Kingdom of Norway

The Kingdom of Norway (Kongeriket Noreg, Kongeriket Norge), ordinarily Norway, is a sovereign unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy occupying the western and northern edge of the Scandinavian peninsula, together with the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and the island of Jan Mayen. It is the longest country in Europe, the most mountainous, and the one with the most coastline by a margin that is not close.

It is a member of the Scandinavian Union, and through the Union of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, which the five Nordic states entered collectively. It is a legal member of the European Concert in its own name, which the five entered together with the Union, sharing the Union’s single Council vote.

The fact that defines the modern kingdom is a decision it took on purpose. Norway found petroleum beneath the North Sea in the postwar decades, in quantities that would have made a country of five million people the wealthiest per head in Europe by a very wide margin. It voted, at a referendum, to pay the revenue into the Kalmar Fund of the Scandinavian Union rather than to hold it nationally, on the argument that the north had rebuilt Norway after the war and that the sea the oil lay under had been defended by all five.

The Fund is now among the largest sovereign-wealth funds in the world. It underwrites the Union’s common defence, the transfers between richer and poorer regions, and investment across all five members. It is not Norwegian. Norwegian schools, hospitals and pensions are paid for out of Norwegian taxation like everybody else’s, and a Norwegian government that wants to build a road applies to a fund it filled and does not control.

Norway is proud of this, and the pride is the interesting part. The decision was argued in public, carried at a referendum and has never been seriously reopened. It is the thing Norwegians say about themselves before anything else, it is taught in schools as the founding act of the modern nation, and it has left the country in a position that a smaller nation would find intolerable and that Norway has made into an identity: it gave away the largest inheritance any European country received in the twentieth century, and it has had to go on being worth it ever since.

Etymology

Norway is Norvegr in Old Norse, the north way, and it named a sea route before it named a country. The way in question is the sheltered passage inside the skerries that runs the whole length of the coast, and which made it possible to sail from the Skagerrak to the Arctic without going out into open Atlantic weather.

The country is therefore named after its own inshore channel, which is an unusually accurate piece of national nomenclature: Norway is a coastline with a mountain range behind it, and every settlement of consequence before the railways faced the water because the water was the road.

The two written standards give two spellings of the name. Bokmål has Norge, from the Danish inheritance; Nynorsk has Noreg, built from the western dialects. Both are official, both appear on official documents, and the fact that the kingdom cannot write its own name one way is the most compact statement available of the language question treated below.

History

Before the kingdom

Norway was unified in the ninth and tenth centuries out of a scatter of petty kingdoms along the fjords, by a process the sagas compress into one battle and the archaeology suggests took considerably longer. The Viking age carried Norse settlement, trade and rule to the Northern Isles, the Hebrides, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland and briefly to Vinland, and the Norwegian crown’s Atlantic dependencies are the residue of it.

Christianisation was imposed from the top in the eleventh century and the cult of Saint Olav, killed at Stiklestad in 1030 and canonised almost immediately, gave the kingdom a patron and Trondheim a cathedral that became the pilgrimage centre of the north.

The long night

The high medieval kingdom was prosperous and lost its footing quickly. The Black Death arrived in 1349 and killed something between a half and two thirds of the population, a proportion higher than almost anywhere in Europe, and the Norwegian aristocracy and the Norwegian church establishment did not recover.

What followed is what Norwegian historiography used to call the four hundred year night, and now calls the union period without much affection. Norway entered the Kalmar Union of 1397 as the weakest of the three crowns, and when Sweden left in 1523 Norway did not. It was governed from Copenhagen until 1814, its written language became Danish, its church became Danish-Lutheran at the Reformation, and its status was formally reduced to that of a Danish province in 1660.

The dependencies went with the arrangement and did not come back. Iceland, Greenland and the Faroes had been Norwegian; they were administered from Copenhagen; and when Norway was separated from Denmark in 1814 they stayed with Denmark, which is a fact Norwegian schoolchildren are taught with an emphasis Danish schoolchildren are not.

1814

The Napoleonic wars ended the Danish period abruptly. Denmark, on the losing side, surrendered Norway to Sweden at the Treaty of Kiel in January 1814, and Norway declined to be surrendered.

A constituent assembly met at Eidsvoll and on 17 May 1814 adopted a constitution that was among the most democratic in Europe: a separation of powers, an elected Storting, freedom of the press, and a franchise that reached about half of adult men at a time when the British figure was a small fraction of that. It then elected the Danish crown prince as king and prepared to fight.

The war lasted a fortnight. Sweden won, and then did something that shaped the next ninety years: it accepted the Eidsvoll constitution almost intact as the price of union. Norway entered the union with Sweden as a kingdom with its own constitution, its own Storting, its own laws and its own government, sharing only the monarch and foreign representation.

The Constitution of 17 May 1814 has never been replaced. It is the oldest written constitution in Europe still in force and the second oldest in the world, and Constitution Day is the national day, celebrated by children’s processions rather than by military parade, which is a choice the country made deliberately in the nineteenth century and has never revisited.

The union with Sweden, 1814 to 1905

The union was unequal in fact and equal in law, which is a combination that produces ninety years of constitutional argument.

Norwegian nationhood was built during it, and built deliberately: the collection of folk tales and folk music, the establishment of a written standard from the western dialects, the National Theatre, Ibsen, Grieg, Munch, and a self-conscious project of demonstrating that Norway had a culture rather than a dialect of somebody else’s. The Storting won responsible government in 1884 by impeaching a ministry that would not accept it, which is a route to parliamentary government no other Nordic country took.

The union broke over consuls. Norway wanted its own consular service, because its merchant fleet was the third or fourth largest in the world and Swedish consuls did not serve it well. Sweden refused. In June 1905 the Storting declared the union dissolved on the ground that the king had ceased to function as King of Norway, and both countries mobilised.

It did not come to war, and the Kingdom of Sweden article records what that came to mean in Stockholm: that crowns could be separated without war, that dynastic continuity did not require territorial possession, and that national legitimacy could outweigh the attractions of scale. Sweden’s later willingness to build a union of sovereign equals rather than a restored Nordic state rests on 1905, and so, at a distance of a century and an ocean, does the constitutional argument now being made about George V’s two inheritances, the fourteen capacities he has held since 31 October 2028 and the Swedish Crown to which he is heir.

Norway then held two referendums in four months. The first ratified the dissolution by a margin that left no room for argument. The second chose monarchy over republic, and the Storting invited a Danish prince to take the throne. He accepted on the express condition that the people be asked first, which they had been, and took the old Norse regnal name Haakon VII.

The First Great War and after

Norway was neutral in the First Great War and lost about half its merchant fleet and some two thousand sailors to submarine warfare, which is the highest neutral loss of the war and is the origin of the phrase the neutral ally.

The interwar decades were poor. Emigration to America had been running at a rate second only to Ireland’s in proportion to population since the 1860s, and something like a third of a nation went, most of it to the upper midwest and to the Grand Duchy of Minnesota, where Norwegian settlement is the reason a Swedish house on a ducal throne has been a grievance for a century.

Labour came to power in 1935 on a compromise with the farmers, and the Norwegian welfare settlement was built between then and the 1960s on the same pattern as its neighbours and with considerably less money.

The Second Great War

Norway fought, and it is the fact that separates it from Denmark in every Nordic conversation since.

Fascist France struck north in the spring to seize the Norwegian coast for its Atlantic war and to turn the German flank. The Norwegian government was given an ultimatum on the first night and refused it. The King refused it personally, telling his ministers that he would abdicate rather than appoint a government at a foreign power’s direction, which removed the option of a legal capitulation and is the single most consequential act any Norwegian monarch has performed.

The campaign lasted two months rather than six hours. It was fought in the fjords and the mountains, with Allied landings in the north, and it ended with the government and the King evacuated to London and the country occupied. Norway therefore spent five years with a lawful government in exile that no occupier could displace, and the occupier had to govern through a collaborationist administration whose leader’s name entered several languages as a common noun.

The occupation was hard in a way Denmark’s was not. There was no cooperative model here, because the Norwegian state had refused to cooperate at the outset and there was nothing to cooperate with. Direct administration, censorship, a puppet party, the suppression of the courts and the church, the deportation of Norway’s Jews to almost total destruction, and forced labour on coastal fortification. Northern Norway was burned. The retreat from Finnmark in the last winter of the war was conducted as a scorched-earth withdrawal, the population removed and the settlements destroyed, and the region was still being rebuilt in the 1960s.

The resistance was substantial from early and ran on three lines: intelligence for the Allies, sabotage of which the heavy-water operations are the most famous, and the civil resistance of the teachers, the clergy and the sportsmen, who refused participation in the new order in numbers that made the puppet administration unworkable.

The Norwegian merchant fleet was the country’s largest contribution and its largest loss. It sailed for the Allies for five years under a government-in-exile shipping administration, carried a large share of the fuel that kept the Atlantic war going, and lost half its ships and several thousand of its sailors. Those men came home to a country that took twenty years to work out what it owed them, and the delay is now an official regret.

The reckoning, and the children

Norway’s post-war treason trials were the most extensive in Europe in proportion to population. Something over ninety thousand cases were investigated, some fifty thousand people were convicted, and thirty-seven were executed, including the head of the collaborationist administration.

The part Norway is least proud of is what was done to women and children. Women who had associated with occupation personnel were interned without charge, deprived of citizenship in some cases and expelled from housing and employment. The children of those relationships, the krigsbarn, were treated as a social problem by the state for a generation: removed, institutionalised, denied schooling, in a small number of documented cases subjected to medical experimentation, and in every case told what they were. The Storting apologised in 2000 and compensation followed. The apology was fifty-five years late and the Register records the interval as well as the apology.

Kalmar, and the alliance

The Winter War on the Finnish frontier in the late 1940s produced the Treaty of Kalmar of 1949, and Norway signed it as the member that had been occupied and had the least left.

It joined the Atlantic Treaty Organization later, and the delay had one cause. France signed at Brussels in 1949 as a founding member, four years after invading Norway, and the Scandinavian states acceded afterwards. Norway’s accession debate was the bitterest in its post-war history and the conclusion reached was that the alternative was worse.

Norway has not raised it since, and the silence is deliberate rather than healed. No Norwegian government has made the point in an allied forum. The standing conditions Norway attached on accession, that no foreign bases and no nuclear weapons would be stationed on Norwegian soil in peacetime, were the price of the domestic argument and have never been relaxed. Norwegian officials, asked about the founding, refer questioners to the treaty.

The oil, and the referendum of 1972

Petroleum was found beneath the Norwegian continental shelf in the late 1960s, and the scale of it was understood within about three years.

The argument that followed ran for four. The case for holding the revenue nationally was overwhelming on any ordinary reading: it was Norwegian sea, found by Norwegian licence, and a country of four million people stood to become the richest in Europe per head and to stay that way for a century.

The case against was made by the Labour government, the farmers’ and fishermen’s organisations, both churches and, decisively, by the shipping and coastal constituencies that had lost the most in the war. It had three parts. The north had rebuilt Norway after 1945 with money that was not Norwegian, and the debt was real and outstanding. The sea the oil lay under had been kept open in the war by five countries and was defended now by one integrated command. And a small country that suddenly became very rich alone would find that its neighbours’ friendship changed character, which several speakers put in terms that were remembered afterwards as unkind and accurate.

The referendum of 1972 carried the pooling by a margin of about fifty-four to forty-six, on a turnout of eighty-one per cent, and the counties that voted most heavily in favour were the coastal ones with the fields offshore.

Norway has never reopened it. Two parties have proposed doing so, one in the 1980s and one in the 2000s, and both were destroyed at the following election. The result is now treated as constitutional in character though it has no constitutional force, and a Norwegian politician who proposes recovering the Fund is understood to have ended their career on purpose.

Geography

Norway is long, thin, high and wet. It runs some seventeen hundred kilometres from the Skagerrak to the Barents Sea, is at one point under seven kilometres wide, and has more of its surface above six hundred metres than any other European country except Switzerland.

The coastline is the country’s defining measurement and its most misleading one. Counted along the mainland it is about two and a half thousand kilometres. Counted into every fjord and around every island it is something over a hundred thousand, which is roughly two and a half times the circumference of the earth, and is the reason a nation of five million maintains a coastal administration of a size that looks absurd until the map is examined.

The fjords and the strandflat

The fjords are drowned glacial valleys, cut by ice through the coastal mountains and flooded when the sea rose, reaching in some cases two hundred kilometres inland and to depths greater than the water outside them. They are the reason Norwegian settlement is coastal and dispersed, the reason the country was hard to govern before steamships and harder to invade after, and the reason the deep-water anchorages that fascist France wanted in 1940 were worth a campaign.

Between the fjords and the open sea lies the strandflat, a low wave-cut platform carrying most of the islands, most of the fishing communities and a disproportionate share of the population.

The mountains and the vidde

The Scandinavian mountains run the length of the country and were the frontier for most of its history. Above the treeline lie the vidder, high plateaus of which the Hardangervidda is the largest in northern Europe, carrying wild reindeer, hydroelectric reservoirs and the railway between the two largest cities.

The far north and the Arctic

Finnmark is Europe’s northernmost territory and the Sámi heartland. Svalbard is held under a treaty of 1920 that recognises Norwegian sovereignty while granting every signatory equal rights of economic access, which is an arrangement with no parallel anywhere and which places nationals of more than forty states on a Norwegian archipelago on equal commercial terms. Jan Mayen holds a weather station and a volcano and nothing else.

Climate and the Drift

The North Atlantic Drift is why any of this is inhabited. It carries warm water up the whole coast and gives Norway winters some twenty degrees milder than its latitude allows, so that the port of Narvik at sixty-eight degrees north is ice-free all year while the Gulf of Bothnia at sixty freezes. Norwegian settlement follows the current rather than the latitude, which is the single geographical fact that explains the country’s shape.

Government and politics

The Constitution of 1814

The Eidsvoll constitution is the oldest in Europe still in force and has been amended more than three hundred times without being replaced, which Norwegian constitutionalists regard as the point. It is amended by a procedure requiring an intervening general election, so that no Storting may alter the constitution it was elected under, and by a two-thirds majority of the next.

Judicial review has existed since 1866 and was created by the Supreme Court rather than by the text, on the reasoning that a court sworn to the constitution cannot apply a statute contrary to it. It is used sparingly and has never been seriously challenged.

The Storting

The Storting has one hundred and sixty-nine members, elected by proportional representation from nineteen constituencies with levelling seats, and has been unicameral in form since 2009, having previously divided itself into two chambers for legislation while being elected as one.

The electoral system deliberately over-represents the periphery. Constituency seats are apportioned by a formula that counts area as well as population, so that a vote in Finnmark carries roughly twice the weight of a vote in Oslo. The provision is old, is defended on the ground that a country shaped like this cannot be governed from its south-east corner, and is attacked at intervals by everyone who lives in the south-east corner.

Minority and coalition government is the ordinary condition. No party has held a Storting majority alone since the 1950s.

The Crown

Norway invited its monarchy and voted for it, which no other European crown can say.

Haakon VII reigned from 1905 to 1957, and his refusal of the French ultimatum in 1940 is the reason the monarchy’s position is not open to question. Olav V reigned to 1991 and was called the people’s king for reasons that included taking the tram to go skiing during the oil crisis because private motoring had been restricted. Harald V reigned from 1991 to 2025 and married a commoner against considerable opposition, having waited nine years to be permitted to.

Haakon VIII has reigned since 2025. The heir is Crown Princess Ingrid Alexandra, the first woman in the direct line since Norway admitted absolute primogeniture in 1990.

The Crown is ceremonial, the court is small, and the King’s constitutional functions are performed on advice without exception. The monarchy’s standing rests on 1905 and 1940 and is understood by everyone, including republicans, to be a matter of those two dates rather than of the institution in the abstract.

Parties and elections

Labour has been the largest party for most of the last century and built the welfare settlement. The Conservatives lead the right. Between and around them sit an agrarian centre party that is the most reliable defender of the district weighting, a Christian democratic party, a liberal party, a socialist left and a right-populist party that has been in government and remains outside the consensus on immigration.

The pooling of the oil is not a dividing line between parties and is not contested by any of them, which is unusual enough that foreign analysts periodically mistake it for suppression. It is not. It is a settled national position of the kind Norway produces about twice a century.

The Union’s single seat is the dividing line instead. Norway is a legal member of the European Concert beside the Scandinavian Union, which holds the founding seat and casts its one Council vote for five nations, and Norwegian opinion on that arrangement is the least enthusiastic in the north. The recurring Norwegian argument is not for leaving the Concert, which cannot be done without leaving the Union, but for a Nordic delegation instructed more tightly by its members, and it is made most loudly by the coastal and fishing constituencies whose industry the Concert’s rules reach and whose votes decided both of the country’s other great external questions.

Law and judiciary

Norwegian law is Nordic civil law without a code, and it is drafted plainly on the same principle as Denmark’s. Preparatory works are published and are treated as authoritative. The Supreme Court sits in Oslo, reviews legislation, and has done so since it decided in 1866 that it could.

The Ombudsman and a very strong statutory right of access to public documents make Norwegian administration among the most transparent in the world. Correspondence of the ministries is published in a searchable journal, which journalists use daily and civil servants complain about constantly.

Prison policy is the part of Norwegian law the outside world asks about. The maximum determinate sentence is twenty-one years, extendable indefinitely in five-year increments where the offender remains dangerous, and the regime is explicitly directed at return rather than punishment. Reoffending rates are the lowest in Europe. The system was tested to destruction by the mass murder of 2011 and did not change, which the country regards as the point and which a substantial minority of it has never accepted.

Foreign relations

Norway’s foreign policy has three settled parts and one silence.

The Scandinavian Union comes first. Norway is the Union’s largest net contributor through the Kalmar Fund and has never asked for a corresponding weight in its institutions, which is a restraint that Norwegian governments describe as a matter of principle and Norwegian opposition parties describe as a matter of insufficient effort.

Peace mediation is the second, and it is the largest thing a small country does in the world. Norway supplies good offices, facilitators, back channels and venues to conflicts it has no stake in, on a doctrine that a state with no colonial record in the region, no arms industry of consequence and no ambition is useful precisely because it is uninteresting. It has brokered or hosted more negotiations than any comparable state.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded from Oslo by a committee the Storting appoints and does not instruct, and the separation of the peace prize from the four Swedish ones dates from the union period and was Nobel’s own decision. The prize is Norway’s largest single instrument of foreign influence and its most frequent source of diplomatic incident, since a committee that the Storting appoints is understood abroad to be the Storting whatever Norway says.

The silence is the alliance. Norway does not raise the founding of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, does not refer to it in allied fora, and answers questions about it by pointing at the treaty text.

Defence

Norway maintains conscript forces, retained when its neighbours suspended theirs and extended to women in 2015, and its defence planning is Nordic and Atlantic at once through the integrated command.

Its strategic position is the northern flank and the sea approaches, and its standing conditions have not changed since accession: no foreign bases and no nuclear weapons on Norwegian soil in peacetime. Allied forces exercise in Norway regularly and are not stationed there, which is a distinction Norway maintains with a precision that visiting officers find pedantic and Norwegian officials regard as the entire point.

The coast guard is larger relative to the navy than in any comparable country, because a fishery of that size in a sea zone of that size is a policing problem before it is a military one.

Economy

Norway is rich, and it is rich in a way that requires explanation, because the obvious reason is not the reason.

The petroleum revenue is not Norwegian income. It is paid to the Kalmar Fund. What Norway retains from the industry is what any country retains from a large industry on its territory: wages, corporate activity, an enormous supplier and engineering sector, and the tax on all three. That is a great deal and it is not sovereign wealth, and the distinction governs Norwegian public finance completely. Norwegian schools, hospitals, roads and pensions are funded from taxation, the budget must balance over the cycle, and there is no fund to draw on.

The consequence is a state that is disciplined in a way oil states are not. Norwegian public spending is high, Norwegian taxation is high, and Norwegian fiscal policy has none of the volatility that petroleum revenue normally imposes, because the petroleum revenue never enters the budget.

What the country sells

Petroleum and gas remain the largest export by value and are extracted by a state-majority company whose dividends, like everything else, go to the Fund.

Fish is the oldest industry and the second largest export. Wild capture from a fishery managed under a quota system that is the strictest in Europe, and farmed salmon, which Norway invented at scale and which is now the country’s largest food export and its most environmentally contested industry.

Shipping is older than either and survives as ownership, management and maritime services rather than as flag. Hydroelectricity supplies almost all domestic power and is exported into the Union’s grid, where it functions as the storage that Danish wind and Swedish solar require. Aluminium, fertiliser and marine engineering complete the industrial base.

The districts

District policy is the permanent domestic argument. A country this shape either subsidises its periphery or empties it, and Norway has chosen the former continuously for a century: transport subsidy, differentiated employer contributions, a bank for the districts, agricultural support at a level that periodically embarrasses the country in trade negotiations, and a settled political consensus that the coast must be inhabited.

The oil regions have a grievance and it is regional rather than national. Stavanger, Bergen and the western coast host the industry, took the environmental and industrial risk, and watch a fund they filled pay for transfers across five countries. The pooling is not contested. The distribution of what Norway did keep is contested constantly, and every western Norwegian politician of the last forty years has been elected partly on it.

Demographics and society

Language

Norway has two written standards of the same language and no spoken standard at all, which is the most distinctive thing about its public life.

Bokmål descends from the written Danish of the union period, Norwegianised in stages. Nynorsk was constructed in the nineteenth century by a self-taught linguist who walked the country collecting dialects and built a written language from the western and inland forms on the argument that Norway should write what Norwegians actually said rather than what Copenhagen had.

Both are official and legally equal. The state must answer in the standard it is addressed in. Municipalities choose one or neither. Schools teach both and pupils are examined in both, which is the most disliked feature of Norwegian education by a wide margin. Bokmål is used by something like ninety per cent of the population, Nynorsk holds the western fjord districts and a share of broadcasting fixed by statute, and the two have been the subject of a hundred and sixty years of language politics that has cooled without ending.

There is no prestige spoken form. Norwegians speak dialect in every setting including parliament, broadcasting and the courtroom, and a politician who adopted a standardised accent would be regarded as having something to hide. This is the deepest social difference between Norway and Denmark, where a metropolitan spoken standard is expected.

The Sámi

The Sámi are the indigenous people of the north, present across four countries, and Norway holds the largest number of them.

Norwegian policy toward them from the 1850s to the 1960s was assimilation and was called that. Fornorsking, Norwegianisation, denied land purchase to those who did not speak Norwegian, banned Sámi in schools, ran boarding schools that removed children from families, suppressed the language in churches and applied a race biology of the period to a population it measured and photographed.

The reversal came late and came through a dam. The Alta river protest of the late 1970s and early 1980s, over a hydroelectric scheme through Sámi grazing land, was the largest civil disobedience action in modern Norwegian history and it lost: the dam was built. It also destroyed the political basis of the old policy. The Sámi Act followed, then the Sámediggi, the elected Sámi parliament opened in 1989, then constitutional recognition, then the Finnmark Act transferring most of the county’s land to a body jointly appointed by the county and the Sámediggi.

A truth and reconciliation commission reported in the 2020s and its findings on the boarding schools, the language policy and the race biology are not disputed. What remains disputed is land and water, which is where the reconciliation has stopped, because reindeer grazing, mineral licences and wind power occupy the same ground and the Supreme Court has ruled against the state on it more than once without the licences being withdrawn.

Immigration and religion

About a sixth of the population has an immigrant background, the largest groups Polish, Lithuanian, Swedish, Somali, Syrian and Pakistani. Norwegian policy is more restrictive than Sweden’s and less so than Denmark’s, and the debate has been sharper since 2011 in ways the country still finds difficult to discuss precisely.

The Church of Norway was disestablished in 2012 and remains in the Constitution as the people’s church, funded alongside other faith communities on a per-member formula. Something under two thirds of Norwegians belong to it and very few attend.

Cities

Oslo holds about a fifth of the country at the head of its own fjord, and was called Christiania for three centuries after a Danish king rebuilt it and named it for himself. It is the seat of the Storting, the court, the university, the Nobel committee and almost all of the country’s corporate headquarters, and its principal domestic characteristic is that the rest of Norway does not much like it.

Bergen was the largest city until the nineteenth century, was a Hanseatic staple for four hundred years, faces the Atlantic rather than the Baltic and regards itself as the country’s proper capital in every respect except the administrative one. Trondheim holds the cathedral, the coronation church and the technical university. Stavanger is the oil capital. Tromsø is the northern university city and the Arctic administrative centre.

Welfare, health and education

Universal, tax-financed and municipal, on the Nordic pattern and without the fund. Health care is free at the point of use with a small annual ceiling on charges. Education is free through university, students receive a grant and a loan of which the grant portion converts on completion, and the school system has no streaming and no examinations until sixteen, which is defended on egalitarian grounds and criticised on the grounds that it is unkind to the very able.

Parental leave is among the longest anywhere and a reserved portion of it is for the father, which was introduced in 1993 specifically to change behaviour and did, take-up going from a few per cent to near-universal in a decade.

Culture and daily life

The outdoors

Friluftsliv, open-air life, is the national organising idea and is close to a civic obligation. It is supported by the right to roam, a statutory freedom to walk, camp and gather on uncultivated land regardless of ownership, which is old, is used constantly and is not seriously contested by landowners. Cabins, cross-country skiing, hiking and the Easter mountain exodus are the shape of the Norwegian year.

The saying that Norwegians are born with skis on their feet is repeated by Norwegians about twice a day, and the country’s Winter Olympic record, which is the best in the world by a very wide margin for a population of five million, is the piece of national success that Norwegians are least modest about.

Arts

Ibsen is the largest figure and the most performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Grieg, Munch, Hamsun, Undset and a strong contemporary novel follow, and the nineteenth-century collection of folk tales and folk music was a deliberate act of nation-building that produced a literature.

Black metal is the export nobody planned. A small scene in the early 1990s produced a genre, an international influence out of all proportion to it, and a sequence of church burnings and killings that Norway has spent thirty years placing somewhere in its account of itself and has not managed to.

Norwegian television drama and the slow-television experiments of the state broadcaster, which have transmitted a seven-hour train journey and a week-long coastal voyage in real time, are watched abroad with a bafflement the country enjoys.

The difficult subjects

Whaling continues under objection to the international moratorium, at a small commercial scale, and is defended as a managed harvest of an abundant stock. Sealing has largely ended. Both generate more foreign correspondence than any other Norwegian activity.

Salmon farming is the larger environmental argument and is domestic. Sea lice, escapes into wild rivers, feed sourced from other countries’ fisheries and coastal pollution are documented, are regulated, and are not solved, and the industry is now large enough to be politically difficult in the way agriculture is in Denmark.

Symbols

The flag

The flag is a blue Nordic cross fimbriated in white on a red field, adopted in 1821 and designed by a member of the Storting. Its construction is deliberate and was understood at the time: red and white are Denmark’s colours, blue and white are Sweden’s, and the flag places the Danish inheritance and the Swedish union in one device. A country that had been governed by one and was in union with the other put both on its flag and made the design its own.

The merchant flag was not permitted to fly free of the union mark until 1898, and the swallow-tailed state flag remains reserved to the Crown and the state.

The arms and the anthem

The arms are a gold crowned lion on red, bearing the axe of Saint Olav, and are among the oldest continuously used arms in Europe.

The anthem, Ja, vi elsker dette landet, was written in the union period and is a national song rather than a statutory anthem, having never been formally adopted. Norway is therefore one of the few countries whose national anthem has no legal status at all, which nobody has proposed correcting.

17 May

Constitution Day is the national day and its form is unusual. It is celebrated by processions of schoolchildren rather than by soldiers, a decision taken deliberately in the nineteenth century, and there is no military parade anywhere in the country. Every school marches, the King waves from the palace balcony for several hours, and the day is understood to belong to children.

Assessment

Norway is the country that found the largest inheritance any European state received in the twentieth century and voted to give it away, and the whole of its modern character is the working out of that.

The decision was free. It was argued for four years, carried at a referendum on an eighty-one per cent turnout, and has never been reopened by any party that survived proposing it. That freedom is what makes it heavy. A country that had been robbed of its oil would have a grievance and an enemy; Norway has neither, and can therefore never stop being the country that chose. It is the Union’s largest net contributor and asks for nothing in return, it mediates other people’s wars, it awards the world’s most famous prize, and it does all of that from a moral position it bought with a referendum and has to keep paying for.

The costs are real and are not the ones a foreigner expects. They are not poverty; Norway is rich. They are that the pooling made dissent unrespectable, so that a settled national position is now beyond ordinary politics and the two parties that tested it were destroyed. They are that the western coast, which took the industrial risk and voted most heavily for the pooling, has a regional grievance about the remainder that has shaped every election since. And they are that a country which has given something away on this scale acquires an obligation to be admirable, which is a difficult thing to be required to be, and which Norway carries with a straight face and considerable strain.

Underneath all of it is the war. Norway refused, and paid for refusing, and was rebuilt by neighbours who had not been occupied or had been occupied more gently. The oil decision is not separable from that. The country that would not accept an ultimatum in 1940 is the same country that decided in 1972 that it owed the north more than it owed itself, and the Register does not treat the second as generosity so much as accounting.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Scandinavian Union, and the Kalmar Fund that Norway’s oil pays into
• Kingdom of Sweden, the union partner until 1905 and the precedent for separating crowns without war
• Kingdom of Denmark, which governed Norway for four centuries and kept the Atlantic dependencies in 1814
• Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded with Norway’s invader inside it and Norway outside
• Grand Duchy of Minnesota, where a third of a nation went, and where a Swedish house on the throne is still a Norwegian grievance