Authors: George Lakey
Population size raises another question: who is to pay for all this infrastructure? The population of Britain is roughly sixty million. During most of its development, Norway’s population was less than four million—an almost pitiful tax base. Where was the wealth to come from for a massive investment in arduous-to-build infrastructure?
Moreover, Norway lacked the UK’s abundant agricultural land; only 3 percent of Norway can be farmed. The UK had iron, copper, vast amounts of coal, and other resources to generate wealth; historical Norway had little besides water power, timber, and fish.
The UK, as a pioneer in industrialization, had a long lead-time to build its infrastructure; until 1905, Norway was linked to Sweden, a country focused on its own industries.
For hundreds of years, the UK was the center of a vast empire. At a time when Norway had a population of scattered farmers and a capital city of only tens of thousands, the UK was capturing wealth from Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
What began in my mind as geography, and the practical engineering challenge of infrastructure, became a fascinating economic question. By 2013, the government of the UK was claiming that the country was broke and had to raise tuition for higher education, cut maternity and childcare benefits and a half-million public-sector jobs, and take other measures that increase its already-high poverty levels.
The UK, an immensely wealthy country that has faced far less economic challenge than Norway and was far more blessed with
resources, a large internal market, and a head start on industrialization—broke?
Because this is a book about the Nordics rather than the British, I leave it to citizens of the UK to ask themselves, in the midst of their government’s austerity policy, just how their enormous wealth went missing. For the rest of us, putting the UK alongside countries that adopted the Nordic model helps us see more clearly the difference an economic design actually makes.
Racism is a very personal issue for Berit and me because we twice adopted African American babies before being surprised by producing one by our (European-American, white) selves. Racism hurts white people as well, but through the lives of our black children, then grandchildren and great-grandchildren, we have lived in a special way with some of the dynamics of racial oppression.
The Nordics’ history is very different from my country’s large economic stake in both slavery and continuing racism today. Nevertheless, Nordic racism does exist, and I was eager to interview the director of Norway’s Anti-Racism Center, Mari Linløkken. I started by acknowledging that my interest was personal as well as professional, then asked for her perspective on where racism comes from in Norway.
Mari somehow combined a no-nonsense manner with eyes full of warm attention.
“George, you might be forgetting that the African slave trade was a reality for Norway, too! We built slave ships, we benefited,
we participated in the belief white people
everywhere
shared that slavery is legitimate because blacks are different from and inferior to us!
“An attitude that justifies monstrous evil doesn’t just disappear. It hangs on, and that’s why you find it here in Norway, too.”
Her analysis resonated. I was brought up in a small town in rural Pennsylvania with no African Americans in my class in school, no black labor force to threaten the insecure Welsh and Cornish slate miners who settled there. The economic role of competition was given to immigrant Italians, and my town’s economic elite—the mine owners—used the Italians’ difference from the earlier settlers to divide and rule. My town’s mostly Protestant Northern Europeans did indeed turn Italians into the “other.” My miner grandfather, I remember, would not eat spaghetti; that was one way he expressed his prejudice.
But even though my town’s Northern Europeans generated prejudice against the Italians, we had plenty of prejudice left over for African Americans. Indeed, wherever in the world I have encountered a settlement of white people, I’ve encountered racism. As Mari Linløkken said, why would the descendants of the Vikings be the exception?
Prejudice in today’s Norway is expressed in many ways.
Bergenstidende
(
The Bergen Times
) reported that four out of ten Norwegians still perceive “immigration as a threat to the country’s distinctive character.” Over half believe that if a time of adversity comes, “employment should first be secured for Norwegians.”
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Prejudice easily converts to discrimination, if you happen to have power. Mari told me that job applicants’ chances of getting to the interview stage were 25 percent less if they had foreign names.
What many do not realize—in my country as well as in Norway
—is that immigration is usually an economic plus. The fishing industry in northern Norway survives with the help of Tamils from Sri Lanka, along with Russians. In the task of maintaining the shipbuilding industry, Poles have played a major role.
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In Iceland, there is an interesting mismatch of perceptions of prejudice. A series of studies show that Icelanders report having a positive attitude toward immigrants, while the immigrants report that they experience prejudice and discrimination.
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On a fine summer day in Oslo, I saw at a corner newsstand a blaring headline with an article occupying most of the front page: “Born in Norway but Feel Like Foreigners: Less than half the teens in Oslo born of immigrants and brought up here feel themselves to be Norwegian. New study revealed in paper today.”
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I knew from my family’s experience in the United States the alienating impact of being made “other” and being feared. I needed to understand better how fear was playing out in the Nordic countries and how their economic model was or was not a resource.
I’d been hearing about Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a social anthropologist who, although young, launched the interdisciplinary research program called Cultural Complexity in the New Norway. I caught up with him at the University of Oslo’s Blindern campus in the western end of the city. Eriksen told me over coffee that even though only one-third of the newcomers to Norway are from Muslim countries, Islamophobes have succeeded in framing the public discussion about immigration.
Eriksen went on to describe what he called “mounting aggression against the ‘elite’ that let immigrants into the country.” Ironically, what the Islamophobes call the “elite” is actually a succession of working-class-based Labor governments that have indeed been pro-immigration. With a tone of urgency, Eriksen said the situation was increasingly dangerous.
Eriksen’s words proved all too prophetic. Two years after our conversation in 2009, Anders Behring Breivik set off a two-thousand-pound bomb that blasted the Labor Party headquarters and other government-related buildings. Breivik then went immediately to the small island of Utøya, where leaders of the youth wing of the Party were enjoying a conference at a summer camp. On the island, Breivik used automatic weapons to kill as many of the youths as he could. All told, 77 people lost their lives and 158 were wounded. July 22, 2011, was Norway’s bloodiest day since World War II.
Operationally, it seems that Breivik acted alone. However, two years after his attack, Eriksen described a sinister background important to all of us who live in societies that suffer from racism. This is how he reported Norway’s situation to the Washington, D.C.–based Migration Policy Institute:
The most important view shared by all who associate with these loosely knit networks [of Islamophobia] is the belief that Muslims cannot become good Europeans, or good Norwegians, until they cease to be Muslims. This view has not only been voiced by members of Parliament (MPs) from the Progressive Party, but also by various commentators and intellectuals who do not identify with the right wing. Historian Nils Rune Langeland, in an interview
with influential left-of-center newspaper
Dagbladet
only days before the terrorist attacks, spoke of a coming
reconquista
(referring to the fall of Granada and the expulsion of the Moors in 1492), raised the possibility that the “Germanic peoples of the North may yet rise,” and concluded by stating that Muslim girls may get good grades at university but “they will never crack the European code.”
With the hindsight of the terrorist attack [by Breivik], Dr. Langeland’s analysis reads almost like a recipe for armed revolt against creeping “Islamification by stealth” (a Progressive Party term) and the loss of honor and masculine strength among mainstream Norwegians. However, the interview was published without much initial controversy, which illustrates that this perception of Muslims has become so commonplace that Norwegians today hardly raise an eyebrow when they read statements like those made by Langeland. What is interesting, in other words, is the ordinariness of his generalizations and the trivialization of his contempt.”
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The Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
invited twelve different political cartoonists to submit caricatures of what the prophet Mohammed might have looked like. The paper published them on September 30, 2005. Many religious Muslims responded with outrage; they found the cartoons humiliating and sacrilegious. Muslims outside Denmark also responded strongly in many countries, even protesting at Danish embassies and consulates.
The newspaper defended itself by saying it was exercising its right to free speech. Despite its eagerness to assert journalistic freedom, I am not aware of the newspaper soliciting cartoons that demeaned Jesus or caricatured in an odious way the Danish king. Not only was the action an obvious act of aggression, but it was cowardly because it hid behind the superior power and privilege gained by centuries of dominance by the Western and Christian world.
The cluelessness of the Danish editor was then emulated in Norway by a Christian fundamentalist newspaper. We can doubt that the paper would find it acceptable if a Muslim newspaper turned Christ into a monstrous caricature.
Henrik Lunde, a leader of the Norwegian Anti-Racist Centre, wrote at the time about the Norwegian response to the Danish cartoons:
The editors and all mainstream papers support the publishing of the drawings and proclaim this as an important battle for freedom of speech … The Islamic Council [of Norway] has done a terrific job and its spokesperson has made it perfectly clear that Muslims are angry and hurt, but will try to put this behind them and go forward because “we are all brothers in this country and must treat each other with respect.”
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In 2015, the populist Danish People’s Party gained so many votes that it became Denmark’s second-largest party, after the Social Democrats. About the electoral campaign,
Politiken
’s editor Bo Lidegaard wrote, “While steering clear of outright racism and Islamophobia, the [Danish People’s Party] has set a strongly
anti-immigrant tone in the public debate and drawn most other political parties into a competition to see who can be toughest on immigration.”
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At least twice in recent years, immigrant youths have rioted in the Stockholm suburbs, in 2010 in Rinkeby, then in 2013 first in Husby and then spreading to Rinkeby and beyond. An estimated 85 percent of Husby residents were born outside Sweden. Police who were called to stop the youths from burning cars and buildings reportedly yelled racial epithets as they worked to bring the rioting under control.
The vigorous Swedish debate that followed in each case most often included veiled and open derogatory references to Muslims. The small anti-immigrant minority in Sweden has grown; in the 2010 election, a party named Sweden Democrats won 5.7 percent of the votes.
Nevertheless, the majority continued to give broad support for helping refugees. In 2012, 44,000 were given asylum from countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia, and Sweden is known as the world’s most welcoming country for asylum-seekers. In 2015, Sweden stood out along with Germany for its hospitality to the flood of refugees fleeing Syria. By January 2016, however, the government called a temporary halt to the influx.
Given how open Sweden has been to immigration, I was puzzled by the young immigrants’ rioting in relatively prosperous and egalitarian Sweden until I read of the study by a team of Norwegian peace researchers. They examined the relationship between
local conflicts and a combination of micro- and macroeconomic measures. After studying a range of incidents of civil unrest in many countries, they found that violent conflict is more likely to erupt in areas with low absolute income, even if overall national GDP per capita is high. In particular, the researchers pointed to local areas with large deviations from national averages. Spatially distributed inequality increases the risk of conflict.
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The big picture in Sweden is that inequality grew more rapidly than in any other European country in the period between the mid-1980s to the late 2000s, according to the OECD.
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Even though Sweden remains far more equal than most countries, something interesting is going on when we look at Husby and Rinkeby compared with Stockholm as a whole. In Husby unemployment is 10 percent, compared with 3.5 percent in Stockholm. Even those in Husby who are employed get 40 percent less income than the average earner in Stockholm.
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Although the study is compelling, we don’t need to conclude that economics explains everything. As Swedish justice minister Beatrice Ask said after the 2013 riots, “Social exclusion is a very serious cause of many problems.”
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Camila Salazar, who works for Fryshuset, a Stockholm youth organization, told
The Guardian
: “For a lot of people who live in segregated areas, the only Swedes they meet are social workers or police officers. It’s amazing how many have never had a Swedish friend.”
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