Undisc's disciples were on point and ready with this one yesterday... #1555171
...and the angle of Skógafoss and the road here looks a little off (AI image generation went haywire?!). Also, those very iconic hay bales have been seen scattered across the countryside. Very nice, very nice.
TL;DR nobody likes the European Union or the euro but the internal corruption/malfunctioning monetary regime and awfully uncompetitive Icelandic banks could use some dusting up. Even a despicable Lagarde (#1020250) is better than this trash.
Alas, we won't even discuss it
THE FIRST week of September is when European officialdom returns from a summer spent at the beach, rested and raring to take on the continent’s challenges. Alas, the mood of the rentrée (#1558304) has been marred by an unexpected snub from the mid-Atlantic.
Though the vote hinged largely on local concerns, it was an unwelcome back-to-work surprise for Brussels types. For a club accustomed to discussing how quickly others might join, being told “no thanks” is discomfiting.
The great geopolitics turned out not to carry the vote:
- Greenland blah-blah
- Europe/Russia wars irrelevant
- Sweden/Finland joining Nato (which Iceland is already part of) and so maybe Iceland should join the reciprocal arrangement, boring
It is a point of pride in Brussels that while Mr Trump threatens his neighbours with takeovers, the EU has such appeal that neighbouring countries are clamouring to join. Someone forgot to tell the Icelanders.
all referendums are local. Iceland’s fishing industry, which accounts for almost 40% of the country’s goods exports, led the charge against EU membership. Fishing interests had derailed Iceland’s previous plan to join the union in 2013, after the country had suffered a crippling financial crisis. This time they made the same argument: the union’s rules would allow other countries’ vessels into Icelandic waters and impose caps on fishing that would hurt exports. The movement against joining was bolstered by a belief that Iceland can prosper on its own, and that existing arrangements with the EU—along with the country’s membership in NATO—are sufficient.
This is true (current arrangements are sufficient) and the country could, in principle, fix its own money/banking/housing market/corrupt insiders problems... It just won't!
Outside push is sometimes needed to overturn local (inefficient) equilibria. And it's a nice vote against centralized inner-city mentalities too.
Only inside Reykjavik, the capital, did most voters back restarting negotiations to join the EU; everywhere else, there was a clear majority against. Farmers fretted about competition and loss of government subsidies. Employers and some unions stood against it, too. That turned out to be more convincing than the campaign in favour, which claimed that a tiny island nation needs formal membership in a wider union to thrive.
THIS is a wonderful summary: We, the richer non-Europoorean neighbors, don't want a union with your messy, bureaucratic EU nonsense:
this will be scant consolation for a union that has prided itself on its attractiveness to outsiders. Ten countries with a combined population of 150m have formally applied to join the union (though talks with Turkey, the largest, have been frozen for years). All of them are poor, most have dysfunctional politics and one (Ukraine) is at war. This weekend’s vote is a reminder that richer potential members of the EU, such as Switzerland and Norway, are in no rush to join.
archive: https://archive.md/JZHYF
Do Euros see the writing on the wall?
The EU experiment is unwinding.
nope, they don't see that. They think it's marvelous.
I don't hear that at all, lol
yeah?!
Clearly you're hanging out with cooler/more based people than I do
so marmars, mormors and murmurs aside, most people on the street - i.e. not the political elite, and even the pro-EU ones, aren't so delusional to want much expansion, and most have their own tears to shed about something they thought EU was going to be, but didn't become. EU approval goes up when people are scared of Russia and Trump. It means that as an institution, it reigns through fear, like a proper dictatorship.
Things pro-EU people these past few years complain about not getting:
and so on, and so on. So there's a lot of skepticism. As long as you don't come to the party with your fur soviet hat or maga cap on, you'll often hear significantly more complaints than people that feel that "this is the way".
tell us how you really feel.
INDEED, write up a post about how the plebs really see the European Union. Pretty pleaeeeease
Me? I'm not pro-EU haha.
I know, that's what I'm saying. Tells us in writing what none of the elite commentariat peeps are saying!
I’m sure the yoga marmar’s are cool in their own way. (Was my Scandi right?)
I had to google "marmars."
I still have no clue what you're trying to get at! Mormor -- i.e., grandma...?
Yes, mormor. I couldn’t remember which spelling it was.
Good for them