The EU has lost almost every direct vote over joining. And let's just not talk about what happened with the initial formation of the EU. It involved a democracy

The EU has lost almost every direct vote over joining. And let's just not talk about what happened with the initial formation of the EU. It involved a democracy sending commando forces kidnapping EU politicians to execute them. But most famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Dutch_European_Constitution_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Dutch_European_Constituti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_European_Constitution_referendum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_European_Constitut... (look at the list of all referenda in those pages, because this wasn't just the Netherlands and France rejecting the EU) Note almost all the referendums that were planned, were canceled. Any honest person should point out: they were canceled because the odds of the referendum passing was negligible. Of course, the EU immediately went against the obvious will of the voters through the treaty of Lisbon. Needless to say, as per usual, the EU makes sure it's popular with politicians (e.g. special tax-exempt status, BUT full social benefits, for any EU personnel. Plus many other things, including an excellent restaurant). So there was a long and thorough discussion in the NL parliament on how to override the will of the voters. Just like, in this case, the party in parliament is bluntly stating they're looking for a way to get membership approved knowing full well a majority is against it. There's yet another reason I'd be wary: the poorer an EU citizen is, the more likely they're to vote against EU. Given the economic performance of the EU of the last 10 years I would expect ... and I do see recent election results (near-majorities for the extreme right, and growth for extreme-left parties that also aren't helpful, in both France and Germany) The EU itself is extremely frustrated about these events, because the whole point of the "EU constitution" that became the Treaty of Lisbon was to trade a bit of EU power for increased legitimacy through a popular Europe-wide constitution. After forcing through the treaty of Lisbon ... the net result of it was less legitimacy instead of more, and less power for the EU executive. They are pretty frustrated since the EU executive actually fulfills a LOT of government functions of the member states. Reality is that for ~70 years the people of the EU have rejected the EU the vast majority of chances they got. Politicians have seen it, imho correctly, as a necessity. Even a country like Germany cannot reasonably negotiate as equals with something like the US, Russia or China, to say nothing of countries like Luxembourgh or Serbia. I guarantee you that while Norway's politicians want to join the EU, they are very unlikely to actually commit to a fair vote to join the bloc.