It all started with a petition by thirty-four academic staff members from NTNU and the regional college HiST recommending an academic and cultural boycot of Israel and Israeli universities. Interestingly enough, at least two of the petitioners have jewish backgrounds themselves. Although I am sympathetic to the cause, I think the idea of academic and cultural isolation is more likely to be counterproductive to the larger goal of improving conditions for Palestinians. My opinion is however beside the matter. For reference, the total number of academic staff at NTNU is about 2700, of which 34 doesn’t seem like an alarming number. This also mobilized a counter-petition by other members of the staff.

Next, three professors at NTNU organized a seminar series about the Israel-Palestine conflict with the endorsement of the university Rector Trond Digernes. They invited international speakers like Stephen Walt, Moshe Zuckermann and Illian Pape in addittion to various Norwegian speakers. They instantly came under attack by “friends of Israel” that critizised them for a biased selection of speakers, accusing them of being inspired by hatred of Israel and jews.

This was eventually picked up by Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. That’s when the ball really started rolling. The usual freak anonymous hate-calls and blog flaming is to be expected. But After the Ha’aretz article, NTNU actually received an official letter from the Israeli ambassador accusing NTNU of “Israel-bashing”. For diplomats to interfere with university seminars, especially with such language, seems rather unusual to me.

Today was the big day when the board was to decide on the issue of the boycott. The Rector had recommended against it, the Minister of Education had warned that it was probably in violation of the law-protected academic freedom, and the board voted unanimously against boycott. The rector didn’t even want to put the proposal on the agenda, but board members felt that it had to be given due consideration. They gave it so and rejected it. As everybody expected to. In the meantime, Israel-supporters have whipped up a frenzy calling NTNU and Norway all manner of bad things. This non-issue of 34 academics forwarding a political opinion with no substantial support was blown completely out of proportion. And it was all topped by the most ridiculous article by Haaretz today.

I don’t think Haaretz was actually there to see the meeting, and their intelligence in general is horrendously bad.

First: They cite Professor Alsberg of NTNU as a board member. He is a professor, but he is not a member of the board. Secondly, they claim the issue was scrapped from the agenda. It was not. It was opened for debate and rejected.

But most importantly: Alsberg claims that the boycott was prevented due to media attention and outside pressure. The leader of the Anti-Semitism center in Oslo even claims it was all due to Alsberg and his counter-petition. They are both very wrong. As a former board member of NTNU myself, I would have been shocked if this proposal went through even if it had been done in secrecy. Trust me when I say that getting a majority of the votes on the board was never even close to being a reality. I know the students were against it. The chairwoman of the board has clearly said she was against. The rector recommended to the board it was dropped, and from what I know of the other members, I doubt more than a couple of them seriously considered voting in favour. Outside pressure was perfectly superfluous.

This was a political expression by 34 out of 2700 academic staff. Nothing more. Although a majority probably supports taking a stand against Israeli human rights offences, there is no substantial support for a boycott. The “friends of Israel” have however once again done a good job of alienating even more of those interested in working for true dialogue.

I recommend the words of Professor Ann Rudinow Sætnan, one of the original petitioners, a Jew herself  and certainly no anti-semite, to learn how far from the truth this media hyped image of NTNU and the general sentiments of Norwegians towards Israel is from the truth:

There are many categories of people being discriminated against, some even to the ultimate point of mass killings. At the moment, Jews are not among them. At the moment I belong only to privileged categories. But if I “tolerate so complacently” the outrages being perpetrated against others, then sooner or later I will find myself assigned to some category singled out for similar treatment. That is the lesson I take from the Holocaust, and that is why I cannot stand by silently as Israel bombs Gaza to pieces, or for that matter starves Gaza slowly. Nor can I accept that my standpoint is anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist or even anti-Israeli. I am critical of current Israeli policies, yes. In my view, those policies will prove suicidal. In my view, it would be better for Israel, for the Zionist vision, and for Jews (remembering here that I do NOT equate these three!) if Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, pull out the settlements or leave them to their own devices, and work on developing good neighborly relations with a viable Palestinian state.

It seems there are a great number of people out there with an interest in portraying Norway as a country of Jew-haters who wish to see Israel destroyed. From my experience, that couldn’t be further from the truth. With the obvious exception of both the extreme right and the extreme left, there seems to me like there is very little hate of Jews and Israel in Norway. There is, however, much sympathy for Palestinians and much resentment over the actions of the Israeli state. This should not be confused. Critique of the so-called Operation Cast Lead aka. the Gaza Massacre is not equal to hate of Israel. Support for UN resolutions condemning the separation wall is not anti-Semitism.

It appears like elements within the Israeli government want to keep the conflict level up, possibly to maintain an image of Israel as a victim and weaken Norway’s position as a peace negotiator in the region. This is a bad and dangerous idea. It serves to further isolate Israel from the rest of the world, making it easier to rally domestic support for outrageous policies. The proposal of an academic boycott is equally bad and will only add a new layer of insulation and make the work of internal critics in Israel more difficult.

Dialogue is the key, but good dialogue doesn’t start with accusing your opponents of being evil or confusing well-reasoned critique with hateful attacks.

More than a socialist victory, this election is a hard blow to the centrist parties in Norwegian politics. Fighting between the two major blocks seems to have drawn voters especially from Venstre who defended their position in between the two blocks. Infighting and chaos among the right wing parties must probably also account for a major part of the loss.

On the socialist side of the centre, voters appear to be shifting from the more radical Socialist Left (SV) to the more moderate Labour. The centrist coalition partner Senterpartiet (the Centre Party) keeps their members of parliament. What this means for shuffling of cabinet seats remains to be seen.

Still, things are far from decided yet. This will be undecided for hours yet.

I see this as an extremely positive development for higher education and research in Norway. I am myself a former university board member, and believe these institutions can benefit immensely from some external views as part of their governance. With the close language culture ties between the Scandinavian countries, it seems very unlikely that it should have any ill effects on the effectiveness of governance at all.

On behalf of my own university, NTNU, I welcome the director of the Swedish elite institution Karolinska Institutet, Mrs. Karin Röding as new board member.

He was party secretary of the Labour party from 1945 to 1969, a period through which the Labour party was in government for most of the time. The joint leadership between Lie and the most prominent prime minister during the period, Einar Gerhardsen has become famous in Norwegian politics both for its effectiveness in building the country and for its latter days bitter rivalry.

Lie was one of the people who rebuilt the Labour party from a party of class struggle to a broader mass party building the welfare state on a compromise between capitalism and socialism. He was one of the ideologers that formed a new kind of socialism where anti-capitalism was replaced by a modern social democratic quest for liberty for all. In domestic policy he pushed for social reforms along with his comrade in arms Gerhardsen.

In foreign and security policy he was much more controversial. He was driven by a distaste for communism whose anti-democratic tendencies he felt was a corruption of socialism.  He feared its spread and favoured NATO membership and nuclear armament. He went as far as agitating for nuclear arms on Norwegian soil and was somewhat of a Norwegian McCarthy in actively organizing networks to report on “suspicious activities”, and demanded internal loyalty. These things created a growing divide between him and Gerhardsen who had a less realist approach to foreign policy and a more open approach to dissent.

In 1967 the conflict between Gerhardsen and Lie came to a boil as Gerhardsen confronted him at the party congress, proposing to depose him as party secretary. According to eye witnesses Lie responded by threatening to “crush you like a louse”. Lie’s reign survived the attack at the ’67 congress, but he stepped down in 1969.

This was however not the end of his political influence. Even unto his sickbed for the last half year of his life, at age 103, he was approached by politicians and journalists alike for advice and comment. He remained an outspoken critic of the Labour party leadership whenever he meant that they strayed from the right path of social democracy. His retirement was also spent writing books, of which he published a respectable number.

Haakon Lie remained a giant in Norwegian politics until his death, and although controversial in many ways he will remain in Norwegian history as one of the architects of the post-war welfare state.

See also

• Obituary in the Guardian
• Haakon Lie on Wikipedia

“As a socialist, I have always said that the market can’t regulate itself,” she said. “But even I was surprised how strong the failure was.”

These are the words of Norway’s Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen from the political party Socialist Left (SV), which is part of the current centre-left government coalition in Norway. The words come from an article in the Global Business section of The New York Times, which praises the economic management of the Norwegian state, among other things  how it has stuck with its social democratic welfare model through boom and bust.

The global financial crisis has brought low the economies of just about every country on earth. But not Norway.

With a quirky contrariness as deeply etched in the national character as the fjords carved into its rugged landscape, Norway has thrived by going its own way. When others splurged, it saved. When others sought to limit the role of government, Norway strengthened its cradle-to-grave welfare state.

And in the midst of the worst global downturn since the Depression, Norway’s economy grew last year by just under 3 percent. The government enjoys a budget surplus of 11 percent and its ledger is entirely free of debt.

The debt free government is of course something the current centre-left coalition can’t take the credit for alone. The Norwegian government has passed between Labour, centre-right and centre-left governments for the last decade.  Since 1990, there has been a broad consensus in the Norwegian parliament for a programme of  national savings in a government pension fund, to preserve value for future generations and avoid “Dutch disease“. I mentioned this policy in an earlier post on this blog.

The description of Norway as always sticking with its welfare model is another issue, though. Norway did go through a phase of privatization of welfare, for example the schooling system, during the last government, but this was abruptly stopped by the centre-left Stoltenberg administration when it came into power four years ago. Of course this didn’t necessarily affect government expenditure.

If the right wing were to come into power in the upcoming parliament elections, we might see another shift in this policy. Although supportive of the need for government stimuli to the economy, their preferred stimuli come in the form of tax cuts rather than the countercyclic government expenditures the current government favours. Last week’s conservative party congress heavily emphasized this.

(Hat tip to Tromp for bringing this to my attention).

Fremskrittspartiet has always been a party critical to immigration and foreign cultural influence. It may not be quite fair to compare them with Jörg Haider in Austria or Gert Wilders in the Netherlands, but to a certain degree they play on some of the same fears.

In a project paper I previously posted on this blog, one of the few clearly significant correlations I could find in the occasionally rather contradictory voter mass of this party was between the propensity to vote for FrP and a scepticial attitude to foreign culture. In previous elections they have gained much whenever immigration and scepticism to foreign cultures has been allowed to become a dominant topic in the election campaigns

At the moment, foreign influence on Norwegian culture is one of the hot topics in Norwegian politics. But the election is still many months off, and it will take hard work, skill and some luck for Fremskrittspartiet to be able to keep this topic alive all the way until September, but if they manage it they might actually be able to make their ambitions for government power somewhat more credible than they are today.

And with so much to gain, I suspect that Fremskrittspartiet will give it a go. Besides the general comments about islamization, party leader Siv Jensen has also recently launched (verbal) attacks at a university college for allowing an imam that denies Holocaust to speak to students and the government for letting international agreements get in the way of expelling suspected Iraqi terrorist-supporter Mullah Krekar.

We may be looking at a season of political debate that might become very ugly indeed…

Further reading:

• This blog: “Who votes for Fremskrittspartiet?“
• Dagbladet.no [in Norwegian]: “- Kampen mot radikal islam er vår tids viktigste“
• NRK.no [in Norwegian]: “-Sivs beskrivelse er langt fra sann“
• Dabladet.no [in Norwegian]: “Siv Jensen advarer mot snikislamisering“
• Daniel Pipes blog: “How many islamists?“

This was picked up by Norwegian media when Norwegian parliamentarians met with Swedish counterparts and presented under the heading “Met by laughter in Sweden”. What the Swedes were laughing at was the level of micromanagement in road building that the Norwegian parliament is involved in. In Norway, every road builiding project is a parliament issue, and Helland and Sørensen have proved that this leads to non-optimal distributions of road construction money.

Norwegian Secretary of Transportation Liv Signe Navarsete doesn’t get the most important point:

- These are scientists that think the country can be planned with a calculator and that obviously find it profitable to close down local communities. There are numerous considerations to be made regarding housing distribution, industry and tourism. We need to develop business and work all over the country, not just in central areas. (Aftenposten, my translation)

The virtues of cost-benefit analysis can of course be debated, and there is a long standing Norwegian tradition of valuing distributed settlement of a lot higher than what is done in economic models. I think politicians might have been over-valuing it, but that isn’t the most important point here.

The most disturbing point isn’t that the distribution of money is non-optimal from a cost-benefit perspective. That’s the nature of politics. The big problem is that there is a skewed distribution as a result of election strategy concerns. That is the point that should be debated, and which Secretary Navarsete is drawing attention away from. Valuing decentralized communities highly is acceptable from a democratic point of view. Consistently bribing swing voters with public money isn’t.

Sources:

• Helland and Sørensen (2008) [Requires subscription] “Geographical Redistribution with disproportional representation: a politico-economic model of Norwegian road projects.” Public Choice, October 2008
• Helland and Sørensen (2008) [Open access] “Geographical Redistribution with disproportional representation: a politico-economic model of Norwegian road projects.” Open access working document, Oslo:BI
• Are Slettan [in Norwegian]: “Navarsete ler av forskere“

The banks, on the other hand, are holding their ace, being the necessary lifeline business needs to stay afloat. Despite packages and central bank interest cuts, Norwegian banks are still holding back on loans to business and have been slow to cut interest rates. This is becoming a major problem for businesses that used to finance activities in the international bonds market. Current estimates are that Norwegian companies need to refinance about NOK 90 billions in bonds this year(2). With a dried up international finance market this needs to be replaced with domestic loans. Bank manager Wærstad is trying to make Prime Minister Stoltenberg play his capital ace before she needs to play hers – extending refinancing loans at acceptable terms to private business.

Both players have more cards in their hands. What Aftenposten designates as Wærsted’s jack is the fact that Norwegian banks are still making money. None of them are threatened by bankruptcy just yet, and can afford to wait. On the other hand, Stoltenberg holds a jack of his own – that bank losses will begin to increase as business get into trouble because of tight lending.

These cards all seem to amount to a classical scenario from game theory: The Chicken Game, also known as the Hawk-Dove game. Neither player wants to yield, but the worst possible outcome for both is if neither yields and they crash. And this all fits rather well. The worst possible outcome for the banks is is nobody extends credit to private business and we start to see mass bankruptcies. This will in turn give banks problems with getting their money back, getting them in trouble. The government on the other hand doesn’t want to hand out free money, but mass bankruptcies will lead to massive unemployment at a great political cost.

The last cards seem to me to be a different altogether, or possible strategies for avoiding the chicken game. The last of Stoltenberg’s cards Aftenposten identifies is the opportunity the government has to circumvent banks and start lending money to business directly. A number of government institutions already exist to support business. Already the semi-governmental export finance institution Eksportfinans has already received a substantial crisis package. Stoltenberg might also channel more money into various development and venture capital funds, or even in the last instance start a complete government bank.

The last cards the banks hold, according to Aftenposten is the opportunity to say no to help from the government if there are too many strings attached. Management bonuses and pay raises is a particular point the government wants to curb, not unlike the recent statements by Obama (Yahoo! News, Marketwatch) This seems to me like the one point where the analogies falter somewhat. Firstly, Norway doesn’t quite compare to the United States when it comes to executive bonuses. They are substantial, but not on the billion dollar level we’ve seen in banks like Merril-Lynch across the pond. Secondly, even if they should want to play hard ball with the government, I fail to see how refusing government subsidies or better than market rate loans from the government is likely to be a win situation for the banks.

Wærsted seems to agree this card is so poor she doesn’t want to play it. Today she, along with a number of finance top manager colleagues went public with a promise not to take any pay raises this year.  Even though they claim this has been the plan all along, it seems like a way to make themselves more acceptable to receive good terms on the new bank relief package promised by the government to be announced soon.

In the end, it looks to me like a piece of journalism in which Aftenposten wants to make this whole thing seem like an interesting game. In reality the government knows business depends on the banks, and the banks know they can’t run forever with nearly no access to international financing. Government can’t do away with the banking sector, but it really looks like Stoltenberg is holding the best cards.