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Article has some factual errors:

> By May 1992, the EEC had been renamed the EEA (European Economic Area) and all 7 member states of EFTA signed “The EEA Agreement” alongside the 12 member states of the EC.

The EEC was not renamed the EEA. The Maastricht treaty (signed February 1992, effective November 1993) established the European Union (EU), and renamed the "European Economic Community" (EEC) to the "European Community" (EC). Alongside the EEC-now-EC, there was also the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, dissolved in 2002) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom, still exists), and the three linked Communities were known as the "European Communities", which was another expansion of "EC". And the EC formed one of the pillars of the European Union, until the Lisbon treaty (signed December 2007, effective December 2009) merged the European Community into the EU and it ceased to independently exist, although Euratom continues as essentially a subsidiary body of the EU. And then the EEA is a separate arrangement, established by a treaty between the EC, its member states, and the EFTA member states, signed May 1992, effective January 1994. So the EEC was not "renamed" to the EEA. The EEC/EC/EU and EEA are separate but overlapping arrangements – the EEA is geographically broader in scope, but topically narrower (certain EU laws and regulations are excluded from the EEA, and hence the EFTA states do not have to adopt them)

> So the EEC was not "renamed" to the EEA. The EEC/EC/EU and EEA are separate but overlapping arrangements – the EEA is geographically broader in scope, but topically narrower (certain EU laws and regulations are excluded from the EEA, and hence the EFTA states do not have to adopt them)

The EEA has much the same scope as the EEC. So in practice the EEC was renamed to the EEA (and the EC was instituted with a broader remit), even if the mechanics of how it was implemented are slightly different.

> So in practice the EEC was renamed to the EEA

It was not renamed to the EEA, in practice or otherwise. The EEA is a geographic part of Europe based on an agreement between the EFTA, the EU, and the various member states. The EEC was a supranational organisation with a whole internal structure (council, parliament, etc). They are not even the same kind of entity.

You can argue about the roles of these different bodies and how some of them were superseded by some others. Although non-EU, EEA member states are outside both the CPA and the CFP, which were cornerstones of the EEC. The EEA is not some mythical, ideologically pure version of the EU as it was back when it was only a common market (it never was). It’s a completely different thing. It was initially a way of functioning for countries that wanted to be close to the EC, but not too close. Saying that the EEA is the EEC renamed is plainly, factually wrong.

The EEC was renamed the EC and disappeared in 2009, at which point the EEA had been existing for 15 years.

Too late to edit, but of course

> both the CPA and the CFP

Should be “both the CAP [common agriculture policy] and the CFP [common fisheries policy]”.

> The EEA has much the same scope as the EEC.

The EEA had several significant exclusions compared to the EEC/EC at the time of its founding: agriculture and fisheries (although it has some application to trade in those products), customs, external trade, taxation, monetary policy. Furthermore, under the Amsterdam treaty (effective 1999) the EC gained responsibilities for immigration, visas, asylum, and judicial cooperation in civil law (which were transferred from the non-EC part of the EU), and the EEA was not extended to cover those new areas (although some of them apply to the EEA member states through their independent membership of Schengen). The EEA is also excluded from the scope of the EU trade mark (f.k.a. community trade mark) and EU unitary patents. The EEA agreement promises future negotiations on extending EU patents to the EEA, but thus far nothing much has happened there, in part because actually getting a common EU patent system up and running turned out to be very difficult and despite being first proposed in the 1970s it took until 2023 to actually become a reality (the biggest obstacle, but not the only one, has been Spain's objection to Spanish not being one of the official languages of the EU patent system–the ultimate solution was to effectively give Spain an opt-out from it)

> Furthermore, under the Amsterdam treaty (effective 1999) the EC gained responsibilities for immigration, visas, asylum, and judicial cooperation in civil law (which were transferred from the non-EC part of the EU), and the EEA was not extended to cover those new areas (although some of them apply to the EEA member states through their independent membership of Schengen).

Exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. So the EEA is a much closer successor to the EEC than the EC, which has a significantly expanded scope, is.

Exactly the reason you're wrong about this. If there is an official document saying that the successor to A is B, and 450 million people accept this as an "official document" and a fact, there is not much point in you saying that successor to A is rather C, because you THINK that would make more sense...

There's also the Council of Europe, which has an almost identical flag as the EU but is completely unrelated to it. Not to be confused with the European Council, one of the ruling bodies of the EU.

With the Arctic turning into the next shipping route, Iceland could turn to be the Singapore of the North Atlantic, a trading hub. I mentioned this to an Icelander a few months ago, and he said China recently asked if they could build a port in the north of the country...

I think you underestimate Singapore. They put a lot of effort into not being just a trading hub.

Also, what's the point in loading and unloading in Iceland, when you're already fairly close to ports like Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg? I get that you could in theory ship around the pole, split your containers in Iceland and ship to the US and EU from there. It's just that unloading a container ship isn't that fast, and we're already shipping so much that the load could just be distributed across multiple ships with separate destinations.

Iceland effectively has free electricity. I believe they are one of the biggest producers of refined aluminum. Could use it as a way station to process raw material that require a lot of electricity.

Free? Half of the world has cheaper electricity than Iceland according to https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...

Electricity in Iceland is very political.

The aluminum smelters are paying something like $0.02/kWh.

Foreign buyers who setup real industry will pay about $0.05/kWh.

Bitcoin miners will pay $0.10/kWh.

The real cost to produce from volcanic sources is under $0.01/kWh.

how do you track Bitcoin miners at home? I will claim I'm producing moonshine!

You look at the electricity bill. If it's much higher than usual, it's most probably either a BTC mining operation or an underground Cannabis farm.

This discussion is about industrial power.

Those are residential consumer prices.

Denmark's 35¢/kWh for households is only 9¢/kWh for industrial users, and (from another site) even less for "very large industrial" users.

Iceland's figure isn't given.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Because all of our wholesale contracts are negotiated in secret without public approval (Icelander here)

Sue them for environmental damage via their energy contracts and request this information under the Aarhus Convention, which your country is a signatory to.

In case your electricity is run by the government you might also have Freedom of Information laws like Austria, Slovenia or Sweden that would grant you access to such public-sector contracts, if requested.

This is mostly the same here in Finland (one of the cheapest non household electricity prices in Europe.)

Though I don’t see much of an issue as that is just a contract between two private parties. What is the ownership structure like in Iceland?

Also in the case of some of the most electricity consuming industries they are mostly buying from themselves (Pohjolan Voima which is a owned by a group of heavy industry companies)

I wonder how much that cost is just amortizing delivery costs.

If most of the population has district heating, there isn’t much of a load per residence.

Comparing retail prices is pointless when replying to a comment referring the heavy industry.

This data is wildly off base for at least Finland, so I would take it with a grain of salt.

Yeah, summarizing electricity cost with one number is not doable in countries where seasons vary as much as in Finland.

Electricity cost will always be higher during winter where it is needed for heating. And this is where households will also use more.

For heavy industry they are buying from themselves when the electricity prices spike (Pohjolan Voima). Basically they always get it at cost of production (mankala periaate).

This is why you don’t see upm kymmene, stora enso, kemira, etc profits go down when electricity prices are high (they go up as they can sell what they don’t need for massive profits). This mainly applies during "normal" times (when olkiluoto nuclear plants go down which they own a big chunk of or something like that the situation might change)

I'm always interested in how reality can be different from the popular notions. Sure, they have plenty of geothermal energy but it's not free to turn that heat into electricity. And many other things are pretty expensive on that island so it's not surprising that the cost of generators and other machinery is also expensive.

But we can dream that it's free, right?

There's no need to turn the heat into electricity then back into heat — they use district heating to move the heat directly to buildings.

This site says 90% of the population is covered by the system.

https://www.greencitytimes.com/geothermal-district-heating-i...

>geothermal energy

Geothermal here is used for heating homes, electricity production comes from Hydropower generation (dams).

Source, an Icelander.

About a third of your electricity is from geothermal sources.

Source: the actual data.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/IS

And farming in winter!

When you're driving the highway from the international airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík, the first big building you see is a massive Rio Tinto aluminum smelter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ATHxAWRLKLMf8Gbh8

    > one of the biggest producers of refined aluminum

According to this article https://archive.is/v5k1Y, Iceland also has hydro power.

> Alcoa arrived in 2007 after Iceland built a giant power plant on the other side of the island, near a sparsely populated region where the fishing industry was in decline.

Iceland’s electric utility built five highland dams that capture glacial meltwater. The largest of the resulting reservoirs is roughly the size of Manhattan. The water is piped 25 miles to an underground power plant, then dropped a quarter-mile down another pipe to make the turbines spin. Finally, the resulting electricity is transmitted 47 miles on high-voltage lines to the ocean’s edge.

Electricity in Iceland costs about 30 percent less than what Alcoa might pay in the United States.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rahnj%C3%BAkar_Hydropow...

I would say that Norway has an advantage because Iceland's remoteness makes it more expensive to ship the bauxite there (there is no bauxite mining in Iceland itself) and the aluminum back. Still, it's apparently the second largest aluminum producer in Europe.

Alcoa actually owns 26% of the output of a hydro electric dam on the Columbia River(Rock Island Dam) directly adjacent to it’s mothballed factory. It’s not that they can’t get power in the US cheaper, it’s that they can resell that power at higher profit than running a smelter with that power.

Thousands of jobs left the town and now a several billion dollar plant sits idle. The idea recently floated they sell the land, power and water rights to MSFT for their new water cooled data center’s nearby, but MSFT didn’t want to own all that infra.

Hydro turbines are almost always peaker plants, with Niagara as an exception. Geothermal is base load. They don't really compare.

But not unlimited

Isn't it geothermal? So just drill deeper..? Or something? (I am a dummy at this topic, just asking.)

There's not infinite spots where you can do it.

Geothermal yes. And hydroelectric, even moreso.

> They put a lot of effort into not being just a trading hub.

But yet that's still where the lion's share of revenue for their Government comes from.

Singapore is also an island, but its relevance to global trade has more to do with the strait it sits in than in being an island. Obviously there are more factors, compare Singapore to Peneng, for example.

Dude, ignore these people. HN has the weirdest bunch of computer nerds that hasn't taken a history class in their lives.

For everyone else, Singapore is important because it sits right at the end of the historical trade route of the Straits of Malacca. There is a whole wikipedia entry about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Malacca

Thanks for the complimentary description, Mr. Knows Better.. Admittedly my source is the 2nd half of this video, but you'll need to have taken a German class to understand it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS4GyHEhNvk

But the idea is that Iceland may end up sitting right on the new busy trade route across the ice-free Arctic ocean.

Not a given, but an okay speculation fodder.

There are a couple 100 or so more Islands all around Singapore. Your comment doesn't say much.

I think that only proves the point that Singapore is very much an exception and there isn’t any particular need for ships to stop at islands on their way.

No, there absolutely is a huge demand for transshipment hubs. By shuttling cargo through Singapore, goods from all across Asia can be consolidated in one point for delivery to various European locations, and vice versa. It's the same model as airport hubs.

However, like many network efforts it's a winner-takes-almost-all market. Tanjung Pelepas is just across the border in Malaysia but it was too little, too late.

Sure, but transhipment hubs don’t have to be islands. In fact they usually aren’t. Hawaii isn’t and it’s the only landmass for thousands of miles. Anchorage isn’t for seaborne traffic. Etc.

A lot of Singapore’s thing is also manufacturing from raw imports and then shipping out processed goods.

> but transhipment hubs don’t have to be islands. In fact they usually aren’t. Hawaii isn’t and it’s the only landmass for thousands of miles.

Hawaii isn't a hub because it's the only land for thousands of miles. You want the hub to be on the way to wherever you're going, not a quarter of the way across the world from there.

And Singapore has leveraged that trade by implementing tax policies that make it in huge demand for financial trans-shipment.

A lot of Australia's resources are bought and sold via Singapore precisely for the tax advantages of funneling things through there without the actual resources going through their ports.

The nature of being a transport hub means that there is only one in a given region.

there's a couple hundred million people in Southeast Asia. There can be more than one.

In fact, there are. If you look at ports by tonnage, Port Klang in Malaysia is bigger than Rotterdam, and Tanjung Priok in Indonesia is bigger than New York.

What I mean by "transport hub" is a place where you drop of containers to be picked up by other ships to go to their final destination.

So you can fill up a ship in LA with containers going to 10 different Asian ports, and drop them all off in Singapore.

This works best if everyone does that at one central location.

You're right other Asian ports are very big, but I think they more serve as origin or destination.

Do they have good deep water harbors?

Singapore controls the east shipping route. There is a very narrow route there, easily controllable by military, if necessary.

Iceland not all. You can easily get around them. The Azores were the trading and fruit manifactoring hub there instead. They could deliver all the fruits for all of Europe. What can Iceland deliver to Europe? They are also in the center, not the north route.

Seems unlikely. Freight would be heading primarily from Asia to either Europe or US East coast, and maybe a bit in the opposite direction.

In either case, Europe and the US have such efficient rail/road freight that I can't see economics of putting a hub in Iceland making sense. You may as well have ships travel direct to the respective continental mainlands.

What value does a hub add in this day and age? I imagine most ships would sail direct rather than stopping at a hub.

(Not a shipping cargo person, so take what I say with a grain of salt)

The value is cross-loading delivers greater network effects. You have many possible paths to get to your destination, and can pick the most optimal for your particular needs at each step.

Most container ships are on a sailing schedule - they visit a set number of ports, and generally stick to it (absent other issues).

So you can get out of your origin country quicker by just picking the next ship with the cheapest rates going to approximately the right location.

For the shipping lines it's more efficient to just pick up a lot of containers at once and visit multiple ports than try and get a full load to just one destination.

It also means that each port they visit they're also getting paid for new cargo for onward destinations, not running empty (or waiting for another full load) to do another trip.

I wish people wouldn't "imagine". It takes only a minute to make a search on the internet.

Maersk list ship schedules here: https://www.maersk.com/schedules/portCalls and with a few clicks, it's obvious that most ships call at many ports.

" It takes only a minute to make a search on the internet."

...between SEO spam and AI generated nonsense proliferating like wildfire, that's becoming less and less tenable by the day.

Isn't it cheaper to refuel than to have to lug enough fuel around purely by the weight of it and the additional energy required?

Plus your crew may need some downtime sometimes.

The incremental cost of a pound of fuel is a rounding error in shipping. You might factor it in, but it'd be very far down the list of priorities.

Interestingly, cars have similar economics. Details vary quite a bit, but every 100lb (nearly two full tanks of gas for me) makes you 1% less efficient. It only really matters if you have driving habits that tend to burn that excess energy somewhere, like rolling in hot to a stop light and hitting your brakes rather than anticipating the light cycle and coasting in.

You're perfectly describing swedish drivers. They seem unable to comprehend that the red light 50 meters ahead will soon be their problem.

That’s kinda a thing for aviation: see “intermediate stop operations”.

Limiting range also lets you use smaller craft with things like smaller fuel tanks.

Iceland does quite a business on this sitting between euro and American destinations. Greenland might get into this too.

Also probably gets some crews at home each night flying the leg back instead of needing to stay on the mainland for a day/night before doing a later return leg.

No, because ports have docking fees since port space is at a premium.

I find it hard to believe the cost of docking for a few hours to refuel is > the cost of carrying and moving 2x the weight of fuel you would need otherwise. Do you have some idea of the costs?

How much heavy fuel does a suezmax vessel carry? Less than 1% of the full deadweight, I assume.

Costs of carrying fuel are negligible.

Ships don’t use all that much fuel. A Panamax ship has a capacity of 2 million gallons of fuel and that would be ~2,600 tons. The total tonnage of a Panamax ship is ~52,000 tons.

Most cargo shipping saves fuel by just running slower.

This makes me wonder if the Navy nuclear reactors used on their ships could be used on shipping vessels to lower the cost of shipping in some manner.

Perhaps a sky high dream but wouldn’t this effectively given ships unlimited fuel?

We tried it but ports wouldn't let the ships dock and they were too small. Now it might be easier.

Capital costs would probably be way too much.

Crew requirements to operate a navy reactor are also probably pretty high. A cargo ship usually has a shockingly small crew.

There's proliferation concerns and you likely wouldn't be able to operate on some routes.

Also, skilled nuclear engineers cost a lot more money than traditional ship labor.

There have been nuclear powered merchant ships. Probably the most famous being the NS Savannah from the 50s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah

There are a small number of nuclear commercial vessels, but nobody is building new ones.

Nope. The safety and security issues make nuclear powered merchant vessels a non starter (except for a few niche cases like icebreakers that operate in Russian territorial waters). Few nations are willing to allow an accident or terrorist attack to sink a reactor in one of their harbors. Plus you can't hire qualified nuclear engineers for low wages.

A more realistic option would be to build more large reactors on land, then use the heat and power to manufacture synthetic liquid fuel to burn in ship engines. Or to charge batteries for short range vessels.

I wonder if there is a nuclear reactor design nowadays that offsets at least some of these fears. I sometimes wonder, though admittedly as a non expert, if some of these fears that linger around nuclear power sources are behind the times.

For example, I saw a demonstration of a nuclear powered device (don’t want to say reactor per say) that was taped for a documentary I saw on PBS, it was the size of a water heater or so and had a self protection system in case of something like a rupture, that at least during the demonstration stopped it cold in its tracks preventing meltdown and made any recovered materials from tampering worthless. It was in the testing phase though, and this was at least 5 years ago. My understanding is they wanted it to power critical infrastructure onsite like hospitals but feasibly it could power a home if I recall correctly or possibly a couple homes.

Another thing I read about was using some form of partially enriched uranium as energy source for heating homes and water heating. It won’t power one but it’s not (and can’t possibly be if I recall correctly) weapons grade by any stretch of the imagination

Maybe we should as a society look a little closer at smaller reactors. Hard to say, I’m no expert

You might be thinking of radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Those can be useful for generating relatively small amounts of electric power in isolated areas. But they're very inefficient and can't scale up to the level required to propel large ships. The risk of contamination from a sinking would still remain. So not a realistic solution.

You should also count that in order to refuel the ship needs to take a longer route

How does the fuel get to Iceland?

Closest supplier can be Norway.

A bit of science fiction maybe, but they could use geothermal and wind energy to produce hydrogen.

This is nothing new. 5-7 years ago there were "plans" announced involving a German conglomerate wanting to create a giant container port in the east of the island.

>Arctic turning into the next shipping route

I always wonder how realistic is this? I assume we dont need special vessel for this shipping lane and we can somehow always clear all the ice before us.

> I assume we dont need special vessel for this shipping lane and we can somehow always clear all the ice before us.

With climate change there are longer and longer times of the year when there is no ice. And when it does reform it is often not as thick as before, so less robust ships may be needed.

We've been adjusting the temperature there so ice won't be a problem soon...

And yet, there is 26% more extent area with ice than in 2012.

https://x.com/TonyClimate/status/1872304912115408920

I can take any two data points to prove any point I want. That's not how statistics work.

The Arctic is expected to be ice free by 2027. That is what matters when it comes to shipping.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/12/04/an-ice-free-arctic...

No it's not. Literally from the study that the article was based on:

> the earliest ice-free conditions (the first single occurrence of an ice-free Arctic) *could* occur in 2020–2030s under all emission trajectories and are *likely* to occur by 2050

Cherry picking a data point is misleading. Rather than compare a record low year, why not look at a trend?

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...

++1

good one!

also, i was thinking about UK joining EFTA, though so far they didnt...

That's exactly why Trump wants to annex Greenland. I'm not taking sides here, but I see why world powers want to control that region, knowing that Russia probably will make incursions in that region—they already control the Arctic to some extent as if it's part of their territory...

On which legal basis does he want to annex it?

It belongs to the few thousands people that live there and want to be part of Denmark and Europe.

There's really no claim to Greenland other than "it's close".

Cash for land is a valid basis for annexation if you have a seller. Worked for Alaska and Lousiana.

As well as the Virgin Islands, which the US bought from Denmark as recently as 1917.

The population of Greenland, per Wikipedia, is 56,583. The US could offer $50,000 to each man, woman, and child in Greenland. That's just over $2.8bn, which is pocket change for the US. The domestic (Greenlandic) politics around this could shift dramatically with such an offer. Throw in a few billion for Denmark (or a promise to continue to engage in NATO, or some other core interest of Denmark's) and you've probably got a sealed deal.

I'm not saying that the Greenlanders should do this, but it's not nearly as unrealistic as some people seem to think. I'd be surprised if Trump actually followed up on any of this though.

Greenland's mineral resources are valued in the trillions.

They can be exploited for the benefit of the residents, why on earth would they sell that for the undefined "benefits" of being an exploited territory of either the US or China?

Yep I read an article about the people in Texas who live next to the refineries and LNG terminals. Lots of cancer and nobody cares. Great for Europe and corporations though.

A very typical European understanding of the US - "I read an article about... ", "I saw on Reddit that... ", "I saw an Onion video that said... " <obviously reductionist caricature follows>.

You're watching the reflections on the wall of Plato's cave and think you have any understanding of the society that cast them.

Edit: I also see in your other comments that you praise Xi Jinping's China. Enough said.

There have been numerous examples of the lack of industry regulation in TX leading to bad health outcomes to local residents with no recourse.

Good news, they get to keep all of them. In the US, natural resources belong to whoever owns the land, which would be the state government and the people of Greenland.

Y'all can fear-monger about 'neo-colonialism', but the only nation that has ever exploited Greenland has been Denmark, what with its actual colonialism.

You're assuming that Greenland would be given statehood which is extremely unlikely, they would be entitled to two Senate seats and one House seat with an even lower population than Wyoming.

> the only nation that has ever exploited Greenland has been Denmark

While Denmark is by far the biggest colonial exploiter of Greenland (including genocidal ethnodemographic policies as late as the 1970s), it is by no means the only one. Other exploiters include Norway, who tried to annex East Greenland, Faroe Islands, who set up a failed factory in South Greenland, Iceland, who has been exploiting the fisheries around Greenland, and—the second worse offender—USA who set up an illegal military base in Pituffik, North Greenland, including forcefully relocating its residents to Qaanaaq, crash landing a bomber armed with a nuclear bomb, illegally using Greenland to transport nuclear bombs, polluting their surroundings, etc.

PS. what you are describing as neo-colonialism, is just plain old fashion colonialism. Neo-colonialism is already a defined term which does not involve annexing territories. In fact its defining feature is exploitation without direct territorial control. In my opinion I wish it wasn’t called neo-colonialism, as it sort of diminishes the true horrors of European colonialism, and is not offering any meaningful distinction from the standard exploitation of global capitalism and neo-liberalism.

PPS. It can be argued that Iceland’s and the Faroes’ exploitation of Greenland are neo-colonial in nature, as opposed to pure colonial, like Denmark’s, Norway’s and the USA’s.

Sure, that arch exploitative act of "trying to set up a factory" in an impoverished area. God forbid the locals get wages and a chance at better living conditions, when they can instead be forced to remain a living museum of impoverished hunter-gatherer cultures for the benefit of haughty Western scholars of neo-colonialism. /s

"Illegally" using Greenland to transport nuclear bombs? Illegal under whose law? The illegitimate dictates of the occupying Danish government?

You can point fingers and "what about?" all day long, but there's only state that colonised Greenland, and that is Denmark. Whereas the United States - while far from perfect - played a pivotal role in pressuring Europe to dismantle its rapacious colonial empires.

Ultimately, the only people who have the right to decide the future and laws of Greenland are the people of Greenland. Whether that is independence, joining the Union as an equal, or continued colony status under Denmark is a matter for them and them alone. Unlike Denmark, the US isn't going to invade and annex Greenland.

Illegal under Danish law.

> In a Danish Supreme Court judgment of 28 November 2003 the move [forceful relocation from Pituffik to Qaanaaq to make way for the Thule airbase] was considered an expropriative intervention. During the proceedings it was recognized by the Danish government that the movement was a serious interference and an unlawful act against the local population.[1]

> In 1995, a political scandal arose in Denmark after a report revealed the government had given tacit permission for nuclear weapons to be located in Greenland, in contravention of Denmark's 1957 nuclear-free zone policy.[2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qaanaaq

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash

Both of these cases were Denmark breaking their own laws to fulfill American requests of US imperialism on their territory. This is very similar to how the UK broke their own laws to hand over Diego Garzia illegally from the Chagocean Islanders to build a USA military base.

The colonialism in those instances, even though the responsibility is ultimately on their colonizers (Denmark), the USA very much participates, and is the main perpetrator of these events.

Exactly. Both of these are Danish laws illegitimately extended to Greenlandic territory, at a time when the Greenlanders were (a) forcefully incorporated into Denmark, and (b) had no ability to make or unmake Danish law.

Greenland, were it to choose to enter the US, would do so freely and in full understanding and acceptance of existing US law, with equal rights and representation in the Congress that makes said law.

There is no comparison between a free and informed entry into a union of equals, and the imposed legal regime of an occupying state (where the rule of law is apparently so weak that the metropolitan colonial government itself readily breaks its own laws).

I don’t understand your logic. In both cases it was the USA that broke these laws. Even though they were Danish laws, it was USA that ultimately a) built an illegal airbase, and b) illegally stored, and illegally transferred illegal weapons.

The damages from these illegal activities remain to this day, they were done by the USA for USA benefits. USA is very much the exploiter here, there is no spinning it otherwise.

Greenland has more exploiters than just Denmark. USA is very much Greenland’s second worst exploiter in history.

Also a note here, this is all before the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (which the USA hasn’t signed), and before the establishment of the Inatsisartut. So Danish laws ware the only way in which Greenlanders were able to affect their own affairs. Denmark has since then granted Greenland autonomy and signed and ratified the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

I'll try to clarify my reasoning.

From a purely legal perspective, the US is not bound by domestic Danish law under any circumstances (and vice versa: cf the doctrine of state immunity).

From the perspective of legal philosophy, the US cannot break Danish law in Greenland, because Danish law is not legitimate law in Greenland, any more than Israeli law is legitimate law in the West Bank. You'll certainly find other perspectives on this within legal philosophy, but any philosophical argument that attempts to reconcile the premise that (a) colonialism is illegitimate, and that (b) colonised or occupied people are nonetheless bound to obey the legal order instituted by an occupier is necessarily going to be quite contorted.

From the perspective of Western liberal-democratic political philosophy, government without the consent of the governed is illegitimate, its laws lack authority, and it is the right (and duty) of the people so governed to overthrow and disestablish that government, which they have no obligation to do peacefully or within the bounds of the existing political order (e.g. many wars of independence, American Revolution, etc).

Ergo, the US cannot violate domestic Danish law in Greenland, both because that's legally speaking nonsense (state immunity), and because domestic Danish law is not simply not legitimate in Greenland. Were Denmark not occupying Greenland at the time, the US government would be able to negotiate with Greenland about the possibility of placing a base there, and the Greenlanders themselves could decide whether this is something they want and what benefit they are able to secure from such a deal (Iceland, for example, has greatly benefited from such an arrangement, being able to secure its freedom from Danish colonialism with US assistance). Denmark's domestic laws, and the extent to which Denmark does or does not enforce its laws, is a domestic matter for Denmark. In as far as it purports to legislate for other countries, and then not even obey those laws itself, that's - again - a domestic matter for Denmark.

I hope this clarifies my argument.

Denmark already subsidizes Greenland to around $10,000 per capita every year, so I think the Greenlanders would want a much higher offer.

I'm talking about a cash in hand offer: a literal bank wire to every person in Greenland. Greenlandic politicians holding out for a different offer might find themselves voted out by people that rather like the idea of $50k in cash ($200k for a family of four, etc).

Re subsidies, the US federal government subsidised local and state governments to the tune of $1.1 trillion in 2023 alone, with funding disproportionately directed to poorer regions (such as Greenland, were it to join). That's not including direct spending on Native Americans, for which most Greenlanders would also be eligible. With no special arrangements whatsoever, Greenland would likely see a comparable amount of subsidy in the US as it does today (and very likely much greater economic growth). In reality, some level of subsidy guarantee for a period of some years could easily be part of the accession negotiations.

The real question isn't whether the US can afford Greenland - they can, many times over - the real question is the value of sovereignty (and I don't have the answer to that).

You seriously believe you are going to buy Greenland with 50k per person and few billions for Denmark?

That's a laughable offer.

Believe it or not, Europeans are not on sale and they do not have that much sympathy or willingness to leave in the US. The few that do, do so for money they would not make in Europe. And money is not an issue for Greenlanders or Danes. They both do much better than people in many US states.

Greenland is in serious need of infrastructure. Denmark has not been a kind colonial master (no such thing exists). However it would be foolish to think that any more infrastructure would be built under the USA’s colonial rule than Denmark’s. And I think the Greenlandic population knows this all too well. Both are their indigenous neighbors to the west in Nunavut and Alaska suffering way more under Canadian and USA’s rule than they are. But also as their autonomy has increased over the years so has their infrastructure, including cultural institutions, as well as their cultural independence.

I’m from Iceland, who also suffered (though much much less; so much less it is not comparable) under danish colonization. And I’m of the opinion that the biggest help Iceland can offer, is cooperate in cultural events and institutions, such as sport competitions (especially football and handball), theater (a collaboration between the two national theaters would be lovely), music (there artists from each country should be constantly performing in the other), etc.

> However it would be foolish to think that any more infrastructure would be built under the USA’s colonial rule than Denmark’s.

As I've noted elsewhere, you're conflating actual honest colonialism (Denmark's) with a hypothetical free choice to join the United States.

By what logic are the people of Iceland free to decide whether or not to join the European Union, but the people of Greenland are not free to decide whether to join the United States?

> And I’m of the opinion that the biggest help Iceland can offer, is cooperate in cultural events and institutions, such as sport competitions (especially football and handball), theater (a collaboration between the two national theaters would be lovely), music (there artists from each country should be constantly performing in the other), etc.

Sounds beautiful. I'm a big fan of this idea. I'd include the inhabitants of the Arctic regions of Canada and the US too.

> By what logic are the people of Iceland free to decide whether or not to join the European Union, but the people of Greenland are not free to decide whether to join the United States?

I think you may be misunderstanding where my argument stems from.

It is off course for the people of Greenland to decide whether or not they will sell their country to the USA. However both their legislator and their people have made it abundantly clear that they are not for sale[1], so the argument here is kind of moot. What I‘m arguing in the other thread is that USA‘s prospects of buying Greenland are of colonialist nature. Those are colonial dreams and nothing else. Expending your territorial control is colonialism, even when you pay to convince your future subjects to fall willingly under your colonial rule, it is still colonialism.

My biggest fear in all of this is actually that Denmark will sell parts of Greenland from under the Greenlandic people in illegal deals with the USA similar to how the UK carved out the Chagos islands from their Mauritius colony just before independence and handed Diego Garcia to USA so they could build their military base there, expelling all the Chagosians that lived there in the meantime. USA and Denmark have already done so in North Greenland. A deal which in 50 years time will be found to be illegal but at that time it is too late to do anything about it. Such a deal would also be colonial behavior, both on the USA, and on Denmark.

Over here I‘m just pointing out that Greenland is lacking in some areas of their economy, and there are prices persuade some Greenlanders (I know some members of the Greenlandic home rule who would love a good old fashioned business deals with USA, both for mining and for their military operation [probably looking at how the martial assistance gave Iceland a bunch of infrastructure in return {wink, wink} for a couple of military bases and joining NATO]).

1: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/12/27/greenland_trump_colo...

> Expending your territorial control is colonialism, even when you pay to convince your future subjects to fall willingly under your colonial rule, it is still colonialism.

The EU has many people and offices working on promoting and facilitating 'EU enlargement'. The EU offers tangible economic benefits to countries that join, including direct monetary payments, which it refuses to offer to non-members (as the UK found out the hard way). Is the EU therefore a colonialist power?

I think you're stretching the word colonialism well past its breaking point, and in so doing trying to erase the massive difference between real colonialism - such as Denmark's invasion and annexation of Greenland - and voluntary membership in a democratic union with economic benefits (such as the US, or the EU).

> My biggest fear in all of this is actually that Denmark will sell parts of Greenland from under the Greenlandic people

I agree that would be bad, but your fear is misplaced. The only people with the power to decide on Greenland's future are the Greenlanders. There's nothing wrong - despite your consistent use of words like 'sell' - with the US explaining or promoting the economic benefits of joining the Union (the EU does exactly the same), provided the final decision is made by the Greenlanders.

The EU is a supranational union of independent states, with voluntary membership. The USA is a country which possesses (as of now) 5 colonies. If you don‘t see the difference between joining a political union of independent states and territorial acquisition by a host state, then I don’t know what to say. Joining the European Union is akin to Greenland making a free trade agreement with the USA which includes free movement of people, etc. That is not what USA is talking about here. They are talking about acquiring the territory of Greenland by buying it, i.e. colonizing it.

I think you are being naive if you think the USA is only talking about a bilateral agreement with Greenland which Greenland is free to enter or leave at anytime. The USA has in recent history purchased (or more commonly borrowed) territories with total disregards to the people that live there. They have on numerous occasions broken local laws (or more commonly gotten another colonial power to break their laws) to undermine the sovereignty of other countries. The most recent example is the military bases they keep in Iraq, despite Iraq telling them to leave (military bases the USA got by illegally invading and illegally occupying Iraq). I think it is a mistake to not take the USA at their words when they say they wont to annex new territory, and I think it is a good idea to assume their intentions are just as bad as they sound.

Big fan of Denmark!

But where in the world did you get the idea people in Denmark do “much better” than people in even the poorest US state?

Median income in the poorest US state (Mississippi) is slightly higher than median income in Denmark, with much lower taxes even if you consider private health insurance a tax.

A similar analysis of people in the poorest decile, after famously stingy US transfer payments, has disposable income for the poor in Mississippi coming out ahead of being poor in Denmark.

I keep seeing folks make this argument. I would love to live in Denmark, but the reason to live there is not because of higher income. The US is just much, much richer than almost all of Europe (Switzerland and Luxembourg are the exceptions, not Denmark).

It’s totally fine to value things like social cohesion, terrific bike infrastructure, and low income inequality. Those are areas Denmark beats the US.

But income? It’s not even close.

> "recently"

Over a century ago is not recently, even relatively.

It's not annexation if you're not appropriating it

It's annexation when you declare it's part of your permanent holdings. That's totally separate from if you are holding it by force or not.

If an undiscovered, uninhabited island forms in international water, and some country claims it, if they want it in their permanent lands, they will annex it. There's not necessarily conflict or appropriation there.

The issue with annexation of Crimea or the Golan Heights is that the holding of the territory is by force, and annexation is an expression of intent to keep it, rather than simply occupy it on an indefinite but assumed temporary basis.

Large swathes of the US think that “I want that” is an acceptable reason to take some land.

If closeness was basis for a claim, Canada would like to have a word. Lol. No, we don't. It's not our way.

Fun fact, though, you can walk from Canada to Greenland. When the winter sea ice freezes. I think it's about 20 or 30 km. This has cross-pollinated people, language, culture for thousands of years in the north.

There’s a land border between Canada and Greenland on Hans Island

I love it. I had not read that the two nations finally settled their friendly dispute just a few years ago!

Previous to this, the Danish military would occasionally visit the island, leaving a flag, and a "Welcome to Denmark" sign and a bottle of Danish schnapps. Then the Canadian military would visit, plant their flag and a "Welcome to Canada" sign, and leave a bottle of Canadian whisky. Repeat. <3

See https://satwcomic.com/epic-battle , then https://satwcomic.com/who-owns-greenlands-island .

You don't need a legal basis. You only need more power.

“The United States includes Greenland as part of the Monroe Doctrine, which forbids European countries from holding American colonies.

“The US used this justification during WWII to prevent Nazi control of Greenland.”

I’m not saying this is valid reasoning. But if I needed to build a movement to reclaim Greenland from the perfidious Danes, it’s how I would do it.

    > want to be part of Denmark and Europe

Some might be, but independence is often contested and not necessarily a majority concern.

Plus it'd be fairly odd to have independence then say "hey, let's let America buy us as a state"

As I understand it, most people want independence, but not at any cost. I think most people have economic concerns about independence, and want to diversify the economy in a way that makes them less economically dependent on Denmark before taking the last steps towards independent.

Politically getting independent wouldn’t be that difficult, they would just need to pass some laws, finish drafting a constitution, and have national referendum. If they can make the economic case for it, I think there would probably be an overwhelming majority in favor.

If it was as an actual 51st state, with 2 Senators, full citizenship for all residents, etc, then maybe it would make sense.

But that is not what the US is in any way offering.

Trump wants a colony that can be exploited.

Trump and his supporters don't care about legalities. The only question is what they can get away with.

All people do what they can 'get away with' which a pejorative expression for saying that people attempt to do what they've decided to do. I would have thought that 'get away with' implies working within a current legal framework. But legality is just a formal description of that which has been decided in the past. It is not a permanent fixture.

Which is zero when it comes this sort of brainfart nonsense.

The Panama Canal belongs to Panama, Greenland belongs to its residents via Denmark, Canada is a sovereign nation.

Trump is just strutting, which is his standard position, pushing nonsense to his cult.

That only encourages Putin in Ukraine and maybe other parts of Europe.

Protection money / payment for defending them during Russian larger scale invasion of Europe?

Just because the US can take it off them if they really want? What would Denmark do about it realistically?

Why would he need a legal basis? It's clear he says stuff and then later we'll see.

Greenland is already protected by being in NATO, and the US Space Force has a base there.

https://coffeeordie.com/us-military-greenland

For protecting Denmark. In the context of a hypothetical WWIII.

The base is clearly there to protect the US, not Denmark.

Denmark would give the USA Greenland as payment for the USA defending Denmark from a Russian attack of Denmark borders. More spelled out I can't.

No. That’s what NATO is for- and why the US is allowed to have a military presence there already.

Trump is talking out of his ass.

The US doesn't need to annex Greenland, just set up a few bases there which can be more easily done. But even that has less benefits now than it had during the Cold War. If one wants to intercept hypersonic ICBMs they need satellites equipped with powerful lasers to zap'em. Kintetic interceptors in Greenland or space won't do.

> If one wants to intercept hypersonic ICBMs they need satellites equipped with powerful lasers to zap'em.

Are lasers the way to go? ICBMs appear to weigh several dozen tons. (e.g. https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1044... )

You have to shine a lot of light on a 40-ton missile before you're going to interfere with the flight path. Would this approach work?

Dunno, it has to be some energy beam because kinetic ammo needs replenishing. In space. So laser, microwaves, EMP etc. Maybe it could ignite the ICBMs fuel somehow, as most of the missile's payload is the fuel.

There aren't "sides" to one country invading another country any more than there are "sides" to you forcing your neighbors at gun point to get on a bus to live in another city so you can sell their house.

Trump wont deliver on any of promises (seriously, who can cause deflation? And tariffs?) so it is just cheap substitute topic.

There's no "why" to what Trump has been saying about Greenland, Panama and Canada. At least not in terms of anything that he seriously believes the US needs to actually do.

It's just another part of his shlock-and-awe campaign, like all these appointments of obviously unqualifed people to important positions. He does stuff like this to get people riled up, and ready to believe he's capable of anything. And always talking about him, non-stop.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

People in favor of Iceland joining the EU should be honest and transparent that it's a pro inflation policy. In fact, Icelandic inflation would probably skyrocket.

Why?

Iceland's interest rate is 8.5% https://www.cb.is/other/key-interest-rate/

EU's interest rate is 3% https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/ke...

The higher Icelandic rate is set for Icelanders by Icelanders in order to bring their 4.8% inflation rate down to the 2.5% target.

If Iceland adopted the EU's interest rate which is mainly set for France and Germany, that would be a 5% interest rate cut which is a massive stimulus. Icelandic inflation would skyrocket and there would be no chance of hitting the 2.5% target.

People should also look into Optimal Currency Area theory popularized by Paul Krugman eg https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...

The US Dollar works because of massive fiscal transfers from states on the coasts to states in the interior. The US also allows whole areas to deindustrialize like Detroit in order to solve the unavailability of currency adjustments between states.

Are Icelanders willing to subsidize Greece? Are they willing to forgo their ability to devalue their currency like in 2008? Without devaluation that means deindustrialization.

For all the above reasons, Iceland joining the EU would be the stupidest and most economically illiterate decision in it's history.

There isn't a simple functional causal relationship between interest rates, inflation and currency rates.

And in fact, I think you have it exactly backwards in this case.

Many countries have dollarized their economies - replacing a local currency supported by high interest rates with the US dollar which has even lower interest rate than EUR - as a tool to tame inflation or kill hyper-inflation. Other - small non-EU countries have adopted the Euro for the same reason.

And with the same result - a massive fall in inflation.

This isn't just theory, this has been observed to work over and over again.

Sorry but you have it backwards. The examples you have in mind are South American and Eastern European countries 20 years ago ie emerging markets struggling to maintain a currency peg.

Iceland doesn't suffer from hyperinflation and it's already got an established central bank and trusted institutions. Lowering the interest rate in this environment would 100% lead to more inflation.

Plus Iceland relies on currency devaluation to cope with shocks. It would be crazy to give this up.

> People in favor of Iceland joining the EU should be honest and transparent that it's a pro inflation policy. In fact, Icelandic inflation would probably skyrocket.

It would not, simply because joining the Euro Area isn't a one time thing, but a series of steps, and they wouldn't move forward as long as the inflation is higher than in the rest of the EU.

> If Iceland adopted the EU's interest rate which is mainly set for France and Germany, that would be a 5% interest rate cut which is a massive stimulus.

Interests rate is only one of the factors involved in controlling inflation, and the fact that Italy has been able to adjust its economic policy in order to align its inflation figures to Maastricht requirements and join the Euro Area is a good proof of that.

> People should also look into Optimal Currency Area theory popularized by Paul Krugman

It has been popularized by Robert Mundell in the 60s, for which he got the Sveriges Riksank prize (the "Nobel") in 1999, not by Paul Krugman.

> For all the above reasons, Iceland joining the EU would be the stupidest and most economically illiterate decision in it's history.

The creation of the Euro is IMHO the "most economically illiterate decision in […] history" but moat of your arguments above miss the mark.

Inflation will always be higher in Iceland, because they have a very specific pro union setup which guarantees salary increases each year. As a result of the unions, Icelanders work very few hours and earn some of the highest wages in the world - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Confederation_of_Lab... It won't (I hope) be following Italy as an economic model.

By "popularized" I mean brought to a modern audience in Krugman's New York Times column. It's Mundell's theory of course.

Interest rates are the main way to fight inflation. Glad we agree that the Euro is a silly currency union!

These kind of questions get ironed out during accession negotiations I think.

> Inflation will always be higher in Iceland, because

They cannot join Euro until inflation stops being higher, because that's simply how it works: countries must achieve “convergence criterias” before they can enter the single currency.

The EU and the eurozone aren't the same. If Denmark hasn't adopted the euro, why would Iceland do so?

Edited to remove Sweden because it's obliged to eventually adopt the euro.

Because it's legally required by treaty.

Of course, the EU often ignores its own treaties. So that's not a hard guarantee. But the first rule of the EU is that everyone has to pretend it follows its own rules even when it doesn't, so it's not like Icelandic leaders can just announce they'll join the EU but won't adopt the Euro.

> Since the convergence criteria requires participation in ERM II for a minimum of two years, and non-eurozone member states are responsible for deciding when to join ERM II, they can delay their compliance with the criteria by not joining ERM II.

> Denmark has a treaty opt-out from the obligation to join the eurozone even if it complies with all criteria.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_the_eurozone

EU countries are not required to join the Euro.

They are required to say they will at some unspecified future date, but that's another matter.

This is angels-on-pins level stuff, though. In normal English lax enforcement of a rule doesn't mean you're not required to obey it. It just means you're gambling that you won't be put under sufficient pressure to crack your resolve.

All EU countries have to publicly commit to joining the Euro and doing the work to do so. They are therefore required to join it, under any reasonable interpretation of the treaty language. The fact that some countries realized they could just not do what they agreed to and/or hack their economy to avoid the entry criteria, without any consequences, is good evidence that the treaties are indeed meaningless. But lax enforcement isn't the same as no requirement. The EU Commission could change their stance at any time.

It is not just down to Commission interpretation.

It has been a while since I last looked at this, but from memory a pre-condition for Euro adoption is spending a certain amount of time within some formal "convergence mechanism", however there is no obligation to join that convergence mechanism.

This could well be ERM-II which I have in mind.

What a ridiculous policy by itself.

In theory EU and the Euro area are the same, because the TFEU says so. But in practice it's more complicated than this as Danes negotiated and opt-out clause during the negotiation of the treaty of Maastricht, and even though such clause isn't open to new entrants, in reality nothing prevents negotiations to eventually lead to such an outcome.

The case of Sweden is interesting though, they don't have an opt-out clause so they are obligated to adopt the Euro eventually, but they exploited a loophole by not joining the newest version of European Exchange Rate Mechanism after the 1999, which prevents their entry in the Euro.

Denmark has pegged their currency to the Euro.

Switzerland pegged the Frank against the US Dollar, until they didn’t.

Many EU countries have done so and then few years ago many stopped doing it.

Because the Icelandic krona is basically universally agreed by everyone to be garbage monopoly money that only stays because of the oligarchs that are in power.

Also, yeah, the Danish Krona is pegged to the euro at ~7.45 so there is little incentive to switch over.

> money that only stays because of the oligarchs that are in power

Can you elaborate?

interesting to read the Icelandic Version of „oligarchs in power want xyz“.

Although it doesn’t make sense, because the influx of cheap money would make joining the EU an obvious boon for that class, wouldn’t it?

Being this late to the party and not that powerful of a country, I would be willing to bet the EU would force them into it as a condition to join.

Why? It’s in the EUs interest to not create horror stories about what happens when a country joins. It makes a lot more sense to make Iceland decide on the timeline for adopting the Euro themselves, so the transition is more likely to be smooth. And this is exactly what the policy for adopting the Euro has been.

A shock therapy Euro adoption is not in the interest of anyone.

Iceland wouldn’t join the euro with inflation like that

I'm sure one of the Big 4 accounting firms and Goldman could step up to help "fix" any problem given their experience with Greece.

> Iceland wouldn’t join the euro with inflation like that

Nobody cares about inflation. They just need the right "democratic leaders". See Georgia. /s

It's not possible to join the Euro zone unless the inflation in the country is at the bottom side of the Euro zone for consecutive years.

The inflation absolutely matters.

Nobody’s taking about Georgia joining the euro

You’d be surprised

> massive fiscal transfers from states on the coasts to states in the interior

That's because of how US politics work. Less populous states have disproportionately higher political power. It's not a monetary policy thing. It's a core difference between US and European politics.

> The US also allows whole areas to deindustrialize

That's because Americans are free to live and work where they choose.

There's a lot more nuance here, if you look at Obama's memoir, he writes quite frankly about the dilemma of propping up the US auto industry with government dollars. When they (US automakers) asked for bailouts, he found them quite mismanaged, but if they went under a large portion of the US economy would find itself unemployed.

As a German I couldn’t agree more. Whoever is trying to sell you joining the EU is wise, run away from them as fast as you can.

Considering its remoteness and population size, where Iceland sits today as country is an absolute success story. Don’t give up your sovereignty.

EU needs to evolve to become closer to USA (imo). Not be a loose union with a central suggestion organ, but a real federation, with unified laws, army etc, provisions to punish sabotage and collaborators with enemies of such new federation and so on. Then internal monetary transfers would make sense, because Iceland and Greece would just be two internal regions. PS: of course it's ok if that never happens. But then EU can't expect to compete, due to not having good properties of truly decentralized collection of countries and neither of a true federation. Any startup will/is be hobbled by the mandatory EU law framework and structure, but won't benefit from the single law set or single language because those don't exist in EU.

Will never happen because Germany and France.

I wonder in the coming years if we'll see the US actually become more like the EU. I expect there to be significant competition between Texas and California, in terms of industry, polity and philosophy. As the US continues to be internally fragmented politically, we're bound to see states compete actively, sometimes even to the detriment of other states. While we won't see a significant fragmentation like the EU, we will see a country that's so internally divided, there would be saboteurs and collaborators with enemies. We're kind of already seeing this, for example Texas and Florida shipping their illegals into Massachusetts and NY, states being firmly in the control of one party, with no room for switching governments, and the ever present question of states' rights.

Fortunately, even if hypothetically Texas and California will diverge even more and implement even more diverging laws, they will still be more similar than two random EU countries. They will have common legal language, they will have common federal law applied to both, they will have the same freedom of personal movement as exists today. All of the more important things for the business. I'm talking about business outlook here, not personal freedoms or other problems applied to individuals.

Let's imagine for a second you want to create a startup making cell phones, or cars, or TVs etc. You base in say Texas for the taxes, but workforce can freely move to the Texas from California. They have zero language barrier, they have zero legal barrier. Legal, highly skilled immigrants in California can freely move to Texas for work. The product you make has to conform with both Cali and Texas laws, bud federal ones are unified. It needs to be localized for 1 single language. And it can be immediately sold to the 350mil market with minimal changes. Now if you do the same in France, you are limited with French workforce, because of the language barrier and legal barriers. Then to sell to the whole EU you need to comply with 24 laws and localize to 21 language. And support all that. EU company is less competitive on this basis alone, plus USA doing brain drain (which they foolishly want to limit now) is not helping.

It will never happen because maybe the EU is faaaaar more diverse than the US? Yes there were/are more than one ethnic group, but it's always been massively dominated by Anglo-Americans, culturally as politically.

The US states are a mosaic between themselves, and I would say that they diverge more aggressively than the EU in terms of politics, philosophy and policy.

In the EU, you don't see countries arguing about which bathrooms people should use, or what model of creation they should teach children in schools. Yes, there is linguistic separation, but there is very little political and even cultural distinction between European countries, save for some hot button issues like immigration (which is also seeing alignment now).

Ask any European what European culture is, and you'll get a fair melange of what make Europe European (they might mention elements such as architecture, classical music, heck Roman Empire even). Ask an American about American culture and you'll get definitely different answers between Americans from even two red states.

> We're kind of already seeing this, for example Texas and Florida shipping their illegals into Massachusetts and NY

Which is a game-theoretically sound choice given the lack of legal authority to prevent unlawful entry to begin with.

Exactly, which is akin to a country self-sabotaging itself and dividing itself internally. It's a very unique problem that frankly doesn't exist elsewhere in the world.

The US isn't the only possible model for states to cooperate as part of a larger entity. There are many examples of federations with little fiscal transfers - which are also highly successful - Switzerland is an extreme example.

Switzerland is a perfect example, thank you. Even without going deep into laws and nuance, the mere fact that we are referring to it by a single name and consider a mostly single entity at least as far as outside is concerned, tells us all. That's what EU needs to become (again, only in my opinion) - a bigger Switzerland.

I think I don’t understand which problem this unification would solve?

Startups?

Startups and bigger companies too, up to international megacorporations. Companies get more workforce and faster time to market for less cost. EU gets better financial regulation (not more, but better). Competitive products means competitive salaries, which slows brain drain and allows for better export to import ratio. It is always better to export as much refined and hitech product as possible.

Putin. It solves the problem of Putin.

Bit late to the party. Just today on a Germany political podcast (Phoenix Runde) I was hearing the "experts", the crop of people who are largely responsible for the current economical and political under performance of the union, ... musing on what the solution could be to make Europe great again.

Their solution? Create an inner union of the EU countries that really matter (Germany, France, Beneleux ...etc). No I'm not making this up. It's not even the first time this idea was floated around. So to me it seems that the EU as a single block is almost finished.

> So to me it seems that the EU as a single block is almost finished.

I don't know how old you are but as a European with a passing interest in politics I have been hearing this at least every month for the last ~20 years. And I'm sure it was said long before then.

What you need to understand is that the EU exists, and has pretty much always existed, in a constant state of crisis. There is always some major disagreement, some urgent problem. This is just a consequence of the EU's existence as an attempt to unify (in some respects) 27 pretty diverse member states. The EU has survived all of these crises to date. I'm not saying it will exist forever, but I see no reason to believe that the current set of crises will be the ones to kill it. The EU may change but I think it will trundle on for the foreseeable future.

Also, there is already an "inner union", it is called the eurozone. Again... constant state of crisis.

If we'd get a cent for every doomsaying post about EU in last 30 years, we could probably make our own Elon Musk.

> seems that the EU as a single block is almost finished

you're drawing some pretty far-fetched conclusions here

Germany and France have always been the core of the EU (and its founding members).

Euroskeptics used to say that the EU is Germany-first and France/Benelux second and everyone else last. The EU establishment used to deny this. To actually now go out and create an inner union is to validate exactly the euroskeptic claim.

It’s a podcast and you’re acting like it’s just been signed into law.

Critical thinking is not one of HN's fortes.

(Arguing about engineering pedantries is, but that is something different.)

I'd say if it has ever been Germany first, that started in the 90s or later. France needed some convincing to agree to German reunification, and they weren't wrong about what would happen next. Germany simply has the largest population in Europe now. AFAICT, Germany is not really seeking out a leading role, it's more trying to avoid it, which has its problems, too.

Germany is lobbying all the time for stupid rules to please minority members of their home coalitions (see them trying to torpedo nuclear as a carbon free source on energy in all the European law related to clean energy to appease Die Grünen for exemple) and have realigned themselves strongly with the US since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Since Von Der Leyden appointment, the commission has been favouring them a lot.

The main issue is that the EPP is basically in service of Germany and France lost a lot of influence when most of their deputies joined Renew, a party which is less well integrated in the European Parliament apparatus. That and France failures to even start tackling the structural reforms it needs obviously.

Regarding von der Leyen I would just like to say that she is widely disliked in Germany and "failed upward" into the EU government. Whatever she is doing, it's her will, not that of most Germans.

I have never heard this claim specifically. But it is clear that the rapid east expansion of the EU still causes friction with the other goal of having a tighly integrated political and economic union. Some steps to strengthen the union may hurt the newer member states more than it would help them in their current state. It is really hard to balance this. This is why the inner union ideas get floated from time to time.

I don't necessarily think it is a good idea. I am a firm proponent of the EU. In a world where the other major powers are many times bigger than any individual European country, Europe cannot defends its interests when every member country is on its own. There are many issues with the current shape of the EU, but I see it as a necessary step on a path to something better.

A coordinated federation could also work, instead of a centralized union.

No, it wouldn't work. The coordination and decision-making processes would be even slower than the EU's current glacial speed. In order to persevere, the European countries must coordinate quickly and act with decisiveness for the next couple of years or risk becoming vasalls to a strong Russia and China.

Well, I think to counter invasive countries military ambitions, a military defense pact is needed. Not central regulation of the size of cucumbers.

And as for everything else, open borders, freedom of movement, standardisation of infrastructure etc. all can work without being mandated as well, if there is a common interest in them. The EU was designed, when there was no internet. Coordination can happen transparent and quickly without kafkaesk buerocratic institutions. And when there is no common interest to do things - then the EU in its current shape is not working so well either.

This take is shortsighted on many levels. Coordination without a fixed framework to do it in creates kafkaeque negotiations where every involve party can fight tooth and nail for their pet rule or exception and everything slows down to a crawl. A government like structure sets clear enough rules and processes that force results.

European defense structures rely on economic collaboration as well. There are lots and lots of multilateral weapon R&D programs that are only really possible because cross border collaboration between the involved companies is trivial because of the EU.

The organisation founded in 1957 which is now known as the European Union, originally had six members: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Weird how everyone always forgets about Italy

Fair point. It’s because France and Germany were the driving force behind the Treaty of Rome (despite it being signed in Italy) and well Benelux wasn’t that important.

Yes, and Germany and France have also been open that the goal was always (and still is) political union. For a lot of other EU countries that is not the goal. So there has always been an "inner core". Making that official is not going to be a huge jump, or particularly destabilising.

The fact that you’re basing this off a podcast aside, it seems fine to allow deeper political ties for countries which want it. Some, but not all, want a unified pan-European military for example. Some countries would prefer the EU remain in its current quasi-(con)federation form, but there’s a group which would gladly form a stronger federation like the United States.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_army

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Europe

You’ll notice it’s not exactly a clandestine conspiracy lol

What's the use of a pan EU military when most EU members are already in NATO? Just to add Austria, Cyprus and Ireland to a pan EU force? Rather than that allow a share of EU funds to be used for members' militaries and adopt common EU military policies. Also incentivize EU members to buy EU military equipment using such EU funds.

The ability for EU common bodies to command the new army to defend their other members without being subjected to divide/conquer tactics from US, RU and CN.

So the idea of building a military, or encouraging economic growth were out of the question?

That’s how it’s done: hard power and economic growth. Every empire in history had those two things. Europe has neither.

It’s pretty obvious than enlargement went too fast and is an utter failure. It was mostly pushed by the UK which wanted to weaken the union as a political entity as much as possible.

It’s even more true with the euro zone where some members are directly harmed by the high exchange rate.

It would make a lot of sense to go back to a smaller more integrated union with the countries which want it and leave the ones which only want the single market be part of a less integrated union.

Then again, considering Germany and France disagree about pretty much everything at the moment, I doubt it would go very far.

> It would make a lot of sense to go back to a smaller more integrated union with the countries which want it and leave the ones which only want the single market be part of a less integrated union.

That option does exist, albeit in a bit of a roundabout way. Nothing is stopping a member country from leaving the EU and joining EFTA and the EEA afterwards. The fact that no country is seriously contemplating this is telling.

That only going to a less integrated union. That doesn’t solve the issue of inner members wanting to go faster towards union and being hampered by countries which shouldn’t even be members like Hungary.

I'm all for European unity, but if a country is only half-committed to joining the EU, it probably should not be allowed to join under the assumption that EU support will continue to grow.

You could say this for pretty much every important decision in every democracy ever. It's seldom things get settled with percentage support starting with anything other than a 5.

It's a form of institutional hysteresis. If a major change can get implemented by a simple majority, it has zero noise margin. If it requires (say) two thirds, then it has a noise margin of 33 percentage points.

I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.

> I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.

In Australia, a constitutional referendum requires a double majority to pass: both a majority nationally, and a state-wide majority in a majority of states (so at least 4 out of 6).

Unlike Australia, the UK has no written constitution, and is a unitary state with devolution instead of a federation. Still, Brexit was undeniably a constitutional-level issue, and taking the constituent countries as the analog to states, they could have adopted the same "double majority" rule in the UK for the Brexit referendum. And if they had, the referendum would have failed: it got a majority nationwide, but in only two out of four constituent countries (England and Wales but not Scotland and Northern Ireland).

A big problem the UK has – which Brexit has arguably only worsened – is its extreme lopsidedness – one of the constituent countries (England) is over 80% of the population, so a big enough English majority on any issue can override the will of the other three constituent countries. And yet there are essentially no constitutional provisions to protect against this. Adopting a "double majority" for the Brexit referendum would have been a small step in the direction of doing so, at least by establishing a precedent.

[0] The fact that it was legally non-binding is not an issue: the legislation could have simply specified the conditions under which the referendum would be "deemed to pass", and require some appropriate government official to make a formal declaration as to whether those conditions had been met or not.

no double majority was required to join (no referendum at all...)

requiring a double majority to leave would the definition of stacking the deck in your favour

Yes, but the UK has evolved a lot since 1973.

In 1973, the UK was much closer to a pure unitary state – there was no Scottish Parliament, no Welsh Parliament; the existing devolution in Northern Ireland (the Parliament of Northern Ireland) had just been abolished the previous year and the attempts to reinstate it in 1974 and 1982 proved to be short-lived failures. By 2016 there was a devolved Scottish Parliament, a devolved Welsh Assembly (designated a Parliament in 2020), and a devolved Northern Ireland assembly.

I think the evolution of devolution (pardon the pun) is a recognition that the UK needed stronger protections for Scottish/Welsh/Northern Irish rights against the English supermajority, and a "double majority" for constitutional-level national referendums would be a step further in that direction.

Wow I never thought about the "joining" stage of this whole brexit topic. If that's the case then that adds a whole new level of dysfunction to "democracy" as a concept.

It seems like democracy really is an experiment representative of our hope of human cooperation, and yet I'm constantly reminded that the way we actually implement and enact is very far from that ideal.

It wasn't the EU that we joined in 1973.

The UK joined the EEC, a very different institution

I'm still stunned that anyone voted "leave". Even if you were strongly in favor of leaving the EU that particular referendum was terrible. The question asked was:

> Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.

The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.

> There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.

It was in the question: leaving the EU. Leaving was what happened, and it wasn't particularly mysterious or complex.

> The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.

So they could rig the second? No, the EU wouldn't have agreed to any negotiations of the form "we might do it or we might not", and it would simply have pushed them to play even more hardball than they did (which in the end turned out to involve a lot of bluffing, many of their supposed red lines were crossed after the UK actually left).

I think the ideal solution in an ideal world would be to do ranked choice voting between the main choices that could be reasonably negotiated and remain. So voters could pick between EEA, Canada-like, remain, etc all at the same time.

Which would annoy the Brexitters that would like to defend vague remain instead of getting into the weeds, or just try to sell their own version of Brexit when it may end up being another version in the end. And the people who oppose voting reform. And I get the feeling the result would be remain wins by being the compromise second preference of a lot of voters.

If you want to split the Leave vote that way you would have also needed to split the Remain vote by asking people what Remain means: something usually presented as obvious by Remainers but it's by no means so. For instance if the UK had remained and the EU had then announced all the opt-outs were voided, that would have been a major change but well within the remit of what was possible in a Remain scenario (without the threat of leaving what stops the EU doing whatever it wants to a member state?).

You can play games with re-running things forever to try and get a Remain win, but the entire reason the referendum was run that way was an attempt to get a Remain win. That's why it was presented as an all-or-nothing vote when basically all the Eurosceptics who had been pushing for a referendum wanted something less than fully leaving to be on the menu (mostly a pile of reforms and much less distance/opting out of any future treaty changes/the ECJ/etc). Cameron specifically set it up as Leave/Remain because he thought nobody could countenance fully leaving and it would force a Remain (unreformed) victory. Obviously he was wrong.

> For instance if the UK had remained and the EU had then announced all the opt-outs were voided, that would have been a major change but well within the remit of what was possible in a Remain scenario (without the threat of leaving what stops the EU doing whatever it wants to a member state?).

Those opt ours were enshrined in the treaties. There was no way to rescind them without the consent of the UK. You’re constructing a straw man.

The EU institutions have done many things they weren't allowed to do under the treaties, so that argument just wouldn't have landed. An example of that was human rights law, which was originally never intended to be law and wasn't written tightly enough to be so. The UK and Poland obtained a supposedly water-tight opt out written in plain language, which the ECJ then simply voided. There are other such cases.

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Winston Churchill

People were pretty ill informed and voted leave for reasons like they were pissed off with the present situation, or they didn't like foreigners.

Which they were entitled to do but have ended up with a worse situation and worse foreigners.

It was deliberately so, Dave wanted to be PM at lot and gave the Eurosceptics of the Tory party everything they wanted.

A simple question for a massively complex problem.

An "advisory" referendum that was guaranteed to be treated as legally binding (will of the people and all that).

Being advisory meant that it avoided what laws there were on referendum, like being able to disenfranchise UK expats of which there were a lot in the EU. Maybe this also allowed it to be a simple 50.1% majority as well, I forget.

Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave rang rings around everyone and got the result they wanted.

> I'm still stunned that anyone voted "leave". Even if you were strongly in favor of leaving the EU that particular referendum was terrible.

Politics is the art of the possible. The referendum was a once-in-a-generation chance to leave, voting for it was smart. If remain had won there's no way we would have left on any terms, nor reformed our relationship with the EU at all; quite the contrary.

Voting for this once in a lifetime opportunity was smart; maybe the smartest ever. The smartest people in the UK voted for brexit. You will totally see in a few years when they made Britain great again!

I can see no reason at all to suppose that this might be the case. Quite the reverse given current events and the determination of the current administration.

I think the parent comment was a parody of trumpite rhetoric.

Good luck with that. Last I checked most more countries went to the BRICS summit rather than the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

https://policyexchange.org.uk/blogs/brics-and-the-commonweal...

In fairness entering was done without a referendum, and could not have won one. (The government can and should make policy decisions without punting them to a referendum, of course).

Yes, there really needs to be some margin for really big and costly changes. One of the main reasons for Brexit being such a clusterfuck was that, once the going got tough, majority support evaporated and the exit was pushed through by what was effectively a minority government at that point, with parliament trying to make their lives as difficult as possible. It could have been less painful overall if there had been more robust agreement to go ahead with it, and therefore some degree of cooperation. Maybe 2/3 majority is overkill, but a 60-40 split should be a requirement for serious changes to the future of a country.

> once the going got tough, majority support evaporated

It's likely that majority support would have evaporated as soon as any leave deal was reached. No deal would have satisfied all the different reasons people voted leave.

Indeed; no deal (including the "no deal" option of leaving with no deal, and also the option of having another referendum) was acceptable to Westminster, which was why May was forced to leave office.

Only Johnson was able to cut that Gordion Knot, albeit by lying to people to their face.

Clever :p

To be fair, Parliament forced a delay from Oct 2019 to Jan 2020, to ensure that there was some sort of agreement in place. And then it passed because there was a one-year transitionary period until Jan 2021 during which the UK stayed in the single market.

And now we've voted in a PM who promises building closer ties with the EU. And eventually the generation that rabidly voted to leave will disappear. Progress marches on slowly.

I live in hope that I will see the UK, or its constituent countries, return to the EU; but events may overtake such dreams, and it would be sensible for the EU to require a supermajority of the candidate nations to be in favour of joining, just to reduce the chances of things like Brexit from happening in the future.

When I close my browser, I get asked “are you sure”, seems crazy not to have that protection with brexit once the details had been worked out.

In the end we had an opportunity to reverse it, in 2017 and 2019, but said “no”

Yeah. I'm astonished that people aren't looking at the EU and AV referendums and thinking that we need to drastically overhaul how we conduct them in future. Guidelines have been published with some pretty obvious improvements, like the sitting government not campaigning for one side.

> I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.

The problem with not proceeding following a "50% + epsilon" is you're then suddenly ignoring the majority of the electorate which has its own political backlash.

The trick is to not have a referendum unless the outcome likely to be definitive. This is actually codified in the Good Friday agreement as a condition for the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to call an Irish unification referendum.

This is a great explanation. I wasn't previously familiar with these concepts and this is exactly the point I wanted to make. If only a 50.1% consensus is needed at one point in time (either by political will or referendum) to join the EU, the EU could end up with a group of members half-committed to membership. It is then much harder for such a body to make difficult or controversial decisions if members are constantly on the cusp of leaving, and easier for members with lower EU approval rates (such as Hungary) to extract concessions far in excess of their relative power.

That is an artificial problem created by the EU's structure and ideology though. There's no reason collaboration between nations must be funneled through an organization that sees itself as an alternate government, and which likes to present everything as all-or-nothing. There could easily be independent agreements on independent topics which would avoid such issues, but this would not meet the ideological goals of the EU to replace the existing nation states and governments, so they don't do it.

Maybe surprising, but based on the latest Eurobarometer, the citizens of the following countries trust the EU less than Hungarians (even if Hungary is just below EU average): Germany, Czechia, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, France (in this order ...) While the stance of Hungary, Slovenia, Cyprus and Greece is not much relevant in relation to the future of the EU, regarding Germany and France, that's a bit more alarming... Nevertheless, the loud HU government propaganda unfortunately has its clear effect on the Hungarian public opinion - Hungarian people trust the EU less every year, and also, everything else, including democracy in general. https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3215

The Brexit referendum was not binding and the decision with what to do with the results, if anything, was still entirely left to parliament.

The whole thing was a bit of a mess. A good analogy I heard was you have a bunch of people in a room with one TV and have a vote whether to change the channel and 50% vote yes because they are fed up with the current one. But no one has specified which channel to change it to. After the vote they check out all the channels and find they are even worse than the first but can't change back because that would be "betraying the will of the people" or whatever nonsense.

The referendum should have been two part. 1 want to leave or not? 2 how about this specific option (channel) or shall we forget the it all?

The problem is that many decisions in the EU require exactly 100% support of member states, which is a problem if you have a country with wildly different ideas than others (now Hungary, a few years ago Poland).

> The problem is that many decisions in the EU require exactly 100% support of member states

We have long known that unanimity holds us back internationally, and that the switch to majority vote is way overdue - but leading European Union member states to accept that is going to be a long slog. We'll get there and we have started on the path: trade policy for example is already qualified majority voting.

The switch you mention happened in 2014.

Actually, even before then.

The Qualified Majority Vote has been being used in increasing scope of policy areas for many years.

QMV was part of stuff from the 1986 SEA, and got a major boost in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, since it was recognised as practically being necessary to make any progress towards (and within) the Single Market.

Yes, not much progress since - apart from Russia, China and the USA increasing pressure... I suppose they support our federalist project and try to motivate us !

The requirement for unanimous voting has not existed for more than a decade. It was removed in response to the tactical shenanigans of Visegrad countries.

In practice most decisions are still technically unanimous, because it looks better politically and it doesn't cost anything more (since a majority can simply pass whatever they want, they are not forced to concede anything to the obstructionists; with the newer rules, it's smarter for any isolated bloc to immediately trade any publicly-stated opposition for any minor favour they can get).

This is the reason why Orban, despite all his bombast, has no influence whatsoever on the actual decisions; but also why German resistance against overdue fiscal reforms has basically melted.

>you have a country with wildly different ideas than others (now Hungary, a few years ago Poland)

Why single out Hungary and Poland specifically? Is it worse than when Austria, Netherlands, France, etc. have a different opinion to the rest of the union and torpedo progress just to pander to the right wingers in their country?

Yes, they are (or in the case of Poland were) worse. The act like typical authoritarians. In Hungry democracy is essential neutered.

Leaving aside personal preferences regarding the previous Polish and current Hungarian governments, the electoral processes are generally viewed as fair regarding the absence of major direct fraud related to vote counting. However, the fact is, that the state resources were used by the ruling parties to promote themselves.

The removal of the former Polish government was largely driven by public disapproval of state fund mismanagement. In Hungary, a key element of the current government's platform appears to be the promotion of national identity, including ties with diaspora communities formed after WWI (The Treaty of Trianon), potentially with implications for future "geopolitical alignments" (the likelihood of which is debatable).

These results, while influenced by the d'Hondt system, reflect the sentiment of the voting population, which is a democratic process, in principle. The ruling methods are not 100% democratic though (rule of majority with respect for minority rights)

However, the opinions of my "more Western friends" on those topics "diverge from on-the-ground realities".

In Poland the ruling party was using pegasus spyware to spy on opposition party politicians (including the head of campaign).

"Public" TV had literal North Korea level of propaganda too.

Even the (useless and bad) SMS service used to warn about bad weather... send out texts to remind old people to vote.

Still, Hungary and Poland are consistently brought in as the bad apples for opposing mass migration quotas, and recently Hungary for the milder tone towards Russia, but it's ignored that everyday plenty of countries oppose many other resolutions.

Selective enforcement.

>The act like typical authoritarians.

That's hilarious (not), given that so much discourse is about just how much democracy should be shaved off to get the desirable Democratic(tm) results (Supermajority for Brexit! Ban AFD! et al.).

How are they authoritans? Do you just look at the optics, or do you look at the damage done to the EU in monetary terms? Because those are two different things?

Orban has corrupted the political system in Hungary and weakened the checks and balances.

Democracies in Europe. Hungary is at the lower end of the spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_Europe

Hungary tends to pander to the big neighbor to the east.

So does Austria yet you never hear so much slander against them.

That rules out pretty much every member of the EU, then. Across the EU, support for EU membership is only 60%.

60% is a very huge number, not understanding the "only" wording.

Also, as an European I know virtually no people opposing EU membership, when there are, it's generally less educated people thinking that the economy or whatever would be better.

As an European, I know many who oppose EU membership, but most educated people would not express it publicly because they are harrassed if they express their opinion -- supposedly only "less educated people" -- i.e. idiots -- support it.

It appears that opposing EU membership is kind of a taboo, and many educated people are afraid to express their opinion on the subject. Which tells you all you need to know about the legitimacy of EU.

And what are their arguments?

Why do you ask? One often encounters an argument that if I cannot make up a rationale that you consider as reasonable, then it means I am wrong. The problem is that the polarization means that neither side can rationally understand the argument of the opposing side. The fact that you don't consider the argument of these people as reasonable does not prove anything.

They don't want to become like USA, that is the easiest argument. We see how USA went the slippery slope of removing states rights and expanding federal power, people in the EU don't want that.

To prevent that from happening there needs to be a resistance to EU expanding its power, and the most effective way countries can do that is to threaten to leave.

The US seems like a success model if anything. Wonder how much better would be the lives of Californians or Louisianans if they were their own country.

I have not reviewed all the arguments.

One is simple. EU does not have a single language. There is are shared values, shared vision, shared culture, or shared identity among regular people.

The cards are stacked against EU being succesful.

"is are" => "are no"

The UK complained at length about the EU for decades including educated people so much so that they decided to leave and are now out.

Both the far right and far left opposes the EU openly in France. Even amongst EU supporters there is a fair deal of criticisms levelled at the organisation.

I think your alleged taboo is very much self imposed.

Maybe it’s self-imposed because those mentioned don’t want to be lumped in with these extreme groups? I.e. the shy voter phenomenon.

> it's generally less educated people thinking that the economy or whatever would be better

You should be very careful with these kinds of sentiments. Openly contemptuous elitism is how we ended up with Trump in US.

But polls do tell that it's generally less educated people having worst feelings about the EU.

It also happened with the Brexit, where it was mostly less educated workers and farmers supporting Brexit, exactly the demographic that got hurt the most by it.

Farmers by and large supported Brexit in line with the rest of the country, especially once you factor in age.

The single clearest indicator was age. Old people - million who have died since 2016 - voted out, young people who have to live with the devious voted remain.

Not true, poorer, lower educated and rural population predominantly voted for Brexit.

> University graduates and those with higher qualifications predominantly voted to remain. Blue-collar workers, particularly in traditional industrial areas and manual labor jobs, overwhelmingly supported Brexit. Reasons included economic discontent, perceived competition from EU migrants, and a desire for national sovereignty.

As usual, it's only people that have very low capacity to understand a complex world, those that are easier to sell dreams about "sovereignity" that end up screwing their own lives.

Somehow the same happens in the US where conservatives can win even while openly promoting policies against workers (but it's always easy to promise more manufacturing jobs and america first).

https://westcountryvoices.co.uk/challenging-the-myth-that-fa...

Being a farmer didn’t seem to make much difference one you remove other factors like age and education.

I'm not sure causation is proven. We have openly contemptuous elitism and we have Trump. Not necessarily cause and effect.

We had one before the other.

I remember the spikes in these kinds of editorials starting somewhere in early 10s.

Could such causation be proven, if it existed? I don't think so.

In addition to contemptuous elitism and Trump, there is also agreement that the US is very divided.

Also, as the posts above suggest, people who oppose people who oppose the EU, do not meet these people with the same proportion they appear to exist according to polls. Which matches my experience that educated people are afraid to express their opposition to the EU.

Still does not prove causality, because causality on such an issue cannot be proven.

You need to look into second-order effects in order to get a clue what is happening. First second-order clue is that people are afraid to express their opinion. The second one is that opinion is very polarized and people are divided on the issue into "us" and "them", i.e. divided.

Educated people in anonymous polls are afraid to express their opinion?

https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2016-eu-refere...

And statistical correlation based on census data?

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/educational-attain...

GP claims that he has not met anybody who is against EU but presented statistics that only 60% support EU.

No, Trumpism is caused by manipulation of public opinion by populist and authoritarian politicans and media.

One of their manipulations is to promote the dismissal of expert opinion as "elitism" and that the "elites" are contemptuous of "the ordinary American".

It's bullshit and always has been factually incorrect.

It varies, as you’d expect but the number is about right

Here are 2 recent reports

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/24/people-br...

https://encompass-europe.com/comment/clear-support-for-eu-me...

For comparison, that's significantly larger approval than the US federal president most of the last decades. ;)

So what is the approval of staying in USA for the states? Approval for a specific politician will of course usually be lower than approval for the union as a whole.

Can't say, but there are plenty of people hating "the feds" in many regions.

Any funny enough, they still want to keep the parts that the Eurosceptics are fighting tooth and nail from being enacted :)

EU is not that big a deal anyway—its stupid AI regulations are keeping it back...

We don't allow AIs to make healthcare decisions, how is that a bad thing? How many people die in the US because their care was denied by an AI?

IMO the EU regulation doesn't go far enough as it excludes banning AI for "military use".

Most EU countries banned certain categories of weapons like cluster munitions and antipersonnel mines, and as a result were unable to provide them to Ukraine. russia had no such qualms. Fortunately non-EU countries were able to supply Ukraine with these useful weapons: the EU was dependent on non-EU countries for its security.

Had russia attacked a NATO country of the EU directly, said country would have been at a disadvantage.

There have been reports of experiments with autonomous drones in the russia-Ukraine war.

If the EU bans AI for military uses and our adversaries do not, I am afraid someday we will regret our mistake. But it will be too late.

If Russia commits war crimes, it is not necessary, that we follow.

Agreed.

None of what I mentioned necessarily implies a war crime, as far as I know.

Usage of mines for example...

> Most EU countries banned certain categories of weapons like cluster munitions and antipersonnel mines, and as a result were unable to provide them to Ukraine

In one word: Good.

>russia had no such qualms.

Neither does the Ukraine or the US.

The hypothetical war in Europe would not be fought the same way it is fought in Eastern Ukraine, where anywhere between 30-60% of inhabitants are ethnically Russian, depending on locale, and Russia goes out of its way to not just methodically flatten things the way Israel flattened Palestine, which, by the way, is something they can do given their near endless supply of guided bombs. That's why you only have ~23K civilian casualties there after 3 years of war, about half of them attributable to Ukrainian strikes. Absolutely nobody in Moscow would care about collateral damage in e.g. Warsaw or Berlin. Nor for that matter anyone in Warsaw or Berlin would care about collateral damage in Moscow. So if this war were to actually break out, it'd spin out of control within weeks, and end with a full nuclear exchange, decimating Russia, and completely destroying Europe, which is much more densely populated.

Have you seen what Mariupol looked like right after it was taken? Or what Bakhmut looks like today?

The reason why Russia doesn't do this to Ukraine as a whole is because it is fighting this war with the ultimate goal of occupying and annexing Ukraine, so why would it destroy valuable resources like infrastructure and people needed to maintain it unless it serves some other goal? OTOH when it does serve some other goal (e.g. actually advancing the frontline), they have zero qualms about doing the same exact thing Israel does. I mean, Russia doesn't care all that much about lives of its own soldiers, given the kinds of tactics routinely used.

How Europe would be treated would similarly depend on what the goals of the war from Russian perspective would be.

You don't understand - that was the _minimal_ amount of damage typically inflicted in urban warfare of this intensity. Mariupol itself wasn't even carpet bombed because there were a lot of locals hiding in the basements. Nor was Bakhmut, for largely the same reason. Look at what we did in Mosul or Raqqa to see how we'd approach this. Flatten first, then move in. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/war-torn-...

The point is that Russia was entirely willing to engage in urban warfare of this intensity regardless of what it does to civilians. And just so that we're clear about what intensity that is, Mariupol has seen a larger percentage of buildings destroyed than Stalingrad did back in WW2.

Carpet bombing is tricky when your planes get blown out of the sky on a regular basis and your industry can't replace them as easily as it can replace artillery shells. That's the main reason why they're using glide bombs and missiles instead.

Oh, and you don't need to look at Mosul or Raqqa to see other examples, either. Grozny, in either the first or the second Chechen war, is a nice illustration of how Russia fight wars.

This is an outrageously blatant lie. Of course, Russia is trying its best to damage as much civil infrastructure as it can.

A quote: "The latest available assessment by the World Bank, European Commission, United Nations and Ukrainian government found that direct war damage in Ukraine had reached $152 billion as of December, 2023, with housing, transport, commerce and industry, energy and agriculture the worst-affected sectors." [1] By now, it should be over 200 billion.

The reasons why Russia failed to cause more damage have nothing to do with demoraphics, good will, or anything like that. After all, Russia sent to death hundreds of thousands of ITS OWN citizens. Had it cared about russian lives as much as you are trying to whitewash here, it would not have been fighting this war to begin with.

The real reasons why Russia has not caused more damage or killed more civilians, are, first, it has failed to achieve air superiority. Second, Ukraine, with the help of its allies, was able to set up more less effective air defense against missiles and drones.

"Nearly 12,000 missiles have been launched against Ukraine by Russia since this full-scale conflict started.

Some 80% of those have been intercepted by Ukraine." [2]

The number of drones must be comparable or higher.

The limited number of civilian casualties is easily explained by the number of refugees from Ukraine which is in the millions. Its definity not because Russia did not try too hard.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-russias-invasion-h...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c20726y20kvt

~23K civilian casualties there after 3 years of war, about half of them attributable to Ukrainian strikes.

What is your basis for this belief?

I guess we can agree to disagree.

I hope to see even more "stupid AI regulation" in the future, fingers crossed.

Recently I benefited from a "stupid regulation" mandating minimum Internet speeds carriers need to provide. How dare the policy makers interfere with the extortionate prices every single ISP in the market colluded to impose on the population. Muh liberty!

LOL. I, for one, do _not_ welcome our new AI overlords in the US.

Plus the undemocratic law making process and the unelected EU commission that is an authoritarian institution without anyone keeping it in check. The DSA is a censorship law with an added backdoor (look up "emergency response" and its implications). And tethered caps are just annoying ;)

That's a lot of BS.

The European Parliament is elected every few years by citizens in all member states.

The European Commission is nominated by the European Council and and confirmed by the European Parliament.

The European Council consists of government officials from the member states where they have been chosen by national democratic processes.

It may be a little complicated, but it's all rooted in democratic processes. Please stick to the facts and keep the populistic anti-EU nationalistic propaganda to yourself.

(Every kid in the EU has been learning those basic facts in school for decades, making it surprising that this populist nonsense still catches on with so many people. I have an easier time forgivin non-EU folks, but even those should check the facts before claiming things.)

> The European Commission is nominated by the European Council and and confirmed by the European Parliament.

> The European Council consists of government officials from the member states where they have been chosen by national democratic processes.

I disagree. Successful elected government officials from member states aren't governing the EU Commission and Council. They're governing their own member states, where they are elected by the public.

Unpopular, unsuccessful ex-government officials from member states are governing the EU, where they are appointed by bureaucrats.

Just look at the uninspiring Commissioners we've suffered over the last few years.

It's telling that the Von Der Leyen Commission scraped in with just 51.4% of MEP votes.

https://facts4eu.org/news/2024_dec_unpopular_eu_I

In her home country Germany, only 33% said she'd make a good Commission president.

https://www.politico.eu/article/most-germans-skeptical-of-ur...

> Unpopular, unsuccessful ex-government officials from member states are governing the EU, where they are appointed by bureaucrats.

Von der Leyen was not appointed by bureaucrats.

> It's telling that the Von Der Leyen Commission scraped in with just 51.4% of MEP votes.

That's nothing special in European voting systems. Various governments (regional or country wide) in Germany have small, but relatively stable majorities provided by coalitions. That's very different to the mostly two-party systems in the US or the UK.

> Von der Leyen was not appointed by bureaucrats.

It's not clear who specifically did the ceremonial nomination, but it was probably the CDU bureaucracy that made the decision.

The "CDU bureaucracy" ? What is that? The CDU is a political party.

Generally about the appointment of the commission:

https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/how-commissi...

> The "CDU bureaucracy" ? What is that? The CDU is a political party.

Right, and like most large organisations it has a bureaucracy.

> Generally about the appointment of the commission

Right, note the vague "suggestions from member states". (Also note that the claimed accountability points have never been activated in practice)

The CDU is a large party, not a particular large "organization" in terms of full-time CDU employees. The bureaucracy of the CDU is in no way responsible for nominating/selecting the EU President of the Commission.

Ursula on der Leyen was 2019 supported by Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany) as the future president of the EU commission. That's no secret. Macron also supported her. The European Council then nominated Ursula on der Leyen and she was accepted by the European Parliament. The Parliament is directly elected the citizens of the European Union.

The election of her was kind of unfortunate, since it was signalled by parties that the election to the parliament will also find the proposed EU commission president. But that was not the case. Since a candidate was not found (various parties and governments were not happy with the proposed candidates), the European Council finally proposed Ursula von der Leyen, which then also got a majority in the parliament.

51.4% is a majority. You are free to disagree again, but that won't change the facts. You can just as easily disagree about gravity, evolution or climate change. Still won't change them.

Look, I don't like lots of things about the EU either. But the first step to being able to change sth is to acknowledge the facts. Claiming that von der Leyen wasn't democratically appointed is similar to Trump claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Not a great start.

> democratically appointed

Now there's an oxymoron if ever I saw one!

Where democracy is involved, we use the word "elected" -- not "appointed"

That was always one of the issues with EU, and EEC before it, membership in the UK. There was no education as to the change in constitutional status, nor explanation of how the EEC (then EU) actually worked.

Most folks still had the view that UK Parliament was in charge, not really appreciating the change. That also applied to our MPs, hence the Factomane cases.

Now if there had bee proper education in the UK as to the impact of EEC and EU membership, possibly Brexit would not have happened.

Sadly this 'populist nonsense' has even infected some prominent public intellectuals. Doubtless your comment will put them straight.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/crisis-behind-the-euroc...

From Chapter 6: 'The Inherently Undemocratic EU Democracy'

'A number of prominent public intellectuals put pen to paper to warn not only of a crisis of European democracy, but of a crisis of the very ‘political institution’ of democracy, and particularly its representative and liberal variants. Contemporary manifestations of the ‘hollowing out’ of democracy following the Eurocrisis have taken many forms and several contributions in this volume have dealt with various aspects of the phenomenon.'

' .... a crisis of the EU’s own democratic credentials. Even as they insisted on its purely economic character, commentators were quick to criticise the undemocratic form that the emergency EMU-related responses to the Eurocrisis came to assume, particularly at the European level, where not only parliamentary processes, but also the Treaties’ legal prescriptions, were systematically circumvented'.

The EU has certainly its issues, no doubt about it. They need to be pointed out and addressed for sure. We are not in disagreement there.

But the flat out denial that EU is in principle a democratic system is just a too simplistic view. It tends to be mostly touted by those populists who ultimately would like to see an authocratic state with themselves in charge.

I think it makes a lot more sense that there's a lot of (especially rich people and US folks) that desperately want EU to fail - either because they're deeply nationalist, see a profit motive or just hate foreigners.

Those will craft narratives that are patently untrue to drive their agenda.

The council, composed of representatives of governments elected in their own state, nominates the commission and proposes laws which are then voted by the parliament where deputies who have been directly elected by European sit. The parliament also confirms the commission.

Care to explain how any of that is undemocratic?

The commissioners are appointed by their party - often the decisions are made by people who are not even directly elected themselves - and as such have no real accountability to the public. MEPs are slightly better but the overwhelming majority of them are "elected" via a party list system, which means that any individual can much more easily get elected by being popular with party bureaucrats than by being popular with the public that they supposedly represent. (But since the MEPs can't write laws, only vote on laws written by the commision, they're pretty irrelevant anyway).

Even an extremely unpopular commissioner is at no risk of being voted out. For many years the UK's representative was disgraced former disgraced former MP Peter *Mandelson, one of the most hated people in the country, who could never have won any remotely democratic contest.

Peter Mandelson*. Recently back in the headlines as he was just appointed as US ambassador.

I think it’s a stretch to call Mandelson “one of the most hated people in the country”. What did he do exactly? By this point I’m sure the average person has mostly forgotten that he exists.

You are right, however, about the lack of real democratic accountability in the EU. The EU commission is the place to “fail up” - it’s where politicians go after their democratic viability has run out at home and the voters boot them out.

> I think it’s a stretch to call Mandelson “one of the most hated people in the country”. What did he do exactly?

He had at least the image of a slimeball "spin doctor", seen as having control over the media and using it to control the narrative and cover up government wrongdoing. He was definitely publicly hated even before it emerged that he'd taken a bribe^Wundeclared interest-free loan from a person he was responsible for investigating. You're right that he's mostly forgotten nowadays.

> The commissioners are appointed by their party

Commissioners are proposed by their country and discussed with the head of the commission (which was selected by the whole European council) before being validated by the parliamentary committee in charge of its portfolio (composed of MEPs which are elected using direct universal suffrage and proportional representation (you can hardly be more democratic than that).

I understand that you have had issue in the past with the UK pick as commissioner. Sadly the UK uses first past the post election and has a party-chosen prime minister. I would thank you for not projecting the results of the poor democratic system used by your country on the Union in the future.

> Commissioners are proposed by their country

Well, no, they're proposed by the government of their country. Which generally means they're selected by the ruling party in that country.

> I understand that you have had issue in the past with the UK pick as commissioner. Sadly the UK uses first past the post election and has a party-chosen prime minister. I would thank you for not projecting the results of the poor democratic system used by your country on the Union in the future.

Huh? Party list systems (which is what alternatives to FPTP tend to boil down to) redouble the problem - you lose democratic accountability even at that lower level.

> Well, no, they're proposed by the government of their country.

Yes, that’s how democracy works. Countries have elected governments.

> Party list systems (which is what alternatives to FPTP tend to boil down to)

Huh? It’s a proportional system and everyone is free to present their own list if they disagree with the existing organisation presenting lists. The fact that you can’t be bothered to take part in the political life of your country is not magically a loss of democratic accountability.

> It’s a proportional system and everyone is free to present their own list if they disagree with the existing organisation presenting lists.

This is one of those "the law in its majestic equality" things. It's not practically possible to compete with the full-time political parties without being a full-time political party. And a society that separates its politicians from its people is as bad as that quote about separating its scholars from its warriors.

> The fact that you can’t be bothered to take part in the political life of your country

I get involved, more at a local level, but at a national level I vote, and occasionally I write to my MP - who is a named individual representing a fairly small number of people who can therefore actually hold him accountable. Piss off your constituents enough and it doesn't matter how much the party likes you. Which is a system I'm very happy with, and something that's deeply missing from the EU.

> And a society that separates its politicians from its people is as bad as that quote about separating its scholars from its warriors.

So you hate all modern democracies actually and it has nothing to do with the EU. Thank you that makes things a lot more clear.

> I write to my MP - who is a named individual representing a fairly small number of people who can therefore actually hold him accountable

It can be exactly the same for MEP. Countries are free to use a per region vote if they want. Turn out the UK chose to have national lists but France had 8 regional zones until 2018. It was entirely a UK decision.

Plus all MEP’s votes are public and easy to consult and they all have an address you can write to. The fact that people don’t even bother remembering how they are called is not per se a deficit of democracy in the EU.

Not OP, but for starters, the referendum in my country about joining EU did not ask whether we should give our independence away to the EU. If people would have been told the actual goal, the referendum would have probably never passed. The EU is not a legitimate democracy.

I visited Iceland in 2013 and between Keflavik and Reykjavik there was a single billboard with the EU emblem and the words “Nei Takk” (no thanks). This article puts a lot of that sentiment in perspective.

Our takeaway at the time was that this has to be the most effective billboard in the country as there is only one road between the major international airport and the capital.

While in Iceland I learned from local fisherman who have conflicting thoughts on joining the EU. On one hand it could strengthen relations, but on the other they would not be able to preserve their fisheries from being over fished.

That is a myth propagated by the owners of the fishing companies. The real reason they oppose the EU is that they benefit immensely from having income and debts in Euros and dollars, while their expenses and interest bearing assets are in the weak and high-interest ISK.

Consider that icelandic mortgage interest rates are currently 9-11% but a few years ago they were 4% which was celebrated as historically extremely low rates.

No, it’s a very real threat. Icelandic waters can only be fished by Icelandic vessels. That’s what the cod wars were about; protecting our right to be the only ones to fish our waters.

If we join the EU we’re pretty much guaranteed to lose this exclusive access to our waters, and that will be devastating for the economy, given how the fishing industry is one of very few industries keeping the economy afloat. Especially considering exports to other countries.

A high profile campaign during Brexit was about U.K. fishing. U.K. fishing rights were sold by local fishermen to large multinational companies who are more economically efficient (at least in the short term - sustainability is a bad word) many years ago.

Unlike Iceland, fishing is a negligible part of the U.K. economy (c0.1% vs c10%), yet was used by people who couldn’t give a stuff about fishing as a weapon.

Have there been any studies on the effect upon local fishing industry when a country joins the EU? I bet that ECB has some studies about it. I could only find this admittedly weak article: https://ireland.representation.ec.europa.eu/news-and-events/...

As I understand, part of the reason that Norway wanted to stay out of the EU was to fully control fishing in their territorial waters. I can understand why Iceland may wish to do the same.

Access to fishing and the quota system will definitely be one of if not the most important items to sort out, but it will not be devastating for the Icelandic economy if a portion of the quota is allocated to other EU members.

" but it will not be devastating for the Icelandic economy if a portion of the quota is allocated to other EU members."

I don't think you realise how small the Icelandic economy truly is, and how big an effect fluctuations in fishing quote already have on it.

Oh I realise how small it is, which is why it makes better sense to join the EU.

So you say, but could you please name some examples?

Iceland already has full access to the single market and Schengen. Historically during times of economic shocks, having our own currency has been useful as it allowed for more flexibility (i.e currency controls, self governance over central bank rates etc). Would taking up the Euro make the island more resilient or less able to respond to shocks? Economists seem to not fully agree on the matter.

I have personally never bought into the scare mongering by the island's quota kings - and fully support making the fishing quota a nationally own resource along with propper utlization fee structures - but having a partner who's doctorate is in fisheries management and having personally had a lifelong interest in the matter my self, I don't believe for a second that our fisheries would be better off dictated by Brussels. I reserve the right to change my mind when, and if, a deal is ever presented that indicates otherwise.

Tourism is already back to pre pandemic levels, so I don't see how anything would change there. Iceland is and always will be a very expensive destination for tourists. Most things need to be shipped in, and joining the Union will not change that in any way.

Aluminum brings in a decent amount, via large scale electrical usage contracts made with the state owned electrical company. While these deals are secret, it is public knowlege that they are tied to the global price of aluminum. Having income in a foreign currency but expenditure in the domestic currency is surely a good thing for the government and all of it's agencies.

Would the government have access to better loans if joining the Union and taking up the euro? Perhaps. However, the loan rating for the Icelandic government is already fairly good, sitting at A+, that I'm not sure that there would be a big impact.

Just to make it clear, I am all for the European Union (heck, I even moved from Iceland and live on mainland Europe) but joining it isn't such a clear cut black/white calculus as your comments have made it sound like.

I don't believe I have said it is a black/white matter. However I do believe that on balance it would be better to be a full EU member instead of being a quasi-member without any say at all.

I also believe it would be better to be an EU member and part of the eurozone instead of having the flaky economic governance we have historically had.

Like you said the economic pillars of Iceland have become broader and more numerous than only the fisheries, and for all the talk of currency devaluation being beneficial, in effect it simply serves to allow the government and largest exporters offload all effects of economic downturns onto the Icelandic people and small businesses.

It is theoretically possible for Iceland to govern itself in such a way that it is stronger outside the EU than inside. Simply adhering to the Maastricht conditions would perhaps be enough, it just does not seem likely to me that there will ever be enough discipline to do so without actually joining the eurozone.

exceptions to the "acquis" have not once been made to new members

you accept the entire body of law or you don't join

the UK and Norway both tried to negotiate away the fisheries policy when they submitted applications in the 70s

the UK "accepted" the CFP and and joined, Norway didn't and still remains outside

given then the odds of Iceland joining the EU are practically zero

That's not entirely correct.

The EU has an abysmal history of setting and managing ITQs in its waters, with Iceland having some of the best (but not at all perfect) managed waters in the world.

So there is plenty to be skeptical about when it comes to how negotiations would go on the matter.

Um, joining the EU is not the same as joining the Euro. They can keep doing this exact thing after joining the EU if they keep their currency just like a few others are doing.

No, this is mostly about fishing rights afaik. Britain also kept having issues on that front.

> joining the EU is not the same as joining the Euro

Now, every country joining the EU is expected to join the Euro at some point.

https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/euro/enlargement-euro-a...

"Who can join and when?

All EU Member States, except Denmark, are required to adopt the euro and join the euro area. To do this they must meet certain conditions known as 'convergence criteria'."

> Now, every country joining the EU is expected to join the Euro at some point.

In theory yes, in practice no. The Swedish government has said repeatedly they don't plan to join despite being legally obliged to do so.

EU law says they have to do it, but it also says it can't be done without their active cooperation, and there is no penalty if they refuse to cooperate. The obligation is essentially toothless.

So Denmark having a formal opt-out from the Euro and Sweden not, is really more of a theoretical difference than a practically relevant one.

> The Swedish government has said repeatedly they don't plan to join despite being legally obliged to do so.

Sweden is long in the EU. CURRENTLY the expectation to new member states to join the Euro when joining the EU is different -> much higher.

Sweden was also long not in NATO. Now it is. Similar, support in polls for Euro introduction is rising.

> Sweden is long in the EU. CURRENTLY the expectation to new member states to join the Euro when joining the EU is different -> much higher.

I don't agree. It isn't just Sweden; Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Romania too. The time between EU accession and Euro adoption is normally a decade or more. If a government doesn't want to adopt the Euro, there are heaps of levers they can pull to slow the process down, and there is no way to punish a government for doing that. The easiest is that you have to join ERM II at least two years before adopting the Euro, but nobody can force you to join ERM II – so Sweden, Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Romania have all refused to join it. The only current ERM II members are Denmark (with a formal opt-out), and Bulgaria (which wants to adopt the Euro – it had hoped to do it 1 January 2025, but the ECB says their inflation is too high – 5.1%, the limit is 3.3%). If Bulgaria gets inflation down in 2025, they may succeed in joining on 1 January 2026.

When negotiating to join, the politicians say "sure, we promise we'll adopt the Euro", knowing that they'll likely be retired by the time joining the Euro is a real possibility.

> Sweden was also long not in NATO. Now it is. Similar, support in polls for Euro introduction is rising.

Yes, but that doesn't change the point – an EU member state (present or future) cannot be forced to adopt the Euro, it will only happen if the member state's government is willing, and they'll likely only be willing if it is sufficiently popular with their people.

Currently 20 of 27 EU members have the Euro adopted.

> an EU member state (present or future) cannot be forced to adopt the Euro

Future members can be forced. They won't become EU members, without a clear will to adopt the policies which lead to the Euro.

> Future members can be forced.

Only if they changed the rules to make ERM II membership mandatory and automatic, or if they changed the Euro convergence criteria to remove the need for it. I've heard no talk they are planning to do so.

The non-Euro EU members have a say in the enlargement negotiation process too, and they don’t want new members to be forced into Euro adoption - it might weaken their own ability to resist that pressure in the future, plus additional non-Euro EU members are a potential source of new internal allies

> They won't become EU members, without a clear will to adopt the policies which lead to the Euro.

The government that negotiates to join the EU may do all they can to convince the EU that they want to join the Euro – they might even really mean it. Then, after accession, that government loses an election and get replaced by a new government which is anti-Euro. What can the EU do to stop that? Nothing.

They could presumably strike some deal, if there is political will on both sides.

UK and Scandinavia got to opt out of the Euro, for example.

You mean Sweden and Denmark, not Scandinavia. And both have different ideas about joining the Eurozone. Norway isn't part of the EU. Finland is using the Euro.

Finland is Nordic but not Scandinavia. Because Norway is not an EU member, discussing a euro opt out doesn't make sense. Thus, OP is accurate in stating that Scandinavia got a Euro opt-out.

Sweden and Denmark are the only Scandinavian countries in the EU.

What about whale hunting? I assume the EU would like a say about that as well?

Are you perhaps thinking of the Faroe Islands and their killing of pilot whales? (Grindadráp, killing hundreds of whales)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Faroe_Islands

Probably the news from a few weeks ago that the government issued whale hunting permits through 2029.

I wonder if Iceland's debt issues could interfere with this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Icelandic_fi...

(Though, perhaps it helps that the UK is no longer in the EU).

No, the debt crisis is long over and sorted.

Absolutely Unrelated, what is living-systems.is ? Your name catch my attention then you're company name catch my curiosity. Your site has left me thirsty. If you're doing brand/marketing well done but I hope it's something else!

I wonder how things would have played out back in the crisis of 2008 if Iceland was a member of the Eurozone:

What they would have been allowed or forced to do and whether their response could have been the same.

Allowed is one thing, influenced is another. Remember the Libdem party in UK? Several of its MPs were elected on Boris Johnson’s pro-Brexit program, then turned over and fought against the Brexit. Yes, after the election. Left and joined the opposite party. This is what Europe does to its countries.

I am confused whether you’re mistaken or just speaking unclearly. Boris Johnson has always belonged to the Conservative party. The Tories formed a coalition with the LibDems in 2010 because there was no majority winner in the Parliamentary election, but the LibDems were anti-Brexit. Even the Tories weren’t consistently pro-Brexit.

I'm guessing they're talking about Philip Lee [0] who was elected under Boris' government but defected to the Lib Dems when it became clear just how insane Boris was.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49570682

Liz Truss was Lib Dem early in her life but then went Tory later. Most of farage’s party are ex-Tories.

Peoples views change, and parties change. The Tory party of today is very different to that of thatcher, just like the republicans today are very different to Reagan’s

People defecting to opposition parties isn't a strictly European thing. Hell the next US president and a number of his senior appointments are now Republican but were previously Democrat

Even boris changed his mind.

https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnsons-secret-remain-arti...

Boris never changed his mind, he knew Brexit was bad but used it for political gain.

It’s an amazing butterfly effect - how something seemingly small - Angus Deyton doing hookers and blow - led to Boris Johnson’s popularity on a panel show which led to his London mayorship and antics which endeared him enough to be able to swing enough votes during Brexit to sway one way or another.

I'm not sure cause and effect on that: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-12.47.14.html

But I also find it odd that Johnson became a guest host a few episodes after Deyton was kicked off in 2002. Was Johnson's adulterous nature not known at the time? Johnson's cocaine stories were, I think, 2005 (on the show itself), 2007, and 2019, and he hosted again in 2003, 2005, and 2006, at least the last of those should not have happened on the basis of the argument used against Deyton.

I'm actually surprised Iceland isn't in the EU already, I had assumed it was. Is Greenland being a Danish protectorate also in the EU?

Well yes but actually no:

> As Greenland is one of the Overseas Countries and Territories of the European Union, citizens of Greenland are European Union citizens.

> In 1985, Greenland left the European Economic Community (EEC), unlike Denmark, which remains a member. The EEC later became the European Union (EU, renamed and expanded in scope in 1992). Greenland retains some ties through its associated relationship with the EU. However, EU law largely does not apply to Greenland except in the area of trade. Greenland is designated as a member of the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) and is thus officially not a part of the European Union, though Greenland can and does receive support from the European Development Fund, Multiannual Financial Framework, European Investment Bank and EU Programmes.

Similar to French and other oversees territories, they can move to and work in the EU, but other EU citizens can't do the reverse. Don't have to follow the laws, yet get funding regardless. Pretty sweet deal.

To be fair, Greenland basically has its own version of Native Americans, complete with a history of Europeans trying to genocide them. There's historical context why EU citizens can't freely flood into Greenland lol

One of the issues they had with the EEC was basically European fishing fleets coming over and decimating their fishing stocks and thus food supplies and jobs.

An utterly strange comparison.

The current Inuits are no more "native" than the Norse settlers, and in fact arrived later than the Scandinavians.

Comparing the treatment of Greenlanders in any way to "genocide" is terrible. A "misguided" Western intervention, perhaps, but mostly at the wish of the Greenlandic heads.

It is even possible, though far from certain, that the ancestors of current Inuit exterminated the Norse settlers in the 15th century.

History rarely walks the paths prescribed by modern ideologues.

The comparison is not strange, albeit simplistic.

As late as the 1970s Denmark was actively involved in demographic policies of the country. Including by secretly sterilizing women without consent, which is one of the criteria for genocide in Article II (d) “ Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”. And just like the Americans Indians, the Greenlandic Inuit had several forced relocations, including to Ittoqqortoormiit in 1925 and to Qaanaaq in 1953.

> The current Inuits [sic] are no more "native" than the Norse settlers

(added [sic] because Inuit is already plural, the singular form is Inuk)

What an utterly false narrative. Just because they migrated relatively late, it doesn’t make them any less indigenous. Greenlanders had unbroken settlements in their lands for a thousand years. The Norse left in the 15th century and than a different population returned 400 years later to colonize the Inuit. By this logic Italians could claim they are as indigenous to Britain as the Anglo-Saxons.

Denmark never sterilised Greenlandic women anymore than they did their own countrymen in Denmark. the only particular effort was in a removable contraceptive. Such efforts were called upon by the inuit Greenlandic leadership.

The "forced relocations" were due to famine!!! The towns were unsustainable due to extreme population growth.

> Greenlanders had unbroken settlements in their lands for a thousand years.

plainly wrong. Just like the Norse, the previous Greenlandic settlers died out.

Those removable contraceptives were put in without consent and without knowledge. Many women wore them for decades without knowing, and were unable to have children throughout that time. The effect here is the same whether the procedure was permanent or not, and the intention was clearly to reduce childbirth among Inuk women.

> The towns were unsustainable due to extreme population growth.

Only if you are unwilling to put in the infrastructure to accommodate. The government of Denmark was racist and didn’t want to spend money that would benefit the people of Greenland.

> The "forced relocations" were due to famine!!!

Where do you get that? Ittoqqortoormiit was established in 1925 by relocating people from Ammassalik to prevent Norway (under Quisling) from establishing a colony there. Even though most the Inuit settlers went north voluntarily (undoubtedly because the hunting grounds were better up North) not everyone did.

The case for Qaanaaq—who were forcibly relocated from Pituffik in 1953 to build an American air base—is even more clear cut. The Danish courts have even ruled that the relocation was illegal and ordered reparations to be payed to the victims. You could argue that the hunting in Ammassalik wasn’t that great in the early 1920s (though saying there was a famine is very much an exaggeration), but there was no such thing in North Greenland in the 1950s. And the people were only relocated to the next fjord over, where the hunting cant have been that much different (in fact the presence of the American military must have made it worse).

>> Greenlanders had unbroken settlements in their lands for a thousand years.

> plainly wrong. Just like the Norse, the previous Greenlandic settlers died out.

Sorry, 700 years than, that is still 450 years longer than the Norwegian/Danish settlements. The Norse and the Inuit both migrated to North America around the same time (1000 CE). The Inuit started in Alaska and spread over to Greenland around 300 years later. Meanwhile the Norse only had 2 settlements in North America, over the course of some 400 years, which they finally abandoned, and didn’t return until 300 years later, by which time the Inuit had populated south and west Greenland with dozens of settlements.

Some norse dropping by in the 10th century means Norway is right to give away an island with an inuit population to Denmark in 1814 or whatever?

Forcing contraceptives and massacres are common methods of genocide, and while it's unlikely we'll find evidence of genocidal intent the danish has acted very much like a typical colonial power.

> Norway is right to give away an island with an inuit population to Denmark in 1814 or whatever?

not only do you lack knowledge of North American history, you do not know the relationship between Norway and Denmark. Would you say the same thing about Iceland, because they are not Brown?

Can you please not post in the flamewar style or cross into personal attack on Hacker News? We're trying to avoid those things.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Fill me in, little buddy. Teach me all about it.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Shared fishing rights in the EU has traditionally been a deal breaker for both Iceland and Greenland to join.

It's a touchy topic throughout the EU.

"They're stealing our fish!" gets voters riled up, even in countries where the fishing industry is economically insignificant and/or unprofitable.

Fisheries are a significant part of Iceland's economy, though.

Well-off European states with lots of sea (Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the UK) are disproportionately likely to reject EU membership due to the Common Fisheries Policy.

It's too bad that the EU failed to recognise, way back in the EEC days, that having all these countries in the EU was far more important than some fish. (And just wait to see what a huge problem the Common Agricultural Policy is going to be for Ukrainian membership.)

Ukrainian membership will hopefully never happen (unless Ukraine actually shapes up into a modern country first). Without the war the process would never have gone as far as it has already.

What makes you think that the reforms that have been going on since the war began aren't evolving Ukraine into a "modern" country similar to Romania, or Bulgaria, or Slovakia, or any of the post-Soviet members?

Not OP, but I think there's a valid argument about how "modern" those countries are. It's generally accepted that Romania and Bulgaria were let into the EU somewhat early, mainly for geopolitical reasons (foreclosing Russian influence there, cutting off Russia from the West Balkans). They are countries that continually lie on the tail end of every EU statistic, and have relatively unstable domestic politics and rule of law.

Personally, I'd like to see Ukraine in the EU asap, but I'd also like the EU reformed into a democratic federation, such that the equivalent of the FBI has meaningful authority to investigate and prosecute corruption and rule of law irregularities in member states like Ukraine and Bulgaria.

Entirely agree on what you would like to see. My point is that Ukraine is no worse than any of those nations, so admitting them to the EU is hardly going to affect the EU in any bad way.

Integration would be difficult on the agricultural front, but is something that the EU has been dealing with since inception.

One of the "benefits" of the war and the Ukrainian diaspora throughout Europe is that they will be able to integrate much faster than the previous Balkan and Balkan-adjaent countries as integration into Schengen would be able to be rapid.

Ukraine's engineering, mining, and agricultural industries would bring major advantages to the EU as a Union, diversifying engineering from dependence on Germany, and bringing broadscale agricultural efficiencies to the EU as well.

> integration into Schengen would be able to be rapid.

If there is one thing that Western EU countries have learned over the last 30 years, is that borders should be opened very slowly. With the current "black wave" sweeping the continent, there is no chance in hell that Ukraine will be admitted to Schengen in less than 10-15 years - if at all.

I'm not trying to rain on your parade, I'm just being realistic. Ukraine has all the problems of countries that were admitted to the EU too quickly, plus all the problems coming from scale and an agrarian economy. Just waving it in the EU would be a repetition of all the major missteps of the last 30 years.

Hopefully this war will be over very soon, and soon after there will be a boom of children born in Ukraine, as happens after wars.

They'll have all sorts of issues, but has there ever been a nation that has been so unanimous about wanting to join?

I think NATO membership is more likely to occur before EU membership, Ukraine won't accept anything less for their future protection, having fought the Russians to a standstill.

EU integration is more about the economics first. For example, Ukraine just cut off traffic of Russian oil/gas across its territory. That was a source of income for Ukraine that will have to be compensated after the war. Perhaps via damages paid by seized Russian assets.

What I hope that both of these perhaps decade long paths start in 2025.

It would make a good celebration in 2035 if both of those things have happened.

Are there any countries where the fishing industry is unprofitable? I don't know any in Europe.

Wasn’t that mostly a UK thing? I don’t think I have heard fishing rights mentioned since Brexit.

NL fishing fleet has been modernized twice over. First cleaner engines, then electric pulse fishing (not nearly as bad as dragnet fishing).

French fishers don’t want to make the investments into their fleet, so they harassed French politicians until those spiked the pulse fishing research permits. This had the by-effect of (nearly) bankrupting the Dutch fishing fleet.

So no, fishing industry fights are not just an UK thing.

Greenland did actually join, but they left again.

Just our savings on IceSave

Greenland isn’t a Danish protectorate. It’s an autonomous territory which is to say an autonomous administrative region of Danemark. Greenland very much is part of Danemark and its inhabitants are Danish citizen. Nothing to do with a protectorate.

I mean, Greenland is always going to be a weird political exception. It has a population smaller than Vejle, which, unless you live in or near Denmark, you are highly unlikely to be able to point to on a map. Denmark itself has a population significantly smaller than London.

None of what you said makes it an exception.

It's a country inhabitated by Danish people, the fact that they are in the low thousands doesn't change the fact it's their land.

Fun fact: one of these Greenland Danes created PHP.

In Iceland rn with Icelandic family- polling them and their reasoning for wanting to join the EU has ZERO to do with Putin/Russia/Ukraine etc and everything to do with gaining access to the Euro for economic stability and the fact that they already abide by EU rules/regs but don't have the ability to vote.

It's interesting to wonder what they'd gain from it. Given just the geographic distance, would it really affect things like trade, movement of people or security cooperation.

My understanding is that they're stable since the financial crisis.

"Stable since the last crisis" is not very convincing. In the EU they would enjoy lower interest rates, a more stable currency and voting rights. The last bit will help negotiations about trade a lot.

Simply put, they want an inverse Brexit.

Nothing stops them from just adopting the euro or dollar. It isn't common but some countries have adopted an external currancy.

If you're going to adopt the Euro to get the benefits of improved trade with the rest of Europe, you might as well join its trading bloc and get votes on its regulatory bodies at the same time...

There are pros and cons to that. The euro isn't just about trade, it means your own government cannot manipulate currency (see the banking crisis) and may bring better interest rates.

What do you think about the suggestions in the article for why this isn't ideal?

I'll admit to skiphing section that discuss details that don't interest me but I did't find them.

in any case nothing is ideal anyway. The question is what set of pros and cons are the best compromise. That is something for the people of Iceland to answer not outsiders like me (and perhaps you)

I wonder if they could benefit from CO2 emission controls.

Iceland's energy is highly renewable (hydro, geothermal), and they have substantial potential for mineral carbonation of CO2. Mafic rocks like basalt, particularly with high olivine content, are close to the top for targets for conversion of CO2 to carbonates.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10003-8

Iceland is already part of the EEA and through that, joined the EU Emission Trading System. Carbfix, the company doing the mineralization stuff, is already receiving quite substantial funding via the EU Innovation Fund, which distributes ETS income to innovative climate technology projects.

Iceland could leverage geothermal energy to produce green forms of ammonia or hydrogen. Not a jackpot but strategically it is fairly inexpensive to leverage. The EU doesn't have a good alternative to cheap Russian gas at the moment. The price of natural gas in the EU is about five times the price than in the US.

Blunting the Common Fisheries Policy would be a significant benefit - they need to abide by as part of the EEA, but can't change decisions surrounding it.

Also opening EU funding opportunities for plenty of infra enhancements.

Iceland is not in the CFP.

I would also like to be able to use European banks and insurance companies.

People here will say that we will lose control of our fishing rights but we already lost them to a handful of filthy rich families.

Don't they already have a market agreement with the EU? Seems to me like they have a nice side deal.

Iceland is part of the EEA, where you accept most the rules of the single market being sent over by a fax machine from Brussels.

But this excludes things such as farming and fishing, the latter of which has been very important for Iceland because the EU has never always got that right in a painful attempt to make all member states equally unhappy, and representation of where those rules are decided (Council, Parliament) or proposed (Commission).

Even outside the EEA, the size of the EU on the continent means European countries who want to do large amounts of frictional-less trading end up importing the EUs rules (e.g. Switzerland, post-Brexit UK) with no say on them.

Being inside offers more effective place to lobby and do horse-trading. Iceland is in position with rather specific interest so they could easily give up many things that don't really matter to them greatly for concessions from others.

It's more than lobby and horse-trading, being inside gives veto powers...

Vero powers don't exist anymore on almost anything; but if you're vehemently opposed to something you have no chance to actually stop, it's better to be inside so you can trade your nominal opposition for something, anything.

If you know you're going to lose 10 no matter what, you might as well trade your opposition for something worth 2 or 3, so you lose less.

>Vero powers don't exist anymore on almost anything

that is blatantly false

Vetoes are limited to very specific areas, and are often bypassed already even in those areas (because most practical decisions are actually not taken by the organisms where vetoes exist). Even the Hungarian government, which has stretched the interpretation of such definitions to the most awkward limit over the last decades, in practice falls in line pretty much all the time, using it as a bargain chip to ensure this or that subsidy keeps flowing. It's a desperate strategy anyway: like the Visegrad bloc's actions effectively prompted reforms to reduce their leverage, so will Hungary bring about new ways to further diminish even the current simulacra of veto.

Maybe you're polling the people that wanted to join before 2022? Otherwise, how would the jump in support in 2022 be explained?

And what would they gain with this? It seems they already have plenty of agreements with EU, by joining they will just lose their sovereignty.

Actually the opposite is true.

By joining the EU they have voting power and influence over their own destiny which they lack under those agreements. Currently they must accept EU rules without being able to influence them.

> they must accept EU rules without being able to influence them

No, they don't really must accept all rules. Only the ones that will benefit them. This will cease once they join the EU.

You might be confusing this with the Switzerland situation. The EEA states (Norway, Lichtenstein, and Iceland) indeed must take all legislation that’s part of the EEA into their domestic law. Sometimes directives and regulations have cave outs for countries but they’re rare.

Implementation is overseen by the EFTA Surveillance Authority who can sue members in the EFTA court.

They have negotiated exceptions, but they can also do that as EU members.

Influence on the rules that they are practically forced to follow. Like Norway Iceland has plenty of agreements with the EU, but that translate to copying EU regulations as if they where an EU country already, except they have no say in the making of those rules.

Iceland has been a pioneer in internet freedom and privacy, joining the EU will subjugate all it stands for.

That sounds backwards. If Iceland is a pioneer and maybe even a stronghold for those issues, then Iceland’s joining the EU would have a better chance of influencing the entire union about those things. There are already a number of Piratpartiet members in various EU parliaments; adding Iceland would hopefully give them larger influence.

As of the recent parliamentary elections here there are no longer any pirate party MP's in Iceland.

We have not been!

I speak as someone who has started both political party here (the Icelandic Pirate party) and participated in IMMI (International Modern Media Institute).

Please don't buy into the hype, we have turned over the Silk road servers to the USA despite not having a MLAAT with them and took down Khilafah.is on technicality when it suited us.

We also blocked the pirate bay after our version of MPAA / RIAA complained.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.is#Domain_suspensions

How do you know that Iceland won't influence the EU in that respect?

Iceland is one exceptionally small country. The EU consists of 27 countries, all or virtually all of which are bigger than Iceland.

Big countries with lots of oligarchs don't listen to small countries with small GDPs. </cynicism>

Dumb question: If Iceland had been part of the EU in 2008, would they have been able not to bail out their bankers and send them to jail? Could the banking industry have been able to go to a supranational court or something?

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35485876

Much of what was written about us in 2008 was sensationalized, especially regarding us "jailing the bankers" and "rewriting the constitution"

A few middle managers took the fall for the actual top bankers and served at most a few months in a country club-esque open prison for non-violent offenders. There was a news item years ago about one getting upset for losing weekend privileges to get ice cream at a local shop.

Our new constitution was thrown out for not being created in an acceptable manner.

Regarding your last question, we did bring in outside investigators from the EU for parts of initial investigation / prosecution.

I'd recommend Sigrún Davíðsdóttir's blog (http://uti.is/) if you want more detailed coverage of what actually happened here.

She's done excellent work.

https://www.rna.is/eldri-nefndir/addragandi-og-orsakir-falls...

> Our new constitution was thrown out for not being created in an acceptable manner.

This is not true (or at least it is not that simple [but you probably know that]). The new constitution is still a draft which was accepted to become a new constitution in a national referendum in 2012. There was nothing inadequate about the drafting of it except failure by the ruling parties to deliver in the results of the referendum (I have my theories as of why which I will say later).

I think you may be referring to the judgement which made the election for the constitutional congress (a separate election the one which asked if we should adopt it, or parts of it), which was voided over (a rather petty) technicality (again I have my theories as to why). The parliament were able to bypass this by simply hiring the same people that won this election to the congress. The only thing this changes is that the mandate for writing the draft came from parliament instead of via a national election. And since it was composed of the same people, it changed absolutely nothing.

Now why then hasn’t the new constitution been adopted even though the nation voted to adopt it 12 years ago?

My theory is that the ruling parties are opposed to it, and don’t want it, even though the nation clearly wants it. Why are they opposed to it? My theory is that they are sheltering the interest of the fishing companies, since the new constitution makes it abundantly clear that the fisheries belong to the people of Iceland, and are not to be bought and sold like they are currently.

Good points, but at least it was more than what US bankers got.

The notion that Iceland jailed a bunch of bankers and whatnot is just a stupid lie that morons love to regurgitate all over the internet. It's a meme in Iceland at this point how often it gets repeated.

Really dumb question: What does the EU actually do?

I’ve read a lot about them and it’s basically always the same as reading information about it here: people saying the EU brings a lot of benefits and another person in reply of that comment saying it’s actually a non-EU treaty/document that’s to thank for that.

On the other hand the EU seems like it costs the country a lot of money to be in since the country has to do their part in supporting failing economies that are also part of the EU.

I would instead prefer we went back to the idea of a Scandinavian Monetary Union / unified krona with Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Czech Republic.

Denmark's krona is also pegged to the Euro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Monetary_Union

For those who have lived and worked in multiple EU countries, the benefits of EU membership are clear, including the relatively simple process of moving between countries.

Iceland is already in Schengen, it's a bit like Norway in that respect, without the benefit to it's currency that all the oil brings

Using the same currency makes it easier to figure out what you’re paying and spot if you’re getting ripped off on holidays.

For example: €100 EUR = 41,172.31 HUF (Hungarian Forint)

Using the same currency without a common fiscal policy and resources is a disaster. It means currency and interests rates cannot be tuned to each country's economy. It means governments cannot borrow in their own currency (which is cheapest). There is a reason almost all countries have their own currency.

The hope was that the single currency would be soon followed by political union. Without this the Euro has been a disaster, leading to the European debt crisis, and painful austerity as the price of bailout.

Couldn't agree more. Greece is a great example of what happens to a country when they have a sovereign debt crisis and no control over the value of their currency.

The ability to control your overnight bank rates, and your monetary supply is important. I don't think the convenience of easy travel or easy(ier) trading of goods outweighs it at all.

Greece showed the flaws with the EU.

The good thing is that the EU has improved since then.

On the flip side, Greece is also a great example of how powerful the EU can be. Greece would have absolutely collapsed outside the EU.

So even with the limitations on the EU, Greece did a lot better within the EU than it would have outside.

> The good thing is that the EU has improved since then

It was indeed a big backdoor attack to the Euro, exploited by GS [1], at least.

> Greece would have absolutely collapsed outside the EU.

Meat for the IMF, BlackRock and so on; Argentina's twin.

Global economy seems to be an ocean with Orca whales, they hit and eat alongside with sharks. The citizens turns to meat at same moment their politicians betray them [2], whether caused by ignorance or by malice (corruption).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/feb/25/markets-pre...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/apr/18/goldman-sac... ( Now we know the truth. The financial meltdown wasn't a mistake – it was a con )

PS: I wonder what happened to the perpetrators of the 2008 crisis.

Greece cheated their way into EUR. They didn't meet the requirements, so they cooked the numbers with the help of GS. This later on blew up into everybody's faces (well, everyone except GS's).

> disaster

By your theory, and by the endless claims of the anti-EU crowd, but it hasn't been. People use euros with no problem, every day, for transactions large and small. It's a major international currency, maybe second only to the dollar.

You’ve offered zero counter points to OPs claims though.

Every time I travel abroad, I transact in local currencies for transactions large and small all over the world using real-time currency exchange rates via the magic of the Visa/Mastercard network.

If that was the core thing the Euro was supposed to solve, the better solution today is just an EU wide digital payments standard.

The point still stands, a common currency without the ultimate unification part is just disadvantageous for most.

The overwhelming counterpoint that I'm making is that it's not a disaster and hasn't been one, now for 25 years. It's been an overwhelming success by any measure.

Where's the evidence of disaster?

Since the financial crisis the US economy has kept on trucking, while the EU has stagnated. This isn’t all because of the euro, but it’s definitely a disaster and I think it is reasonable to hold the euro at least partially responsible.

The US has much higher debt than any point in history, which is climbing rapidly, and are manipulating things as much as possible.

I wouldn’t hold them up as a shining example of “good” or “we should do the same”.

Take a long term view the US has done a lot better in the period it has had a common currency than the EU has done in the period it has had a common currency.

Even in recent decades the US has done much better economically than the EU.

The EU economy is a disaster? Unless we redefine 'economic disaster' to meaninglessness, I think you don't have ground to stand on.

Being the slowest growing major economy is hardly success.

The Euro crisis was a disaster for multiple countries.

'Slowest growing' is hardly disaster! 2008 was pretty bad for a few countries.

Why are you comparing EU against an economy that also has a common currency that cannot be manipulated by member states?

Because the US is structured in a way that makes a common currency workable. It has direct federal taxes, and a very large federal budget. The EU budget is a tiny fraction of total EU public spending.

There is a huge difference between EU states and US states.

> People use euros with no problem, every day, for transactions large and small. It's a major international currency, maybe second only to the dollar.

You are missing the point. The problem is not that transactions work, the problems are with interest rates and government borrowing.

Meanwhile the strongest federation on Earth somehow manages without allowing Texas and Wyoming their own dollars and currency manipuliation. Funny that.

That is exactly my point. The US has a very large federal budget, federal taxes, direct federal spending and federal national debt. To make the Euro work the EU needs to emulate that.

Ah, on that we agree then :)

Technically, the whole country could just switch to Euros without even being in the EU.

Granted, the only two countries to do so (Montenegro and Kosovo) never bothered with creating their own currency to begin with, they went straight to Euros post-independence (with some disgruntlement from the EU). And then there's also two (Bulgaria and Bosnia) which are technically not using Euros, but their currencies are pegged to Euros and stupidly simple to convert (1 EUR = 1.95583 BAM/BGN, so just multiply/divide by 2).

Denmark is also in ERM II and 1 EUR ~ 7.46 DKK with a very tight band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Exchange_Rate_Mechani...

I wonder why they pegged at 1.96 instead of 2?

They had pegged their currency to the DM (Deutsche Mark) and 1.95583:1 is still exactly the same exchange rate as when DM were converted to Euro.

> 1 EUR = 1.95583 BAM/BGN, so just multiply/divide by 2

Why didn't they just set the peg to 2?

Likely to make it simple for retailers to accept euro. Making it exactly two means the retailers would lose money on the exchange spread. Another example is with 1 hkd = 0.97 mop.

That's a proper speculation, not very much grounded in the reality. Also the Euro is not accepted to this day in retail in Bulgaria.

B/c the conversion to Euro happened later. It was already fixed after the hyper inflation in 1997.

The initital rate was 1000 levs = 1 DM, in 1999 there was a denomination of 1000 : 1, same year the Euro happened and the Deutsche mark enjoyed the same rate to the Euro.

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Schengen has independent of the EU status. Eg. you can move freely from Germany to Switzerland (without obligatory border check) but not between Germany and EU-member Cyprus (there is the obligatory border check).

> Schengen has independent of the EU status.

Schengen governs border controls, not the right to work and residency, which is a function of EU membership, not Schengen membership.

EEA gives you that, and Iceland is a member state of that too. So Iceland already enjoys this freedom.

I think Switzerland has a bilateral agreement with the EU (or via EFTA) that allows for free movement and employment of people, so they enjoy these freedom as well despite neither being in the EU nor the EEA (but they are a member of EFTA).

Employment too? I thought that was excluded. IIRC EU citizens can’t just work in Switzerland.

They can, pretty much like in the EU. There might be some technical differences, but overall it's both "right to work and stay if employed"

EU citizens do have a special status for work and stay in Switzerland that is barely more strict than moving within EU.

Yeah, I don’t know about what is included in the bilateral agreement with Switzerland. But at least in EEA (which is EU + EFTA - Switzerland) you are free to work in any of the member states.

[dead]

The person you are replying said "moving" as in you relocate to another country. Not going on vacation. Swiss people can not just move to say denmark one day and start working there. They need work visas etc for that.

No, they don't. Whilst Switzerland is not in the EEA, it does have agreements with the EU which include FoM.

Switzerland is both a member of Schengen (meaning no border checks) and its nationals enjoy FoM (via bilateral arrangements). They don't need work visas.

Freedom of movement is not the same as Schengen.

I assume they're referring to actually residing and working in other EU countries, rather than just visiting.

This is the fantasy that is commonly perpetuated but it is the opposite to reality.

Could you elaborate?

I have worked in Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France.

Belgium took 3 years to process the form for national insurance which caused me to draw down about 20,000 Euros. I couldn't drive my European vehicle in Belgium because I didn't have Belgium license plate which was required for insurance. Rather than working for the first 3months, I had to visit the gemeentehuis every alternate day to push some piece of paperwork to some government authority. I couldn't park my car in Belgium outside my property because I didn't have permission to do so because it wasn't a Belgian vehicle. In order to rent a property I needed a Belgian bank account, which I could only get if I was a Belgian resident, forcing me to live in a hotel temporarily and using that as my address. I required my accounts to be signed off by a Belgian notary, of which there is a government enforced limit, so to speak to one for a microsecond cost 1000 Euros minimum. At the time, operating a British company in Belgium cost 17,000 Euros fee. I still receive paperwork from the Belgian government more than 10 years after leaving.

The other countries aren't much better, and the only country that was easy to start working in was the UK.

Sounds like you had a bad experience. I moved to Lithuania nearly a decade ago, and my experience was just like moving to another city in my country. Opening a bank account took around an hour, they just needed my passport.

After a year I realised I should have applied for a temporary residence permit (if you have FoM you are allowed to live as a resisent for 6 months without it), which took a few weeks to get.

This year I finally changed my drivers license over, as I couldn't get a parking permit without a local license. I've owned 2 vehicles with local plates before that. Took a few days to do that.

I did the same to Ireland a decade before, and my experience there was pretty much the same.

I worked in those countries and more; never had those issues, but then again, I don't worry as much about details as you seem to do. Who reports that they are running a business in another country? The Belgians, like many others in the eu, are on paper a stickler for the rules, but in reality, not many people care or do that. Especially in Belgium where I heard locals at the chess club call them guidelines as a sort of joke.

That you need to be a resident to open a bank account is silly, I admit, but KYC and AML are a problem banks have to work with. Even in the EU, you can disappear a bit over borders: my birth country tax office lost me only after one jump and I moved 6 times since then. I always have to call them and explain things as they still don't have a clue that I am not in in my home country anymore; it's been 20+ years...

Your experience sounds a while ago; things did get somewhat easier; my gripes are opening bank accounts (but we have neobanks now; not sure if that works with rent) which should be eu wide, nummerplates (you have to import your car if you move somewhere which I do find nonsense; it's a tax thing) and renting. The rest is pretty smooth. If these things, and preferably tax, can be done eu wide, it's good. I just do the stuff I agree with and ignore the rest; it is what the locals in every country I have been to do too: hell, I am the only one (that I know of) paying (significant) taxes in my town; people laugh at me at parties.

I've lived snd worked in four different EU countries. Yes, each has some paperwork to do, but none came with the problems you describe. For the most part it was pretty easy, and anything that remained could be solved by paying someone a few hundred euros to assist with the relocation.

> In order to rent a property I needed a Belgian bank account,

This part is proper weird and (very) likely not complaint with the EU directives. All Eurozone banks must be treated the same. Since you appear to be British, that would preclude the Eurozone. Still all banks in the UK were allowed to transact in Euro although there was a spat where the guys in Brussels wanted to exclude London from the juice EU clearance.

Many years back (not in Belgium) I did get a bank account prior to obtaining the local residency. Moving to work within the EU has been absolutely hassle free for me. Again, I have not worked in Belgium.

It took me a single, half hour appointment in Denmark, booked online for a couple of weeks after I arrived.

(Then a simple follow up which any Dane would also need to do if they moved between cities.)

The bank account was easy. I didn't bring a car, but I have friends that did and it wasn't complicated.

Belgium has special rules limiting immigration that don’t apply to most the EU.

I wish I had more details on this. It just comes from a stray comment in a newspaper.

It was easy for me to work in Belgium, but I didn’t have a car or a company from a different country.

So in other words: research what is required before moving to and trying to do business in, another country - or hire a professional to do it for you?

You seem very unaware that your experience is not typical by any means.

His words were debating the claim above:

"the relatively simple process of moving between countries."

But I wonder, how long ago that was?

That’s Schengen zone, some countries are in Schengen but not in EU.

No, the right to live and work is not related to Schengen.

Ireland isn't in Schengen, but a French person can move there tomorrow for work or study etc. They have to show a passport at border control, but otherwise face a very similar situation as they would moving to Germany (fill in some papers, get a local tax id etc).

Minor nitpick: you don't need a passport to travel to/from EU countries not in Schengen as an EU national - your national ID will do.

In practise I forget that, as neither of the two countries relevant to me issue(d) national identity cards (UK, Denmark).

"As an EU national, you're entitled to work — for an employer or as a self-employed person — in any EU country without needing a work permit."

ref: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/work-abroad/index....

Iceland already has freedom of movement (to live and work) due to its EEA membership; and it is only somewhat to do with Schengen, which is about passport free travel not living and working. You can have FoM without Schengen - e.g Romania until 1st Jan 2025.

Schengen is more about removing border controls so that EU can be more like USA in this regard. EU is about alignment with each other on common issues and resources like fishing waters, agriculture, trade deals, right etc.

They each have many implementation details, like if you are in EU but not in Schengen you don't have access to certain common databases.

The desire of countries cherrypicking and sovereignty made Europe very complex structure, I can't wait to have Federal Europe with every country in it with a simplified structure. Can be like US, can be like Switzerland or Germany maybe but thise structures over structures is just way too much and its begging for simplification.

Apparently, %36 of Spanish businesses haven't heard of the Schengen area and another %18 have heard of it but don't know what is it: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3177

Iceland is in the EEA so EU FoM is already a thing.

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So UK will basically be surrounded by EU members top and bottom?

Strangely enough, Faroe Islands are not EU.

They'll never join because it would put an end to their horrific fishing practices. (I just spent a week there)

the useless massacre they indulge in is why I will never visit them

don't want my money to support that

and has land borders with two (Ireland, France).

We used to travel to Europe and travel from country to country for an entire year. Now, we go to Europe and can spend no more than three months on the whole continent. I guess Iceland will be added to this. Why does Europe discourage long-term travelers from spending money there?

Quid pro quo. Do you grant the same benefits to EU nationals - all EU nationals - travelling your way?

We are one country, Europe is an entire continent of countries. You would think there would be one that would want my money.

that doesn't answer OP question/point at all

also, legislation in EU is harmonized, i.e. all important legal bits between the different countries are the same (implementation might differ slightly)

What’s sickening is that the 15 million who voted against this and the 15 million who were denied a vote had their rights stripped because a few people who are now dead voted for “change”

What's this referring to? Dead people voted for change where?

In the 8 years since Brexit millions who voted for Brexit have died. Nobody under the age of 26 voted for Brexit, and more above the age of 26 voted remain than voted leave.

Mostly to discourage illegal immigration. Because there are no internal border controls, nobody knows if you are traveling from country to country or living permanently in one country.

Iceland is already in Schengen. Your 3 months already count there.

https://www.government.is/topics/foreign-affairs/iceland-in-...

I think both of the government parties have said they'd support a public vote for whatever EU deal gets proposed, so that's a possibility. "Getting ready to join": perhaps. But that would still take some time.

Why would anyone outside some desperate eastern European countries want to join? EU is going down hard, since 2008 no meaningful GDP growth, flat salaries, no tech companies propelling growth, old population, all the while US and Chinese GDP is exploding. The only thing EU has is regulation and high taxes, everything else is deteriorating quickly and the rate of decline is accelerating. Barcelona, previously a jewel of Europe, now has as many homeless as LA in some areas.

    > Barcelona, previously a jewel of Europe, now has as many homeless as LA in some areas.

Ok, I just Googled: "Barcelona homelessness"

    > In December 2023, Fundació Arrels, an organization that helps the homeless, reported that 1,384 people were living on the streets in Barcelona, the highest number ever recorded.

    > The 2024 count estimated that the homeless population in Los Angeles County declined by 2.2% to 45,252.

Living on the streets is one very visible form of homelessness; your numbers are apples to oranges.

LA is also an order of magnitude bigger than Barcelona, so absolute numbers (even if carefully only tracking people sleeping rough) are a weird point of comparison.

So you cherry pick one real-world observation, try to refute it and it makes the rest wonderland? EU is doing super great because you just scentifically proved that Barcelona can't be as bad as LA?

You probably shouldn't make claims that aren't true if you want people to not refute your claims.

I said in some areas of Barcelona which is true. Now somebody did the Simpson's paradox using the whole data set instead of conditional data, leading to a different result.

So Barcelona homelessness is going up and Los Angeles homelessness is going down? The only reasonable conclusion must be that the homeless are relocating from Los Angeles to Barcelona. It is only a question of time then.

So EU homelessness is as bad as the US in some places, but the EU needs to be more like the US?

No, but EU with all its social agenda is now imploding at unusual places that were once considered great places to live, inflation is doing its thing. In the US tech is considered the most important engine of the economy, EU wasted over a decade and lost its only competitive company that led one large sub-field of tech (Nokia). Pretending nothing is going on won't help the EU, sooner or later this will be apparent everywhere (with a chance a hot war with Russia collapses it quicker).

They kinda have to, now that Trump has set his sights on Greenland they know they will be next. And alone they can't fight off the US.

Joking aside, I (as EU citizen) personally don't really care whether they join the EU or not. They're a bit too much out of the way, too small etc. And EFTA already covers a lot of it. But if they want to join it'd be nice.

If they join they should do it forever though and not change their mind again when another conservative government comes to power. I'm really sick of Britain with all their fussy wheeling and dealing around the Brexit era (and taking attention away from real issues). That can't happen again. For three years Brexit was in the news every day with them asking for stuff they knew was impossible and acting offended when they didn't get it. I'm really glad that's over but if Iceland is so divided on this issue the same could happen again.

they should join USA instead

Canada here, can we join too?

I heard you all will be joining a different union of sorts here soon enough.

I think it more likely we'll burn the White House down. Again.

Maybe the US will break up, and then some parts of the US will join Canada.

As big as the political problems the US has been having in recent years are, I don't think that's likely to happen in the short-to-medium term. But, if these problems just keep on getting worse, then eventually it may become a very real possibility.

Why not the reverse?

Peter Zeihan makes the case in one of his books for why Alberta should leave Canada and join the US. I’m not Canadian or American and have no dog in the fight, but it’s interesting reading.

I lived in Alberta for a few years.

While Alberta is often called “the Texas of Canada” there is not a single Albert a that would give up their healthcare to join the US. In many meaningful ways their standard of living would plummet overnight - healthcare, education, safety, violent crime, life expectancy, etc.

Why would violent crime go up?

USA vs Canada per capita

Rape: 16x higher

Total Crime: 5x higher

Murder rate: 3x higher

Prisoners per capita: 6x more

.. and it goes on

... would you want your community to change like that ?

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Canada/Uni...

Why would the law-abiding people of Alberta become violent criminals just because they gained American citizenship?

And why would the US's existing violent criminals move to Alberta?

Violent crime in the US is not evenly distributed.

I think it's reasonable to presume that any territory added to a country will become the average of that country over time.

So the better question is actually why is the average American such a violent criminal compared to the average Canadian? Answer that and you will have answered your question.

Likely lack of healthcare (desperation), lack of affordable education, debt, need to fill for-profit prisons, corporate lobbying to make regular people's lives worse, etc. etc.

> Violent crime in the US is not evenly distributed.

Neither is it in Canada.

If you want to cherry pick the "best" of the US and leave out the worst from any comparisons, you'd have to do that for whatever country you're comparing it to.

You're missing the point, I think. The question the previous person was asking what would send all the criminality to that province?

> what would send all the criminality to that province?

Nothing would "send" criminality there, over time any place joining the USA would become the USA, and by definition it would become the average of the USA (because it will be a part of the USA)

A lot of people like to think a place will become the USA in all the perceived "good" ways like higher potential salaries, lower income taxes, more freedom, etc., but they fail to realize a place will also become the USA in all the ways that make the USA so vastly different from every other developed nation (healthcare, education, violence, crime, etc.)

But the average doesn't matter if you're in a place with low crime.

Of course it does! Those higher crime areas are using up limited time and money that could be better put to use making your life better, but instead it's being used to deal with all that crime and criminals.

Your live is measurably worse because of it.

Interestingly enough while the Canadian constitution doesn’t flat out permits this, it does allow the province to have a binding referendum and should a vote come to pass by it’s people, it forces the federal government to seriously consider it, thus a faithful negotiating can take place which could lead to the province becoming a sovereign nation.

See the Clarity Act of 1999.

I'd be down to switch things up and join Cascadia as a BC resident. Though the US can keep Oregon...

I've always joked about joining Europe because I feel we have more in common with them then our neighbour to the South, but recent comments from said neighbour's upcoming Führer have made the jokes just a tad more serious.

Our 7 farmers will put a stop to anything like that.

No, that's actually off limits, by treaty.

> No, that's actually off limits, by treaty.

They have to amend the treaty anyway to allow a new member state to join, so why couldn't they just amend it to remove that limit at the same time?

What really matters here isn't the letter of treaties, it is the political reality that it ain't happening. Canada's economy is very tightly bound to that of the US, joining the EU would be erecting all these new barriers to Canada-US trade which would hurt the Canadian economy, and the reduced barriers to Canada-EU trade wouldn't be enough to counteract that. There is no escaping the geographical reality that the US is right next door, the EU an ocean away.

> What really matters here isn't the letter of treaties, it is the political reality that it ain't happening.

And the political reality is that no one in the EU wants to widen the discussion to countries like Morocco, so the rule that the country must be in Europe is useful.

I don't think they really want Kazakhstan in the EU either, but the rule that "the country must be in Europe" isn't needed to keep them out. (Most of Kazakhstan is in Central Asia, but a small sliver is in Europe, by the standard geographical definition.)

You're right. You could say the same about Turkey.

And, really, Georgia (also granted candidate status) which is a problem in that a not insignificant fraction of the population isn't really sure if the EU is better than Russia.

But having a problem with expanding further east doesn't necessarily recommend that the EU should expand further south or west.

Iceland is literally on the gap in the tectonic plates between Europe and North America.

With the disclaimer that my original post was firmly tongue in cheek and I don't expect it to ever happen:

Trump has threatened 25% tariffs. If that were to happen I wonder if that ocean would suddenly seem much smaller.

What does your governor say?

Actually, I am surprised Island hasn't joined the EU yet. IMO they should.

How about NAFTA?

I'd like them to be in.

They're Europeans, and a nice bunch.

Fully agreed.

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Try not projecting your own racism onto others.

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Non white countries with a European culture?

Could you give an example?

Stop whining right wing snowflake. You accused them of being racist with no evidence whatsoever.

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All Easter European countries massively profited from joining the EU.

Romanias GDP jumped from 122 billion to 214 billion from 2006 to 2008 after joining in 2007.

Poland had a similar jump.

In addition eastern countries receive immense financial subsidies.

Ireland and Luxemburg more or less monetise the fact that they can give companies access to the European market.

For larger countries ( Italy, Germany, France) the benefits are less visible, but being able to negotiate with large markets on eye level is of immense value to exporting economies.

In addition, if you read the Schuman address you might realise that the EU project never was about economics, it was and is about lasting peace. The only founding nation of the union that saw it as purely economic union was the UK.

Finally, anticipating the matter of immigration: Countries like Hungary, Greece and Italy that keep complaining about EU immigration policies, fail to acknowledge that in the absence of the EU they would be left alone with the arriving immigrants from Africa, while the rest of Europe would close its borders.

The problem with this approach is that you're talking about the past. Yes, Poland and others did profit from joining the EU, initially, but once EU realized that they changed the rules of the game. EU is not about economic prosperity anymore, it is all about "climate change", immigration and similar bullshit. Lisbon Treaty in particular redefined how EU works. The best thing to do right now is to leave the EU before it collapses.

Are you also proposing to reject all the subsidies too? Or just leave the EU but keep getting investments, somehow?

Somebody has to pay for the subsidies. If poorer countries get them, richer mebmer countries will have to pay for them. Richer countries, like Iceland, will never get subsidies.

Fuck the subsidies. They do more harm than good anyway.

Afaik Italy can’t close its borders and deport back migrants because it’s not sovereign anymore and in the eu

Italy not only can close the outer borders, but Italy must and doesn't (doesn't work hard enough).

That's what Frontex is all about. Same in Lithuania - not only it can close outer borders, but it has a requirement to do so.

So unless being sovereign is about having borders open, this argument doesn't work.

What about the inner borders? Often times "illegal" (not authorized being in the country) aliens come from the inner borders, which can not be effectively controlled as per Schengen.

During the 2015 migrant crisis, did not refugees end up traveling to Germany while first entering Greece and Italy? If Dublin regulation really applied, Germany would not need to take the responsibility of the majority of the asylum seekers. At the same time, that only concerns for the asylum seekers and not the unregistered aliens.

If European NGOs are free to pick up (mostly) economic illegal migrants a few miles off Libia and drop them in Italy, the former interior minister is prosecuted for blocking them (finally absolved), you see it's not a lack of will

They can indeed close their borders, as evidenced by the fact that they're doing so right now across the whole border with Slovenia (and they're far from the only ones): https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/schengen-borders-...

They can't do so permanently, but they can provide some sort of a justification every six months and keep it closed, nobody can veto them.

The important border for immigrants is the coastline, not the land borders with other EU countries. We can’t close them and forcefully repatriate like Australia does due to “humanitarian” reasons and NGOs.

>Romanias GDP jumped from 122 billion to 214 billion from 2006 to 2008 after joining in 2007.

Looks like some creative accounting. Real GDP cannot almost double in two years.

While the benefits of the EU for countries that are somewhat economically weak (and I include Czechia to the list) are obvious, Iceland is a different story. Iceland would be joining a union that is, on average, both less rich and less economically dynamic than Iceland. This could be economically disadvantageous for them; and being very far from the EU core, there aren't that many network effects to benefit from.

I'd say that there are no benefits for France and Germany. They are paying for the whole party and their populations get fleeced.

Please restore the old economic union with the core countries. Iceland can join, too.

> no benefits for France and Germany

Peace, friendship, shared values, culture, diversity, stability, ...

We have a lot of benefits.

I preferred the culture and diversity that came from each country having its own national identity.

Why would we celebrate the EU's efforts to homogenise our national cultures?

I preferred the EU when it was a trading union as opposed to a utopian political experiment.

> I preferred the culture and diversity that came from each country having its own national identity.

We still have or national identity. I live in Hamburg/Germany. Our identity is largely European since hundreds of years (see for example our history in the Hanse), before the German nation existed. We have a strong Regional and European identity.

> Why would we celebrate the EU's efforts to homogenise our national cultures?

The EU doesn't do that. In many ways it actually preserves local (and also regional) cultures. It sets a framework for democracy and law in Europe.

> I preferred the EU when it was a trading union as opposed to a utopian political experiment.

A trading union doesn't influence culture and politics?

The EU was never thought as just a trading union. It was set up as a process to get a peaceful Union for the European Countries after hundreds of years of wars. After the WWII which made clear that lasting peace can be achieved by deep cooperation.

> In many ways it actually preserves local (and also regional) cultures

That really conflicts with the "Freedom of movement for workers".

Cultures can not be preserved if people freely move between regions.

Look at the thousands of years of Europe. People were moving in Europe, to Europe and from Europe. If they did not had the freedom to do so, it was often done by force. Wars, slave trade, migrations, ... that has been in our history for thousands of years.

Now EU citizens can do it peacefully.

Freedom of movement in the EU also does not mean "people can move freely in Europe". It's a right for EU citizens. Not for all people. It's also for people who can actually afford to live at a new place.

Preserving a cultural heritage does not mean regions are suddenly cultural museums. Cultural regions also are not by single nations, they span across several nations or nations have several cultural regions.

For example in Germany there wasn't a 'Nation' for much of the history. Much of the culture came out of changing regions. Visit Munich, Aachen, Lübeck, Danzig (not even a part of Germany today) and look at their history. Different. Look at their cultural history: different. They are now living in a FEDERAL republic of states (Danzig is even in Poland, now). A Bundesrepublik of Bundesländer. This FEDERAL republic is also a member of the EU. People from German regions can move freely in the German states. They also can move freely in the EU.

Cultures in Europe developed and mixed since the beginning of human settlement on this continent. Now it still happens, peacefully.

I live in Northern Germany. There was an intense cultural exchange for hundreds of years, spanning several regions. Do you think that this is suddenly not a part of my cultural heritage?

Don't you think that modern transportation, modern communication, change things? Don't you think we need to find answers to changes? That we cope with changes? This platform here is international in English, from the US, spreading innovations and discussions about it. Don't you think that this has effects? Deep cultural effects??? Freedom of Movement in the EU is one of the answers to these changes we see.

> After the WWII which made clear that lasting peace can be achieved by deep cooperation.

If the Axis powers had won the war all the countries of Europe would have had even deeper "cooperation"

Cooperation is fine when everyone retains agency. It's the people who want us all to cooperate -under their system- that worry me.

> If the Axis powers had won the war all the countries of Europe would have had even deeper "cooperation"

There you've placed a link from Fascism and "National Socialism" to the EU.

Nice try.

I linked a grandiose political project to bring Europe under a single government with a grandiose political project to bring Europe under a single government.

yeah, what you say makes no sense, since it has nothing to do with reality.

As a Portuguese, I'm 100% convinced that if we hadn't joined the EU, we would have impoverished ourselves to a worse standard of living than Morocco by now.

The EU has many, many, many faults but at least in our case it serves as a crucial dampener to our worst ideas about public financing and spending. Homogenisation is a good thing for the bottom 50% of participants.

> joining the EU has been national suicide for every other country that submitted to it

Care to elaborate with a couple of examples that can help me grok your POV? Honestly curious, because my personal perspective is nearly diametrically opposed.

Most of these issues have to do with EU immigration quotas, being unable to set competitive tax rates, and not being able to enforce borders, where if you don't have those, you don't have a nation.

I understand this is the point of EU policy, but if you are a country with a history and a future, given how it has gone for everyone else, why would you give that up?

The examples below are from giving up national accountability for their own policies to "harmonized" EU regulations:

- Greece's economic collapse as the consequence of predatory ECB lending

- Spain's economic collapse from related causes

- Germany's failure to manage its national energy needs due to EU "green" policies made it subject to Russian energy dependency. The US had to literally rescue Germany from itself by blowing up Nordstream

- Sweden's no-go zones

- Italy's costal humanitarian crisis'

- Ireland's collapse of their "tiger" economy and yet another serious migrant crisis

- In France, French people are treated as occupiers in their own cities, e.g. Bataclan, Hedbo, etc.

- general anti-family and anti-natalist policies have stopped replacement level birthrates in all EU countries.

With the exception of Italy's refugee crisis, which I agree is down to a failure of EU country to work together and take a joint responsibility, the rest are individual EU countries failing to govern themselves in a proper manor, and in some of those cases the EU stepping in is literally to only thing saving them.

Regardless of what I think about the actual issue, this is not honest depiction of the reality. At least in Finland, the politians keep saying that they are forced by international treaties and EU to keep the borders open.

There is some leeway within the EU regulation. Denmark have had some form of border control for years now. You can't do a hard border like previously, but that doesn't prevent countries from patrolling, checking checking passports or even turn away certain people.

The effectiveness of that type of border control is debatable, but it is already being done by other EU members.

Border patrol and passport checks exist in many places in the EU, including in my country, but in the public debate, the expression "open borders" refers to the fact that the countries cannot for example choose whether to turn away non-national asylum seekers, even if they are arriving from other safe EU countries, are clearly originally from safe countries but have "lost" their passport, lie that they are 10 when they appear as 18 etc. Other countries turn such people away, but our politicians claim it is not possible. Of course it could also be that our politicians follow the regulations more carefully than politicians in other countries. However, as Italy has not been able to control their border either, and italian politicians are not famous for following the regulations meticulously, it is more likely that there comes some heavy pressure from the EU.

EU doesn’t set national tax rates.

The rest of your comment is similarly uninformed, just a random collection of irrelevant notions picked up from media; like arguing that the United States of America was a bad idea because traffic in Los Angeles is annoying and Florida has too many criminals.

> EU doesn’t set national tax rates.

Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the EU VAT Directive, which sets minimum tax rates?

And maybe you didn't know that the EU sets minimum Excise duties?

And be under no illusion, the EU is intervening in corporation tax rates. Read up on the 2020 Digital Services Tax and the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base.

Which country would go below 15% VAT?

Most big ones are above 20% and use it to get tax money for the government.

Also if you tried to sell/export something to EU you geneally use their VAT rate anyway.

Switzerland has 8.1% VAT

Australia has 9%, in some US states there’s no VAT

Austalia is not in Europe.

My question was: realistiacally, which EU country would drop their rate to lower than the minimum 15%.

Most stay at above 20%. Switzerland somehow balances own budget with lower VAT. I doubt any EU country can lower the VAT below the EU mininum of 15% and balance their budget

They should spend way less then

I am not an europhile, but

"general anti-family and anti-natalist policies have stopped replacement level birthrates in all EU countries."

This problem is present everywhere outside Subsaharan Africa and Afghanistan, it cannot be pinned down on the EU. If Tehran, Beijing and San Francisco have the very same problem, it must go deeper than just "anti-natalist policies": all sorts of societies, religions and systems tend to react to modernity by an almost identical crash in births.

Your arguments are making it hard to not be snarky when responding.

But your arguments are blaming "the EU" for clouds shadowing the sun, as to say - "the EU" doesn't have a strategy of maliciously importing migrants. And even if it did, migrants are not somehow magically bad. Having migration in Europe is not a new thing, it was so for thousands of years now - migrations of war refugees, religious and cultural groups, invasions and other restructurisations of countries...

To keep trade going + keep using internet, but also somehow stop people moving + culture changing is impossible. If you have freedom, you have freedom.

(And why do your arguments have a smell of "let's forget about Frontex"?)

>The US had to literally rescue Germany from itself by blowing up Nordstream

I wonder what rescued Germans think about that.

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> So I'd estimate that in an honest poll to reopen Nord Stream and protect it militarily you'd easily get 60% in favor.

That's nonsense. There are AFD and BSW bought and paid by Russia telling this nonsense.

Russia has used their energy policy as a weapon to try to dominate Europe and to conquer countries. It was a huge mistake to fall into that trap.

Nord Stream is dead. Russia is a paria in Europe.

Thanks, that's interesting, I didn't think numbers have changed so much.

What do Germans think about the fact that either Ukraine, which received tens of billions of euros in money and weapons from Germany, or the US, who is Germany's ally, blew up the Nord Stream?

Whenever there is a brief moment of free speech, they might find it odd. Similarly, they find it odd that Ukraine has kept its own transit pipelines open until just this week.

That's a lot of nonsense.

> Germany's failure to manage its national energy needs due to EU "green" policies made it subject to Russian energy dependency.

Germany did not import EU green policies. It was a driver of those.

The offer of cheap energy from Russia combined with the corruption following that, caused German politicians (CDU/SPD) to make a series of mistakes, like expanding energy dependence from Russia without making sure energy needs are covered in times of a crisis (AFD and BSW are making the same mistake, only worse, worshipping the authoritarian & corrupt government of Putin). When Russia was invading the Ukraine, suddenly the Gas storages were not filled anymore - Russia trying to blackmail Germany. Putin influencers like Sarah Wagenknecht denied any Russian plans, just days before the invasion, when already a huge Russian military, ordered by Putin, at the Ukraine border. At the same time the US already warned allies about the Russian plans.

> The US had to literally rescue Germany from itself by blowing up Nordstream

The US did not blow up Nordstream. Actually the US warned their allies of planned attacks. There is zero evidence for US involvement. The Nordstream pipelines were also useless, since they did not transport gas at that time.

> "the Ukraine"

Careful, that alone would get others flagged as a Russian asset. The name is just "Ukraine" now.

> Putin influencers like Sarah Wagenknecht denied any Russian plans, just days before the invasion when already a huge military was waiting at the Ukraine border.

Jordan Peterson has been interviewing Frederick Kagan (of the Iraq surge strategy fame) days after the invasion. Kagan said that no one in the U.S. foreign policy circles thought there would be an actual invasion.

So to you the EU is evil? Advances like ECHR have curtailed the ability of countries to act against the basic interests of their citizens (like a supranational Bill of Rights)... what sort of evil is that?

Actions like directing money to deprived areas, when national government would not; supporting cultural projects; supporting major infrastructure projects. Encouraging nations to work together and increasing mobility of citizens, so far it's seemed to be a most beneficial project.

What are your top 3 examples of 'how the EU is evil' (or more correctly, to paraphrase your last paragraph 'has evil people at the levers')?

The main example is a bureaucracy that is trying by every means conceivable to get more and more power over national governments. Every crisis in the Eurozone is exploited so that the EU has more and more to say about how governments need to behave and which rules they need to follow. And of course, the EU controls the currency, which makes it easier to deal with smaller governments.

The ECHR is unrelated to the EU, it is overseen by the Council of Europe which is something else.

Hmm, the alternative of being a second class participant in trade with your biggest trade partners seems to be worse though. Britain is finding out just how bad Brexit was for them.

This is the underlying truth for all international trade.

Most countries don't have unique industry/resources in a globalized trade world.

Consequently, population size and economy are the final arbiters of relative trade power. The EU blocking up to create something of comparable negotiating power to the US and China is critical.

Nobody is ever thrilled with the sausage making of treaties and trade agreements -- that's the definition of compromise. But scale does give countries the best chance to strike the best deal possible.

This is a nice theory, but we can now see this is not how it played out in the EU. EU does have better bargaining power, but not everybody has gained. The larger states have been able to extract even more value from the growing bargaining power, while smaller states have lost all their ability for negotiation.

One can argue that this is a consequence of EU punishing Britain for Brexit to scare other nations from exiting the EU. Which means that if Iceland joins, it will have hard time leaving the EU. If you need to punish members from leaving, it does not give a very good impression. Iceland is better of by deepening their trade agreements with the EU without joining as a full member.

How exactly did the EU punish Britain?

Britain was by far the most annoying of the two during the whole negotiation and didn’t even play fair. The Home Office is currently being sued by the EU for not respecting its engagements related to foreign nationals.

The current situation is not punishment. The UK wanted to leave the single market and is now out of the single market. Turns out that leaving a common market including your main import and export partners is somehow disastrous for your economy. Who could have guessed? Certainly not the experts who spent months explaining at length to the UK population before the referendum.

We cannot know what really happened, but we can look at the end result. Britain wanted to leave EU, not quit trade. Britain has worse trade agreements than before joining the EU.

> Britain wanted to leave EU, not quit trade.

This sentence doesn’t make sense. The trade agreements are part of being in the EU. Wanting to leave the EU is literally wanting to stop being part of the single market. Obviously they have worse trade. They decided to leave the trading union.

This is not punishment. This is literally what Britain asked for.

EU is much more than a trading union, to these people EU represents giving up on the sovereignity of your nation. I have not read that anybody would be opposed to trading. They were and are opposed to giving up on sovereignity, and against the laws passed as a consequence of that, but not against trading with other EU countries.

There are other trading unions and agreements that are possible besides EU, and it seems like EU has prevented UK from re-establishing the trading unions and agreements it had prior to joining the EU.

We can only speculate why, but it seems plausible and rational that EU is doing this as kind of a punishment and warning to other nations considering leaving the EU. UK benefits more from these agreements, while EU benefits less from these agreements.

On the other hand, EU is under an existential threat, and will disintegrate if other nations follow Brexit. So it is kind of rational (albeit only for the short term) for the EU leaders to think that EU benefits from preventing these agreements from happening if it prevents or hinders the disintegration.

> joining the EU has been national suicide for every other country that submitted to it

Laughs in Irish

yeah, this is a hot take that would be rejected by the great majority of Europeans. The only country to join the EU and then leave now regrets doing so. Incidentally, their economy is on fire - not the good kind, they still have lying liars who lie trying to push them into leaving the ECJ (not an EU institution, but certainly a surrender of some national authority for, you know, accountability).

I don't know if you live in the EU. I do, and I like it lots.

I have also lived in the UK during the Brexit campaign, and was exposed to such a shower of self-seeking arseholes - some of whom still apparently wish to take from others, but grant themselves exemptions - will I hope remain a unique experience in my life.

Yes, yes, the EU has no end of fuckery. Yes, it's true. But better that, than bend the knee to the US, or Russia (UK, Hungary. Delete as appropriate.)

As a Pole, all I can say to this

" joining the EU has been national suicide for every other country that submitted to it"

is lmao.

The EU has actually been one of history's most successful projects for ensuring peace and prosperity in Europe. Looking at objective metrics like GDP growth, living standards, and decades of peace between former neighboring country adversaries over centuries, EU membership has broadly benefited its members. Poland itself has seen remarkable economic growth and development since joining in 2004. The single market, freedom of movement, and shared democratic values have created unprecedented opportunities for cooperation and development. While the EU isn't perfect, characterizing membership as 'national suicide' ignores the tremendous gains in stability, prosperity, and quality of life that integration has brought to member states. imho.

You're putting the cart before the horse. Countries only join the EU after they establish friendly relations with the rest of the EU members and become democratic.

Joining the EU is seen as desirable to these countries, so they work to establish friendly relations with the rest of the EU members and become democratic. The horse and cart are properly ordered.

There isn’t a single country that became more democratic and improved its relations with the EU in exchange for the benefits of membership.

Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria all introduced democratic reforms and resolved disputes specifically in order to meet accession requirements. Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia have all also made reforms and/or resolved disputes as part of their ongoing accession negotiations.

Ok, so let's compare the economy of Europe between 1950 and 1995 and from 1995 to 2004. What is the most prosperous? I think there is not even a fair comparison. The only places where you'll find any improvement are in the eastern countries because they literally left communism!

The Treaty of Rome is 1957, so those are strange dates to select…

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> West Germany of the 1980s and unified Germany of the 1990s was a much nicer place.

Please name the indexes where Germany in the 80s did better than German of the 20s.

the posting account was created 20 minutes ago

The stock market indices are useless for evaluating population wealth. Inflation numbers in Germany are an outright lie where the most expensive items are excluded.

You could support a family in the 1980s on one salary and live comfortably.

I mean every index from health to social mobility.