I love this diagram: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1tda6wl/european_in...

There are so many treaties besides EU.

They don't need to join the EU to use the euro. There are countries that use the U.S. dollar even though they're not the U.S. Sometimes it's just de facto use the dollar. There is technically a local currency and people use it when forced to but they would prefer the dollar. If you're a small country, something like the dollar or the euro is probably your best bet because of the stability it affords. The advantage to joining the EU is Iceland gets a little bit of input on how the euro was run versus if you use the dollar of the euro when you're not a member of their respective country you are partially tying your financial stability to something that you have no input or control over.

If the króna fluctuates so much, wouldn't that also indicate that demand for the króna just fluctuates a lot? Presumably, in absence of major conflicts between Iceland and its trading partners, as a result of economic imbalances. Those won't go away if Iceland were to join the eurozone, either as a EU member or via the Kosovo/Montenegro route. It might deprive the Icelandic central bank of a valuable tool to stabilize their economy, by weakening or strengthening their currency as economic circumstances demand. This was a big problem for the southern EU economies back in credit crisis times.

Now there are of course many other considerations that might offset this downside to joining the eurozone. I would personally welcome our Icelandic friends joining the EU (if they chose to), but it's good for them to have a public debate about both the up- and downsides first.

Not sure how it would affect home mortgages but the majority of icelanders are on mortgage plans that the principal remaining rises with inflation(I forget the name, I left a few years ago) - and will never likely pay them off.

Well, Kosovo and Montenegro haven't joined the Eurozone. They just use the Euro, but they have no influence in the monetary (?) policy.

Edit: I'm not the first one to point this out, so to add some new information: both of them used Deutsche Mark prior to Euro, Montenegro even under the union with Serbia.

As I understand it, Kosovo and Montenegro adopted the Euro unilaterally, without agreement from the EU. I don't think that'd be (politically) possible for Iceland (?). So the EU would need to agree to this, which also doesn't seem politically possible (?)

Not sure for a small country like Iceland if it make sense to use Euro over having control over their currency. Things could get super expensive overnight and it would work when things are smooth, but in current political climate you never know when the next financial crisis going to happen and don’t think they want Brussels to dictate their monetary policy

Kosovo and Montenegro adooted the Euro unilaterally, but various micro countries use the Euro through special treaties (Monaco, San Marino, Vatican etc). Iceland is 10x larger but this in principle possible.

During the 2010 debt crisis there was much talk of profligate Greece being "thrown out" of the euro zone. In this dark scenario Greek civil servants would get their pay rises in worthless drachma, but Greek homeowners would be left with unpayable euro mortgages. But nobody ever talked about the Montenegro option (similar to Ecuador and USD). I never understood this. What was stopping Greece from defaulting and keeping the euro anyway?

Joining the Euro is not the panacea that everyone thinks it is.

It comes with some major drawbacks: - no control of interest rates since these apply to everyone in the Eurozone regardless of the current economic situation of a particular country. - no more devaluation to get back some competitiveness on international markets - strict financial guidelines in theory (3% deficit max per year and 60% of GDP/debt ratio)

Finally, the biggest problem as it's been highlighted by many economists is that it spreads the risk to the whole Eurozone which sounds great in theory until you find yourself drowning in debt like Greece was in the 2010s or like France is nowadays.

Because now your government is borrowing in Euros, the markets move very slowly and the full impact of the finances of any Euro government is completely subdued since in the pool of countries that use the Euro there is Germany which is very good and very trustworthy creditor.

Take a look a what happened with Liz Truss in the UK, she made some rather stupid announcements and the markets reacted as they should and that lead to her removal and to a change of plans.

In France by contrast, no such changes have happened despite the fact that the French economy has been going downhill for awhile due to their 5%++ yearly deficits and their 120% debt ratio.

If France still had the Franc, then the markets would have forced the politicians in charge to either course correct and/or eventually to pass on multiple painful but necessary reforms.

Instead what we have is complete political paralysis and many presidential candidates are openly calling for a roll back of more pension reforms, lowering the retirement age to 60, increasing the pay of all the civil servants by 20% and more complete out of control spending.

The supposed EU fiscal rules have never been enforced anyway which means that countries don't really have any incentives to curb their spending since the ECB is always backing them.

Yes their currency suffered a lot in 2008, they would have been protected if they were using the Euro at the time

But then what currency would they use in eve online? How could we replace all of the iskies memes

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

Can they become part of the eurozone without joining the european union?

> One solution for Iceland would be to join the eurozone without becoming a member of the EU, as Kosovo and Montenegro have done.

This only makes sense if the primary concern is native (Icelandic) politicians being unable to responsibly manage their currency. Otherwise, there's no advantage over just maintaining a stable exchange rate with the euro.

Thank you for the clarifications!

Someone from Iceland tried to explain this all to me once, and if I understood correctly, it had less to do with the GDP (which also includes money circulating within Iceland) and more to do with the balance of trade, where fishing played a bigger role? But my information may have been misunderstood, or it may be out of date.

In any case, you have a stunningly gorgeous country and very nice people, and I wish you the best of luck in figuring all this out in a way that benefits Iceland.

Yeah, and the number also is not of all exports, but of goods exports (as opposed to total, which includes both goods and services).

In 2024, fishing/marine products was ~18% of total exports, which is still a massive deal, but only half as massive. (I believe tourism, the largest "export", is close to 40% of total exports.)

If you join the EU you will lose control of your fisheries and have worse management policies pushed on you. Fantasy to think it will be any other way.

The US keeps talking about leaving.

No high-income country has shown serious interest in joining the EU in decades. Norway is a hyper-privileged nation that already has several relevant treaties with the EU and has very little to gain by submitting to a system where the Balkan gets to vote on the measures Norway must implement.

Including a very healthy metal scene, Martröð (50 % icelandic) and Nexion were recent favorites of mine.

Also Ólafur Arnalds. And Múm of course.

The best part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest:_The_S...

(Edit: This is obviously a joke!)

And Jóhann Jóhannsson (RIP)

Gus Gus too.

And some of us still remember Greta & Jónsi, even out here in Australia.

And GusGus

And games.

check out solstafir too!

Meh, too pop. Hildur Guðnadóttir!

Yes. Ten years ago mackerel was cheap and abundant but the quota was set in excess of scientists' recommendations. Stocks are dwindling now (surprise!) and mackerel has gone from cheaper than tuna (for a tin) to nearly double. It's absurd.

The goal of the EU is to form a single economic area. Irish an I elandic fishers should be under same rules when fishing the same waters.

EU often is a mechanism to find a compromise (which makes the regulations so convoluted and bureaucratic ...), but too many special clauses to make a country happy means you got a similar debate on next subject.

It could potentially open doors for other EU states to ask for exempts.

> 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 as ally. Not to mention nuclear defense and early warning infrastructure. Without Europe, there is a big, big ocean between the US and most everything.

For example in terms of military roles, the US lacks the stealthy submarines of European navies. Incidentally, it relies heavily on aircraft carriers for force projection. I think there is a chance European subs could wipe out US carriers and therefore significantly disable US attack abilities straight-away. There is evidence from prior combined exercises, where the US navy was pretty much owned by a single Swedish sub. They are really damn good. So, without deploying ships, what's the US gonna do? Bomb Greenland's tundra? Fly big, slow transporter planes there and hope the European subs won't use their AA missiles? The whole point of those subs is to be a massive pain to aggressive forces and the US assigned that role to Europe...

War against Europe means losing comms and nuclear defense/early warning infrastructure located there. The US would also immediately become vulnerable to Russia and China, and every conflict in the middle east too.

I think attacking Europe would be pretty idiotic from every perspective. Sadly, that doesn't mean much anymore.

Not if everyone else starts fishing in them. Take a look at the Common Fisheries Policy. It effectively means everyone else in the EU can show up and fish for it themselves, potentially undermining the export revenue and (more importantly) severely disrupting all the work they've done to make it sustainable.

Sovereignty is not a binary thing. And it's also not the case that not being a part of some structure makes you sovereign from it. In some cases it's the opposite - you need to conform anyway and have no input into the decision process. So as usual things are nuanced and not black and white.

EU is indeed a military alliance. They are just no integrated command structures but this is common among most military alliances across the world.

SAFE credits are an EU military thing.

They can easily implement a large no-fly zone across Europe, as demonstrated with Eyjafjallajökull in 2010.

And yet they defeated the UK navy several times :P

The reason low tech works for something as important as voting is because it's expensive and inefficient. That expense and inefficiency is what protects it from fraud. You would need enormous sums of money to overturn an election like this even for a place as small as Iceland and even then, such amount of money wouldn't guarantee the result of future referendums.

I agree. It is very transparent.

I've attended a few UK vote counts. Pencil is also used - but you can bring your own pen if you'd like.

I think it's mainly to prevent smudges as the paper is folded to be put into the ballot box. Pencils are also more reliable than pens, and have a longer shelf life between votes, I'd imagine?

At the polling stations & counts I've been to and overseen there is pretty much zero opportunity (or interest) in changing people's votes on the papers. I'd imagine this is the same in most first-world countries. In fact, once I spotted and got corrected a paper missed for a candidate opposing the candidate I was a counting agent for.

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.

'roaming fees' :)

That's my point: that's the most marginal thing imaginable, it's borderline tabloid populism - even though yes, admittedly over a lot of issues, it' beneficial obviously.

The 'common market' is pretty valuable and it's what the focus should be.

Literally nobody is against that - it's what everyone agrees on.

As far as travel and roaming fees - you don't need a centralized government for any of that. This is the 'political project' substituting for what you think are benefits of what is mostly shared regulations.

But the 'currency' thing is the most misleading.

Your ability to 'not change currency while on holiday' does not come for free!

It comes with a massive cost, and that is nation states cannot control their own monetary policy.

What 'feels like' some kind of obvious amazing benefit, is possibly the most ugly structural think holding all of Europe back.

The theory is - you cannot have shared currency unless there is absolute political and economic integration.

The 'Euro' can only work if basically you have 'Europe Federal Superstate' - one country.

When it was introduced, the population would 'not yet' accept federal political integration, and it was assumed that the inevitable 'Euro' crisis would be just cause for deeper political integration.

The 'Euro crisis' arrived in early 2010's (it was inevitable) and Europe did not go to 'full federal state' (thankfully), but - it's never recovered from that mess.

When periphery countries joined the Euro, it was kind of assumed that risk would be shared. Nations were given lending rates far below what was appropriate.

That massive building in Spain in the 2000's was caused by Euro integration - was 'low rate' euphoria - money washing over the country.

But it was not sustainable, crashed, and left many countries in a horrible state. No 'bailouts' from German taxpayers, and no 'Eurobonds' or shared risk - and worse - no ability to devalue the currency to spur economic activity.

Unless there are transfers of wealth or other mechanisms (North Europe will never accept) then ... Mediterranean Europe is stuck in an economic prison due to 'half complete' currency project.

The evidence on the other side is strong: places Sweden and Denmark - that at least maintained their own currencies - are in much better position. Literally those that avoided the Euro are arguably better off.

It's a complicated subject obviously - but my overall point is, the 'psychology of the Euro' aka 'no exchange on holiday' and the sense of unity around common currency etc. can be very misleading. The Euro could very well be one of Europe's worst problems - again - even if it has benefits as well.

'The Euro' might be the best symbol of all over what is 'perceived' to be good for Europe, but what is actually bad.

And 'the answer' is probably not a pendulum of 'more or less integration' - but actually less integration in some areas, more integration in others.

Isn't easy travel already covered with their Schengen membership?

They did not really ditched the roaming fees. You get some free roaming with any plan, and if you go over it, you get charged.

Yes, it is nice for a day or two in another EU country, but pretty much that’s it.

Depends who you talk to. I have a mixed bag of UK friends, and it's about half-half.

One thing I think myself is that there was an ugly _hope_ that the UK would suffer as a result. A hope which, as far as I can see, wasn't realised. Living in Europe, I saw a lot on the news about how the UK had shot itself in the foot and things were going badly, but when I visit friends, not so much.

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 sovereignty to those under their rule, and I think that this should be somewhat self evident. When you try to enforce conformity across an empire, you're going to face resistance and even the mightiest of empires cannot sustain itself without a solid internal foundation.

It's become serious in German, Austria, and Czechia. The sentiment in France is not insignificant either.

I hear a lot about how the UK has suffered after Brexit, but none of my experiences there support it. Not the people I talk to, not my own experiences from before vs. after. I think people _want_ it to be true, which I find ugly.

The AFD is openly campaigning on it and they are currently the most popular parti in Germany.

The French RN is not openly campaigning on leaving anymore since its pretty scary to the voters but the intention of Le Pen is to hold a referendum to ask the French people to recognize the supreme rule of French law above EU law which would act as a soft exit since that means that France would no longer be bound by directives and other regulations which it doesnt agree with.

The other major parti France unbowed is even more direct and wants to set "fire" to some of the debt which would most likely trigger a Euro/Eu crisis and force either the ECB to bail out France or force France out of the Euro.

The most likely outcome is that the EU is more or less what it is now for the decades to come, and the lack of reform costs significantly in terms of progress, and that Europe misses out on leading key industrial elements and becomes less relevant to global affairs especially as a lot of so-called 'global south' countries become more successful.

The dynamic of Europe sending all the talent to US is probably just going to continue as it is.

Angela Merkel used to be my favourite politician because I thought she was so 'pragmatic' but I think in retrospect she was basically 'do nothing, kick the can down the road, don't rock the boat'.

In some ways, the 'second most dangerous' kind of politician because it's so alluring to even reasonable people.

The kinds of reforms that the EU needs ... which both re-instill a sense of national dynamism but at the same time provide even deeper integration other areas aka capital markets, defence ... almost nobody is talking about.

5 years into a conflict right on the borders, still can't get full sanctions, still buying Russian carbons, still can't get real access to that $100B Russian money, still totally dependent on the US, still have no proper munitions inventory, still don't have proper defence against ballistic missiles aka huge existential gaps in defence capabilities when the wolf is right at the door.

The CIA had to visit Kremlin few days ago to warn against NATO attack is basically admission that Europe, 80 years after WW2 is not fully sovereign. It was daddy DJT that still to this day, is the one at the table, doing the talking. Not Von Der Leyen, not anyone from Europe ... but an American.

The rise of 'ugly nationalism' may cause pro-EU people to rally and defend broken systems instead of reforming. There is a path through that storm that is a wining outcome however...

There are obscene amounts of money involved in financing anti-EU marketing. The European unity is a thorn in the eyes of Russia, the US and China. A (reasonably) united Europe is the fourth major player on the global scene. 27 individual states aren't influential by themselves and are much easier to be influenced.

Currently, the EU is in a de facto war with Russia, in a trade war with the USA and China, and previous colonies don't seem to care too much for the West either.

The USA would like to see nothing more than an explosive end to the EU and the Russians have been trying to kill any united front against their invasion plans for longer than the EU has been around.

Every major world power has the money and motive to spread misinformation about the EU. They're influencing extremist European parties to repeat their talking points so they can point at a source on the "inside" as well.

The more people think the EU is some kind of awful oppressive regime, the more power the other world powers will gain over Europeans.

Why do you think you're not biased towards the EU? The EU's share of the global economy has fallen from something like 30% to around 13% (PPP). Not all that long ago they even had a larger economy than the US. They've already had the third largest economy within the EU leave, approved overthrowing the results of an election that would have viably set another [strategically critical] country on its way out, and now the EU's largest economy is having an anti-EU party gradually come to be the top party in the country.

Here's another interesting datum. In 2004, 3 of the top 5 economies in the world were part of the EU. [1] Today? 0. [2] So you have sharp decreases in global relevance paired with significant increases in internal issues and pressures. Perhaps you think the EU will overcome this, but to me at least - that's the view that doesn't align, at least not in an 'obvious' fashion, with the data.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

I imagine every time they see a cookie banner they feel a chunk of the EU crumbling.

The thing is I don’t see you asking that same question to the other Americans in the comment section here making stupid claims, with clearly zero clue on how the EU actually functions.

So my question is: why? Why does this comment in particular deserves your attention as a “source your claims” flag, but the other one below about the eu commission being a dictatorship does not?

Polling would be good enough I would think here, do a poll and if you're within 10% of a majority being in favor, just do it and then let them decide on the final agreement. Be public with that stance so that the EU and the population know that the public will have the final say and we (the gov) aren't trying to railroad this

Maybe in a country the size of Iceland it's not as big a deal to run an election but it seems like a lot of work for what is just an advisory vote

Great, this is an actual answer and makes sense. I mean it's a little silly but 100% makes sense

But that is quite literally what they are going to do. They're asking the public if they should try to join the EU. If yes, they will negotiate an agreement with the EU. Once the government has agreed a path forward with the EU, they'll then have another vote and if yes they'll actually sign the agreement and join the EU, if no, it ends there and they don't join

This first vote isn't committing the country or population to anything

You would hold the confirmatory vote before you do all of that. You'd go to the EU, agree what joining looks like, and before doing any of the actual implementation you hold the vote

> The EU commission is just a way for national governments to launder their authoritarian desires through the EU. The commissioner for each country is choser by national governments. It's them pushing that shit.

You're both right. The problem is it's the commission that sets the agenda for the parliament.

If you inverted it and had the elected parliament set the agenda for the national government appointed commission it would be far more likely to reflect the will of the people, which is precisely why it is the way it is.

Europe still hasn't learned the lessons of the French revolution, and is destined to keep repeating it.

Switzerland is currently in the process of implementing a third wave of bilateral agreements with the EU, and the federal government has indicated that in their opinion the "bilateral way" is the best of both worlds in terms of sovereignty and integration, so I don't think joining the EU will be on the agenda anytime soon

Why do they need the Horizon programs? Switzerland is a rich country, in any pan-EU project scheme, they'd pay more than they'd get back.

That's because the PM's party brokered that half-way deal with EU against the will of the people, after they had voted no to EU for the second time[1].

Not saying some of our export companies aren't enjoying the access to EU, but the people was against it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Norwegian_European_Union_...

Important to clarify: IIRC that comment was about Norway's EEA membership. The UK is not an EEA member.

Except in areas of fishing and agriculture. Especially fishing they really care about, just like iceland.

What do they get in security from the EU that they don't get from NATO? Is it so they can get in on the new joint EU defence funds?

Yes, Luxembourg has a higher GDP per capita than Switzerland, also for banking reasons.

If anything when your economy is based on European countries relying on your banking services, being part of EU makes it even easier for said countries to pour their money to your banks.

Speaking of Switzerland - no it absolutely is not.

Is far from being fully integrated into EU. You have to pay customs on shipments, which can be delayed for weeks on borders.

You need to apply for the residence permit and you can lose it for trivially sounding reasons. - E.g. lying on the application which could mean " you mentioned in the application you wull look for job but lied and went to learn the language instead". - also look at the recent case of a woman and her daughter abused by some Swiss politician facing deportation because she moved to Switzerland for work officially, but in reality she moved to live with her Swiss romantic partner.

Switzerland still have bottles of water without permanently attached lid.

It's integrated in many ways but still far from being a member state.

Stop claiming this. It's complete bullshit and you probably have never even been here.

Neither is Iceland as it has no oil ... or any other mineral resources for that matter.

The current UK government was also elected by democratic vote, so they have a mandate that postdates the referendum.

You can argue their mandate is invalid due to the first-past-the-post system, but in that case the original decision to hold a referendum, and all subsequent governments that negotiated the terms of the EU exit are also invalid, since they all derived from first-past-the-post elections.

The vote was to leave or stay - there was no mandate for or against a specific relationship to the EU before even considering how drastically opinions have shifted since.

That mandate has quite changed, even more when you look at the non-retired cohorts. Reintegration with the EU will take plenty of time.

The vote wasn’t binding and had a low turnout. Not really a good example to point to for democratic voting

The majority of UK inhabitans wants to rejoin the EU. It is indeed democratically legitime.

Democratic vote which has since then been proved to be heavily influenced by the Cambridge Analytica campaign, so which probably did not reflect the actual opinion of the population. It was a manipulated vote.

Euro would be a bliss for unstable Islandian currency. Actually Euro is used by the yes camp.

Ok, but why is it the Icelandic crown "bad"? What is the economic cause of it?

I do not know much about Iceland, only that, like New Zealand (and Canada), it is sometimes painted as some sort of progressive heaven that the US should aspire to.

Then, as you learn more, it turns out life isn't that great there.

As the Polish government have made very clear, the length of the transition period can be indefinite.

And it isn't really a negotiable. It's up to the country when it wants to join the Euro. They just have to promise that they'll do it at some unspecified point in the future.

> Look what happened to their currency in 2008, at the time they really wished they were using the euro.

Alright, after looking at that, look at what happened to Greece (who adopter Euro as their currency).

Countries have wildly different needs regarding monetary policy. Those interests are sometimes in conflict. When push comes to shove, unsurprisingly the powerful dictate the rules: see the 2010s Eurozone crises.

Why wouldn't the price also fluctuate if it is in Euros?

Doesn't the price fluctuation reflect an economic reality?

Related: couldn't a country adopt euros voluntarily without joining the EU? Like Ecuador adopted US dollars.

This is a great example of how people comment very confidently on shit they know nothing about.

Iceland complies with EU because it belongs to the EEA. It has nothing to do with "precence of EU across the sea".

UK doesn't have to comply with th EU. It has to if it t wants to be able to export stuff there.