The World's Best Place Norway and the Norwegians

By Solveig Torvik

The United Nations says Norway is the world's best place to live. So what's it like to live there? Who are these people, and what are their civic and cultural values? An unblinking look at celebrated, and uncelebrated, aspects of this paradoxical socialist welfare state by a Norwegian-American journalist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Solveig Torvik
• Release date: Jan 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9780615337753

Solveig Torvik

Solveig Torvik, a native of Norway, is a former newspaper reporter, editor, columnist, editorial writer and Washington, D.C., political correspondent. She is the author of Nikolai's Fortune, an historical novel based on the lives of four generations of women in her family in Finland, Norway and Idaho published by University of Washington Press in Seattle and Minerva Press in Helsinki, Finland.

Book preview

THE WORLD’S BEST PLACE

Norway and the Norwegians

By

Solveig Torvik

Smashwords Edition

Published by Solveig Torvik @ Smashwords

© 2010 by Solveig Torvik

[e-mail]

ISBN 13: 978-0-615-33775-3

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This book was made possible with generous support from the

Runstad Family Foundation and the Norwegian American Foundation.

Manuscript formatting and cover design by Deb Dahrling

Cover photo by M. Roach

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For Karen

With boundless gratitude for her Swedish forbearance of all things Norwegian

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Foreword

Year after year, the United Nations tells us that Norway is the world’s best place to live. So it seems fair to ask: what’s it really like to live there? Who are these people, anyway, and what are their civic and cultural values?

The United Nations’ Human Development Program index repeatedly scores Norway highest on markers of a successful society such as education, longevity, and national productivity. (In rankings for 2007 announced in 2009 the United States placed 13th.) For a nation that entered the 20th Century in grinding poverty and remained impoverished for another 60 years, this is a remarkable achievement.

Largely out of sight and mind, Norway has embarked on a grand social experiment to create a just society. Is this high-minded experiment proving to be a model for the world to emulate? Or is it a cautionary tale?

Norway’s intriguing experiment poses — and perhaps even answers — questions that endlessly resonate in American political debate: How far should governments go in providing for the welfare of citizens? What happens to individual initiative and personal responsibility when governments provide generous welfare benefits? What sort of society results when communal interests are placed above those of the individual? What’s to be learned, for good and ill, from Norway’s laudable effort to provide social and economic justice for all?

Equal parts affection and exasperation, informed by the perspective of an American journalist and native of Norway imprinted with Norwegian cultural sensibilities, The World’s Best Place offers a snapshot of a socialist democracy awash in paradox and drowning in oil.

Steeped in a confident sense of national exceptionalism, Americans tend to dismiss as irrelevant lessons to be gleaned from the experiences of other societies. Yet we Americans have ample reason for modesty: unprincipled, largely unregulated business practices that have triggered worldwide financial catastrophe; a Congress — and a federal regulatory system — too easily corrupted by corporate interests; 38 million citizens (12.5 percent) living in poverty; 46 million without health insurance; the highest murder rate (seven and one-half times its nearest comparable competitor) in the western democracies; pervasive lawlessness that annually puts one in every 100 citizens behind bars; 29th place worldwide in preventing infant mortality, and a citizenry so divorced from a sense of civic responsibility that 43 percent of the voting-age population typically doesn’t bother to vote in national elections.

The common root from which spring such precursors of a failing state is the American ethic that all too often places the private interest above that of the common good.

This is the story of what’s happened in a country that chose a different path.

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Table of Contents

Chapter One: Welcome to Norway

Chapter Two: Work and Welfare

Chapter Three: Welfare Capitalism

Chapter Four: Governance, Media and Accountability

Chapter Five: Race, Culture and Conformity

Chapter Six: Sickness and Health

Chapter Seven: Crime and Punishment

Chapter Eight: Women and Children First

Chapter Nine: Drunk and Disorderly

Chapter Ten: Church and State

Chapter Eleven: The Next Norwegians

Afterword

About the Author

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Principles of the Norwegian welfare state

1. Poverty is primarily to be explained at a societal level and should not be understood as a moral defect in the individual.

2. It is the role of the state to take responsibility to secure the individual and the family against poverty.

3. In the long run poverty will be eradicated through the transformation of the capitalistic class society into a welfare society based on a mixed economy.

— "The Norwegian Welfare State" Norway Society and Culture p. 142 Portal Books Copyright 2005 Kristiansand, Norway

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Chapter One

Welcome to Norway

A Norwegian will not talk to you without good reason. And saying hello is not a good reason.

— Pellegrino Riccardi, cross-cultural communications consultant

In less than half a century, Norway has undergone a remarkable transformation from bracing poverty to cosseting riches. This country of 4.6 million souls — an independent nation for barely a century — repeatedly is touted by the United Nations as the world’s best place to live. When it comes to successful human societies, Norway apparently is as good as it gets.

While Americans struggle to pay for health care, childcare, and college tuition and anxiously strive to secure a pension, Norwegians enjoy these things as all but a birthright. The crime rate is low; the literacy rate high. The welfare of children is a top government priority: parents are granted paid maternity/paternity leave and daycare is subsidized. Paid sick leave is generous. Working hours are short; vacations long. Family caregivers are granted free vacations in special respite care facilities. Women by law must hold 40 percent of top corporate jobs. The country is debt free and has a huge surplus of wealth from oil revenues.

Americans can only dream of such a seemingly civilized society.

And there’s more: While common capitalist wisdom holds that any taint of socialism means economic success is impossible, this nation happens to be both economically successful and a socialist society.

Such paradoxes abound in modern Norway. Descendants of murderous Vikings bestow the Nobel Peace Prize, and pampered descendants of rigorously self-reliant forbearers demand cradle-to-grave protection from life’s hardships.

The North Sea oil money that began flowing into the country’s coffers in the 1970s partly explains how Norway can afford to treat its citizens so well. But this newfound wealth masks the fact that Norwegians made the decision to embark on a social welfare program long before they were rich. Starting in the 1930s, they laid the foundation for creating a social services safety net to protect all citizens from the personal catastrophes that attend poverty. After World War II, they went further, agreeing to pay high taxes — and re-distribute wealth more equally among all citizens — to assure the well being of everyone. And today, despite their oil wealth, Norwegians continue to pay some of the highest taxes in the world to support their often-envied way of life — but one that nevertheless often seems to fall short of their expectations.

Norway stands as an intriguing object lesson in the fierce debate in the United States over the proper role of government in providing for the welfare of its citizens, and its experience commands attention. What are the effects of Norway’s generous welfare state on the society and individuals? Are these highly taxed people getting their money’s worth? Have they become acculturated to rely on the state? Are there downsides to life in this welfare paradise?

First, some basics to help unlock the national Norwegian mindset.

Norwegians have a reputation for being aloof, unfriendly and dour. This generalization isn’t entirely fair, nor is it entirely undeserved. They have as much of a sense of humor as anyone, but it’s rarely on display for strangers. Norway is a long, thin, geographically isolated country with marked regional differences. Its inhabitants vary in degree of openness and warmth. As anywhere, city people tend to behave differently than rural dwellers. Still, enough Norwegians are reserved, formal and ill at ease with strangers to have fairly earned this reputation for their country. They don’t easily reach out to others; they’re unlikely to take the initiative to strike up casual conversation with people they don’t know. That’s a social skill not much valued in the culture. In public, they tend to retreat behind a stony wall of silence rather than seek out someone to chat up, as many Americans so easily do.

Americans are seen as aggressive socially and superficial, says Pellegrino Riccardi, an Italian communications expert born in England who’s married to a Norwegian and makes his living as a cultural bridge builder for firms doing business in Norway.

You have to take the initiative. It’s the guest who has to take the initiative, he adds. The mistake people make is to wait for the Norwegian to make the first move.

He tells his clients new to Norway’s cultural folkways: Don’t expect to go into the home. But if you never enter a Norwegian home, chances are you’ll never understand how goodhearted, hospitable, and full of fun Norwegians can be.

This is a rich nation that values frugality; common laborers and government bureaucrats alike are devoted to the ubiquitous matpakke, the sandwich brought from home for lunch. This is a country whose citizens have a higher tolerance for intervention by authorities into their personal lives than Americans; until 2003, for example, parents were forbidden by law from giving their children first names that might disadvantage them. And it’s a culture that values group, rather than individual, decision-making and action. As a result, accountability can be harder to demand, or trace, than in the United States.

To understand why Norwegians chose to create a welfare state, it’s imperative to understand their two most cherished cultural concepts: equality and safety.

The most fiercely held Norwegian core value is likhet: alikeness, sameness, equality. Egalitarianism is the Norwegian religion, the national passion. Nothing excites the supposedly staid Norwegians more than transgressions against their notions of equality. They hold a fervent faith that all of them are beings of equal worth and thus equally deserving of the necessities of life. So it’s simply unthinkable that health care, higher education, pensions or eldercare should not be equally available to everyone.

The most celebrated example of this egalitarian trait was the day the late, beloved King Olav hopped a city bus and rode, without royal fanfare or flourishes, to his destination. Norwegians loved him for it, as he well knew they would. He was demonstrating to them that while he might be their king, he knew his place: he wasn’t really any better than anyone else. He was wise enough to understand that Norwegians won’t tolerate overbearing, lordly behavior, even from their own king. Or, for that matter, from their own bosses at work.

This egalitarian impulse to care about equal treatment and the welfare of others is to my mind Norway’s most admirable national trait. It bespeaks a culture that seemingly has evolved to a higher, more civilized plane of civic values than the me-centered societies in which all too many of us live.

But this high-minded devotion to sameness and equality has another face. While it serves the laudable purpose of giving every Norwegian a solid foundation, a floor to stand on, it can act as a subtle ceiling on personal achievement. In the United States, the common cultural imperative is to be the best you can be and to fulfill your potential; shameless self-promotion and high-octane careerism are tolerated byproducts of this imperative. But in Norway, there’s an uneasy disdain and disapproval of the rich or more wealthy, of strivers and high achievers, especially those immodest enough to brag. Efforts to set oneself apart as the best — that is, better than the rest — are not admired. Norwegians have an historic, bred-in-the-bone suspicion of wealth, high station, and of those who behave as though they’ve risen above the crowd. Obviously, such people put the cherished concept of likhet to the test.

One who saw a dark side to this emphasis on sameness was the writer Aksel Sandemose. In his bitterly satirical 1936 send-up of Norwegian conformity, A Fugitive Crosses his Tracks, he enumerated the infamous Ten Commandments of The Law of Jante (Janteloven).

1. Thou shalt not believe thou art something

2. Thou shalt not believe thou art as good as we

3. Thou shalt not believe thou art more wise than we

4. Thou shalt not fancy thyself better than we

5. Thou shalt not believe thou knowest more than we

6. Thou shalt not believe thou art greater than we

7. Thou shalt not believe that thou amountest to anything

8. Thou shalt not laugh at us

9. Thou shalt not believe that anyone is concerned with thee

10. Thou shalt not believe thou canst teach us anything.

It may be that disdain of privilege comes with the territory. Norway’s a rugged, demanding place where only three percent of the land is tillable, so life in its sometimes idyllic but isolated, ingrown settlements was lived on the raw edge of survival. Self-reliance was essential, and it too was bred in the bone and became a defining, and much admired, national characteristic. Norwegians were never subjects in a feudal system but lived as their own masters on their own, or leased, small plots. They served no one, at least not willingly — and tourists are heard to complain that they still don’t.

After likhet, Norwegians most prize trygghet: safety and security.

Norway’s national consciousness was forged in the crucible of heartbreaking poverty. The cry for help by impoverished Norwegians, and their stubborn insistence on equality for all, paved the way for establishment of the welfare state. Not only were they cursed by a lack of agricultural land to sustain their country’s growing population, but low wages, labor strife, unemployment and economic depression bred sharp class resentment.

Taken from Denmark (which had cast its lot with Napoleon) and awarded to Sweden in 1814 when Napoleon fell, Norway didn’t rid itself of the Swedish yoke until 1905. Under the Swedes, as well as during the previous 400 years when Norway was part of Denmark, Norwegians were more or less left to fend for themselves in Scandinavia’s hard-scrabble, insular hinterland. Political reformers who set out to bring this newly independent nation into the 20th Century were intent on alleviating the suffering of the country’s citizens. But in 1940, Hitler invaded Norway. So it wasn’t until the 1950s, with their country shattered by war and a ruinous Nazi occupation, that Norwegians could get serious about social safety. Some, like my parents, concluded that safety lay in the United States and in 1949 joined the wave of post-war European immigration to America. Those who stayed behind agreed to embark on, and pay for, a grand social experiment that promised to end deprivation and suffering for all. And by the mid-1960s, before oil was discovered in the North Sea, Norway already had made such impressive strides toward fulfilling that promise that my parents concluded it was safe to return home to live.

The architect of Norway’s welfare state was the late Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen, who served 17 years in three separate terms between 1945 and the late 1960s. Imprisoned by the Nazis for his resistance efforts, this admired war hero rebuilt Norway’s economy after the war. He persuaded Norwegians that paying high taxes was the ethical way to level the society and achieve social security for everyone. Regarded as the Father of the Nation, Gerhardsen had flirted with communism in the tumultuous 1920s, but he and his influential Labor party — which has held power longer than any other — finally settled on the mixed economy, democratic socialist model that exists in this constitutional monarchy today.

Of course, the reason King Olav could ride around Oslo on a public bus is that Norway was safe enough for kings to do so. Even today, police officers often as not are unarmed. A front page Los Angeles Times (11/8/01) report filed from Norway led with this amazed declaration: Imagine a world so shielded from modern dangers that children accept candy from strangers.

Preoccupation with safety is a constantly thrumming undercurrent in