Iceland Takes New Steps Toward EU Membership
James Joyner writes about Iceland’s continued march to EU membership. This is brought about in part because the financial meltdown has made EU membership look better on the merits, in part because the financial meltdown has brought left-wing parties to power, and in part because the financial meltdown has just changed public opinion. Still, mass opinion is rarely all that Europhilic and there remains some chance that the public will reject accession in a referendum. EU leaders, meanwhile, seem to be welcoming the idea of expansion to a tiny rich country after so many contentious fights about the accession of medium-sized medium-income Eastern European countries.
The EU has a ton of problems, running the gamut from a nutty decision-making structure to the fact that voters seem to hate it. But when you step back and think about it, it’s really an enormous human achievement relative to where things were 60 or 70 years ago or to what anyone would have thought possible back then. And for all its problems, the EU keeps moving by fits and starts to become both broader and deeper and I see no real reason to think either trend will actually reverse. Most likely, some of the problems will get resolved and that, combined with generational turnover, will build a more EU-friendly public in the future.
49 Responses to “Iceland Takes New Steps Toward EU Membership”
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July 18th, 2009 at 11:40 am
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power
July 18th, 2009 at 11:42 am
“Most likely, some of the problems will get resolved and that, combined with generational turnover, will build a more EU-friendly public in the future.”
In Iceland, that will result in a generation named Euroskepticsdóttir.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:57 am
It is rather beneficial in some ways, at this juncture, to have Iceland join, at least for the EU’s image. Right now, the whole accession debate revolves around poorer Eastern European countries and Turkey; unpleasant and unlikable material, really, even though I am strongly in favour of the membership of the entire Eastern Europe ex the Ukraine and Belarus, which are hopeless.
No one is going to protest having the Icelanders join; they are a rich country and they are relatively similar to the rest of Western Europe.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:57 am
So you are advocating for one of those NWO kind of things? Because isn’t that what the EU is? Isn’t the size the cause of its unwieldiness?
July 18th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
So even though many of the voters hate it and in many countries there would be rejection of many EU policies if the voters had a chance to directly vote you think that the EU is a great accomplishment?
So you don’t believe in democracy and instead believe that a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats should run a major part of the world with little or no accountability or support from the public. And many of the same politicians and bureaucrat who can’t get the job done at the national level are suppose to be able to get things done in a much larger and complex organization
It appears that you think that progress is creating larger and more unaccountable political systems
July 18th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
The EU has a ton of problems, running the gamut from a nutty decision-making structure to the fact that voters seem to hate it. But when you step back and think about it, it’s really an enormous human achievement relative to where things were 60 or 70 years ago or to what anyone would have thought possible back then. And for all its problems, the EU keeps moving by fits and starts to become both broader and deeper and I see no real reason to think either trend will actually reverse. Most likely, some of the problems will get resolved and that, combined with generational turnover, will build a more EU-friendly public in the future.
You don’t build a public, Matt. You can convince, or persuade, or lead, the public. Build is the wrong word, and I’m afraid it’s more than that, it’s the wrong perspective.
For example, you don’t build support for single-payer healthcare in America, but you could persuade, or lead, towards it.
You don’t build support for democracy in Afghanistan.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Matt’s ultimate goal is for the EU to open membership to north america nations.
The thought of the US joining the EU just makes tingly all over.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Welcome Icelanders. You have my support in the comeing disputes with insane Spanish and French fishery lobyists. Not that my support would helpy you in any way
.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Re: The thought of the US joining the EU just makes tingly all over.
Bluesmoke, you’re right. The funny thing is that it doesn’t even occur to Airhead Yglesias that some might disagree.
Scr*w the EU and those who support it. SCr*w the EU with a rusty nail. It represents everything I hate in the world, the utoppia of usurers, the paradise of pornographers, the dream of the decadent and the heaven of hipsters. It represents a basically soft and gutless view of the world in which machines do all our labor, there is no more need for labor, for suffering, for self-denial, where the individual is everything and the collective nothing, where most people seek not to be dissolved into some vast and all-encompassing struggle of good against evil, but rather to spend their life indulging their taste for pot, porn, and playstations. It is the zenith of all that makes the modern world basically corrupt and effete, and I will fight against it to the last drop of my blood. A real utopia would look like the very opposite of the EU: it would be an agrarian world of self-contained, fiercely rooted rural communities, run by peasant cooperatives, presided over by a benevolent and paternal government run by heroic and virtuous men not by Bush/Obama/Blair/Berlusconi style showman mediocrities. It would be a world that strove not to encourage people to be happy but to encourage them to be good, and one that realized that the best aspects of human character can be developed only in unending and constant struggle of good against evil. It would be, in short, a world of real men and real women not a bunch of p*ssified, gutless, loveless, soulless hipsters of the kind that populate Amsterdam and Georgetown.
Iceland has greatly erred, they have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, and the day shall come when the daughters of Reykjavik come to weep for themselves and for their children.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Against my inclinations, I enjoy and like you, Hector. You seem to be a left-winger with rock hard principles, and I admire that.
July 18th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
I assume that Hector at #9 is an impostor?
July 18th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
No, it’s me. I hve nothing for the EU but the utmost contempt and antipathy.
July 18th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Not that simple.
In its current form the EU has a fundamental flaw: no political power. Sure we elect a parliament and all, but it has basically no power. The EU’s executive branch is not independent from the nations and is hobbled by its collegial format. The only independent EU institution is the ECB, and its rate-setting policy is really, really stretching the Union at the moment (Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy, as well as the Baltic States are in freefall while the ECB, doing the Germans’ and the Dutch’s bidding, is refusing to strain from Washington compromise orthodoxy). The financial crisis has laid bare the EU’s fundamental lack of executive power and its deference to the States. The EU institutional makeup and its political culture is geared for good-to-average times. It’s kinda useless in a crisis, when members’ interests and policies start diverging. So this begs the question: what is it really good for in the current situation? (and sure, looking back 60 years, it is an amazing achievement – but the real test was the financial/economic crisis, and so far the Commission is flunking it). And by the way, for the first time in a ages, the Parliament is standing up to the members’ government by refusing to rubberstamp the re-election of the hapless Barroso as President of the Commission.
July 18th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
“Scr*w the EU and those who support it. SCr*w the EU with a rusty nail. It represents everything I hate in the world, the utoppia of usurers, the paradise of pornographers, the dream of the decadent and the heaven of hipsters. It represents a basically soft and gutless view of the world in which machines do all our labor, there is no more need for labor, for suffering, for self-denial, where the individual is everything and the collective nothing, where most people seek not to be dissolved into some vast and all-encompassing struggle of good against evil, but rather to spend their life indulging their taste for pot, porn, and playstations. It is the zenith of all that makes the modern world basically corrupt and effete, and I will fight against it to the last drop of my blood. A real utopia would look like the very opposite of the EU: it would be an agrarian world of self-contained, fiercely rooted rural communities, run by peasant cooperatives, presided over by a benevolent and paternal government run by heroic and virtuous men”
Who knew that Hector was actually the reincarnation of Pol Pot?
July 18th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Why does Hector hate the EU so much? Subsidies to farmers are a large part of the EU budget.
The dream of a peasant society lives on, thanks to the comrades in Brussels.
July 18th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Manu @13: I’m not sure what you’re point is. The US has lots of executive power, but there is a lot of complaint about the handling of the financial crisis there, too.
It would seem obvious that it would be good for the EU to have a common foreign policy, but then the policy would be at greater distance from the people, and who knows what they could make up in Brussels. NATO (mutual defense) exists, but clearly you can actually exist without common foreign policy, so why not?
As for the financial crisis, are you saying the states with the most problems would be better off outside of the EU?
July 18th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Re: Who knew that Hector was actually the reincarnation of Pol Pot?
Ah, the typical response of the hipster. How tiresome.
July 18th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Bengt @16
I’d argue that the US response was by and large much better and better coordinated (between the executive, Congress and the Feds). There was a concerted policy effort towards resolute quantitative easing – so yeah, the stimulus could have been better, but I didn’t see anything of that scale happening in the EU besides the usual big empty pronouncements by Sarko.
As for counterfactuals re: the periphery States, I really don’t know. The point is that their hands are tied with respect to monetary policy, and as a result the spread on their bonds (compared to the German benchmark) is getting crazy wide. That can’t be good. My point was that the EU seems to work for them pretty well in a non-critical environment. But come crunch time…
July 18th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I would say that it’s your opinions that are tiresome, Hector, but honestly they’re too bizarre.
It’s our world, Hector. Hipsters rule now. Do you have a daughter? Wait until we get our hands on her.
July 18th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
And contrary to our Pol Pot friend, I do like the European Union, I think it’s a great idea and I think it’s very positive on many levels (the Danish Erasmus babes totally convinced me). If anything, I’d like the Union to be truly federal, with increase powers to the Parliament and the commission, and diminished powers to the States. In my dreams, all the sovereign national bonds would be consolidated and issued by the ECB (yeah, yeah I dream of bond issues – how nerdy). The disbursement of structural funds would be subjected to increased parliamentary review. And the Commission would be elected by popular suffrage. You know, like a true federal State. In fact, the Canadian model would be the ideal setup (minus the Queen of course). Oh and the Polish government would stop whining and blocking everything. It will take another 100 years, no doubt…
July 18th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Hector–isn’t it about time to bring up your Bolivian whipping fantasies?
July 18th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Iceland … yet another one of the Blue-Eyed Utopias that so enthrall Matt.
July 18th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
When did “fight against it to the last drop of my blood” become “write angry anonymous internet comments”? If you really feel that way, go there and foment revolution (or should I say Revolution) like a real man. Otherwise tone down the Che-wannabe rhetoric.
July 18th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
As for the Revolution, I certainly don’t want to do it with authoritarian clowns like Hector – he’s a puny corporal, a stalinist scum and a kapo in training.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
A couple of points on Iceland applying to join the EU:
Im not convinced Yglesias is correct on the reasons for Iceland applying to join:
The Social-democrats have clamored for a application for quite some time, as has the center-rigt “Progressive” party, which formed the government with the conservatives for most of the past two decades. The conservatives have been split, while the Left-green party (that is the literal translation, they are further to the left of the Social-democrats, as the name suggests…) have been largely opposed to EU membership. Until now.
The reason they have decided to support an application probably has more to do with the bargaining involved in forming coalition governments than it does with having the “left” in power.
On his other point – that the financial crisis plays a key role, Yglesias is correct. But EU membership is not touted as a solution in and of itself, rather, it is the Euro that Iceland is after: Iceland has its own currency, and the deapth of the crisis in Iceland has alot (everything, some would say) to do with that fact.
The public remains quite un-Europhilic, as Yglesias notes. The political elite has been much more interested in the EU than the public and I seriously doubt that Icelanders will vote to join the EU when the time comes.
The funny thing though, is that support for an application to the EU has been dropping in recent weeks, months.
The reason has to do with negotations with the UK and Holland over money people in those countries lost in the bankruptcy of the Icelandic banks. But people in Iceland are shocked and bewildered, and are clinging at straws.
This is the first time in history where the entire financial system of a advanced capitalist country collapsed in one fell swoop, the worst currency collapse in recent history, and looks to be the worst depression in Iceland since the 30s. So anything can happen.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
The cosmopolitan media elites over here managed to frame the issue of applying for EU membership as a “let’s see what we can get” type of idea. So a lot of people supported the EU application even though they are very skeptical of the EU. They think that the EU might offer a good “deal” and if they don’t, well, we’ll just say no in the referendum. I think this is a very misguided view of how this actually works.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
MY “But when you step back and think about it, it’s really an enormous human achievement relative to where things were 60 or 70 years ago or to what anyone would have thought possible back then.”
Agree. It is an enormous human achievement.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
All right, someone needs to write a Hector Generator, a la Kant Generator: http://www.barbalet.net/kant/
July 18th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Amsterdam is full of hipsters? Don’t they like Eurovision over there?
July 18th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Hector’s a little ridiculous, but Pol Pot’s not the comparison. He’s something of an Integralist, and the closest to his system in practice would probably be Franco and the Falange. He is drawing on an actual tradition, a tradition largely of the intellectual movement aligned with the Catholic Church, that had a lot to do with the Popes trying to find a way to win modernity. Of course, over here even the Catholics don’t take that tradition seriously, to the extent the culture embraces an intellectual tradition it’s largely the transplanted Viennese Jewish one by now. Liberation Theology was an offshoot of the same tradition, but by the time Latin America gets its next revolutionary wave it’ll probably be in the name of Santa Muerte.
July 18th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Hector @9: I think I may have just witnessed the coup de grâce of internet crankism. Well played, sir. Well played.
July 18th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Re: Who knew that Hector was actually the reincarnation of Pol Pot?
Ah, the typical response of the hipster. How tiresome.
Actually, more like something from Vichy head of state Marshal Petain. The National Revolution lives!
July 19th, 2009 at 7:17 am
‘I think this is a very misguided view of how this actually works.’
Far from it – the EU is nothing but sheer (national/regional) self-interest disguised by a thin veneer of idealism. It is just that in general, the self-interest is less venal than most Americans seem to grasp.
Which is why it actually works so well – anybody notice any EU country wanting to leave? Where it doesn’t work well is on the traditional measurements suited for governments – the EU cannot project military force, for example, since there is no EU military. And since the EU is made up of governments, don’t expect an EU military any time soon.
The EU is something new – an attempt to provide a framework for history’s most violent continent to do something other than wage incessant war. So far, it has succeeded brilliantly.
It isn’t really much of a surprise that Americans miss this point – after all, after having basically bankrupted itself in the pursuit of preparation for imminent and total war, the U.S. is exceedingly unlikely to admit its idiocy in falling into the classic trap that Europeans have attempted to find a way out of.
Or to put it a bit differently – the odds of the EU integrating Russia into a system where both sides find sufficient mutual benefit to make armed conflict about as likely as the U.S. invading Canada are much higher than the U.S. subduing the Russia military threat through building a missile defense shield. And the EU model is not only much cheaper, it is much more durable – as the Russians have already done sufficient preparation (decoys are cheap, for example) to be able to defeat current American anti-missile systems.
The EU is probably the next logical step in the Enlightenment – that is, attempting to create institutions which transcend national borders without attempting to do away with national governments. Its flaws are varied – its virtues much less so, when one looks at the basic reason the EU exists.
Of course, like any human institution, the EU will fail. Which is another difference between those that live in the EU and Americans – just ask a Spaniard about Franco, a Pole about Stalin, a Greek about the colonels, or for real fun, ask a Slovak about the Czechs, or a Slovenian about the Serbs. The EU is composed of people who know that all human institutions will fail, the same way that we will all die. Without exception – except for those that believe in their own brand of exceptionalism.
And Hector? The capital of the porn universe is the U.S. – the EU is about as second rate in porn as it is military power. Even the Japanese are better at porn than entire EU.
July 19th, 2009 at 9:02 am
Re: Of course, like any human institution, the EU will fail.
Good. When it does, I will be dancing in the street.
Re: And Hector? The capital of the porn universe is the U.S. – the EU is about as second rate in porn as it is military power.
Oh come on. You know as well as me that I was using porn as a symbol for the general degeneration of the human virtues in the cosmopolitan West.
July 19th, 2009 at 10:52 am
‘Good. When it does, I will be dancing in the street.’
Well, considering that its most likely end will be connected to what history will record as WWIII, you are less likely to be dancing in the street than decomposing in it. Enjoy the celebration – I think some other pithy anti-EU type remarked something about the living envying the dead in such circumstances.
‘You know as well as me that I was using porn as a symbol for the general degeneration of the human virtues in the cosmopolitan West.’
No, actually I didn’t, since you wrote this – ‘SCr*w the EU with a rusty nail. It represents everything I hate in the world, the utoppia of usurers, the paradise of pornographers….’ And what I meant, since this may not have been clear, is that the U.S., followed a distant second by Japan, produces vast amounts of pornography, and is the world’s leading provider by basically all measures. The EU may have a lot more nude beaches, mixed saunas (mostly local government owned and operated, at least in Germany), and a lot less prudish attitude towards nudity and sex in general, but it really lags in the porn production business. Of course, as an American, I find this anything but ‘degenerate’ – where American standards, including raging hypocrisy, most certainly are.
July 19th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Not_Scottbot,
You seem to be under the impression that I like the U.S. society as it stands. I don’t. The United States is a bloated, corrupt, oligarchic, decadent empire, without faith and without morals. The Europeans are rapidly on their way to creating a similar Empire across the pond. Pardon me if i fail to congratulate them. Just how much porn is being produced by the peasants of Etchmiadzin or Ayacucho? Not very much, I would suspect.
Frankly, I would rather die as a Christian and a believer in the natural order, than live as an overfed, oversexed Eurocrat with no meaning and no purpose to my life.
July 19th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Frankly, I would rather die as a Christian and a believer in the natural order, than live as an overfed, oversexed Eurocrat with no meaning and no purpose to my life.
I would say that the goal is to create a world rule of law and then to explore space.
July 19th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Shorter Hector, “My life isn’t any fun. Why should anybody else’s be?”
July 20th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Re: I would say that the goal is to create a world rule of law and then to explore space.
Those hardly seem like particularly worthy goals, Mr. Bengt Larsson.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Hector:
Your peasants’ pursuit of the collective good: of course it would include paying tithes to the rulers? Collectively, your rulers would enjoy the “goods” of pursuing esoteric knowledge and traveling the world, while the peasants’ good might look different, correct? And “good” would always mean fidelity to a social heirarchy…after all it’s divinely ordained. Yes?
July 20th, 2009 at 7:45 am
More specifically, the “good” of peasants is probably defined as dawn-to-dusk backbreaking labor and incessant reproduction, something like that.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Re: More specifically, the “good” of peasants is probably defined as dawn-to-dusk backbreaking labor and incessant reproduction, something like that.
Actually, Mr. Haha, it would probably look something a bit more like Venezuela (minus the crime rates, which we would deal with thru giving a bigger role to the Church and the Army) than like Philip “Pussy” Petain’s France. But don’t let that stop you from indulging your ‘Fascist’ slurs. (By the way, I fail to see just how a man who retreats to a spa town in the South of France and begs surrender from the Nazi hordes is an exemplar of the masculine martial virtues, but apparently it makes sense to the hipsters.)
July 20th, 2009 at 7:55 am
In other words, if I did not make it clear, if the hipsters had their way we would live in a world of Pussy Petains. Just how the hipsters intend for us to resist the Nazi hordes if our young people are tought in the schools that courage, honor, virtue, and self-sacrifice are outmoded, out-of-date anachronisms is beyond me. I have to run to work now, but you should meditate on this simple fact: Pussy Petains will always exist, as evil is inherent in our world, but his arguments would never have appealed to the French had they not been corrupted by the emasculating hipsterism of the Third Republic. The Greeks were one of the few European societies where Westernizing influences were limited, and they fought the Nazi hordes to the last drop of blood.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:59 am
I was attempting the sketch the system of clerical control and peasant obligation in preindustrial agrarian societies, not industrial-age totalitarianism. So I have no idea what you mean by Fascist slurs or your reference to Phillipe Petain.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Cripes, is this what Hector means by “Hipsters?” Anyone who isn’t in favor of virtuous feudalism?
The thing about Petain is, while he isn’t the facist ideal of what a nationalist-conservative Catholic oligarch should be, he is what that brand of 20th Century conservative authoriarianism always came up with as leaders.
Just finished Weinberg’s A World at Arms. An interesting and energetic look at World War II, with an emphasizis on the people making the decisions and what they knew and thought at the time. The right-wingers who wind up running much of Europe come off as a bizarre mix of talented thugs and corrupt buffoons and weaklings.
Stalin is creepier only because he is such a pure, cold-blooded sociopath, blinded only by his inability to understand that two capitalist rulers (Roosevelt and Hitler, for example) could actually have different views of war and morality.
The European authoritarian right, and their ideolgoical relatives around the world, seem to have in common that element of pious corrpution. They talk a good fight about the horrors of decadence and immorality, but they never seem able to overcome their own lack of character and rational good sense. One in ten of them might be able to run a country effciently, but most of them either stagger along and get by until they get old and senile or they bungle the job completely and bring misery to everyone around them.
Which is why we peasants keep overthrowing them and trying something else.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Oh great, I write something, and all the world goes crazy.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Re: The thing about Petain is, while he isn’t the facist ideal of what a nationalist-conservative Catholic oligarch should be, he is what that brand of 20th Century conservative authoriarianism always came up with as leaders.
Midland,
You seem to be smarter and more morally decent than your cosmopolite yahoo counterparts, so I’ll try and be polite. I don’t see myself as conservative, and I violently detest Petain all his sort. I am with Simone Weil, who dreamt of France transformed along agrarian, antiliberal, Christian-Socialist lines, and who hated Petain and Vichy precisely because they enacted such a filthy and grotesque parody of this ideal. I am a supporter of the Chavez Regime in Venezuela, which is, today, pretty much the classic example of a surviving Left-wing regime. Just how can one be a conservative and also in favor of Colonel Chavez.
Mr. HaHaHa,
While I realise that you did not bring up the late and unlamented P*ssy Petain, other people in this thread did. I am sick and tired of having the yahoos in the Peanut Gallery chime in with cries of “Vichy!” when I point out the elementary fact that the chattering classes of the United States and much of western Europe have constructed an ultimately decadent, corrupt, and antihuman society bearing remarkable similarities to the Rome of Nero and Caligula whose downfall was prophecied in most remarkable detail by the Beloved Disciple. As Simone Weil pointed out, Vichy, and Fascism more generally, was the logical outcome of hipsterism run amock. Man was made for virtue and self sacrifice, and if you deny him these things as liberal civilisation has been wont to do, he will simply seek a demonic and diabolic parody thereof, which goes under the name of Fascism.
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