Norway

WHEN the Norwegian Labor Party was voted out of power after thirty years of continuous rule last September, the Socialist ministers carried on in office for another month with the momentum of permanence and a kind of impervious disbelief at the prospect of change.

They completed work on a government budget for 1966. They drew up a legislative program and duly presented it to the new Storting, which they no longer controlled. Then at last, in October, the Socialists cleaned out their desks and departed from oiliccs where they had almost been part of the fixtures since 1935, except for wartime exile in London. The Conservative-dominated four-party coalition government which moved in was grateful for a month in which to sort out its own political problems and table of organization, and apparently just as grateful for the program which the Labor government left behind.

The first policy statement and outline of the government’s program by the new Premier, Per Borten, ruffled few Socialist feathers and was barely distinguishable from that of the old government. In November, after a month in office looking at the books and getting acquainted with the problems of power, the coalition then proceeded to adopt Labor’s budget almost lock, stock, and barrel. Minor tax relief on upper incomes and small increases in appropriations for roads, schools, and harbors affected less than one percent of the budget total.

Change takes place slowly in Norway. Carving a viable life out of these ruggedly beautiful woods and fjords is a slow process. Norwegians move carefully, and then they dig in tenaciously. They are shipowners who go for long-term contracts and long sea hauls, fishermen who buck the oceans and wait for the herring runs, farmers who must hide the long nights in the lonely countryside until the short harvest of the summer sun.

When Norwegians woke up to find, somewhat to their surprise, that indeed they had changed their government after thirty years, they also woke up to find that there had been a steady, almost glacial alteration in the social, economic, and political structure and outlook of their country across the long years of benevolent Socialist rule and the post-war boom. And the Norwegian Labor Party discovered to its visible distress that it had failed to stay politically tuned to an emerging new, young, liberal middle class which its own policies had helped to create.

There are 3,700,000 Norwegians living in a country which is half again as large as Great Britain with a coastline almost as long as from Maine to Florida. But only 3 percent of the land is tillable, another 24 percent is covered by forests, and the remaining three quarters of the country is wasteland. Norway has been primarily a country of small towns and villages, averaging less than 10,000 population, strung along its beautiful coastal fjords and connected by little coastal steamers which call in once a day, up and down, day in and day out, winter and summer, with the regularity of a railroad, bringing mail, fresh vegetables, oil, tractor parts, stocks for the village stores, schoolbooks, and all the other paraphernalia of a viable society.

The new middle class

In such a small and stable society, the shifts and changes of economics and the movement of population produce a much greater proportionate impact than the statistical numbers alone would appear to indicate. From 1960 to 1965 the patterns in Norway altered to a remarkable degree. The rural population, which numbered nearly 2,500,000 in 1960, declined by more than 10 percent in five years. The towns and cities grew by approximately 35 percent, up from 1,150,000 in 1960 to well over 1,500,000 by 1965. With this shift of people into the urban areas, there has been a steady decrease in employment in the traditional Norwegian occupations: farming down 10,000 since 1960: forestry and lumbering down 7000; fishing down 5000; mining and quarrying down more than 1000. Meanwhile, manufacturing industries have added 1 5,000 workers to their payrolls, the retail and distributive trades have expanded by 10,000 employees, and 5000 are now employed in banking, finance, and real estate.

Perhaps the most interesting statistics from the standpoint of Norway’s social development are a 15,000 increase in five years in the number of schoolteachers and educational workers, and an increase of 7000 doctors, veterinarians, and hospital and medical employees. In a total working population of a little over 1,000,000, these figures reflect a very considerable change in Norway’s economic and social structure since the war.

The new class of educated wage earners, white-collar workers, and professional people are better read, better informed, and more independent-minded than their parents were. They are not imbued with the cautious, inward-looking traditions of the countryside or the old-fashioned trade-union socialism.

Against this background, the Labor Party went into the general election suffering from an “old” image — the same faces, years and years in power, the same manner of dealing with problems under Premier Einar Gerhardsen, a carpenter and an old-time Socialist, who spent the war years in a German concentration camp and who has run the government and the party with a carpenter’s grip since 1946.

Gerhardsen’s main political preoccupation, moreover, was not with the new voting class but with the extreme left. In the 1961 general elections, a group of fellow-traveling neutralists calling themselves the Socialist People’s Party broke away from the Labor Party and won two seats in the Storting, which was then split exactly down the middle — 74 seats for Labor, and 74 for all the other parties combined. The two SPP members voted with Labor on almost all basic issues until suddenly in 1962, when they sided with the parties of the right on an internal issue involving a mine disaster. As a result of the tie, Labor was out of office for one month. Then the two leftist renegades withdrew their support from the Conservative coalition, and Labor was back.

The result of this affair was to give the opposition parties a real thirst for power, while Gerhardsen concentrated for the next three years on getting errant Socialist voters of the left back into the fold.

Labor out, compromise in

Norway goes to the polls every two years, alternately electing new municipal councils and the national parliament. In the municipal elections of 1963, following the brief month out of office in 1962, the Labor Party came out strongly on top and prided itself that it was on the upswing and that the Socialist People’s Party still was its main enemy. But as became clear when the national elections came around last September, the new voters had simply stayed at home in the 1963 municipal elections and then turned out in droves in 1965 to put Labor out of office.

Labor held its own in September of 1965. But the Conservative Party was up 55,000, the Agrarian Center Party up 29,000, and the Liberals up 53,000 for a total of 137,000 new votes. The fourth coalition party, the religious Christian People’s Party, dropped by 15,000 votes, but nevertheless, the net increase by the coalition parties was more than enough to give them 80 seats in the new Storting to 68 for Labor. The Socialist People’s Party also increased its vote by nearly 80,000, and easily held its 2 seats in the Storting. The defeat made it painfully clear that the Labor Party had failed to assess the changing outlook in Norway.

The coalition parties finished well out in front because they offered a variety of appeals and alternatives, and they pledged in advance that they would join to form a government if they won control of the Storting.

The Conservative Party, representing big business, the shipowners, the industrialists, and the managerial class, promised to “curb Socialism,” readjust the tax burden, ease up on property controls, make private building easier to finance, and examine and overhaul the workings of state-owned or state-controlled industries and enterprises.

The Agrarian Center Party was pledged to pay higher subsidies to farmers, bring roads and improvements to rural areas, and check the movement from the farms into the towns. The Christian People’s Party appealed to the old-fashioned Lutheran fundamentalists, who wish to see religion playing a larger role in the life of the nation. And on the left of this assortment of odd political bedfellows, the Liberal Party offered a kind of “we can do it better” appeal to the Socialist-minded Norwegians.

When the election was over, it was no easy operation to fit all of this into a coalition, but the overriding desire for power after thirty years in the wilderness was enough to ensure an atmosphere of compromise. The coalition will be subjected to a great deal of internal and external stress and strain. But at the same time, it is a new government in power, and the satisfaction of power will undoubtedly do a great deal to hold things together.

This is particularly true in Norway, because the range of options and solutions to problems is very narrow. In a small and fairly sophisticated state like Norway, the problems are easy to define, and the facts then almost always dictate the solution. The Labor government, for example, was collecting about 31 percent of the national income in taxes. This is a very high percentage, and about all the coalition will be able to do will be to reapportion the burden in some new way. But if it reduces taxes, it will also reduce the money available for such projects as roads and harbors and schools, which it has pledged to expand. No very dramatic breakthroughs or dynamic new policies are in fact possible in Norway. The economy runs more like a watch than a boiler factory.

A change in management

The change which the coalition is bringing to Norway is essentially one of management. At the very outset, the four parties made clear and everybody accepted the fact that there is not going to be any retreat in Norway’s social security structure or basic socialist measures. But the coalition government did announce in its first policy statement that it was not going to proceed with plans drawn up by the Labor government to establish a state-owned commercial bank in Norway. Banking will remain the preserve of private ownership, and will not be invaded by the state.

Similarly the new government intends to reorganize the management of some of the state enterprises and sell off or close down some stateowned industries where the investment is clearly shown to be poor. In the housing field, a program is still being shaped, but in general the government intends to ease up on the taxes on property turnover, and make it easier for private investors to buy, sell, and build apartments and houses. This will be the general approach of the new government— to encourage private enterprise and initiative at the expense of state direction.

At the same time, the new government is as aware as the Socialists are that there is a limitation to what private capital and private enterprise can achieve in Norway. A small society with small resources always requires a high degree of government investment, direction, and interference. Norway’s nonferrous and ferrous ore reserves have an estimated life of only about fifteen years. After that it will be necessary to depend on imported ores for the small but economically important aluminum and steel works.

The wood and pulp industry is on the decline, and though reforestation is under way, trees grow slowly, and it will be twenty years before production can begin to rise. Hydroelectric development has been going on at a steady, planned, upward rate all over Norway, but in ten years it will have reached capacity and there will be no more to develop. Fishing has its limits and its competitors.

Hope in new industries

In short, the framework for economic growth in Norway is very narrow and very small. In a decade or so, it will begin to decline. The future seems to lie in bringing new, small industries to Norway’s small towns to utilize a good labor force and cheap electric power. Instead of producing mainly raw aluminum, Norway should be expanding into aluminum finished products. One American company, Northrup Aviation, has already been helping in this field by turning over to a Norwegian company its designs for a whole range of aluminum construction fittings. Alcoa is investigating the possibility of an aluminum plant in Norway.

Some Norwegians believe that it is essential to attract big companies with world marketing facilities to establish plants in Norway and provide the production know-how, the designs, and the distribution for Norwegian-made products, but there is both a reluctance to invite too many outsiders into the Norwegian economy and also a rather determined Norwegian pride in “do it yourself.” There is a Scandinavian epigram: “The Swedes make it, the Finns complain about it, the Norwegians brag about it, and the Danes sell it.”

All the same, as basic industries such as forestry, mining, and fishing decline, Norway will have to find ways of expanding its manufacturing industries, and will also have to check the continuing movement into big population centers such as Oslo, Bergen, or Trondheim by providing jobs in the smaller cities and towns. It is not a program which will just automatically happen under laissezfaire capitalism, and the new government recognizes this as clearly as the outgoing Socialists do.

The change in Norway is being watched closely in the other Scandinavian countries, whore Conservatives are taking heart that Socialist rule need not be permanent after all. Meanwhile, the Norwegian Labor Party, after the first shock of defeat, now takes the pragmatic attitude that a spell in opposition to rethink and reorganize and, above all, to try to “get with” the new class in Norwegian society is not a bad thing. Despite the change in government, Norway is still basically a leftist country, and Labor is by far the dominant political party, with 44 percent of the vote.