Fallout from German Intransigence with Greece

Iceland has been trying to join the EU for the past few decades.

Not any more:

Iceland has announced it is dropping its bid to join the European Union in line with pledges made two years ago by its then-new eurosceptic government.

Iceland first applied for EU membership in 2009 but its foreign minister, Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson, said in a statement that the centre-right government had informed current EU president Latvia and the European Commission of its decision to annul the application.

“Iceland’s interests are better served outside the European Union,” the minister wrote on his website.

Iceland first applied for EU membership under a leftist government in 2009, when the country was badly shaken by an economic crisis that saw the Icelandic krona lose almost half its value, making eurozone membership an attractive prospect.

But the thorny issue of fishing quotas was seen as a key obstacle to joining the bloc, although it was never brought up in the accession talks.

Clearly, a lot of this was a worry about fishing rights, which had in the past resulted in hostilities between Iceland and the UK, and another part of this is the dispute between the UK and Iceland over insurance guarantees for their failed banks, as well as the UK using an anti-terror law to seize the assets of Icelandic banks.

I think that a bigger part is that the people of Iceland saw what was done to Ireland and Greece, and realize that EU accession doesn't give them much beyond a loss of sovereignty to Germany, which has used its position to exert hegemony over Europe since the financial crisis.