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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

It is logical if indeed sovereignty was a main issue in the debate even if this vote was officially only about whether to resume "accession talks."

They have the benefit of seeing the situation in the EU and the direction of travel so it is quite clear that any debates on joining the EU is a debate between continuing as an independent country or being absorbed in a federal EU. A very, very big decision to make.

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I think the idea of continuing as an independent country is a bit naive for a country with no army and a population of 400k in a neighborhood full of newly imperial ambitions.

It's either join democratically into a slowly federalizing EU or be eaten up by American imperial ambitions at this point - and I have my doubts the latter option will include the same right to self-determination, considering the Puerto Rico precedent.

The Greenland campaign shows these concerns aren't hyperbole - they're just next in line.

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.

I think the opposite is the plan: Fearmongering against the EU with false talk of sovereignty to butter it up to be eventually be swallowed up by the US.

Greenland wasn't at risk of invasion either, until the US explicitly started threatening it.

It's not the Russians these places need to worry about. Sovereignty will go away either way. The question is whether democratic rule will stay or not. It would as part of the EU. The US has precedent not granting it.

Your point of view is fundamentally anchored to the world of yesterday, when the global landscape looked significantly different and the US was a guarantor of security to Western states, not a threat model. The world has changed since. Old assumptions no longer apply.

Iceland went basically bankrupt less than 20 years ago, saying they're doing "extremely well" is either misinformed or disingenuous. They do ok on some parameters, bad on others, and their small size makes them fundamentally weak to global economic winds. EU (and particularly Euro) membership would not magically solve all problems, but could make some things a bit clearer and more reliable.

Sadly, the voters have spoken and so they'll have to continue doing what they do now.

Everyone went basically bankrupt 20 years ago and while they were hit they also recovered. The Euro can be a big impediment, too, as we have seen.

Iceland ranks 5th globally in nominal GDP per capita, 1st in Europe for average wage, 1st globally for HDI. I think it is a fair assessment to say that they are doing extremely well..

> either misinformed or disingenuous

That was uncalled for...

Iceland is the only nation that punished its bankers for their misdeeds, and it’s bounced back from 2008 in very good shape. They still have a strong industrial base thanks to massive hydropower investments, and their people (who are fairly well educated) retain control over their government, which seems more democratically responsive than other European governments. Their strategic location (GIUK gap) also gives them a lot of negotiation leverage. I’d say they are doing pretty well.

How do you think Iceland would have fared in 2008 under the ECB's iron whip or within euro? Legitimately curious.

> It is logical if indeed sovereignty was a main issue in the debate

It is kind of hard to take countries without standing armies talking about sovereignty seriously.

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.

They have a strategic location in the north Atlantic, if the US did not have defacto military control of iceland several other countries have historically been interested in annexing them (germany under WW2, soviet union after that). They also only got their independence from Denmark after WW2.

And yet they've done fine for 1000+ years.

Moreover, this whole narrative of defense is so childlish and asinine, generally spread by people of countries that are always on the attacking side like Americans.

It reminds me of the elementary kids in a local school that started to bring knifes to school because others had knifes too.

I think over the past year or so the calculus has changed dramatically. There was credible threat by the US of invasion of another NATO member in the same neighborhood. It's intellectually dishonest to say things are the same as in the 90s, when the US was defending the sovereignty of these places.

> And yet they've done fine for 1000+ years.

They got their independence after WW2, they have been either annexed or colonized by other powers since 1262.

You have a country where there is people still alive who remembers their country getting independence, don’t you think that independence matters to them?

WRT sovereignty: I'm sure situations like the recent EPR/PPWR debacle didn't help, where the EU passes bad laws that all EU countries are nevertheless forced to adopt. (Recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49419237 )

Joining the EU would be a no-brainer if it didn't micromanage and meddle so much.

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.

But sovereignty is of the people in a democracy. Why is the arbitrary, much weaker unit of "Iceland" better than the much more powerful, much more defensible unit of "EU"?

The sovereign remains the same, the people.

There's also the added wrinkle that Iceland already is in the EEA, so already has the primacy of EU law in a lot of areas. How is it more sovereign to have to follow laws you don't get to decide? Your setup is taking away power from the sovereign that is the people. Or are you advocating exiting the EEA as well? You are aware that would be economic suicide?

In the EU Iceland would lose sovereignty because the EU is going federal, and the people of Iceland would lose sovereignty, too as a consequence. You are trying to clutch at straws because you are insisting on denying a fact that is not even controversial. I understand that you think it is worth it but not you should deny it is the case.

Iceland is in the EEA (and indeed that's already a loss of sovereignty) not in the EU and a key reason is indeed to maintain sovereignty on key issues and industries (especially fishing, which is excluded from EEA), which they would lose by joining. So again it is very unclear to me what they would gain by joining.

Why would they lose sovereignty? You haven't established that at all.

If we read Rousseau's Social Contract, we see that the sovereign is the people, not the executive power at their service.

The people wouldn't stop being the sovereign just because they change the administrative details of executing their sovereign will.

You haven't made a successful case to counter this point, instead you've gone to attacking me personally with loaded language ("clutching at straws") to defend your insularism.

Sovereignty, noun: the power of a country to control its own government. [Cambridge]

A country, EU member, Euro, Schengen, etc. does not control its foreign trade, has no currency, does not control its monetary policy, does not control its borders (Iceland is a remore island so possibly less of a practical issue and indeed they are in Schengen), does not control its laws. That's the way it is. This includes the people as citizens of that country.

I think you are trying to say that they are still "sovereign" at EU level but obviously that's fallaciously ignoring the whole actual issue of national sovereignty vs. the EU, which isn't just a "change of administrative details", obviously...

Interestingly, with your argument they could equally join the US and as long as they have full voting rights they would still be "sovereign", which I don't think many would agree they would be because the whole point is obviously being sovereign as Iceland and Icelandic, not as citizens of whatever other country.

That's the issue with discussing the EU within Europe at this point, it has become a religion and it is not possible to discuss religion with religious people.

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.

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