Norway's history: a constitution that outlived its own independence

How Norway was first pulled together

People followed the retreating ice north. There was settlement as far north as Magerøya by 9300 BC, the oldest human skeleton found in the country was lifted from shallow water off Sogne in 1994 and has been carbon dated to 6600 BC, and farming reached the Oslofjord about 4000 BC.

Long before there was a king there was the thing, an assembly of the free men of a district which met at a fixed place to settle disputes and set penalties. It matters because when kings did arrive they had to legislate through it.

Harald Fairhair began the unification after an alliance with the Earls of Lade and a decisive engagement at Hafrsfjord, dated to somewhere between about 870 and 900, and he held the result by placing stewards on the estates of chieftains he had beaten or driven out. His son Håkon the Good took the crown in 930 and set up two large assemblies, the Gulating for western Norway and the Frostating for Trøndelag, along with the leidang, the levy that turned coastal farms into a navy.

Christianity took three kings and a battle. Olav Tryggvason was killed at Svolder in 1000. Olav Haraldsson, from 1015, made the things pass church laws and built a priesthood, was banished in 1028, and was killed at Stiklestad when he tried to return in 1030. The church made him a saint, Nidaros became the country's Christian centre, and by 1152 it had an archbishop of its own.

Those islands were the other half of the story. Shortage of farmland in western Norway pushed settlement onto Shetland, Orkney, the Faroes, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man. Iceland was divided among some 400 chieftains by 930, Icelanders led by Erik the Red settled Greenland in the 980s. Civil war over the succession ran from 1130 to 1217 and closed when Håkon Håkonsson imposed clear succession laws and brought Iceland and Greenland under Norwegian rule.

The kingdom that came out of it was solvent and unequal. The population grew from about 150,000 in the year 1000 to about 400,000 by 1300, and over the same period the share of land in farmers' hands collapsed: by 1300 roughly 70% belonged to the king, the church or the aristocracy, and about a fifth of a farmer's yield went out in dues. Tenants stayed free men, and the church closed the High Middle Ages holding some 40% of the land.

Why the Black Death broke the kingdom

Plague reached Norway in 1349. Store norske leksikon puts the mortality at between a third and a half of the population; other accounts put it at nearly two-thirds inside a year, with later outbreaks halving what remained by 1400. By the early sixteenth century the population stood at around a third of its medieval peak, and hardly a decade of the intervening period passed without plague somewhere.

For the farmers who lived, the century after 1350 was the best in generations. Land rents and other dues fell to about a quarter of their former level, and grain gave way to livestock. For everyone who lived off those rents it was a catastrophe: tax revenue fell, the crown weakened, and the archbishop took a seat on the Council of the Realm.

Into the gap came the Hanseatic merchants, who ran the dried cod of northern Norway out through Bergen and became, in the Norwegian phrase, a state within the state. The pirates known as the Victual Brothers raided the port three times, the last raid in 1427.

The unions arrived while the country was at its weakest. Norway and Sweden shared a king from 1319 under Magnus Eriksson, Olaf Haakonsson inherited the Norwegian and Danish thrones in 1380, and in 1397 Margaret I brought all three crowns into the Kalmar Union. How willingly Norway went in is still argued over: the union letter of July 1397 names seventeen issuers and carries only ten seals, historians disagree about whether the document was a contract or a draft, and some read the missing Norwegian seals as reluctance. Sweden broke out of the union in 1523. Norway had neither the strength nor a council capable of trying.

What Danish rule did to Norway

The end came in 1537. Christian III, having won a three-way war of succession in which the Archbishop of Trondheim backed the losing side, dissolved the Norwegian Council of the Realm and demoted the kingdom to a lydrike, a dependent province. The Reformation was imposed in the same year: church valuables went to Copenhagen, the 40% of the land the church had owned passed to the king, and Danish became the written language while spoken Norwegian carried on in dialect.

Politically that arrangement held for 277 years. Commercially it was the making of the country.

The water-driven saw arrived in the early sixteenth century and turned standing timber into an export. A deal struck with the Netherlands in 1544 gave Dutch merchants control of Norwegian timber exports for the next 150 years, and Amsterdam was built on Norwegian piles. Mining grew beside it, silver at Kongsberg and copper at Røros.

The bill came in wars against Sweden. The Kalmar War of 1611 to 1613 conscripted 8,000 Norwegian peasants. The Thirty Years' War produced a system dividing the country into 6,000 legd, each obliged to keep one soldier, and cost Jämtland and Härjedalen. The Second Northern War of 1657 to 1660 cost Bohuslän, and conscription peaked during the Great Northern War of 1701 to 1721.

Absolutism, imposed in 1661, put about 1,600 salaried officials in place of the provincial nobility and paid for the lost wars by selling crown land. The share of farmers who owned the land they worked rose from a fifth to a half, and beneath them a new class formed, 48,000 smallholders by 1800, living at the mercy of the farmer whose ground they held. Taxes stayed low by Danish standards, typically 4 to 10% of the harvest. The population rose from about 150,000 in 1500 to about 900,000 in 1800. Up to two-thirds of the audited national income went to Copenhagen.

How the constitution survived losing independence

Denmark and Norway entered the Napoleonic Wars on the French side in 1807, and the Royal Navy's blockade cut off both the timber exports and the grain imports the country lived on. There was mass starvation in 1812. When the war ended on the wrong side, the Treaty of Kiel of 14 January 1814 handed Norway to the king of Sweden.

Christian Frederik, heir to both thrones and viceroy in Norway since 1813, refused to comply. He called twenty-one prominent men to Eidsvoll on 16 February 1814, and they gave him advice he had not gone there to get. Instead of a fresh absolute monarchy under a Danish prince, they wanted an elected assembly to write a liberal constitution and settle the form of government.

Representatives were elected across the country, 112 of them met at Eidsvoll, and after six weeks of argument they signed the constitution on 17 May 1814 and elected Christian Frederik king. The document drew on British constitutional practice, the United States constitution and the ideas of the French Revolution. It was not democratic by any later measure, and it gave the vote to about 40% of men over 25, which for 1814 was a broad franchise.

Sweden had not been consulted and did not agree. Carl Johan marched into Norway in late July, the fighting was brief, and the Convention of Moss of 14 August 1814 set the terms: Norway would enter a personal union with Sweden, and Sweden would accept the Norwegian constitution and Norway's separate institutions. Christian Frederik abdicated. An extraordinary Storting met in Christiania on 7 October, passed the amendments the union required on 4 November, and elected Charles XIII of Sweden king of Norway the same day.

This is why Norwegian reference works date the modern state to 1814 and not to 1905. Norway had lost a war and come out of it with a constitution, a parliament, a government, a supreme court and, from 1816, a bank of its own. The one thing it did not have was a foreign service, and the next ninety-one years were spent arguing about that.

Whether 1814 was a national awakening or, in the Norwegian phrase, freedom handed over as a gift, has never been settled. Store norske leksikon reports that most historians now stress how decisive the power politics of the post-Napoleonic settlement were, while recording that there is no general agreement and that traces of a Norwegian national identity run much further back.

Who governed under the Swedish union

The first decades belonged to about 2,000 officials. Nobility was abolished by a decision of 1821, there was no landed aristocracy to take its place, and the civil service ran the country. Under threat of a coup by Carl Johan the Storting paid the debt set out in the Treaty of Kiel, a treaty Norway had never ratified. The Bank of Norway, established in 1816, issued the speciedaler.

Constitution Day turned into the annual measure of how much autonomy the union would tolerate. In 1829 the Swedish governor-general Baltzar von Platen used force against a crowd celebrating 17 May in Christiania, and resigned over it.

How parliamentarism arrived without a revolution

From the 1832 election farmers began electing farmers, and a majority of them sat in the Storting. They passed the Local Committees Act, which gave every district an elected council from 1838. The long dispute over the king's governor-general in Christiania was settled on Norwegian terms in 1873.

The decisive fight was about confidence. A Conservative government refused to enact a constitutional amendment the Storting had adopted three times, requiring ministers to appear in parliament and defend their policies. The court of impeachment forced the government out in 1884, and Oscar II then appointed the majority leader Johan Sverdrup as prime minister. From that point a Norwegian government held office on the Storting's sufferance and not the king's. Parliamentarism ran as constitutional custom for 123 years and was written into the text of the constitution only in 2007.

The Liberal majority legislated fast: the vote for about half of all men, two written standards for the language in place of one, juries, seven years of compulsory schooling, and universal male suffrage in 1889. Women were given the vote in 1913.

Why so many Norwegians left for America

Better hygiene and a sharp fall in infant mortality from the early nineteenth century produced population growth the farms could not absorb, and the population reached 1.7 million by 1865. Emigration began in 1825 and became a mass movement from the 1860s. Store norske leksikon counts more than 750,000 departures in the fifty-odd years from the middle of the century, most of them to the American Midwest.

What stayed behind mechanised. The first railway opened between Christiania and Eidsvoll in 1854, steam sawmills came in the 1860s, and by 1880 there were 60,000 Norwegian seamen.

Why the union ended without fighting

The union had one hole in it and everybody knew where it was. Foreign policy was run by the Swedish foreign minister, and from the 1880s the Storting pressed for a Norwegian foreign minister of its own. The Venstre government elected in 1891 asked instead for the smaller thing, a separate Norwegian consular service. Sweden refused flatly in 1892 and again in 1893, and when the Storting moved to create one anyway it was made to negotiate under threat of military action. The talks collapsed in 1898, and Norway removed the union emblem from its merchant flag over the king's veto.

The break came seven years later. Christian Michelsen's coalition government got a consular service bill through the Storting, Oscar II refused to sanction it, and the government resigned. Since no other Norwegian government could be formed, the Storting declared on 7 June 1905 that the union was dissolved because the king had ceased to function as Norwegian king. The Swedish parliament refused to accept a unilateral declaration, both sides mobilised in part, and negotiators met at Karlstad through the summer, deadlocked over whether the union was already over and over disarmament along the border. They settled in September with concessions from both sides.

Two votes followed. A referendum on the dissolution returned 184 votes in favour of keeping the union, and a second settled the form of the state, after which Prince Carl of Denmark took the throne as Haakon VII. On 26 October 1905 Oscar II renounced the Norwegian crown and the separation was formally recognised.

Store norske leksikon's assessment is worth recording, because it cuts against the usual telling: the break with Sweden mattered far less to Norway as a state than the events of 1814, since in 1814 a state came into being and in 1905 a loose tie was cut. The same source calls the manner of the separation a diplomatic masterpiece while noting that the outcome would hardly have been the same without considerable Swedish goodwill.

What independence did change was who owned the country's power. By 1906 three-quarters of developed waterpower in Norway belonged to foreign concerns, and the Concession Laws passed by the Storting in 1909 made the state the gatekeeper for waterfalls, mines and forests.

How the occupation changed Norwegian foreign policy

Norway declared neutrality in 1905 and held to it through the First World War, during which the merchant fleet carried for Britain, half of it was sunk and 2,000 seamen were killed. Nine governments held office between 1918 and 1935, lasting an average of eighteen months, unemployment stood at 10% from 1931 to 1933, and industrial production rose by 80% from 1915 to 1939 while the number of jobs stayed flat.

Neutrality failed on 9 April 1940. Germany invaded, Vidkun Quisling attempted a coup the same day, and the king and government refused to surrender and left Oslo for Elverum. Fighting continued around Narvik until the Norwegian forces capitulated on 10 June, and the king and government had sailed for London three days earlier.

The exile government's asset was the merchant fleet: 4.8 million tons at the outbreak of war, of which the Germans took about a fifth and the government took the rest, roughly a thousand ships. Half were sunk, and the earnings of the rest paid its costs in London. Josef Terboven governed as Reich Commissioner, having dissolved the Administrative Council set up in April 1940. Quisling became prime minister of an all National Unity cabinet on 1 February 1942, an arrangement peculiar to Norway, where a domestic party of the occupier's politics was allowed to govern. Its membership peaked at 43,000 in the autumn of 1943. The attempt to nazify institutions failed: the Supreme Court resigned, and organised sport and the bishops refused to cooperate.

In the autumn of 1942, 772 Jews were arrested and deported to Germany, and few came back. Some 30,000 people were imprisoned during the occupation. The retreating Germans burned much of Finnmark and northern Troms in the winter of 1944 and forced the population south. There were 360,000 German soldiers in the country when they surrendered on the night of 8 May 1945. The treason settlement that followed sentenced 46,000 people and executed 25.

The war is the most contested part of Norwegian history, and Store norske leksikon says so directly, listing the conduct of the Nygaardsvold government, the contribution of the communists, the treatment of Jews and of Norwegian women who had German partners, and the national story that almost everybody had been on the right side. None of those arguments is closed.

The policy consequence was permanent. Neutrality was abandoned, Norway joined the Marshall Plan in 1947 and took 400 million dollars, and in 1949 it became a founding member of NATO. It has never allowed foreign troops to be permanently stationed on Norwegian soil or nuclear weapons to be held there, a limit adopted to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, with which Norway had shared a land border since 1944.

How the state claimed the oil before finding it

In May 1963 the government proclaimed sovereignty over the Norwegian continental shelf and passed an act establishing that any natural resources found there belonged to the Norwegian state, and that only the crown, in practice the government, could award licences to look for them. Nothing had been found. The first licensing round was announced on 13 April 1965, and 22 production licences were awarded over 78 blocks.

Phillips reported the Ekofisk discovery to the authorities just before Christmas in 1969, and production started on 15 June 1971. The state built its holding on the framework already written: Statoil and the private Saga Petroleum were both established in 1972, and the state took a 50% interest in every production licence, split from 1 January 1985 between Statoil's own share and a portfolio of stakes held directly by the state.

Safety followed the accidents. Ekofisk blew out in 1977, the accommodation rig Alexander Kielland capsized in 1980 killing 123 people, and petroleum safety regulation was tightened after both. The exclusive economic zone declared in the 1970s added about 2,000,000 square kilometres of sea, and the Barents Sea boundary with Russia took until 2010 to agree.

The same period settled two other long questions. Membership of the European Economic Community was rejected in the 1972 referendum, and membership of the European Union was rejected again in 1994, after which Norway tied itself to the single market through the European Economic Area and later joined the Schengen Area. Norwegianisation of the Sámi ended after the war and a Sámi council was created in 1964. The fight over the damming of the Alta river united Sámi and environmental campaigners and made large hydroelectric schemes politically difficult, and the Sámi Parliament opened in 1989.