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Yes, we love this land that towers
   Where the ocean foams;
   Rugged, storm-swept, it embowers
   Many thousand homes.
   Love it, love it, of you thinking,
   Father, mother dear,
   And that night of saga sinking
   Dreamful to us here
   
   This first verse of the Norwegian National Anthem written by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Henrik Ibsen’s contemporary, friend and rival, tells a lot about how the Norwegians perceived themselves conditioned by nature and history. That is still the case, but in the period we might call the National Awakening, leading up to Independence in 1905, this constituted a strong part of the nation-building imagery.
   We were dreaming of a new nation based on the (reinvented) heritage of the old sagas, determined by nature, struggling for an outcome along a precarious coastline.
   Approximately 1000 years before Henrik Ibsen wrote The Lady from the Sea in 1888, a north-Norwegian chieftain called Ottar, visited King Alfred of England, telling he had sailed southwards from his home in Hålogaland (near the Arctic Circle) and passing a long coastline reached at a port called Norweg which is inhabited by Northmen. He further related that the people living north of his chiefdom were called Finnlanders, Kvens and Biarmians.
   Some years after Ottar’s voyage, around 900 AD this coastline was politically united for the first time under one king–– Harald Fairhair. The Kingdom was enlarged in 1030.
   At the time of the Vikings and in the Middle Ages, power and riches was to be had and held by controlling the Norweg. From here the Norwegians sailed out to explore and at times conquer foreign lands. They colonized Iceland and Greenland, fought for the control over England and Leiv Erikson discovered and established settlements in America (Vinland).
   It was this myth of a glorious past that was at play among Norwegians in their strive for national identity and independence when Henrik Ibsen started his career as a poet and playwright. By the time he wrote The Lady from the Sea, he had since long lost interest and faith in the nation-building project of national Romanticism. He had even surpassed Realism and was critical, if not alien, to politics. He regarded the conservative ideas of the old regime as something of the past, but he was also bitterly disappointed by the liberal political movement that recently had won power in Norway.
   In 1884, after a political struggle that had started in the 1820’s and since 1872 had been the most important on the political agenda –– the system of parliamentary government –– Parlamentarism was instituted as an unwritten rule of the Constitution.
   This system ordains that a government has to be backed by a majority of the Storting (The Norwegian parliament) in order to remain in power. The Storting at the time, headed by Johan Sverdrup, the party leader of the Liberals, opened up the possibility of bringing the ruling government to the Court of Impeachment (Riksrett) through a resolution that withdrew the King’s right of veto in constitutional matters (1880).
   After a landslide victory in the elections of 1882, Sverdrup decided to file for impeachment against the government (appointed by the Swedish King ; Oscar II). The Court judged against the Prime Minister Christian August Selmer and several of his counselors, forcing them to resign.
   The royal prerogative to appoint a government (even against the will of the majority of the Storting) was ended and Johan Sverdrup was finally asked, on 26 June, 1884, to head a new government. His Liberal Party –– Venstre (Left), had been founded in 1883 as a modern political party even though it had existed as a loosely organised entity since the 1870’s. Its main political opponent, the Conservative Party –– Høire (Right) was founded in 1884. These two parties were to struggle for political power in the years to come. This political battle that had gone on for decades during the old regime, was to be fought by the means of a steadily broadened democracy.
   Prior to the introduction of Parlamentarism and the victory of Venstre, the conservative elite of civil servants, big landowners, merchants, early industrialists and ship-owners were in power of the country supported by the King. He saw the conservatives as a safeguard to keep the Union between Norway and Sweden. The political stalemate of an economically and socially changing Norway had been rocked. The Liberals had won the power in Norway by strengthening the Norwegian Storting against the rule of the Swedish king, his government and the Swedish parliament (Riksdagen).
   Now the work to dissolve the Union, imposed on Norway in 1814 by the great powers of the time, could be intensified. And it was. In this period, members of the same family were opposing each other, old friendships were broken, the old elite was engaged by the young and aspiring new generations and classes in a strive for independence and a new order.
   This is easily detected in Ibsen’s play from 1886 –– Rosmersholm, for example, in which Rosmer is seen by his (former) friend Kroll as a renegade and a political enemy to be fought by all possible means. Some of the minor characters are also sucked into the maelstrom of this political play within the play.
   William Gladstone, PM of England at the time, on a visit to the Norwegian fiords in 1885, the year Ibsen did the same trip after a long absence, said about the Norwegians that it was ‘a small nation living happily in the spirit of democracy.’
   Today it seems rather exaggerated that Norway could be regarded as a democracy in those years. According to the election reform of 1882, only about a third of the male population over the age of 25, based on census and property, had the right to vote. In the coming years, however, the demand for universal suffrage was growing in strength. Every year, on 17 May, the Norwegian National Day, demonstrations were held in favour of the right for all to vote. This was finally obtained for men in 1898. The newly established Norwegian Feminist Association (1884) had taken up the fight as a part of women’s liberation and equal rights. It took a longer time for the Storting to heed their call, and they were not awarded universal suffrage until 1913.
   On his first visit to Norway after more than 10 years in 1885, Henrik Ibsen was a spectator in the Storting when it was debating whether a state stipend were to be given to Alexander Kielland. Despite that fact that he was a novelist as critical of the Norwegian Church as Ibsen, he received the same stipend (for life) in 1866. This triggered a general debate on the right of freedom of thought and expression in religious matters, and the stipend was denied.
   This being decided by the new Liberal government, led by Sverdrup, claming to be a herald of free speech, infuriated Ibsen. He felt that the government had violated its own principles, not representing the true Left. He declared in public that he was supporting the youth of Norway, being himself ‘til venstre for Venstre’ (to the left of Left). Some days later in Trondheim, in a speech to a demonstration of workers, he claimed (like Dr. Stockmann) that a new nobility of the mind and the will would rise up creating true freedom for all: ‘This will arise from two groups that not yet have been oppressed by the party system. It will come to us with our women and our workers’.
   It is interesting here to note that the workers of Norway at the time were already busy organising themselves in political parties and unions: The Labour Party (Det Norske Arbeiderparti) was founded in 1887. The labour unions had their breakthrough in the 1880s, and in around 1890 there were 40 unions in the capital Kristiana alone. After a strike in 1889 by the female workers making matches (a very hazardous and underpaid employment), the first union for women was organised in 1890. In 1899 all the labour unions were united in one central organisation ( LO).
   After a petition from 1884, signed by the Norwegian writers, Ibsen, Bjørnson, Kielland and Lie (The Great Four), the Storting passed a law in 1888, granting married women equal juridical and economical rights.
   Ellida of The Lady from the Sea was made more able to claim freedom and self-determination than was Nora of A Doll’s House in 1879. And Bolette, the oldest daughter of Dr. Wangel, had greater possibilities in pursuing a proper education and find an occupation.
   From 1860, elementary school was obligatory for all children (for boys as well as for girls), and from 1889 the school was strengthened with a better and more adequate curriculum for a changing, more modern society. Women were trained and found occupation in crafts and trade, and many other ways of earning a living were opened up to them –– some women were employed as lower functionaries in private companies and public service. In 1890 there were also registered 800 midwives, 1200 nurses and 3200 female teachers in Norway. On top of the educational ladder, women had been given the possibility in 1882 to study for the exam (examen artium) that gave them the right to become students at the University.
   The Norwegian population of 1888 was still basically occupied in the traditional way with agriculture, forestry and fisheries as the main means of earning a living (56% of the workforce). The occupation in the industry, the crafts and in the service sector was, however, increasing rapidly in these years.
   The infrastructure was built out and modernised all over the country. More and more people were on the move from the countryside via the small towns along the coast to growing cities. Kristiania, in particular, but also cities like Bergen and Trondheim attracted tens of thousands of new inhabitants. New houses were built at a rapid pace, but they were often too small and uncomfortable. A growing number of people was forced to live in a slum-like environment.
   According to the census of 1890, Norway had a population of around 2 million. This meant that the population density was very low (6.5 persons per square kilometer).
   The traditional way of using the resources had for a along time proved insufficient to sustain a larger population. Throughout the 19th century, the emigration from Norway, mostly to America, reached staggering proportions (second only to Ireland).
   From 1880 to 1884, around 110, 000 people went overseas to settle, and between 1884 and 1915, some 420, 000 persons left the country. This was about 20 % of the entire Norwegian population at the turn of the century.
   The Stranger in The Lady from the Sea, might be seen as a representative of the contemporary Norwegians on the move. Ellida Wangel is a Kven (a people that had immigrated to Norway from east), originated in the extreme north, who is steadily moving about. In the end of the play, after a visit to the fiords, he is about to leave the country for good, wanting to bring Ellida with him.
   In this context in is interesting to note that two of Henrik Ibsen’s brothers –– Johan Ibsen and Nicolai Ibsen –– left Norway to try their luck in ‘the New World’. We do not, however, know so much about their life ‘over there’.
   In 1850, Johan sent a long letter to his father describing how he was living in Wisconsin. After this the historians have lost all traces of him. From his letter we know that he was about to engage in the gold rush in California during which he probably died.
   His younger brother, the disabled Nicolai Ibsen, also moved from place to place in America. From the 1880s he lived a modest life in Estherville, Iowa. He did not want to write to his family, and when his sister Hedvig sent a letter urging him to return home, he told his friend Ole Myre that he would consider it. He never went.
   In April 25, 1888, some weeks before his brother Henrik made the first notes on his new play The Lady from the Sea, Nicolai A. Ibsen died. On his tombstone in Estherville it was written: ‘By Strangers honoured and by Strangers mourned.’
   At the time when so many Norwegians left their motherland in the hope of a better life elsewhere, the Country by the Sea witnessed a reversed ‘invasion’ of foreigners who wanted to enjoy the beauty and the resources along the Norweg.
   Discovered and opened up for tourism by English Lords earlier in the century, Norway had become fashionable among the well-offs in Europe and America. The mountains, the fiords and the rivers full of big salmons to be fished were visited, during the summer and early autumn, by shipload after shipload of people from the big cities of the world in the grip of industrialisation. The tourists had come to see the unspoiled nature inhabited by what they perceived as an almost mythical people living in closeness and harmony with the elements. Their image of the Norwegian was closely linked to how Ellida Wangel as is described and seen in the play by Ibsen. They did not stay in Norway long enough to find out that most of the population was living their life close to the stagnant dam of the day to day struggle for a meagre outcome in a country where social immobility finally was starting to drift, rather than by the ravaging waves of an adventurous, radical change.
   One might see Henrik Ibsen, as pictured by the artist Edvard Munch, as a lighthouse leading his fellow countrymen and women through the rough waters of the distressed minds having to cope in a changing world.
   The Lady of the Sea is about this –– the abyssal freedom to choose.
   Ketil Jensehaugen, a Norwegian poet, currently lives in Dhaka

This week’s most terrifying remark came from the foreign secretary, Jack Straw. He declared that a nuclear attack on Iran would be ‘completely nuts’ and an assault of any sort ‘inconceivable’. In Straw-speak, ‘nuts’ means he’s just heard it is going to happen and ‘inconceivable’ means certain.
   A measure of the plight of British foreign policy is that such words from the foreign secretary are anything but reassuring. Straw says of Iran that ‘there is no smoking gun, there is no casus belli’. There was no smoking gun in Iraq, only weapons conjured from the fevered imagination of Downing Street and the intelligence chiefs. It is a racing certainty that Alastair Campbell look-alikes are even now cajoling MI6’s John Scarlett into proving that Iran is ‘far closer’ to a bomb than anyone thinks.
   As for a casus belli, there was also none in Iraq. Tony Blair had to beat one out of the hapless attorney general before his generals would agree to fight. But Iran’s casus belli was set out in unambiguous terms by the prime minister in his speech to the Foreign Policy Centre in London on March 21. Blair was updating his 1999 Chicago doctrine of global intervention. Then it was justified by humanitarianism and was optional. Now it is vital for the ‘battle of values ... a battle about modernity’. Those who are not of our values are to be subject to pre-emptive attack.
   Blair demanded that the west become ‘active not reactive’ against alien values (obviously Islamic) as ‘we risk chaos threatening our stability’. The crusade against them was ‘utterly determinative of our future here in Britain’. He accepted that Britain should seek international agreement before going to war, but should still fight without it. People were crying out for democracy. We must bring it to them since ‘in their salvation lies our own security’.
   The speech was full of jihadist rhetoric. Blair’s desire to wipe non-democratic values off the map is akin to Iran’s view of Israel. But we know that when he says war he means war. The speech was the wildest by a British leader in modern times and was the clearest imaginable statement of a casus belli. He mentioned Iran three times. It was gilt-edged, copper-bottomed, swivel-eyed neoconservatism.
   To such a world view, Iran is a far more plausible target than Iraq. It is a nation approaching 80 million people, whose values would be a real catch for ‘beacon democracy’. Elements within its regime want nuclear weapons. The country is rich and capable of buying the relevant components. The mullahs have sponsored terrorist groups abroad and fiddled elections. In February, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad restarted uranium enrichment at the Natanz plant, in defiance of the UN, and yesterday Iran’s nuclear energy chief announced that it had proved successful. What does Straw mean, ‘no casus belli’?
   Tehran has two more weeks to stop enrichment, after which sanctions seem inevitable. Some ostracism of Iran’s ruling elite might lead the parliamentary moderates and clerical oligarchs to force Ahmadinejad to back off for a time. But sanctions will split the world coalition against nuclear proliferation, since Russia and China have close trading links with Iran. The US and Britain would then be back to the same ‘slide to war’ as in Iraq. They would have to decide whether to fight on alone or endure humiliating retreat.
   A land force attack on Iran is, for forces that cannot even hold Iraq, out of the question. But sowing mayhem through bombing military targets (always causing civilian deaths) might instigate enough anarchy to stir a putsch, a regional uprising or more subtle changes within the regime. There are reports of US special forces operating inside Iran and funds being channelled to opposition groups. The US is said to be aiding Sunni Baluchi insurgents in the south, as they once did the Taliban in Afghanistan.
   Bush’s description on Monday of leaks about nuclear bunker-busters as ‘wild speculation’ was part machismo, part tautology. Every weapon is an option to a soldier. It would be unlikely even for the Bush government (even with Blair’s support) to put the west’s status as world policeman back in the stone age. But such talk indicates the brain-scrambling effect of the Iraq war.
   Iran is the first test of Blair’s interventionism, and the auguries are not good. Every sabre rattle in Washington must be music to Ahmadinejad’s ear. Whether or not a bombing attack might damage his factories, it is unlikely to destabilise his government, rather the reverse. It would heighten nationalist fervour and increase hatred of the west.
   Sanctions that stop Iranians going to conferences or shopping in Knightsbridge are hardly of concern to mullahs. Any nation supposedly forced to ‘choose between weapons and the economy’ chooses weapons (look at the US). The more the west threatens, the stronger is the case of Tehran’s hawks for a nuclear arsenal. Iran is within range of five nuclear powers, including the US. What army would not want a deterrent when the world is awash with crazies?
   Confrontation without a willingness to use total force is bluff. Many Iranian hardliners must be itching to cause more trouble in Iraq, threaten tanker lanes in the Straits of Hormuz and set Asian opinion further against the west. As for backing the Baluchi insurgents, this is madness. The most lawless group in the region are, through the Taliban, the chief enemy of British forces in Afghanistan. Is Blair aware that the US is funding his enemies? This whole venture is degenerating into a fourth crusade.
   The much-vaunted neocon campaign for a secure and liberal democracy in Asia is in retreat. It is ailing in Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. What might have been gained through security and friendship has been wrecked by the war in Iraq. War puts a premium on paranoia and encourages existing regimes to crack down on dissent. These may be rogue states, but it is time for the west to decide again which are ‘our rogues’.
   One country in the region that has retained some political pluralism is Iran. It has shown bursts of democratic activity and, importantly, has experienced internal regime change. If ever there was a nation not to drive to the extreme it is Iran. If ever there was a powerful state to reassure and befriend rather than abuse and threaten, it is Iran. If ever there was a regime not to goad into seeking nuclear weapons it is Iran. Yet that is precisely what British and American policy is doing. It is completely nuts.
   The Guardian/London, 12 April 2006