Anna Domnick
24 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 12 — 2015