Norway is a rich nation, thanks to oil and marine resources, and has suffered little from the global financial crisis or the European debt crisis. It’s the third richest country per capita in Europe and its gross domestic product has risen steadily since 1998, (except for a slight downturn in 2009). A high proportion of the population works (70%). The welfare state is still strong: there have been no drastic cuts in public spending and the country still has probably the most generous social policy in the world. For years, Norway has been top of the UN list of the best countries to live in.
But social and wage inequality has grown sharply over the last 20 years. A report by the left-wing think-tank Manifest states that since 1990 the income gap between the 1% who earn the most and the national average has grown much faster in Norway than in the UK or the US . The share of gross financial assets (bank deposits, shares) held by the middle classes was halved between 1984 and 2008. The income of the richest rose sharply, while wages fell as a proportion of value added. It’s against this backdrop that immigration has become a central political issue.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor of social anthropology specialising in multiculturalism, said: “These people are clearly not classical neo-Nazis who beat up Muslims in the streets. They are not unemployed men left stranded by factory closures. They are lower-middle class people who are well read, even if their reading is very selective” According to Eriksen, there is not necessarily a correlation between economic stagnation and the emergence of a populist right wing, but the Islamophobic right in Norway is made up of “people who feel they have been downgraded. They feel their standard of living has stagnated; they feel marginalised and excluded from society. After 22 July, many said out loud that they had not been heard. They consider themselves a key part of the nation, but can no longer identify with it, because another concept of national community has been imposed on Norway — a more cosmopolitan and egalitarian concept, founded on citizenship rather than ethno-national affiliation."
Does Norway really have an immigration problem? The open-door policy on foreign labour ended in 1975, when Pakistanis had just come on to the labour market. Today, first- and second-generation Pakistanis, the largest immigrant group from outside Europe, account for the majority of Norway’s 90,000 Muslims. 86% of Norway’s five million citizens are Lutheran Protestants. Most immigrants since 1975 are from the European Union, Sweden, Poland, France, Germany, and work in industry, or refugees and asylum seekers, who are subject to strict acceptance criteria. Even if unemployment is higher among immigrants (7.7% compared with a national average of 3.3%; among second-generation immigrants, unemployment is only 1 percentage point higher than the average for all young people), they are relatively well integrated. A survey in 2010 found that 70% of Norwegians “appreciate immigrants’ culture and labour efforts and believe that labour immigration from non-Nordic countries makes a positive contribution to the Norwegian economy” .
So Norway seems to have succeeded in creating a multicultural society where integration is not a major problem. Yet Islamophobia is a growing element of the political debate. Civita, financed by employers’ organisations, have done their best to prove that the Nordic welfare state model is no longer viable, although day-to-day reality shows that taxation and productivity growth are more than enough to support the current system. The Progress Party and elements of the Conservative Party have blamed, and continue to blame, immigrants for the supposed breakdown. Last year a government commission on the role of immigrants in the workforce published its report; the right used it to denounce both immigration and the welfare state, declaring that “non-western immigrants are a net … loss”. The conclusions of the report are far from being so clear-cut. This has allowed the populist right to harness the frustrations of an electorate that feels it has been mistreated — particularly the "middle classes", who have been left behind by the richest.
Ali Esbati, an Iranian-born Swedish economist currently working for Manifest, said: “When the political debate on social reform, the balance of power on the labour market or how the economy functions is no longer treated as an important axis of practical politics, other axes will come into play, such as cultural conflict.” The populist right plans to make the “popular will” its own — the will, as Esbati put it, of “those who belong to an elite in some domains but cannot bear to see those they despise in the limelight and becoming more visible in society. They hate the labour movement, women’s liberation organisations and cultural and academic figures who argue for a different social order.”
For instance Helge Lurås of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs who said on Russian television that the multiculturalists were responsible for the Oslo bombing because they had stifled popular will with their policy on immigration.
According to Esbati, the right-wing upsurge originated outside Scandinavia: “Throughout the western world, over the last few decades, the highly organised forces of capitalism have fought to prevent economic stagnation by means of even greater exploitation, and by attacking former bastions of the labour movement — pension systems, public health services and labour law. The present difficulties present a golden opportunity to exploit fear and divide society on ethnic and religious lines. These themes are recurrent and transnational.”
Adapted from here
But social and wage inequality has grown sharply over the last 20 years. A report by the left-wing think-tank Manifest states that since 1990 the income gap between the 1% who earn the most and the national average has grown much faster in Norway than in the UK or the US . The share of gross financial assets (bank deposits, shares) held by the middle classes was halved between 1984 and 2008. The income of the richest rose sharply, while wages fell as a proportion of value added. It’s against this backdrop that immigration has become a central political issue.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor of social anthropology specialising in multiculturalism, said: “These people are clearly not classical neo-Nazis who beat up Muslims in the streets. They are not unemployed men left stranded by factory closures. They are lower-middle class people who are well read, even if their reading is very selective” According to Eriksen, there is not necessarily a correlation between economic stagnation and the emergence of a populist right wing, but the Islamophobic right in Norway is made up of “people who feel they have been downgraded. They feel their standard of living has stagnated; they feel marginalised and excluded from society. After 22 July, many said out loud that they had not been heard. They consider themselves a key part of the nation, but can no longer identify with it, because another concept of national community has been imposed on Norway — a more cosmopolitan and egalitarian concept, founded on citizenship rather than ethno-national affiliation."
Does Norway really have an immigration problem? The open-door policy on foreign labour ended in 1975, when Pakistanis had just come on to the labour market. Today, first- and second-generation Pakistanis, the largest immigrant group from outside Europe, account for the majority of Norway’s 90,000 Muslims. 86% of Norway’s five million citizens are Lutheran Protestants. Most immigrants since 1975 are from the European Union, Sweden, Poland, France, Germany, and work in industry, or refugees and asylum seekers, who are subject to strict acceptance criteria. Even if unemployment is higher among immigrants (7.7% compared with a national average of 3.3%; among second-generation immigrants, unemployment is only 1 percentage point higher than the average for all young people), they are relatively well integrated. A survey in 2010 found that 70% of Norwegians “appreciate immigrants’ culture and labour efforts and believe that labour immigration from non-Nordic countries makes a positive contribution to the Norwegian economy” .
So Norway seems to have succeeded in creating a multicultural society where integration is not a major problem. Yet Islamophobia is a growing element of the political debate. Civita, financed by employers’ organisations, have done their best to prove that the Nordic welfare state model is no longer viable, although day-to-day reality shows that taxation and productivity growth are more than enough to support the current system. The Progress Party and elements of the Conservative Party have blamed, and continue to blame, immigrants for the supposed breakdown. Last year a government commission on the role of immigrants in the workforce published its report; the right used it to denounce both immigration and the welfare state, declaring that “non-western immigrants are a net … loss”. The conclusions of the report are far from being so clear-cut. This has allowed the populist right to harness the frustrations of an electorate that feels it has been mistreated — particularly the "middle classes", who have been left behind by the richest.
Ali Esbati, an Iranian-born Swedish economist currently working for Manifest, said: “When the political debate on social reform, the balance of power on the labour market or how the economy functions is no longer treated as an important axis of practical politics, other axes will come into play, such as cultural conflict.” The populist right plans to make the “popular will” its own — the will, as Esbati put it, of “those who belong to an elite in some domains but cannot bear to see those they despise in the limelight and becoming more visible in society. They hate the labour movement, women’s liberation organisations and cultural and academic figures who argue for a different social order.”
For instance Helge Lurås of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs who said on Russian television that the multiculturalists were responsible for the Oslo bombing because they had stifled popular will with their policy on immigration.
According to Esbati, the right-wing upsurge originated outside Scandinavia: “Throughout the western world, over the last few decades, the highly organised forces of capitalism have fought to prevent economic stagnation by means of even greater exploitation, and by attacking former bastions of the labour movement — pension systems, public health services and labour law. The present difficulties present a golden opportunity to exploit fear and divide society on ethnic and religious lines. These themes are recurrent and transnational.”
Adapted from here
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