Protest against centralisation in Norway: The evolvement of the goal for maintaining a dispersed settlement pattern

Abstract

Norwegian regional policies emphasise geography and demography more than structural factors such as business development, unemployment or income conditions, which are more important in the rest of Europe. The background for the particular Norwegian case is revealed in this article, through a discourse analysis of selected political and academic texts. During the 1960s a rural movement surfaced, articulating demands on behalf of the rural population. The mismatch between the rural mode of living and the government policy was revealed, mainly through the work of the sociologist Ottar Brox. This new approach to rurality, where an alternative modernisation scenario was introduced, formed the academic and political basis for claiming better protection of rural communities against the hegemonic strategy for modernisation. However, the articulations of this movement triggered other symbolic issues in Norway in the radical 1970s and policies came to be about much more than rural communities and particular rural interests. Working against centralisation became synonymous with working to preserve Norwegian culture and nature. In this article the widespread and continued support for a distributed settlement pattern is explained on the assumption that meaning springs from the representation of rurality to the represented rural condition, more than the other way around.

Keywords:

• discourse theory
• rurality
• social movements
• settlement goal

Acknowledgments

The author thanks three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. I thank Ragnar Nilsen, Hans Kjetil Lysgård and colleagues at the Centre for Rural Research and Agder Research for their discussions and comments upon earlier versions of this article. The study was funded by The Research Council of Norway.

Notes

1. This article is part of a five-year programme at Agder Research, financed by the Research Council of Norway. The programme is analysing ideas about rurality and how these ideas influence Norwegian national policies towards rural questions (Agder Research 2005).

2. The inspiration was a romantic motif, especially from Herder who, despite his position as a philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment, inspired many of the young Romantics later on in their belief in democracy and abolishment of central authority. Herder's populism is a political theory for how people can govern themselves without the State (Berlin & Hardy 2000).

3. This started already in the 18th century in England, when the massive rural-urban movement supported urbanisation and industrialisation (Marx 1970). England became more dependent on trade and industry than on agriculture (Marsden 1993). In Denmark the agricultural hegemony did not start to fall until the 1970s (Svendsen 2004) and it is still very important to the Danish economy.