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Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

bbc.com

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Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

#391

Post by raffael_de »

ngruhn wrote: post #143
bluegatty wrote: post #108

These debates are hard to watch. 'Loss of sovereignty' for some reason is perfectly fine for Iceland, Switzerland and Norway, but not UK or others wanting to leave. 'Fisheries' was a small but founding and perennial concern before and during Brexit but they were labelled 'ugly nationalists'. The EU has benefits obviously but it's been failing Europe in critical ways for about 20 yeas now, and the crazy paradox is tha…

> The EU has benefits obviously but it's been failing Europe in critical ways for about 20 yeas now I like those benefits: The shared currency, easy travel, they killed roaming fees! Also they're the only ones seriously taking on big tech. They made Apple ditch their dumb ass lightning cable.

those are just conveniences relevant to relatively wealthy citizens. i regularly travel to places outside of EU and none of these missing "benefits" have ever posed more than minor challenges.

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

#392

Post by inigyou »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #381
inigyou wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, then you become a landlord for 5 or 10 years. Once the rights are given out by whatever method and set for 10 years, then anyone else who wants one in the next 10 years has to buy or rent one from whoever has one. That's landlordism.

But that would trend to cutting out the middle man due to the inefficiencies they create. Middlemen will only work if either these middlemen make the utilization more efficient or you make the requirements to bid so onerous that only these specialized middlemen have the competency to do fulfill them.

No, middlemen would happen if it's profitable to be a middleman. Extreme case: one person bids just enough to get all the rights, then charges double that to fishermen to use them.

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

#394

Post by anal_reactor »

beloch wrote: post #375

The EU needs to develop an associate option for close allies unwilling to become full members. Canada, Iceland, and others are very closely aligned with the EU in many respects and all could benefit from closer relationships. Ask a Canadian if they'd favour joining the EU and they'd probably be all for it, until you start talking about what that means. Fully joining the EU involves giving up a lot of sovereignty to a…

We already have associate options - not joining Schengen, not adopting Euro. Anything more than that results in a horrible mess of legal agreements.

Imagine that suddenly each US state gets more sovereignty and they just... make different decisions. California adopts Spanish as second official language, New York adopts metric system, Alabama permits sister/brother marriages, Utah declares Mormonism as official religion, and Wyoming stops contributing to US army. How are you supposed to do business in these conditions.

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

#395

Post by matteoraso »

somenameforme wrote: post #243
azan_ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If EU wants to be superpower, we need more European integration and less of national sovereignty. Unfortunately it will never happen and we are doomed to become more and more marginalised.

When the EU was more a coalition of independent nations, it had vastly more influence and power in the world. The efforts to centralize power seem to be exactly what's causing the divisions. You have highly partisan leaders trying to dictate policy to countries that lean in very different directions. That's not going to lead to good things. Stable empires have always been those that offered the greatest degrees of so…

But the EU was never meant to be a loose forum of nations. From the very beginning, the Single European Act made it clear that the intention was to integrate the member states into a single union, "speaking ever increasingly with one voice".[0]

[0]https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

#396

Post by tadfisher »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #265
victorbjorklund wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just voluntarily adopt euro. Montenegro isn’t officially in the eurozone. They just unilaterally adopted it.

The problem is if you let your debts run too high then you can’t print your way out the problem. Very few countries seem to have the fiscal discipline to make joining the euro a sensible option.

You need a desirable currency for that to work. Not every currency has a volume like the USD and Euro.

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

#397

Post by jankubica »

xaxbxcxdxe wrote: post #376
amenghra wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this diagram: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1tda6wl/european_in... There are so many treaties besides EU.

Is there any "western" values coalition? Like really adhering to them, not just the "free trade" lowest comon denominator.

As a side note, you cannot escape values even when you are only considering "free trade". As an example, influential EU law cases include questions of promoting abortion as a freedom of service, ban on Sunday sales, ban on sex dolls ... Then free trade clashes with other fundamental rights, such as a right to strike. Arguably this tension is exactly the spill-over effect that made EU project successful – integration in one area (originally steel and coal for obvious post-WWII reasons) creates pressure in an adjacent area to integrate as well.

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

#398

Post by jankubica »

beloch wrote: post #375

The EU needs to develop an associate option for close allies unwilling to become full members. Canada, Iceland, and others are very closely aligned with the EU in many respects and all could benefit from closer relationships. Ask a Canadian if they'd favour joining the EU and they'd probably be all for it, until you start talking about what that means. Fully joining the EU involves giving up a lot of sovereignty to a…

Yeah, this already exists in various forms.

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

#399

Post by testing22321 »

jijijijij wrote: post #331
testing22321 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and membership in the fraying NATO military alliance That framing is.. strange. One member of NATO has lost the plot. For everyone else, it’s stronger than ever. If the US tries to attack a NATO member they’re going to find out just how serious the alliance is. For example, Maersk shipping line in Danish, and carries 15% of the world’s shipping containers. If the US were to invade Greenland it would be illegal for…

> It’s unlikely NATO members will fight the US with bullets and bombs, but I guarantee they can still seriously hurt them. I am not even sure the US would be able to completely dominate a conflict. While it obviously has the largest military, it's set up to depend on European military defensive and complementary roles in a large scale conflict. In particular US aggression supply and comms critically depend on Europe…

> I am not even sure the US would be able to completely dominate a conflict

While everything you said may be correct (I’m not an expert), I doubt NATO countries want to get in an energetic war with the US. It’s simply so costly in lives and resources and effort.

Hypothetically if the US “takes” Greenland I fully expect all the NATO countries to declare war on them (as article 5 requires), but not attack with military.

They’ll sell all their bonds and completely shut them out as if they don’t exist. Zero trade. No tech. No services (google, apple, etc). Not a single thing in or out to/from the us.

Yes it would really suck for every country, but I suspect it would suck less than either slowly letting the US walk all over them and slowly take any country they want, or an energetic war.

The US is putting its head in the sand and going backwards on renewables and vehicles and science and tech and so many more things. They’ll become an island if this happens.

I don’t put it past trump to try. It’s exactly the kind of “emergency” he needs to give himself emergency powers and stay in office indefinitely.

Re: Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

#400

Post by mytailorisrich »

inigyou wrote: post #367
mytailorisrich wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it happens sovereignty is a binary thing, at least when looked at domain by domain. Either you are sovereign or you are not, there is no half-sovereign. The EU is going the federalisation way. Even now member countries relinquished sovereignty on key aspects: border control and immigration, monetary policy and currency, trade policy, and then a bunch of other things. This is hugely significant for a country. This…

If countries relinquished sovereignty on borders then can you explain how they are now controlling their own borders again to stop migrants?

Well there are not. And they did relinquish sovereignty on borders: Schengen means you do not control your border and we've seen exactly that over the years. This is factual, not an opinion. Even just free movement is a big reduction of sovereign border control and certainly of immigration (in effect you no longer have control of that). We can discuss the pros and cons but not the facts.
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