The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  The OECD has warned that the greatest challenge Norway faces is to maintain its population’s incentive to work, study and innovate. Today, almost 10 per cent of Norwegian jobs are carried out by foreigners, mostly the kind of jobs – peeling bananas, gutting fish, washing hospital floors (according to Sætre almost half the country’s cleaning staff are foreign) – from which Norwegians would run a mile. Recently, the New York Times spoke to an economist at Handelsbanken in Oslo, Knut Anton Mork, quoting him as saying, ‘This is an oil-for-leisure program . . . We have been complacent. More and more vacation houses are being built. We have more holidays than most countries and extremely generous benefits and sick-leave policies. Some day the dream will end.’

  Already many Norwegians are calling for more than 4 per cent of the fund to be spent each year, and there is increasing political pressure for this from the Progress Party. ‘Why do we have to pay the world’s highest petrol prices?’ they ask. ‘Why are our hospitals not the best in the world? Why did my post arrive at 9 a.m. this morning instead of 8 a.m.?’ Up goes the cry, ‘How can this happen in the world’s richest country?’

  ‘Wealth changes us, and we don’t discuss it very much,’ Sætre concludes at the end of Petromania. ‘But how the oil wealth affects us is the most important question of our time.’

  I contacted Sætre in New York, where he now lives, and asked him how the book had been received when it was published in 2009.

  ‘I expected this to be a theme that all Norwegians were interested in,’ he told me. ‘But it turned out that Swedes were more interested. I felt the issues I tried to raise were largely ignored, especially by the older generation and people in the oil-producing areas, who were quite sceptical. Whenever I went to speak about the book, someone would rise from their seat and say that the oil had been a blessing for Norway. The attitude was often that I was spoiled, since I didn’t appreciate the wealth the oil had brought to my country. I often pointed out that what I was interested in was not how bad Norway had become because of the oil, but that I rather tried to describe how Norway was changed.’

  Sætre didn’t want to paint too dystopian a picture of his homeland. Things are pretty great in Norway, and fears about what will happen when the oil runs out are being pushed further into the future. Eventually, though, it will run out, and an economy in which the public sector accounts for 52 per cent of GDP will no longer be viable. ‘Norwegians will have to adapt to a new situation. Probably, the welfare state will have to be curbed, and people will have to get by with fewer government services. Another question is what the business community will do and what kinds of jobs people will get in the post-oil era, since the whole Norwegian economy is so tied to the oil. If these questions are handled the wrong way, there might be some tough times ahead for Norway, and this could lead to political unrest. I think the Norwegian institutions are solid enough to deal with this. I do, however, believe that I live in the best of times in Norway now, and that the wealth of the government is almost unreal, and this feels almost unfair, and I can imagine that it will go downhill from here.’

  Sætre warns, too, of the colossal power of the oil lobby in Norway, with its anti-climate-change propaganda and the whitewashing of its industry’s activities in countries headed by dubious regimes like Angola, Kazakhstan and Algeria. The oil industry controls Norway’s foreign policy, Sætre claims, ‘isolating us and making the country asocial’. As a result Norway has been sidelined from Europe and is becoming ever more protectionist. He points to what he perceives as the ever-increasing, pernicious influence of Statoil on life in Norway. The company is becoming a dominant element in the Norwegian cultural sphere, for instance, awarding massive grants to young artists and musicians. The only catch is, those artists and musicians have to sign a contract promising not to criticise the company.

  Cultural censorship is by no means the most serious allegation aimed at Statoil. Greenpeace says that the company has completely undermined its reputation for good environmental practice with the acquisition of a controversial tar sands lease in Canada – tar sand oil being more polluting than crude, both in terms of its extraction and in its use. Though Statoil was awarded the lease having promised that its methods would be the least environmentally onerous, Greenpeace says their actions ‘will certainly result in major greenhouse-gas emissions and environmental damage’. Statoil is very vocal on the subject of social corporate responsibility, but a few years back it was hit by what Business Week called ‘the worse bribery and influence-peddling scandal in Norway’s history’, involving payments to Iranian officials. Really, it is hard to see how its ethical code differs from any other oil company.

  I had talked a little about ethical issues with Yngve Slyngstad, head of Norway’s oil fund. He said that they didn’t invest in tobacco and followed the UN’s advice on arms investments, explaining that their approach is to try to change companies’ policies and practices from within.

  ‘You cannot invest in eight thousand companies where there is no one to blame,’ he said. ‘What do you do? Wash your hands and say that’s not our problem? Or do you sit down and say there are things we can improve here, and our role is to find ways to improve them?’

  But what about the environmental impact of the oil itself? How did the Norwegians come to terms with that? Slyngstad took a deep breath.

  ‘So, if it turns out that the cause of climate-change carbon emissions . . .’ he caught my smile at that ‘if’, ‘. . . and it seems that most people are of that opinion, then at least as an oil fund we can see what we can do to make the companies aware of the issues.’

  This, of course, is the elephant in the room as far as Norway’s riches are concerned. It is universally acknowledged by most intelligent, independent observers that all fossil fuels, and oil in particular, are bad news for our planet – they are unsustainable, pollute the atmosphere, and it seems likely they are slowly making the planet warmer. Norway sources much of its own energy from clean, renewable hydroelectric power, thus absolving itself of direct consumer guilt. It is the wily drug pusher who refuses to touch its own product.

  An even more uncomfortable issue for the Norwegians, one presumes, is the fact that they directly benefit from those geopolitical conflicts that push up the price of oil – the invasion of Iraq, for instance, or the Libyan Civil War. It is a great irony that a nation that is so often called upon to mediate in international conflicts – as Norway did in Sri Lanka, for instance – benefits the most from the various conflicts connected to oil production elsewhere in the world. I asked Slyngstad if there was any sense that their great fortune was tainted by the environmental and human destruction oil is responsible far in the world.

  ‘You will receive different answers to that question depending which Norwegian is answering,’ Slyngstad answered carefully. ‘You would find someone of that opinion. I think the consensus view is that probably yes, this oil has this aspect of CO2, but it’s probably better than coal. But how about other renewable, sustainable energy sources? We have therefore put in place a specific programme to invest in new technologies.’

  Obviously Slyngstad was never likely to criticise the source of his fund’s gargantuan wealth. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, on the other hand, had fewer qualms.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ he had said the first time I had interviewed him, back in 2009, and asked him about Norwegian oil guilt. ‘I think you might be on to something, yes. We don’t ever make any link from the pollution to our wealth; actually, Norwegians think they are very clean, but they pollute far more than the Swedes.’

  The next time we met, post-Breivik, he had a new take on the subject: ‘The mental conundrum is very similar to the situation we had on 23 July when we realised it was one of us who had committed the crime,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t blame the foreigners. We’ve always been used to thinking of ourselves as a nation as part of the solution, and with the oil we suddenly became part of the problem, and we can’t reconcile ourselves to that. Most people are really in d
enial. They say, “Well, you know, if we hadn’t been involved in these tar sands in Canada,” which is one of the filthiest ways of extracting oil you can imagine, “then someone else would have done it in an even less environmentally sustainable way.” And you know, when you argue like that you can argue for everything, basically – “If we hadn’t done it, someone else would have, and they are a lot badder than us.”’

  Does anyone in Norway ever suggest that you stop extracting the oil altogether?

  ‘No. In fact we are pumping it up at enormous speed, much faster than anyone else, and I have always been struck by this because there is hardly any debate about this.’

  And the impact on the Norwegians themselves? Is it making them soft and lazy, as the Danes liked to claim?

  ‘Oh yes, of course it’s done something to us. My evidence is mostly anecdotal because this is not really my area of research, but take the fish factories on the north coast – it’s well paid but hard, cold work, fish-filleting. Most is now outsourced to China – the fish is flown to China, filleted, packaged in Findus boxes and sent back – but the rest is done by Tamils and Russians, not Norwegians. Norwegians move to London or Paris to be something “in the media”,’ he guffaws, ‘and that’s a real sign of decadence! No one wants to work in a factory, or be an engineer, everybody wants to be famous . . . One tends to take the world for granted. Nothing is at stake. It doesn’t really matter if I show up for work tomorrow, things will chug on anyway. Sick leave is up, and has been since the nineties, and not because people get more influenza, but because they feel it doesn’t really matter.’

  Chapter 7

  Butter

  AS WE’VE HEARD, Norway has always been a somewhat peripheral, isolated, inward-looking place. In a sense, the geopolitical turbulence the region has seen over the centuries has played a lesser role in determining the psyche of the modern Norwegian than its beautiful, savage landscape has.

  Denmark built, then lost, an empire, has always been the bridge with continental Europe, and wrangled ceaselessly with Sweden. Sweden ruled and lost Finland, waged wars deep into Europe, and, post-Second World War, has seen its manufacturing corporations conquer the world. Though it shares Norway’s geographical isolation, in its own cursed way, Finland has also been forced to engage more with regional geopolitics thanks to its role as the rope in a tug-of-war between east and west, ruled first by Sweden, then Russia, bloodied yet defiant after countless conflicts, and it is the only Nordic country to have embraced the euro. You could argue that Iceland has also existed on the edges of Nordic history, although it was Icelanders who discovered America, and they have, of course, recently enjoyed a second rampage, this time out among the money markets of the world.

  As for the Norwegians, they have always tended to keep themselves to themselves. Even within their own borders they spread themselves out as if they are trying to put as much space as possible between one another. And even on those justly celebrated occasions when the Norwegians have displayed immense courage and ingenuity in venturing out into the world – your Roald Amundsens, Fridtjof Nansens and Thor Heyerdals – they still appear to have taken great care to ensure that the venturing took place where there were likely to be few, if any, people.

  The outside world can sometimes appear to be of little consequence to the Norwegians. They had their fish and their timber, and now they also have their oil and their dairy monopoly. They don’t really need anyone else, except perhaps for a few Swedes to peel their bananas. My impression from a brief attempt once to seek help from the Norwegian tourist board for research on a magazine article seemed to suggest that visitors are politely welcomed rather than overtly encouraged, but they’d probably prefer it if you stayed on your cruise ship if you don’t mind.

  Why are the Norwegians so closed? Throughout the Danish and Swedish occupations they lacked not only self-determination, but to a large extent any sense of self or nationhood. After a long, drawn-out but not especially fiercely fought campaign for independence, self-rule finally came in 1905. What happened next presents us with a telling difference between the Norwegians and the Swedes, and their progress over the following century. The Swedes made a conscious, unified push towards the light, embracing technological and industrial progress, modernism, secularism and socially progressive politics, in the process becoming one of the most successful industrial nations of the post-war years, a manufacturing colossus, a paragon of what a modern, multicultural nation should be – and with great pop music and sexy tennis players to boot.

  As Thomas Hylland Eriksen put it, ‘Sweden went onwards and upwards into the future and modernism because, I think, they felt it was the only way. They had become a kind of syphilitic old country, they needed renewal. But Norway needed to find, and to an extent construct, an identity – hence all the weird costumes and national romanticism, which still continues.’

  The Norwegians decided that they neither liked nor needed the modern world, they preferred their bunad, their folk dancing and their dried fish, and retreated back into the safety of their agrarian past to commune with nature and the sea. And then the oil came along, which has changed things to a degree, but if anything has only helped the Norwegians to maintain their traditional geographical population spread, their isolationism and protectionist trade policies.

  ‘If you look at Europe horizontally, so to speak, you see Norway and Switzerland sticking up,’ Yngve Slyngstad told me. ‘They are not really part of Europe. Sweden and Denmark had a nobility and the feudal system, they were part of the European way of looking at the world, with small villages that expanded and farms with serfs, and so on, but we didn’t have that in Norway, so the differences are much larger than you might expect given our common language.’

  Occasionally though, this isolationism backfires on the Norwegians. There was much mirth in the rest of Scandinavia when, in 2011, Norway was reported to have run out of butter. A fad diet that recommended ingesting vast quantities of the stuff had swept the nation and cleared out domestic stocks. To protect its own dairy industry Norway imposes extravagant duties on imported dairy products and, as a consequence, the price of butter shot up. People began panic-buying, supplies of domestic butter produced by Norway’s Tine Dairy monopoly ran out, and soon Norwegians began asking Danish friends to fill their suitcases with Lurpak when they came to visit.

  ‘It’s a disgrace and it is embarrassing,’ harrumphed Torgeir Trældal, spokesperson on agricultural affairs for the Progress Party. ‘The last time we received free food supplies from our neighbouring countries was during the Second World War.’

  ‘I’d rather be a battered citizen of the EU with a mouth full of buttery cookies, than a filthy rich Norwegian chewing on unbuttered toast,’ wrote one rather graceless Swedish journalist at the time, adding, ‘There is an irresistible irony when a small country awash with oil money can’t manage to supply its people with something as basic as butter . . . Our own home-cooked traditional saffron buns will taste that much better when we think that the Norwegians will have to do all their cooking with margarine.’

  Unappealing as her Schadenfreude may have been, it offers a telling insight into the raw resentment and jealousy which festers beneath the surface of the supposedly harmonious Scandinavian tribal triumvirate. The Norwegians, however, remain unrepentant about their protectionism: recently they provoked great indignation in Copenhagen by arbitrarily imposing a 262 per cent import duty on Danish cheese – Norway’s own form of post-colonial revenge.

  Another revealing aspect of this are the numerous jokes at the expense of the Norwegians told by their neighbours, in which they always seem to play the role of village idiot – much like the Irish jokes told by the English, or the Poles in jokes told by Americans. Such jokes are racist, reductive, politically incorrect and colonialist. They must of course be condemned in the strongest terms by all right-thinking people and should never be repeated.

  This is one of my favourites:

  A Swede, a Dane and a Norwegian a
re shipwrecked on a desert island. The Swede finds a magic shell which, when rubbed, grants each of them a wish. ‘I want to go home to my large and comfortable bungalow with the Volvo, video and slick IKEA furniture,’ he says, and promptly vanishes. ‘I want to go back to my cosy little flat in Copenhagen, to sit on my soft sofa, feet on the table, next to my sexy girlfriend and with a six-pack of lager,’ says the Dane, and off he flies. The Norwegian, after giving the problem a bit of thought, rubs the shell. ‘It’s really lonely here,’ he says. ‘I wish my two friends could come back.’

  These next two come courtesy of my son. That he heard them at his school in Denmark is testimony to the fact that Norwegian jokes are thriving. Interestingly, my Danish wife tells me that this is a relatively new development. When she was at school, she says, the role of the dunce in playground jokes was taken by people from Denmark’s second city, Aarhus (meanwhile, a Norwegian friend says they used to tell these jokes about Swedes). Of course, back in the 1970s, the Norwegians’ oil wealth was a distant fantasy. Could it be that Norwegian jokes have grown in currency as the Norwegians’ currency has grown in value?

  A policeman encounters a Norwegian walking through central Copenhagen with a penguin on a lead.

  ‘You should take that to the zoo straightaway,’ insists the policeman.

  ‘Righty-ho!’ says the Norwegian.

  They meet again the next day, yet the Norwegian is still accompanied by the penguin.

  ‘I thought I told you to take him to the zoo,’ says the policeman.

  ‘Yes, I did!’ says the Norwegian. ‘He seemed to like it. I was thinking we could go to the cinema today.’

  And in a similar vein:

  A Norwegian man buys a ticket from the girl in the kiosk at the cinema. A few moments later he returns to buy another. Then comes back for another. And another.