Originally Posted by harrison:
@Teho. Doesn't Norway have a trade agreement with the EU which requires them to still contribute into the EU funds without any of the membership powers? And at the same time accept free movement of EU migrants?
Norway has access to the EU market and EEA through its EFTA membership. Norway does send funds to the EU as part of participating in certain programs. We are not forced to do this, we wish to participate and pay our share. We don't have the powers of full EU membership, no, but we are in a strong bargaining position due to EU requiring our gas, and we also export our surplus clean hydroelectrical power to the EU. In fact while we have access to the EU market, the EU does not have full access to ours. Specifically in agricultural products, to protect the norwegian agriculture there are high import duties on products from other countries, making them too expensive to compete. So norwegian stores will mostly only have norwegian-produced foods, while only having the odd foreign product which will be more expensive. So when they do have them it is usually fancy stuff that would be expensive anyway. This is one thing the EU is known to dislike and wants to have abolished, but can't. For consumers it would be good as they would be able to buy cheaper foods that are just as good, but it would kill off the norwegian farming industry who wouldn't be able to compete. To quote the EEA article linked above:
Originally Posted by wikipedia:
The EEA is based on the same "four freedoms" as the European Community: the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital among the EEA countries. [...] Agriculture and fisheries are not covered by the EEA. Not being bound by the Common Fisheries Policy is perceived as very important by Norway and Iceland, and a major reason not to join the EU.
Our open borders weren't forced on us by the EU either, that's part of the EEA agreement. There is also already an agreement between the nordic countries to have open borders between us which has existed since long before any of the nordic countries became EU members so is much older than that as well.
EEA participation does require adopting some EU regulations but on the whole we're not in a bad place at all. While it may seem that Norway is forced to abide by the EU's rules and legislations it is actually due to the EEA agreement which we are willingly participating in. EU cannot readily add new rules and legislations to the EEA without members including Norway agreeing to them, and we are in a strong position when negotiating these things as they don't want us to leave the EEA. So it is actually not so easy for the EU to force anything on us.