Viking Economics (21 page)

Still, it may be significant that Sweden cut back its public spending in the period before the riots, from 67 percent of GDP to 49 percent. Making those cutbacks while cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations seems like asking for trouble. Twenty-three percent of young people in poor, largely immigrant communities do not achieve good enough grades to enter upper
secondary education; Sweden had one of the highest ratios of youth to general unemployment in the OECD.
¹⁵⁵

Together, those trends
increase
the chance of social exclusion and resentment, followed by the blowback of racism from a majority population that is previously conditioned by its whiteness. In 2010, a self-identified Nazi was elected to a democratic assembly in Sweden for the first time since the 1940s. “The leader of the
Svenskarnas Parti
(Swedes’ Party) won a seat on the Gråstorp municipal council in the south of the country, thereby making history.”
¹⁵⁶
The party subsequently declined and dissolved in May 2015.

Sweden Democrats is currently the only party taking a stand against immigration. It increased its percentage of the vote in parliamentary elections from 5.7 percent to 12.9 percent (in 2014). Sociologist Ulf Bjereld of the University of Gothenburg sees growing opposition within the working class to Sweden Democrats, despite that party’s claim that it speaks for the workers more forthrightly than do the traditionally worker-based Social Democrats. Workers at a Volvo factory told Sweden Democrats’ leader that he was not welcome to come to the factory to campaign for the 2014 election, as did the national organization of community centers,
Folkets Hus
.
¹⁵⁷

In researching this book, I have asked how people’s life chances and choices are influenced by their economic model. The Nordics designed their economies to provide security and opportunity for
economic advancement. Even though Mari Linløkken said we can expect residual white racism among the Nordics, why the intensity of the fear?

In conversation with pedagogy professor Hanna Ragnarsdottir of the University of Iceland in 2014, I made a breakthrough in my understanding of what the stakes are in these small countries. Since 1995, the number of immigrants in Iceland doubled, then doubled again.
¹⁵⁸
To economist Thorvaldur Gylfason, this makes complete economic sense, and he argues for greater increases of immigration in the future. Hanna, on the other hand, described to me the Icelanders’ sense of themselves as the only people in the world who speak Icelandic and love their culture. There are only 320,000 of them. They represent the strongest link to the ancient Vikings, who wrote a powerful literature and formed the first parliament.

I began to get it. If the Icelanders lost their culture, the world would lose something very precious. The legacy is theirs to protect. The newcomers to Iceland are not coming in order to celebrate, and join, the Icelandic culture. They are fleeing poverty and persecution. They are looking to earn a living. They want a fresh start and would prefer to keep their own cultures, wherever they are from. If the newcomers speak English, they can cope with daily life, since nearly all Icelanders speak English. What a relief it might be, from their point of view, not to have to engage with the tongue-twisting ordeal of learning how the Vikings talked.

The stakes are high, and this plays out, according to Hanna, in the schools. Should the newcomers learn Icelandic as a second language while also speaking their first language in school? But if they continue with their first language, how does anyone know whether they will
really
learn Icelandic?

The stakes are most compelling in Iceland, given the extremely
small numbers of people there, but a similar sense of legacy exists for the Norwegians, of whom there are only 5 million in a world of billions. Norway accepts more immigrants per capita than the UK. Norway also has a higher percentage of its population that is foreign-born, at 14 percent, than the EU average.
¹⁵⁹
Danes are 5.5 million, 10 percent of whom are immigrants. Of the 9.5 million Swedes, 14 percent are immigrants.

In the last fifteen years, the number of immigrants and their descendants has almost tripled in Norway. In a country of only 5 million, already one in seven isn’t from Norway. “Who,” they might well ask, “will speak my language and love my culture, when my children already tune in to American television and the English world of the Internet. Some Nordic pop singers compose and record their songs in English from the outset. As the years go by, will I continue to feel at home in my own country?”

On a recent visit to Oslo, I hung out in an outdoor museum filled with centuries-old houses, farm buildings, and an ancient stave church complete with carved wooden dragons. I enjoyed folk dance performances by laughing young people dressed in brightly colored handmade clothes of the old styles. I talked with their leader, who told me that there is a trend among young people of increased interest in the traditional dances and music.

“Do you have an idea where that trend comes from?” I asked him.

He took a moment to think, his eyes taking in the Hardanger fiddle in the hands of a nearby teen. “You know, these days young people mix in school with girls wearing the hajib, Somali boys listening to Afro-pop, a lot of cultural styles side by side. Maybe it encourages them to root themselves a bit more securely in their own ethnicity. Maybe that’s it.”

Maybe these young folk dancers are pointing the way, I muse. Instead of worrying about how others are different,
why not become more securely at home with one’s own uniqueness?
Perhaps a world could be made safer for everyone.
¹⁶⁰

The Nordics have an anti-oppression resource: their outstanding track record in important arenas of diversity. I’ve already described the rapid strides made in tackling sexism and the economic design’s important role in that. The cabinet of the new Swedish government elected in 2014 has an equal number of women and men, a fact that goes largely unremarked within the Nordic countries, so usual has women’s participation in leadership become. Americans who enjoy reading mysteries have no doubt noticed that many of the most prominent of the male Nordic novelists, such as Denmark’s Peter Høeg, Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason, Norway’s Jo Nesbø, and Sweden’s Stieg Larssen and Henning Mankell, repeatedly explore feminist themes.

In 1971, during a time when a wave of young people on both sides of the Atlantic was inspired by a new vision of freedom, a group of squatters in Copenhagen founded
Fristaden Christiania
, the Free Town of Christiana. In 2014, I wandered through the stable community of more than 800 mostly long-term residents, in wonderment that a town of “anarchist hippies” could thrive for over forty years surrounded by a sea of Protestantism. Full of questions, I sat down with Kirsten Larsen Mhoja, a social anthropologist who has lived in Christiana for more than three decades.
Smiling as she recalled the struggle, Kirsten acknowledged that there had been multiple threats to the community. Survival, she said, required strategy, the cultivation of allies, and the development of strong norms of conflict resolution within the community itself.

The result? Christiana has proved itself so expert in sustainability, despite its marginal lifestyle within Denmark, that requests come from mainstream Danes for it to make itself a conscious laboratory for new approaches that support living on a changing planet.

Norway was the first country in the world to pass a law to protect homosexuals from discrimination, a major move for both equality and freedom. Since 1972, sexual activity between same-sex consenting partners has been legal. The age of consent was placed at age sixteen whether heterosexual or homosexual.

In 1979, Norwegian lesbians, gays, and bisexuals gained full rights and anti-discrimination protection in the armed forces. Two years later, the Storting prohibited hate speech directed at sexual minorities. In 1993, a civil partnership law took effect that gave many marriage rights to same-sex couples. (Denmark had already passed a similar law in 1989. Sweden followed in 1994.) In 2000, Norwegians gained the right to change their legal gender.

The Labor coalition government initiated a move for marriage equality in 2007, and the following year two opposition parties gave up their resistance to the initiative. The resulting parliamentary vote was 84–41, and the new law took effect on January 1, 2009. The law includes joint adoption by same-sex couples.

The city government of Oslo celebrated the law’s passage by throwing a giant free party for gays and their allies on the roof of the new Opera House.

Sami (formerly known as Lapps) are the indigenous people of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. They speak a form of the Finno-Ugric language and have traditionally lived a nomadic life, moving with reindeer herds across the national boundaries of northern Scandinavia.

Ethnic Norwegians have a history of oppressing the Samis, including efforts to suppress their religion, language, and way of life. The Samis responded with a liberation struggle, found allies, and in Norway succeeded in amending the Constitution to require the Norwegian state “to create conditions enabling the Sami people to preserve and develop its language, culture and way of life.”
¹⁶¹

In Geneva, Switzerland, while teaching in a United Nations–sponsored seminar for indigenous leaders around the world, I met John Henricksen, permanent representative of the Sami Council to the Commission on Human Rights at the UN. He was a leader of the
Sameting
(Sami Parliament), which was established in 1989. He told me that the Sameting has considerable authority in the internal affairs of his people, including education, economic, and welfare issues, while the Norwegian state retains authority for international affairs and the overall economic direction of the country.

One point of tension is that the Sami people feel considerable solidarity
across
national lines—the drawing of boundaries called “Norway” and “Sweden” is a recent imposition with no real legitimacy for the indigenous people who were there when Norsemen were nowhere to be seen. The question still to be worked on is, how can the unitary peoplehood of the Sami be asserted, with these nation state boundaries getting in the way?

Nevertheless, more and more of the 40,000-plus Sami are
identifying
themselves as such in the Norwegian census. That may mean that the stigma is receding. Steps like the Sami people taking
the global spotlight in the opening ceremony of the 1994 Lillehammer winter Olympics may be paying off.

Even while Denmark, Norway, and the other Nordics took diversity-friendly steps, an anti-Muslim sentiment could be heard in the background, occasionally erupting on the campaign trail largely initiated by the anti-immigration politicians.

When I was visiting family in Skien in 2000, I browsed among the vegetables and fruit on offer in the open market at the center of town. Political parties had booths, giving away their brochures and urging people to vote for them. I was struck by the assertiveness of the Labor Party brochure, showing on the front a full-page photo of two young children playing together, one black and the other white. I read with interest the accompanying text that amounted to: Labor is the party you’ve trusted all these years to build a strong economy that supports equality, democracy, and freedom, and you can trust us also to handle the challenges of building a strong multiracial society.

Other institutions resisted Islamophobia in 2000 as well.
Literaturans Huset
, an old and prestigious center of intellectual life in Norway, scheduled frequent forums and dialogues on diversity and issues raised by immigration, and academics appeared frequently on the radio and television dispensing light to go along with the rising heat.

As the Bishop of Oslo, Gunnar Staalsett, stood in the line of a thousand years of history in the Church of Norway. This was a church that stood against the Nazi oppression during World War II. On December 28, 2000, he made history by being the first
bishop to visit a mosque. He chose Oslo’s largest mosque and the important holiday of Id at the end of Ramadan.

In 2009, Siv Jensen, leader of the Progress Party, made an Islamophobic speech claiming that Norway was becoming a victim of “sneaking Islamization” (
snikislamisering
). Bishop Staalsett’s successor, Bishop Ole Christian Kvarme, stepped up. Kvarme is regarded as centrist and moderate, but he urged politicians to create reconciliation, not confrontation, between faiths. He then followed up by publically visiting two Oslo mosques.

By that time Muslims had become the second-largest denomination in Norway, after the Church of Norway. In 2010, a year after Siv Jensen’s speech, a group of Church of Norway bishops visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. Two years after that the Norwegian state finally ended its historic relationship with Christianity as the official religion. When I later met Halvor Nordhaug, the bishop of Bergen, he was visibly relieved. He was pleased that the mainstream Lutherans could now meet Muslims and other faith groups on a somewhat more equal playing field.

Inter-religious cooperation is growing. Imams are taking responsibility to end female mutilation, a custom used by Islamophobes to claim the moral high ground. Clergy actively oppose discrimination. Teachers in schools deliberately extend the range of what being “a Norwegian” is. The mass media write more stories about discrimination.

The Norwegian Center Against Racism (NCAR) is a nonprofit founded in 1978 that works with immigrants and supports dialogue
between the newcomers and ethnic Norwegians. I smiled when Mari Linløkken told me about crusty old Norwegians with traditional skills like hunting and fishing who were eager to help the newcomers.