Iceland rejects reopening talks on EU entry

The EU is tremendously effective, is just that the narratives are always about emphasizing the shortcomings.

Iceland is already in the EEA and Schengen. The only upside I have read about would be access to adopting the Euro which has a lower inflation rate than the ISK.

The main downside and likely what steered the vote to no are conflicts with Iceland's fishing industry x EU regulations and becoming more vulnerable to foreign ownership and fishing rights.

Fishing represents 40% of Iceland's total exports according to Wikipedia.

My guess is most voters in Reykjavik have near zero exposure to fishing as an industry.

that's also pretty much what happened in Brexit

I listened to an interview with the Icelandic PM and this seems pretty much correct. She was pro EU but equally was very clear that there were other things the government could focus on instead.

Do you want us to burn a huge amount of time and effort on this. Or would you prefer us to focus on other problems?

I would be curious to know the age distribution in yesterday's Iceland vote. In the case of Brexit, the brexiters were mostly old people and the bremainers mostly young; for this reason, the forces of demography are slowly pushing the UK back in the EU's orbit again (looking at the polls). Wondering if the same could apply to Iceland.

Have you ever been to Iceland lol? I have. Their isolation actually encourages wealth concentration and they have "big" chains everywhere.

This looks like the usual "plan": frightening people (either because of Russia or Trump) will make them see the "correct path". In fact this is standard EU rhetoric: in today's world there is no choice. This is ironic because in effect this is saying that surrendering sovereignty is the only way to face threats to your sovereignty...

But in reality Iceland is no more at risk of invasion now than it was during the Cold War and is doing extremely well on its own so why give up? I must say I don't follow Icelandic politics but from here it is not clear what they would gain by joining the EU, especially considering that fishing is one of their main industries.

Iceland is one of few countries that can actually afford to have no military. They live on an island. Closest landmass to them is Greenland that's certainly not plotting to annex them and its 300km away.

There's no natutal resources, no anything other than fish and 400,000 human population.

The complaint in that article is that "instead of creating a single European system, the PPWR preserves a fragmented national model. A business selling directly to customers across the EU must register and fulfil its obligations separately in every Member State where its packaging becomes waste. For large companies, this is part of the cost of doing business; for micro-businesses selling only a handful of products into each country, the cost and administrative burden can be wildly disproportionate to the amount of packaging involved."

That is not the EU passing bad laws that members are forced to adopt, it's every member state individually deciding that they don't care about microbusinesses that can't even afford the registration fee for their national packaging waste disposal system.

Generally, the EU is a platform for coordination and negotiation between member state governments. So the danger for Icelanders wouldn't be that the Icelandic government is overpowered by the rest of the EU, but that they voluntarily sign up to a deal that benefits some constituencies at the expense of others, and that can't be changed easily anymore because it's now part of an international agreement. That the referendum was rejected is also an indication that Icelanders don't trust their government to negotiate on their behalf.

But that's exactly how it is supposed to work. Primacy of EU law, currency, monetary policy, borders, trade, defence (under way), etc. It is not micromanagement, it is the aim to transfer sovereignty to a federal EU.

There is no way to sugarcoat it. It is no longer the 70s or even 90s when you could claim that this wasn't the situation and aim. So whether people are in favour or opposed to that it has the merit of being clear.