The Lost Massey Lectures (29 page)

Canada's regional cities have their traditional role. They work primarily as service centres for the exploitation of resources from their hinterlands.

To be sure, all have some manufacturing, even the small ones like Halifax, Thunder Bay and Saskatoon, as well as the larger ones like Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and the largest, Vancouver. But large or small, they have not served, at least so far, as creative economic centres in their own right. That is why so many Canadian inventors and creative entrepreneurs must traditionally leave
Canada for other countries to put their ideas to use. That is also why Canada, taken as a whole, has developed so little manufacturing, and why so much of what we do have is undertaken in branch plants spun off from other countries. That is also why Canadian regional cities boom while the exploitation of their hinterlands is booming, as is happening in Alberta—but then characteristically stagnate when the resource exploitation reaches a plateau.

We now have a difficulty unprecedented in Canada. We have never before had a national city which lost that position and became a regional city. We have one now. Montreal cannot sustain the economy it had in the past, or retain its many other unusual assets, if it subsides into becoming a typical Canadian regional city. If that is all it does, it will stagnate and decline economically, and probably culturally too.

In short, Montreal cannot afford to act like other, uncreative Canadian regional cities. It must be the kind of place in which enterprises can develop new, innovative city-made products and services, and can take to producing locally wide ranges of former imports, and can find capital to help this happen. If Montreal cannot be that sort of place, it will be in grave and gathering trouble.

The chances are small that Montreal will be able to transcend the usual inertia of Canadian regional cities if Quebec remains a province of Canada. As Montreal's troubles deepen, Quebecois are certainly going to believe they would do better by taking their economy into their own hands. They might not do better, of course. They might cling to the traditional Canadian approach to economic life, themselves, and neglect other possibilities. But the point is, Quebec is now headed for trouble because of Montreal's situation, and the traditional Canadian solutions are not going to help. Inevitably, whether or not they would do better on their own, the Quebecois are going to think they could. Perhaps they even might.

This is why the issue of sovereignty, now that it has been raised, is not going to evaporate. The changes underlying that issue are irreversible and
they
are not going to evaporate. Until the issue is somehow resolved, it is going to be raised again, and again, and again. In one guise or another, it will go on, and on, and on. Thus, it seems to me that we'd better think about it, emotionally painful though it may be.

We know little from actual experience about peaceable separations. To be sure, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Iceland all became independent in peace, as did a few of the still newer nations that formerly were colonies. But those were overseas possessions of empire. With only one exception—the separation of Norway from Sweden—new nations that were former provinces or regions of another country have come to birth in violence. They have either won independence after armed insurrection, highly disruptive terrorism or civil war; or else, like the Balkans or East and West Germany, they have emerged as a sequel to military defeat, prostration and dismemberment by conquerors. It is difficult, if not impossible to sort out the repercussions of such disasters from the practical consequences of the separations themselves. This is only one of many reasons that the singular case of Norway's peaceful separation is interesting.

Although the separation occurred in this century, in 1905,
⁸
it
seems to be little remembered. Perhaps precisely because the tale lacks blood and thunder it has become forgettable. But it does not lack conflict and struggle. The kinds of emotions at work in all cases of separatist sentiment were present in all their force.

Offhand, it might be supposed that Norway was a special case because once upon a time, long ago, it had been an independent kingdom. But think of Scotland, Ulster, Wales, Burgundy, Aquitania, Catalonia, Bavaria, Sicily, Saxony, the Ukraine. . . . one could go on and on. Nothing has been more common than the reduction of kingdoms or powerful dukedoms to provincial status. Norway lost its independence in fact in late medieval times, and then lost it officially in the 16th century when the Danish King decreed that Norway had ceased to exist as a realm and was henceforth part of Denmark.

This was how things stood until 1814 when Norway became one of the chips lost and won in the Napoleonic wars. It was given to Sweden. Denmark was out of luck because it had sided with Napoleon.

At this time Norway was a poor and undeveloped place. Although its economy improved somewhat over the next ninety-one years while it belonged to Sweden, it was still very poor in 1905, at the time of the separation. So we must visualize Norway's struggle for independence as taking place in two small provincial cities, Oslo and Bergen, a few poor and old towns, and the scattered and isolated settlements of subsistence farmers where most people eked out their livings. Norwegians today marvel at the succession of their great men, generation after generation, who emerged from the narrow, drudging, tradition-bound life and built the country's independence.

At the time Norway was transferred from Denmark to Sweden there happened to be a few months' hiatus between the signing of the treaty of transferral and the assumption of rule by Sweden.
During this moment of accidental freedom, a group of Norwegians proclaimed independence and called for an assembly representing a cross-section of the population. That assembly, held in the small town of Eidsvold just north of Oslo, went to work feverishly. In ten days it managed to write and adopt a constitution, and authorized itself to create a national bank and a currency. The constitution provided for a constitutional monarchy and a national legislature to be called the Storting, meaning “Great Thing.” At the time, the constitution was the most democratic in Europe. It was also so well constructed and so workable that it still serves as the Norwegian constitution today.

But grand as all this sounds, it was pitiful too. Sweden had made its own very different plans for Norway. In Swedish eyes, Norway was now in effect a province. The arrangement in form was that Sweden and Norway were two kingdoms under one crown, like Scotland and England in the United Kingdom. Indeed, the form was proposed to Sweden by the British.

The actual rule was set up this way. In Stockholm the King appointed a cabinet of Ministers for Norway, composed of Norwegians. They lived and worked in Stockholm and served at the King's pleasure. On matters affecting both Sweden and Norway, these ministers joined with the Swedish ministers in one cabinet. On matters affecting only Norway, the Ministers for Norway and the civil servants on their staffs were the Norwegian government. So these ministers constituted both the provincial government of Norway and a portion of the national government. In Oslo, a governor-general was ensconced to represent the King and to see that the will of his government was executed.

In view of all this, the Storting and the Norwegian constitution would seem to have been rather in the realm of folk fantasy. Perhaps that is the way the Swedish government thought of it. Let them have their fantasies if it amuses and occupies them. At any
rate, Sweden, to its credit, never forbade the Storting or tried to suppress its elections, never arrested or otherwise harried its leaders and members, never attempted to censor its debates or interfere in its communications with the Norwegian people, and did not poison Norwegian political life with spies, secret police, bribers or informers.

By means of persuasion during the first two years of Swedish rule, the Storting managed to pry loose two little fragments of autonomy. Sweden had made what seemed a generous offer, and probably was: the opening of military and civil appointments in both realms to people of both on equal terms. The Storting rejected the offer, and the rejection was respected by Sweden. This closed off to Norwegians the prestigious and ample opportunities of public life to be found in Sweden, but of course it also meant that Swedes could not occupy government posts within Norway, and the members of the Storting evidently thought that was worth the sacrifice.

The other point won was that Sweden agreed to separate its own debts from the debts incurred on behalf of Norway. In this way the Norwegians limited their own financial responsibility for Sweden but at the same time they insisted on taking their full share of a national debt without also having powers to determine the size of the debt, the way the money was raised or what it was to be used for. The Norwegians were also determined to use their own bank and currency which that hasty meeting of the constitutional assembly had authorized, and amazingly enough they did so for a period, although later Sweden tied the money to its own. After independence, Norway again had an independent currency and still does.

Thus two persistent themes were set from the beginning and thereafter ran through Norway's entire struggle. One was the Norwegians' lack of fear, poor though they were, about taking
financial responsibility for their own affairs—indeed their positive eagerness to do so. The other was their strategy of seeking and grasping whatever bit, piece or symbol of independence they could find, no matter how irrational it might be, given their subordinate status.

They did not win another of those fragments until 1821 when they got themselves a flag. Not a national flag, which they would have liked. That was denied them on grounds that Sweden's flag was their flag too. Nevertheless, they got permission to use this flag of theirs on their mercantile ships, as a commercial emblem in northern waters. Years later they won the right to use the trade flag on all the oceans. Thus things went in the Storting, symbol or substance, push, push, push over the years, always for a little bit more. In 1837 they won another fragment of financial responsibility, the right of local taxpayers to govern local expenditures for purely local matters. Not all the ideas came out of the Storting. Early on, a poet conceived the idea of celebrating the adoption of the constitution by the Eidsvold assembly. His idea caught on, it soon became a great Norwegian national holiday, and still is.

Up to 1859 the conflict, though earnest, was on the whole very tame. But the Storting was turning balky, digging in its heels. That year it managed to hold off two governmental changes adopted in Stockholm and also asked Sweden to abolish the office of governor-general. Sweden refused. Now, before we plunge into the political crises that are going to follow, we need to be aware of other excitements brewing.

Norway had lacked, or thought it lacked, a language and culture of its own. The language of the pulpit, the press, the schools, the government, the capital city, all educated people and many who were uneducated too, was Danish owing to the centuries-long Danish occupation and rule. The Norwegians pronounced it in a distinctive way; nowadays it is called Dano-Norwegian. Even in
Dano-Norwegian, Norwegians had produced little literature, so the Norwegians assumed they had no culture of their own, as that word is usually understood.

Then, beginning in the 1840's, two young Norwegians started publishing folk tales they had picked up by travelling among the villages and listening. Their work created a sensation in Oslo. In the first place, the stories themselves were a revelation. Their originality, fantasy and beauty revealed a side of the national character Norwegians themselves had hardly appreciated. But the real bombshell was the language. The authors incorporated into Dano-Norwegian as much indigenous Norwegian vocabulary and idiom as they could, while keeping the work understandable to city readers. A new style had been born, based on a preference for selecting words of Norwegian origin. The style produced a new language over the course of time, called Neo-Norwegian, which by the 1890's became a second official language, making Norway bilingual, which it still is.

About the same time the folk tales were published, a battle shaped up between improvers and preservationists over whether to tear down the ruins of an ancient cathedral in Trondheim. The preservationists, who won, were headed by Norway's leading historian, who used the battle as an opportunity to educate his country-men in the achievements and civilization of medieval Norway.

In sum, beginning about the middle of the 19th century, Norwegians began to understand they had a history in which it was possible to take pride, a language it was possible to enjoy, and the beginnings of a literature of their own. The excitement and pride this generated was rather overdone, if anything, both then and later. According to an English historian of modern Norway, “anything done by a Norwegian in the arts and sciences, commerce and even sport had always to be vociferously acclaimed as the triumph of a specifically Norwegian culture. . . .”

Alongside the nationalist ferment rose another movement, also idealistic and exciting, which ran counter to independence, a movement called Scandinavianization. Its object was the unification of Denmark, Norway and Sweden into a single nation. The Swedish king favoured the movement, so did many people in all three countries and many Europeans outside them. Unifications were in the air everywhere. The German principalities were uniting into the North German Confederation which became the German Empire. Austria and Hungary were sealing the union that was to hold the joint empire together for half a century. Here in Canada, the time was nearing for Confederation and the British North America Act. In the Scandinavian countries the movement for unification flourished for some twenty years; then abruptly in 1864 it collapsed when Norwegians refused to enter a war with Germany on Denmark's side.