I was just reading about the Nordic Council for a few hours (Yawn!) on Wiki, Norden.org, Norden.ee etc. and with my very limited knowledge of Estonians' current views, values etc. I simply cannot see why you couldn't join..
They operate on a tiny budget (~30 million DKK or like €4 million) so it can't possibly be that part that keeps Estonia out. People keep mentioning economy, so what exactly do you mean? Wouldn't Estonia be able to afford some of the reforms required to meet the requirements for joining or..?
I am aware that Estonia is not currently on the same economic level as the current members, but since the Nordic council doesn't rule any country, their "ideas" aren't binding for the members. They can't just suddenly walk into your parliament and demand you spend €10 billion on something for example.
The values part is where I'm completely lost though. I simply don't know enough about you fine Estonians to have any real idea of what your current views and values are. In what ways are they not currently compatible, would you say?
I'm not involved in a government or in the Nordic council myself, but from what I see it seems like "advertisement" would help a lot. Make some noise over there. Good noise of course. Don't start any wars or whatever. Hehe It seems to me like a big part of potentially joining is simply a marketing issue. A lot of people over here have no idea what Estonia is like today, what your values are like, what you want, how you view yourselves etc. We never really hear anything about Estonia.. Good or bad. :)
When I think about the other Nordic countries and reasons for working with them and seeing them as "closer to us" than other countries in Europe, it's mostly because of mentality, liberal values and a lot of common goals. If you can make people think you guys are essentially our lost Nordic brothers by doing things (And making us hear about you doing them.) that we tend to see as being typically Nordic values etc. I think people will start seeing it as more "like us".
An example of that is a country like The Netherlands. They're not even interested in joining the Nordics, but they seem to share a lot of our values, views, interests etc. so we tend to see them "like us" a lot. At least here in Denmark. Why? Because we hear about them doing things that we tend to agree with. :)