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The Rise of Little Big Norway
The Rise of Little Big Norway
The Rise of Little Big Norway
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The Rise of Little Big Norway

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"The Rise of Little Big Norway" explores the unlikely rise of Norway from peripherality to today’s global steward with an enviable work-life balance, influential oil fund and Arctic front-row seat. Drawing on wide-ranging source material, John Ross’s original approach combines astute observation, thoughtful analysis and a flowing essay style, leavened with the comparative insight that only a seasoned observer of the region can bring. The book examines the settings, histories and niche elements that lend Norway its distinctiveness and differentiate it from its Nordic neighbors. It gives special attention to the northern and Arctic dimensions of Norwegian life and elaborates a connecting thematic thread, the mobility that once took Vikings across the Atlantic in open boats and makes today’s Norwegians the most-traveled people on the planet. The result is a carefully crafted general study of Norway, a country long overlooked in favor of its Nordic neighbors but now a quiet force in its own right and a touchstone for twenty-first century issues ranging from identity politics to the Arctic melt. This book fills a major gap in the literature on Norway and the Nordic region.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherAnthem Press
Release dateNov 30, 2019
ISBN9781785271953
The Rise of Little Big Norway

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    The Rise of Little Big Norway - John F. L. Ross

    The Rise of Little Big Norway

    The Rise of Little Big Norway

    John F. L. Ross

    Anthem Press

    An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

    www.anthempress.com

    This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

    by ANTHEM PRESS

    75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

    or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

    and

    244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

    Copyright © John F. L. Ross 2020

    The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

    Support for this project was provided by Det Faglitterære Fond and Fritt Ord.

    All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

    ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-193-9 (Pbk)

    ISBN-10: 1-78527-193-8 (Pbk)

    This title is also available as an e-book.

    For Rebecca

    Contents

    Preface

    ▄ ▄ ▄

    Part I Settings

    1Little Big Country

    2A Directional Puzzle

    3Meanings of North

    Part II Histories

    4A Fractured Timeline

    5Long Night’s Journey into Day

    6Norway and the Dazzling Dutch

    7The Union of Weights and Wings

    8A Sporting Start

    Part III Perennials and Currents

    9The Reluctant Unionists

    10Well and Truly Oiled

    11The Meaning of Nobel

    12Epilogue

    Bibliography

    Index

    Preface

    This is a broadly conceived work of exploration, which springs from two basic aims. One is to examine Norway’s national development via some less familiar angles; the other is to elaborate on the unorthodox characteristics of a country celebrated for its simple virtues yet marked by relentless complexity. At its heart lies the interplay of geography and history—the basic grid of time and space as Norman Davies astutely frames it in his prodigious history of Europe—applied to one, quite special national context and in terms that might engage nonspecialist readers with an interest in the north.

    In keeping with this spirit of duality, the exploratory theme is pursued by two different but, I hope, complementary means.

    The first involves a search—a long-running, open-ended and at times quite personal one—to find Norway: to unlock its mysteries, locate its cultural heart, grasp its world role and intuit its distinctiveness especially, but not only, as regards its Nordic neighbors. These linked essays are suggestive sallies in this direction. As such, they might lend perspective to ongoing debates, especially over a post-oil future that carries such immense consequences for the world and for Norway.

    I’m setting out, secondly, to probe aspects of Norwegian life that highlight an insistent national motif, namely the search. Norway has always struck me as a society relentlessly but purposefully on the go, and data from a recent survey have indeed confirmed Norwegians as the most mobile people on the planet in terms of working life. Norway has been, and still is, a conveyor belt of inquisitive globe-trotters with a deep capacity for surprise and a surprising capacity for going deep. While many societies are mobile, few are so thoroughly characterized by mobility. This to me is intriguing. Perhaps rashly, I take it as a symptom of deeper processes. For there is something truly striking about a country that is so organized, so successful and so ancient, yet so evidently and earnestly seeking its rightful place in the world.

    As a non-Norwegian writing (in English) about Norway, I enjoy a certain freedom of expression that might elude a native. But liberty isn’t license, and it is balanced by the caution required of anyone treading on sensitive ground. Fairly or not, outsider observations can easily get taken as a sort of litmus test of approval. Even the most cursory effort to convey a culture, especially one as intricate as Norway’s, requires tiptoeing, not trampling, through the fields of cliché that sprout from the national soil. Norway’s copious harvest ranges from knitted sweaters and sod-roofed mountain huts to blocks of brown cheese that, lo and behold, isn’t cheese at all.

    Such icons of old-timey innocence have held their ground through a commodity boom that transformed a congenitally hard-luck country into a preternaturally blessed lykkeland (land of happiness) within the space of a generation. Their tenacity speaks volumes about Norwegian continuity in the face of change. It also reveals a native talent for meshing opposites: complication and simplicity, speed and due deliberation, risk-assumption and risk-aversion, softness and steel. This flair for symbiosis, pulled off with the casual aplomb of conjurers in a circus act, is far easier to admire than to explain.

    Arguably understudied as a subject, Norway has been inarguably underestimated as a country. It rarely draws attention to itself, unlike its neighbors Sweden, renowned purveyor of the just society; Denmark, the dominant market force in hygge (cozy living); and Finland, innovators in mobile telephony, educational reform and untranslatably dry humor. Oddly for such a forthright, open society, there is a puzzling ambiguity surrounding Norway. Having long eschewed a self-conscious world role, it has almost self-consciously eschewed such a role. No wonder it gets misconstrued or mistaken for its neighbors by otherwise intelligent people. Norway stands out for not standing out, and its people seem remarkably unfazed by the fact.

    That alone is quite the feat for a country which, in 2017, achieved two notable milestones in quick succession. Norway was tipped by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network as the world’s happiest country in a study more serious than it sounds (it measures social capital, not laughter). Around that time Norway’s sovereign oil fund—already the world’s biggest—surpassed the incomprehensible figure of a trillion (US) dollars. True to form, Norwegians reacted to the news with insouciant shrugs and cryptic smiles. Then they headed out to ski.

    The seeming interpretation of this extraordinary double act—that money really buys happiness, as if verifying the hoariest of clichés—barely scratches the Norwegian surface. Its most basic national features, from the language and history to the lay of its land, defy every notion of straightforward. It brings to mind the famous knot of ancient Gordium, which stumped visitors until Alexander the Great came along, unsheathed his sword and chopped it into two.

    Norway is a Gordian knot of our time, a tenacious holdout to facile explanation. The paucity of outside writings on Norway, and the poverty marking some that do appear, amply attest to this characteristic. Careful disentangling is in order. Fool’s errand it may be—and Norwegians don’t impress easily or suffer fools gladly—I’m seeking to explain how a country so physically scattered and historically truncated that it shouldn’t even be, has corralled its tinkering, inquiring and exploring impulses into the unprecedented twenty-first century national project that a half-comprehending world is only now waking up to in its midst.

    It’s not surprising that Norway, with fewer than six million mostly well-mannered people, flies below the radar in a world of galloping globalization and tribalized braggadocio. Yet Norway’s catalog of accomplishment, and its burgeoning influence, can no longer be casually dismissed. Its oil savings, bound up in a pension fund, control upward of 1.5 percent of the world’s financial markets. That fund, meaning Norway’s people, has a guiding hand in the world economy and a direct stake in our future.

    Norway has arrived as a world player, slipping in through the side door; just as typically, it has surpassed itself by summiting. It impels a fresh look at norskhet, Norwegian-ness: at how the country slaved or stumbled into a golden age that dares not speak its name. Even now—especially now—there’s a case for elaborating the Norwegian story from both sides of the national interface: as a unit with a certain mien and personality in the world, and as a set of inner works so finely tuned it could stump a master watchmaker in Neuchâtel.

    Some readers might already sense that the book’s title can be read several ways. Norway does rank high on plenty of world performance charts, as do all the Nordics. The Economist Intelligence Unit rates Norway as the world’s most democratic country, while its work–life balance is the stuff of envy. Norway crowns its continent and reaches above the 80th parallel, while this famously hilly land’s highest point, Galdhøpiggen, is the tallest peak in northern Europe. We call Tibet the roof of the world, but Norway has a stronger, three-dimensional claim to the title of verdens tak, the top of the world literally and not just figuratively.

    There’s also a touch of irony in my choice of phrase. If pushed, few observers would place Norway atop their list of world-beaters. Oslo, its monied but unpretentious capital, trails nearby Stockholm, Copenhagen and even Helsinki in the grandeur stakes. Few Norwegians would take such a haughty claim—that they’re absolute best at anything (apart, of course, from cross-country skiing)—at face value. A people accustomed to downplaying themselves, especially in their own neighborhood, are prone to turn the very idea into slapstick comedy or brush the evidence aside as so much inconvenient truth. Telling sighs of relief greeted the news in 2018 that Norway had slipped a notch from the dual milestones reached the year before.

    Yet the broader trend is the more persistent one: Norway has emerged with little fanfare as one of the most economically, ecologically, politically, diplomatically, juridically, architecturally, technologically and ethically influential countries on the planet. It has ascended into the rarefied air of global stewardship. Such influence is not simply a reflection of affluence. Some of it isn’t even new. More than a century ago, pioneering Norwegians redefined theater, isolated the leprosy bacterium, beat the British Empire to the South Pole and, with a few deft brushstrokes on canvas, gave the modern world its indelible image of existential angst, courtesy of Edvard Munch’s almost absurdly famous Skrik (Scream).

    Norway’s across-the-board contemporary impact craves the sort of critical scrutiny that reaches beyond the random blessings of geology and taps into the cultural wells that supply Norway with its mutedly contrarian spirit and marks out its people as quiet exceptionalists. As a fossil fuel provider Norway has managed to blend the volatile duo of big oil and big finance and even channel them into some greater good. Alone among Europe’s 50-odd nations, Norway voted twice to stay out of political Europe, then turned its seeming bloody-mindedness into uncanny foresight that somehow drew praise from both sides of the bitter Brexit divide. Seemingly alone among Western countries, Norway manages to deal rationally yet firmly with Russia, the troublesome giant it happens to border.

    There is a suggestive abundance of sui generis about Norway. It wears an array of public hats ranging from trendy ecologist to winter sports juggernaut to crime fiction factory. One of Europe’s younger states, Norway operates with a veteran’s finesse as a global arbiter of peace, respected norm entrepreneur and floating fixer that’s also respectfully in the Western camp, serenely riding out the Trump earthquake. Norwegians pop up everywhere, addressing the US Congress here and coining global buzzwords like sustainability there. It’s quite a turnaround for a country that languished for most of its long history as poor, peripheral and only occasionally unforgotten.

    While Norway’s accomplishments impress, the country is also a potentially valuable object lesson, a microcosm of something far bigger than itself. Today’s world is said to be split by a perceptual chasm, dividing those with localized mind-sets and superpatriotic hearts from some self-appointed and unchained global elite. David Goodhart employs the terms somewheres and anywheres, the tribalists and the world citizens. Intriguingly, Norway exemplifies both tendencies, and in spades. Here we find the small-towner merging with the cosmopolitan, a special Norwegian concoction that epitomizes the global villager. The label is also reversible in a country of grounded globalists.

    In a world fixated on identity struggles, Norway is an experienced hand that offers clues for how to approach, manage and potentially reconcile them. In a world of fractious division, it’s an edifying example of soft-hued strength and rough-and-ready synthesis—and one that happens to have a front-row seat on the Arctic.

    Norway mainly draws attention for its inanimate sides, from its achingly scenic glaciers, fjords and waterfalls to the fossil fuel storehouse that keeps on giving. Such emphasis isn’t misguided, but it is incomplete. It underplays the society that occupies the timeless terrain and is now reaping the fleeting fortune. In turn, the Norwegian character is an elusive commodity. One recent study proposed three abiding national traits: egalitarian values, moderation and nearness to nature. Another examines goodness as a time-honored theme. Earnestness, its close cousin, crops up frequently. Themes of cooperation, fairness and benevolent compromise likewise permeate discussions of Norway.

    These redeeming qualities tend to paint a misleading picture of agreeable idlers. For a doggedly disputatious country that exudes vitality, esteems the human struggle and rumbles with uncertainty, whose abiding images include the Viking longship, the ski pole and the ryggsekk, other qualities beg for attention too. Elements like dynamism, mobility and active engagement need factoring in. So do a flair for improvisation, a streak of defiance and that eccentric twist without which no account of Norway is complete. These elements add to the sense of a country that’s easy to misconstrue and hard, figuratively or literally, to pin down.

    Such features mark, for example, Norway’s emergence as a global peace-broker, sidling into Sweden’s traditional role with few people even noticing. They find physical expression in exploration and sport, pursuits Norwegians broadly identify with. Norway emerged as a land of thinker-doers, of autodidacts and polymaths, for whom a restless, probing spirit has been an abiding characteristic—and conceivably the defining trait—over the centuries. That is the Norway that occupies this work.

    The idea of seeking the seekers is a promising vehicle for unraveling the Norwegian knot: a self-effacing collective molded by larger-than-life individuals in a certain heroic age and a global constructivist whose forebears epitomized an age of medieval terror. Remove the active, physical side of the Norwegian story, or neuter it intellectually, and something essential goes missing. It took a perceptive writer and traveler from outside, Fredrika Bremer, to pose Norway as the ideal antidote to the confined air of rooms and the dust of books.

    Norway’s subject appeal derives partly from its divergence from the cloying paragon of virtue it is sometimes taken for, the sculpted land remarkably unsullied by oil rigs, almost irritatingly full of really nice people. Norway is not without its blind spots, and chart-topping success has brought attention and occasional notoriety, not least for an environmental record that’s decidedly patchier beyond the borders.

    There is something intriguing, and instructive, about how a national champion of do-gooding produced a surfeit of history’s dreamers and malcontents; about the electric-car-buying global citizens who still sell hvalersalat (whale salad) in my local and pump oil for a thirsty world; and about an officially bilingual country whose two written languages are both called Norwegian, clueing the newcomer to something unusual on his or her first, unsettling encounter with Noreg, the Nynorsk equivalent of Norge. It’s all suggestive of the perceptual cul-de-sac Norway has long occupied and of the tenacious cleavages that gave me grad-student fits and still constitute blind alleys in the Norwegian maze.

    Questions abound, and my thrust for answers is divided into three parts. Each addresses basic features of the Norwegian experience while exploring inner folds that often escape mainstream (especially non-Norwegian) treatment. The first part clusters around themes of geography: Norway’s size dichotomy, coastal exposure and directional puzzles, along with its northern and Arctic dimensions that shape an infrequently recognized locus of national identity.

    The second part looks at formative elements of the past: Norway’s complex engagement with history, the ghostly thread linking the medieval country to the modern, the flickerings of progress along the way and the unions with Sweden that bookended an alleged national eclipse under Denmark. The final part tackles a trio of subjects having both long-term and contemporary national import: Nordic identity, oil and the Nobel Prize. It wraps with the suitably daunting task of summarizing a national cornucopia that poses, preposterously, as simple.

    With so much attention gravitating to the Vikings and the modern big three of Munch, Grieg and Ibsen, formative centuries get pushed aside and a host of influential Norwegians swept under the rug. My own bias favors elements that are underexplored as subjects and overlooked as influences. Some, like the Hollandertid, are little known even to Norwegians. Others, like the country’s sporting roots, often get trapped in puerile discussions about nature. Ditto for an Arctic element exasperatingly soft-pedaled in textbooks that paint the country into a dubious corner of the Baltic. A democratic breakout that led the Nordic way and a Nobel legacy it shares, rather uncomfortably, with Sweden further set it apart.

    This work draws from a deep well of extant research on Norway, much of which languishes unfairly in minor-language purgatory. But it’s not a work of narrative scholarship and makes no claim to definitiveness. My angle is too wide for that, my sourcing too deliberately eclectic, my nonuse of notes too obvious and my avoidance of obfuscatory jargon hopefully all too apparent. A piecemeal approach can at least help avoid the temptation to see Norwegian society as conveniently complete, modeled in the social-sciency sense. Modeling can limit our perspective on a country where adaptability and change are not just features of life but imperatives of it. Norway’s array of national paradoxes, which gets significant play in these pages, just as often assign it anti-model status.

    Model talk also feeds three persistent assumptions about Norway. One is that it is region-typical, a land of Swedish knockoffs, when it often begs to differ. Modeling also emphasizes the collective over the individual, which jars with the formative Norwegian experience. A third assumption, occasionally justified, rates Norway as a satisfied, complaisant place on cruise control, its edge dulled by conspicuous gains in prestige, comfort and worldly wealth.

    Put another way, I’m exploring a Norway still in the throes of formation despite (or better yet, in spite of) its long and convoluted history, which fuel today’s curious mix of vaulting ambition and conscious hand-wringing. "Norway shows an extremely uneven profile, wrote Johan Galtung in a provocative 1960s essay (his italics), probably one of the most uneven in the entire world community. Such a statement from such a prominent postwar scholar should give us pause whenever we assume bland conventionality to be a Norwegian staple. Norway has been labeled a Hamlet among nations" (Linda Sangolt’s pithy phrase), and it’s a surprisingly common and not always flattering refrain.

    The essai (meaning effort), which dates back to the sixteenth century and Michel de Montaigne, draws an occasional rap for assuming interpretive license. Yet the suitably grounded essay is a deft alternative to straight-up narrative. It can capture an unwieldy subject (like Norway) by stages. It has the virtue of open struggle in the spirit of inquiry and lends contextual color to empirical black and white. Why is it generally assumed, historian Barbara Tuchman rightly asked, that in writing, the creative process is the exclusive property of poets and novelists? An interpretive essay is a kind of mental joystick, a tool that not only liberates but also disciplines. Besides, there’s a lot to be said for nursing a subject along gradually, as opposed to bludgeoning it with an analytical sledgehammer.

    My working model is the mosaic: an art form built from shards of colored glass out of which, given some distance and imagination, a unity starts to emerge. It’s an apt image for a country whose defining dynamic has been bottom-up rather than top-down. In my own case, colliding inner impulses of the researcher, analyst and scribbler have shaped an arrayed perspective which I hope informs this work more than it detracts from it. Writers conjure images, social scientists build frameworks: I’m venturing to do some of both. It’s underwritten by an Odyssean route to Norway that once seemed hopelessly diversionary but now seems decidedly Norwegian.

    Via this textual mosaic, my hope is that a Norwegian portrait comes together for the diligent reader. My aim is to highlight exploratory aspects of Norway that lend some thematic unity. My wish is that it fosters interest in this enigmatic, unconventional and increasingly influential land we had best, and at last, pay serious attention to.

    JFLR

    Oslo, June 2019

    Part I

    Settings

    Strange lands open their treasures more readily than the familiar world to the eye whose vision is bound by habit.

    Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany

    The reader should bear in mind the principle which guided the traveler at every step and on every page: a pursuit of […] history and culture. Guided by this principle, there’s no chance of losing the way.

    José Saramago, Journey to Portugal

    But, dear uncle, what have you to do with such quarrels? Is it not better to stay peacefully at home instead of roaming the world in search of trouble, not to mention that many who go for wool come home shorn?

    Niece to Don Quixote de la Mancha

    It’s easy to be dogmatic at a distance, and I dare say I could have made my half-baked conclusions […] sound convincing. But it is one thing to bore your readers, another to mislead them. I did not like to run the risk of doing both.

    Peter Fleming, One’s Company

    What, then, is Norway exactly?

    Uffe Østergård, The Geopolitics of Nordic Identity

    1

    Little Big Country

    Geography is clearly a fundamental part of the why as well as the what. It might not be the determining factor, but it is certainly the most overlooked.

    Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography

    What I wish to emphasize is the duality of the human requirement when it comes to the question of size; there is no single answer.

    E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

    Maps tell stories. At one, mundane level they’re simply depictions, cold blueprints. The printed versions I prefer tend to fold badly, fall apart at the seams and draw snickers from teenagers on the sidewalk. But maps are also windows onto worlds and reflectors of reality. A finger on a page can quicken the pulse before a trip or unleash torrents of memory afterward. Cartographers know this instinctively. Past and future, writes Denis Wood, demolishing notions that they represent some objective truth, come together in my present through the grace of the map.

    Maps of Norway have a particular resonance. Political versions, those that delineate boundaries, instantly reveal an ungainly, tadpole-like outline, broad sea exposure and peripherality. Physical maps unveil a deeper, three-dimensional untidiness befitting a glacier-gouged, island-pocked, peak-strewn and sea-carved land. Norwegians enjoy a reputation, even among their Nordic brethren, for being straight shooters, but the terrain they call home seems sculpted by geological jesters. Anyone who begins to examine Norway from a perspective other than its Tolkienesque landscape is either very bold or exceedingly counterintuitive.

    Strikingly, Norway’s physical barriers have not been human ones. In north-central Norway, Finnish names tell of early-modern migrations from the east—the Skogfinner or Forest Finns, later the Kvener—that lasted; in the farthest reaches of Finnmark, the names trend into Russian and Sami; in the deep south and distant north, Dutch names surprisingly proliferate. Place-names in the Norwegian Arctic were once so chaotic that an official commission had to impose etymological order, an effort that produced riveting titles like Names on Svalbard. The emergence of a cohesive society out of this miasma of nature and nomenclature could well be regarded as the, or at least a, Norwegian miracle.

    If the story of Norway is bound up in a single idea—a big and tempting if—it is the timeless struggle to find, and define, their country’s center of gravity. And if the patriotic proclivities of Norwegians boil down to one factor, it is their ability to overcome obstacles that are not just formidable but also seemingly insurmountable. A knack for surprising on the upside, for getting the better of expectation, is a justly celebrated Norwegian characteristic that plays out in human terms but originates in rock and ice.

    Norway’s political map is still evolving. In early 2017 the government announced a plan to consolidate the 19 fylker that long demarked the country’s internal boundaries. While confirming Norwegian cartography as a growth industry, it was a revealing sign of a country willing to rejig, rename and redraw its own lines. Imagine the uproar if Nevada merged with California.

    Another western state, Montana, sourced the name that best attaches to Norway. There, in June 1876, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his seventh army division were massacred by native tribes in a counter-raid forever known as Custer’s Last Stand. Those events, and their blundering architect, went down at the Little Bighorn. The name echoes loudly in a Norway that exhibits exaggerated tendencies in both directions.

    Norway has a built-in size paradox, one of many that mark Norway’s history, culture and worldview. In the mid-1980s a perceptive German writer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, described a Norway characterized by utakt, that is, anachronistic or slightly out of touch with the times. His teasing depiction of a nostalgic nation looking eagerly ahead—half folk museum, half hi-tech lab—rang bells even as it rubbed some Norwegians the wrong way.

    Similar logic attaches to the metaphorical geography of Norway, where a soul of small is robustly counterbalanced by worldwide reach and outsized influence. Turn the image around and we have a country of globe-trotters ineffably characterized by small-townish modesty. These two Norways, the local-provincial and the global-worldly, are like two halves in search of a greater whole. Each is basic to the country’s self-perception and its place in the world.

    In 1972, then-prime minister Lars Korvald uttered a phrase that captured a prevailing spirit: Norge er et lite land i verden (Norway is a little country in the world). Two decades later, a second mantra was born when Gro Harlem Brundtland, a national mother figure and Norway’s first female prime minister, told the nation that it is typisk norsk å være god (typically Norwegian to be good). It was intended to admonish Norwegians to be big-spirited Olympic hosts and cheer for all the athletes at Lillehammer. The two sentiments feed off each other.

    The big/small paradox informed a 2002 book by Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud titled Norge—et lite stykke verdenshistorie (Norway—A Little Piece of World History), which plays on this theme while turning it on its head. Contra Korvald, they argue the opposite, that Norway is et stort land i en liten verden, an expanding presence in a shrinking world. Thinking big became a Norwegian project ahead of the national centennial in 2005, when the Foreign Ministry hired a British advisor to spruce up Norway’s image. Danish historian Leon Jespersen notes this tendency as early as 1618, when Dutch advisors were being hired to explain the glorious past of the Scandinavian countries to the European public.

    Small is a deceptively simple designation, vulnerable to public-relations spin. Relative by definition (big or small against what?), it can be measured variously. Modern analysts nearly always cite population numbers, but this flies in the face of history. Iver Neumann and Sieglinde Gstöhl, two small-state analysts, figure the upper population limit runs along Dutch lines. Seventeen million Netherlanders make their country, by this thinking, the biggest of the (European) small.

    With a population around 5.3 million (but growing rapidly, mainly because of immigration and its consequences), Norway readily qualifies. Without ceremony it passed the five million mark in 2013. Norway remains the smallest of the Nordic four (Finland has roughly 5.5 million people, Denmark about 5.7 million and Sweden around 10 million). Norway ranks in the modest mid-20s in Europe.

    Small-state analysis is a reliable cottage industry within the social sciences. The study of small is usually restricted to minor-nation Europe, stretching from the Alps to the Arctic. The two Alpine republics, the three Benelux countries and the five Nordic states constitute the heart of this group, with Canada thrown in for quasi-European variety. They lack formal identity but share ecological sensibilities, foreign policy postures designed not to rock the boat and propensities toward societal sobriety and order. Each exudes muted yet keen patriotism, a pride built on thriving among the sharks. Their export-oriented economies encourage niche enterprises. Their polyglot populations have cosmopolitan mind-sets, it being easier to think outside the box if you live in a small box. Yet if push comes to shove, they are eminently capable of raising the psychological drawbridge. They demark the parameters of Europe and embody much of its collective essence, not some forgettable fringe. The Nordics fit this profile to a T, but Norway bucks the trend in some surprising ways.

    Bernd Henningsen, a cultural historian, traces the Nordic appeal of small back to Olof Rudbeck, an imaginative Swede who in 1679 wrote Atlantica, an idyllic portrayal that posited Sweden as the home of the lost Atlantis. The link from Rudbeck to our time, Henningsen holds, lies precisely in smallness. Beyond a small-state mentality, it amounts to an overarching perspective on the world.

    The association arises from the grandeur of Nordic nature and the instilled sense that humans are bit players—little souls to Swedish writer August Strindberg—in the presence of far bigger forces, from the stately boreal forests to the celestial curtains of the Northern Lights. The human being becomes great by feeling himself small is an enigmatic sentiment he traces to educator and women’s activist Ellen Key. It captures a very Nordic notion, impelled by living in wide geographical expanses and capricious climates. It also clues us to the sensitivity of Scandinavians, who live near the margins of human habitation, to the challenge of global warming. A related aspect is broached by Barton, a cultural historian: that Scandinavians, who like Canadians live in quite large territories, tend to congregate in the far south. In mountainous Norway, they long clustered in villages separated less by distance than by terrain. Geography has been doubly important as a constricting factor.

    History, too, weighs heavily. Among the Nordic fraternity, Norway is often said to be afflicted by a lillebrorkompleks, a little brother mentality owing to centuries of subjugation under the Danes and Swedes that are unraveled in Part II. A region riven and even defined by Danish-Swedish power struggles long made Norway the gimpy third leg of a fluctuating Scandinavian triad.

    In 1889, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the poet-nationalist who wrote the lyrics for Norway’s national anthem, popularized the term storsvensker. Usefully from the national standpoint, the big Swede attribution conflated two different notions. One referenced the stifling social hierarchy of a country still dominated by its aristocracy. The other was a certain grandiosity of mind-set attributed to a country clinging, in his sharp view, to the tattered remnants of empire. Here’s a big, size-based clue to Norway: Sweden, which to the rest of the world encapsulates the essence of a small state, has loomed exceptionally large in modern Norwegian experience. Within these sentiments lay a tendency to associate large size with nefarious intentions and its opposite: to link smallness with virtue.

    Countless elements reinforce a Norwegian cult of small. The typical farm, or jordbruk, tends to be a smallholding, broken into plots and confined to dips and valleys of the landscape. Lines of vision are cut off, and horizons restricted, by that same folded landform that was sufficient, wrote a visiting Mary Wollstonecraft in 1795, to prevent the idea of a plain from entering the head.

    A land traveler from the east can scarcely miss the contrast with south-central Sweden, especially Värmland and Bohuslän (once part of Denmark–Norway), with its wide vistas and generously scaled farmland. There is scarcely an acre of level land in Norway, wrote geographer Roy Millward in the early 1960s, a factor he boldly linked to the conservatism and poverty even then holding rural sway. Norway may conjure up a name like Little Bighorn, but it’s not a big-sky country like Montana.

    You cannot live long in Norway without being aware of a powerful rural aesthetic that evokes the smallholder and esteems the small producer. In contrast, Norway’s landed nobility was always an embattled minority: deprived by nature of plantations, it was decimated by the Black Death, watered down by foreign blood and, after 1814, eliminated politically by parliament. Just one titled property survived into the twentieth century, the Rosendal Barony.

    Urban life reflects the same pattern, with just six Norwegian cities having over 100,000 inhabitants, counting liberally. Greater Oslo barely cracks Europe’s list of 100 biggest cities, ranking 97th on one scale. It’s now in construction overdrive, but there’s a lot of catching up to do and resistance to overcome. Oslo was long an object of provincial resentment for its concentration of power and wealth and Trojan horse associations with the Danish and Swedish crowns of old. For 300 years it carried the name of the Danish king, Christian IV, who rebuilt it after a fire in 1624. In a country of rural sensibilities, Norway’s own capital long represented a disembodied and vaguely threatening presence. It’s a prominent theme in Norwegian art, from Munch’s expressionless faces on Karl Johans Gate to the pitiless anonymity of Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger to the urban bread-beggars in Christian Krohg’s harrowing painting Kampen for tilværelsen. Ironically, Scandinavia’s least overbearing capital has stirred the most animosity by nationals not living there.

    In global affairs, Norway’s smallness is accentuated by its chief external reference points. Its status has been defined less by Europe, a continent of mid-sized countries, than by the United States and Russia, quintessential big states. During the Cold War this became an urgent reality for Norway, a close ally of the former and an opposing neighbor of the latter. In fact, Russia and America have framed Norway’s place in the world for over 200 years—in widely diverse ways, of course—which has exacerbated the perceived size differential. In 1809, czarist Russia snatched Finland from Sweden, intensifying a westward push begun under Peter the Great a century earlier, impinging on a Norway just finding its constitutional feet in 1814. In the early twentieth century, the Russian revolution stirred Norwegian domestic politics in unsettling ways.

    The United States, meanwhile, became Norway’s main physical outlet of the nineteenth century, its Great Plains and bustling cities drawing almost a million Norwegian émigrés fleeing poverty at home. It established a storied Norwegian diaspora. Since World War II, US political and cultural influence in Norway has been overweening, even if the old epithet Americanized seems dated in today’s global, digitalized stew. Still, there is no denying a bedrock role of Americana in Norway and no reason to doubt the Norwegian official position that the United States is its main strategic ally, for all the intra-Scandinavian hobnobbing that goes on.

    A David versus Goliath dimension of Norwegian thinking is a major side effect of these processes. Sweden, its eastern neighbor and cultural cousin, has been notably more insulated from both Americanization and Russian pressure. Losing Finland in 1809 gained the Swedes an eastern buffer, which in turn strengthened the neutrality that kept them out of NATO. For Norway, a proverbial minnow among whales, geopolitics has reinforced this defining motif.

    Little Norway resonates as a cultural touchstone at home. The freeholder image, the bit player that counts, is a tenacious Norwegian trope. The farmers’ political hand shaped both the 1814 constitution and the 1884 parliamentary breakthrough. Its societal attributions are endless. Norway, Bjørnson wrote, is a land of cottages not castles. The phrase applies the element of compactness even to patterns of home and hearth. A larger-than-life personality himself, Bjørnson spoke with authority on such matters. Yet this characterization is misleading; castles and cottages aren’t mutually exclusive (Denmark has plenty of both, Sweden too). To his mind, Norwegians’ dwellings were not just small in size but a direct reflection of an anti-opulent mind-set.

    There are contemporary regional signs typifying this trend. Modern Swedish housing, reflecting a mania for postwar central planning, typically comes in apartment blocks of medium (four- or five-story) height. Norwegian housing still tends toward the rekkehus (row house), semidetached or multifamily dwellings, the to- or fire-mannsbolig (two- or four-family house). These are often rambling structures that have been divided up and sold or rented separately into a red-hot property market.

    Oslo’s Storo district, a transport and commercial hub, exemplifies this theme on a localized scale. It is home to a long-running communal holdout by a neighborhood of houses with wood frames and latticed fronts. Ikke til salgs (not for sale!) protest signs dot countless awnings. It is a fascinating test of wills pitting gutsy homeowners against faceless, tower-block developers, even if the omens are unpromising.

    Norwegian development pressures are surprisingly acute and arise from the fact that only around 3 percent of the land area is cultivable. It’s a number to command our attention. Yet a casual visitor to the country’s populous southeast might well regard this figure with disbelief, since that’s where the richest farmland is. Mary Wollstonecraft called the Vestfold stretch from Larvik to Tønsberg the most fertile and best cultivated track of country in Norway. Østfold, on the fjord’s eastern shore, is equally productive.

    Norway also marks its compactness in public life. Its officials walk the streets in ways inconceivable for bigger countries. In a Norwegian press frequently hailed as the world’s freest, politicians are routinely referred to by their first names. It reinforces the sense that public Norway is like one big, unruly family, where the top brass is reassuringly answerable to a hoi polloi that, in turn, refuses to regard itself as such. Interconnectivity and relentless egalitarianism feed a national mind-set defined by compactness.

    When corroborating details fit the broad framework, a picture starts to emerge. The Norwegian fixation with small is willful and insistent, not just subconsciously present but consciously belabored. It even marks out holiday tradition. Norway does not celebrate an all-knowing, well-girthed and big-spirited Santa Claus; its Christmas traditions are built around the nisse, an elfin figure that lurks in barns.

    Size when combined with self-assessment helps shape a worldview. In this case it gives janteloven, the proscription on inflated self-opinion, a collective importance. Long ago it became a point of reference for Norway itself—a subtle form of national self-diminishment, born of submission to bigger forces ranging from the natural world to overbearing neighbors. Casting it aside is a work in progress.

    This perspective pervades the publishing industry, where countless book titles belabor the theme of den lille Norge or "little Norway." A hefty volume on Norwegian intellectual history, Norges idehistorie, is subtitled Et lite land i verden (a little country in the world). Knut Frydenlund’s Lille land: hva nå? reflected such thinking—ironically articulated by the foreign minister who presided over a massive increase in Norway’s territorial shelf claims. A documentary TV series was entitled Vårt lille land (our little country), profiling plucky but unfamous individuals. The prefix lille proliferates among local place-names. A coffee-table book on the section of Nordmarka called Lillomarka describes it as liten og variert (small and full of contrasts), assigning a double diminutive to what is, in fact, a formidable expanse of forest. A reference source useful for this very work is wildly oxymoronic:

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