In what’s now Norway, the country with the world’s second-longest coastline, Neolithic fisher-farmers once harpooned enormous bluefin tuna. As centuries passed, Norwegians refined the arduous fishing process, becoming nimble conquerors of the sea. Plentiful species like herring became staples of diet and livelihood. But in the 1960s, annual herring catches that had measured 600,000 tons suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. The population had collapsed.

The cause, it emerged later, was technological. Norwegian fishers had adopted the power block to pull in nets mechanically, massively multiplying their catches. What they didn’t realize was how these hauls tested the limits of fish populations. The herring would take nearly 20 years to recover.

Now, new technology is allowing Norway to pioneer another kind of ocean harvest—and the consequences and damage could be even more devastating and longer lasting. On January 9, 2024, its parliament voted to permit deep-sea mining exploration, with hopes of being the first country to mine the seafloor commercially for minerals like copper and cobalt. Yet where the fishing industry needs stable fish populations, this prospective mining industry—which would extract to build modern electronics—has no inherent need to preserve life. The exploitation threatens to destroy complex ecosystems before scientists have even documented the life forms at risk.

Norway’s proposed mining is extreme even compared to proposals for deep-sea mining elsewhere. Most miners in other regions, including the central Pacific and Indian Oceans, want to harvest polymetallic nodules, which are mineral aggregations on flat seafloor areas. Mining Norway’s volcanic seabed would instead use remote-controlled machinery to completely remove hydrothermal vents and strip mineral crusts off seamounts.

It takes fierce machines to pry rocky surfaces from the seafloor. So far, the companies have kept their methods and equipment clandestine. Yet the enormous robots developed for ocean mining startups elsewhere offer clues as to what may be used: heavy-duty spiked drillers and cutters designed to crush into seamounts and vents.

These seamounts and vents, even inactive ones, support a surprising amount of life that can survive at extreme depths. The minerals on the volcanic formations offer hard surfaces for animals to cling to. Anemones attach to vent chimneys; sponge grounds grow, garden-like, across seamounts. Enormous basket stars with curling tree-like limbs whorl along the seafloor.

Deep-sea ecosystems also take a remarkably long time to establish themselves. On seamounts elsewhere, explained Tina Kutti, an ecologist at Norway’s Institute of Marine Research, some corals live for 3,000 years. While those exact corals may not live on Norway’s seabed, what’s there is likely ancient, too. According to Kutti, as a general rule, deep-sea fauna “grow really, really slowly. They have slow metabolic rates because there’s not so much food.”

And then there’s all the life that’s still undiscovered. The deep sea is incredibly hard for scientists to study. Their research vessels often have to beat harsh weather, while the scientists themselves have to search out geologic formations in pitch-black water, like “children wandering around a forest at night with a flashlight, trying to count trees,” said Eoghan P. Reeves, a geochemist at the University of Bergen. Sometimes, he added, they make discoveries “about places that have been studied for years, when we shine the flashlight in a slightly different direction.”

Even in more accessible marine environments, scientists have struggled to understand how ecosystems function. In parts of the once-bountiful Oslofjord, more than 80 percent of the cod are gone, thanks to overfishing and modern pollutants. Marine experts long thought ocean fish would repopulate the fjord, but recent research suggests uniquely adapted fjord fish are effectively irreplaceable. Other species have fared worse. Today, much of the Oslofjord remains nearly lifeless.

Farther north, fishers along Norway’s coasts noticed unusually large sea urchin populations starting in 1970. The grazing echinoderms devoured kelp forests, and other marine life disappeared with the kelp habitat. Only recently have researchers learned the cause: as technology increased catches and fishers targeted more species, the urchins lost their natural predators. The kelp is slowly growing back today.

One reason for these past collapses was a pervasive belief that fish were so abundant they couldn’t be exterminated—and therefore fishing didn’t need to be regulated. Ocean science, tracing causes of collapse and possible paths to restoration, was key to recovery. Herring made a comeback in under two decades through a fishing moratorium. Urchin harvesting might return kelp forests to the country’s north and central coasts. Even the decimated Oslofjord may stand a chance, with new fisheries management.

The relatively fast recovery of life in shallower seas has been a saving grace. But the consequences of deep-sea mining could last far longer than those of overfishing, given the slow pace of the ecosystems’ regrowth. Species that die at that depth might take centuries to regenerate, according to Kutti. For some, regeneration may not even be possible.

Unlike with coastal environments, scientists are essentially starting from scratch to understand the deep sea. They currently lack the knowledge and technology to detect the damage deep-sea mining might cause—let alone regulate or mitigate it. Norway’s newly approved exploration process requires companies to conduct environmental baseline surveys. Yet these surveys will be of limited use, as they’ll only target areas with potentially attractive mineral deposits. “We have no data below 800 meters,” said Kutti. “It’s been shocking to us that the government hasn’t taken any big initiatives to start studying what fauna lives there on the seabed and in the water column.” Without independent research of the whole seafloor and how its ecosystems connect, attempts at regulation become shots in the dark.

“We [Norwegians] have a close connection to the sea, but also a history of using technology and bravery to conquer the natural power of the sea in quite brutal ways,” Truls Gulowsen, leader of the Norwegian Association for Conservation of Nature, told me.

While humans are capable of decimating ecosystems, we’re equally capable of safeguarding them by implementing restorative and protective measures. But there is another option, too: innovating away from environmentally harmful extraction. One alternative to deep-sea mining might be urban mining—recovering and recycling minerals from our built environment. Innovation isn’t just technology, after all. Sometimes, it’s the creativity to reimagine how things get done.

The post What Will Deep-Sea Mining Do to Norway’s <br>Oceans? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Located on a remote island in the North Atlantic, the village of just 100 people had closed its schools the week before; restaurants and hotels never reopened after the new year holiday season. And now my last glimmer of hope for a hot coffee this morning—the “Bakeriet på Å”—had closed.

As the Northern European Correspondent for the Swiss Broadcasting Company, I must rove around a reporting area that extends from the far north of Greenland to the very south of Lithuania. Å, which is as tiny as its name, sits close to the geographic center of my beat. This is a friendly and open part of the world, where you cross borders without thinking about them. People here in the Arctic Circle exhibit unusually closeness and cohesion, and ever since my visit to the far north as a teenager in the 1980s, my trips to the lands and seas near the North Pole have always felt like homecomings.

But this time, I reach Å on the same morning that the central government announces an immediate lockdown of Norway to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It is a startling announcement that sends me scrambling to come to terms with what it means for an open region to shut down—and to find a way home before it’s too late.

In Å, the snow is falling heavily, and I don’t catch a glimpse of anyone stirring through the contracted curtains that cover the windows of Å’s picturesque and colorful houses. My requests to interview some local fishermen go unanswered. I can’t blame them. Overnight the government in the capital Oslo—more than 1300 kilometers southward—has declared all foreign visitors to be undesirable persons. I am officially a threat to public health.

I wanted to talk with fishermen because the economic backbone of the Lofoten archipelago is fishing. In spite of the islands’ position—at the same latitude as Northern Alaska—temperatures seldom go below zero Celsius (32 F). The reason for this has a name: the Gulf Stream. Early in the year, this relatively warm Atlantic current drives gigantic schools of fish into the Bay between the Lofoten chain of 80 islands and the mainland of northwestern Norway. For the fishermen of Å and dozens of other villages and towns in the archipelago, it is possible to catch enough cod and pollock in these few months to secure a full year’s income. It is why the islanders call the fishery “our treasure chest in the sea.”

Unable to talk with the fishermen, I make my way through thick snow towards a small factory, where I might find someone to interview. But all the doors I try remain closed. On the car radio, I hear the sober voice of a Norwegian radio announcer read a long list of measures decided by the national government: “By Monday morning at 8 a.m. all our national borders will be closed,” the announcer says, adding that after it will be “guarded by the military.”

Remi Solberg, the mayor of the outer Lofoten archipelago, whom I had met for an interview just a few hours before the shutdown, punctuated the national regulation with a mayoral decree: “All visitors from outside the Lofoten islands are immediately banned and must be quarantined for 14 days.”

That left me just 36 hours to escape, or face two weeks of quarantine. And escape would require reaching the mountainous border station between Norway and Sweden, my country of residence.

In normal times, it’s easy to leave the archipelago. Here is where the iconic E10—the European highway connecting the Baltic Sea in Luleå (Sweden) with the Atlantic Ocean in Norway—ends dramatically on a cliff falling into the sea. Seventy years of European peace have made borders an afterthought as we freely traveled to the most remote parts of the continent. But this time, the odds are against me.

Going through a checklist of possible transportation options, I quickly realize that I need to be both innovative and lucky. Harsh winter storms have closed the highway and many of the very narrow roads across the islands. There are no trains that will go where I need. And the few propeller plane connections onto the mainland were either grounded because of the storm, or fully booked weeks ago.

Most of the time, crowds are the concern—National Geographic has ranked the Lofoten among the world’s most beautiful islands, and since 2010, a crush of tourists has confounded residents. “Last year we got 1 million visitors, that’s too much for our pristine archipelago,” said Mayor Solberg.

Still, while overtourism is an issue for the Lofoten, the bigger threat, for decades, has involved oil. Norwegians depend on royalties they received for their country’s oil production, and there have been longstanding plans to extend oil production fields into the far north. Young ecologists and senior fishermen have fought bitterly, and sometimes together, against such a move, which could threaten both the natural beauty and the lucrative fishing business.

Not long before I arrived, the local nature lovers and fishermen had triumphed when the conservative government in Oslo agreed to table its search for oil outside Lofoten.

This decision was touted as preserving a fishing tradition that goes back at least 6,000 years. And in the era of the COVID pandemic, that experience suddenly paid dividends. A few years ago, when the virus spoken about locally was the one savaging the local salmon, the fishing industry set up a comprehensive infrastructure to test fish for viruses. Now, that infrastructure is serving local hospitals where a large number of humans are now being tested for the coronavirus.

I wanted to learn more about what the remote islands can teach us in this strange time, but I knew I needed to get home. A local Norwegian journalist generously agrees to drive me across several of the Lofoten Islands, connected by bridges and tunnels, to the small harbor city of Stamsund. There, the last ferry boat is supposed to depart for Tromsø, on the mainland, in the evening.

In Stamsund, I find myself the last man around, sitting totally alone in the cozy lobby of the Live Lofoten Hotel, which the lockdown has emptied of all visitors. And I am also the only traveler to board the MS Polarlys on its 18-hour crossing to Tromsø. It is a truly gloomy feeling to be on one of the last overnight rides. The ferry company Hurtigruten was founded in 1893, and it normally connects more than 30 Norwegian ports. Now, because of the virus, only two boats are running. And I am on the final one.

Tromsø, northern Norway’s biggest city with more than 70,000 inhabitants, is sometimes called the “Paris of the North” because of the great density of bars, restaurants, and coffee shops. But now, when I arrive there is nobody to be seen.

I make my way through empty streets to the bus station, where one of the last long-distance buses to the Norwegian town of Narvik is about to depart. The bus driver does not even bother to sell tickets—he does not want to risk interacting with passengers. I board and we leave Tromsø according to schedule for a four-hour trip, during which we see—and overtake—many military vehicles on their way to various border posts. Older residents of this part of Norway still tell stories about a time in the beginning of the Second World War when fierce battles were fought around the Lofoten island between the Nazi occupants and the British naval fleet. Now the fact that the military is out again means that the circulation of daily life is stopping.

The bus reaches Narvik, but that still does not get me to Sweden. Narvik is considered a border town, but that’s just because it’s the town closest to the border, and it has a harbor. In fact, it’s still 50 kilometers from the soon-to-be-closed Swedish border. The only way for me to get to the border now is to catch a ride up a mountain road that has been closed for days because of heavy snow.

But I am fortunate. As the bus approaches Narvik, I check the Norwegian Road Administration app, and—Eureka!—the road has just reopened, at least for now. I manage to convince the local taxi company to send me a car to pick me up and drive me across the border, where concrete elements stand ready to block the crossing just a few hours later.

While the whole of Norway is entering into COVID-19 hibernation, Sweden tries to keep up a more ordinary path, asking people to keep distance without going into full lockdown. On the way, the taxi driver, whose name is Pernille, talks of the spring that lies ahead. She will have time to enjoy it. “This is my last assignment before I am laid off tomorrow,” she tells me.

The post A Letter From the Norwegian Village of Å, Where COVID Lockdown Forces a Dramatic Escape appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I braced myself to hear the usual stereotypes from the news from the Norwegian students in my class. Then the professor clarified, “What to you is truly good about America?”

Even though I’m an American, I was stumped. I mentioned the clichés of “liberty,” “melting pot,” “representative government.”

My Norwegian classmate Astrid was much more awake: “What about your Constitution?”

“The Freedom of Information Act!” exclaimed Dag, an outspoken intellectual with his hair slicked stylishly forward. “That is what makes America great.”

I realized that Dr. Mauk was actually leading us to one of the big questions of the day in Norwegian newspapers: What did it mean to be “Norwegian?” This was especially relevant because thousands of new immigrants had recently arrived in Norway, to a less-than-enthusiastic welcome. What I didn’t realize was how this question would help me understand my place in my own country.

Like many Americans, my great-grandparents escaped poverty and underwent a grueling ocean voyage to seek a better life. They came from Scandinavia, 125 years ago, and settled in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I had thought of this past as a curiosity rather than having much bearing on who I am today. Now that I was living in Norway for a year—and relying on its great socialized medicine and free university tuition—I, too, was one of the new foreigners. The word in Norwegian for us was “innvandrere,” which sounds like “invaders.” My classmate Sophie pointed out that “No, it’s ‘vandre.’ That’s more like wander, so it’s people who wander in.”

Sophie assured me that I wasn’t a foreigner in Norway; I was Norwegian, because my great-grandfather was born here. She and others in Norway referred to Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota and other cold spots as Norway’s “colonies” in America. I was simply a colonist returning to the homeland.

I insisted that I was American, just with Norwegian roots and last name. But during my time in Norway, I slowly realized that many traits that I considered Minnesotan were essentially Scandinavian. Our art of avoiding confrontation and being passive aggressive to bring down people who think too much of themselves is reflected in the Nordic idea of janteloven, which enforces the “law” that you are no better than anyone else, so get your nose out of the air and put it to the grindstone. The Minnesota accent is Scandinavian or Germanic, and Midwestern linguistic peculiarities such as leaving prepositions to dangle come right from Norwegian (“Do you want to come with?”). Like Scandinavia, our government in the upper Midwest is remarkably clean and free of corruption. All we need is Nordic universal health care.

To appease the others in my class, I gave up arguing over whether I’m truly Norwegian or American. I realized this debate signaled that they accepted me, even though other new immigrants seemed to be excluded. While Sophie was positive about my “Norwegianness,” she wasn’t sure about Professor Mauk. He spoke the language fluently (as opposed to my halting Norwegian), lived in Norway, was even married to a Norwegian, but, without ancestors from Norway, definitely was not Norwegian.

Professor Mauk replied, “People keep asking me if I have become a Norwegian citizen yet, so I thought up a pat answer, ‘Would you consider me more Norwegian then?’ They pause to wonder if it’s a trick question and then reply, ‘Probably not.’ Then they stopped asking if I’ve become Norwegian.” He was American, according to them, even if he knew far more about Norway than I.

Back in the American Midwest, many people refer to themselves as simply “Norwegian” or “Swedish,” not “Norwegian-American” or “Swedish-American,” even though many have never been to Scandinavia and can’t speak the language. Most are third-, fourth-, and even fifth-generation Scandinavians who can decide which of their many different backgrounds they want to claim. Ethnicity in America becomes a choice when one has more than one background.

In the past, though, the U.S. government viewed these “hyphenated Americans” with suspicion. When World War I broke out, suddenly no one was German in Minnesota, even though it’s the largest ethnic group. Scandinavians were viewed with equal distrust. My grandfather spoke a mixture of Swedish and Norwegian at home (“Svorsk”) until he went to kindergarten—where he was punished for not speaking English, a language he didn’t know. One child in the class translated for the rest of the kids. When I asked why my grandfather didn’t pass on the “old language,” he told me solemnly, “We’re in America; we speak English now. It’s better that way.”

Warning posted at Scandinavian lodges and elsewhere advising against using foreign languages during WWI. It suggested that people speak “American,” rather than “English.” Image courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society.

During World War I, speaking foreign languages in the U.S. was considered tantamount to treason. Posters mounted in ethnic lodges warned, “Don’t be SUSPECTED! Use AMERICAN LANGUAGE. America is Our Home.” The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety had the power to jail anyone speaking out against the war or for “the idea of peace.” The government set up “Americanization” committees to force immigrants to give up their hyphenated identities by abandoning their old citizenship and culture and becoming Americans and only Americans. My great-grandparents arriving in the Midwest were ultimately able to assume a new identity of being “American,” if they wanted. However, today’s new immigrants to Norway may never have the option of being considered Norwegian.

Remnants of Norwegian culture remain and are treasured in the Midwest, but my family lost the language, though some of us have struggled to learn it again. One Lutheran parishioner joked to the author of They Chose Minnesota about being forced to give up his native tongue, “I have nothing against the English language. I use it myself every day. But if we don’t teach our children Norwegian, what will they do when they get to heaven?”

Would I have learned all of this if I hadn’t lived in Norway? I feel that only through living abroad was I able to appreciate this complicated history and discover my place as an American. While I feel comfortable with this label, many people in the Midwest call themselves simply Norwegians without the hyphen. I told Helen, another university student, about this and how many of these “Norwegians” in Minnesota have never been to Norway and can’t speak a word of the language.

Without a hint of irony, she responded. “Then you, too, are Norwegian now.” I argued that I’m American with Norwegian roots, but she didn’t agree. “You were Norwegian first,” she insisted.

The post How Norway Taught Me to Balance My Hyphenated-Americanness appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2012, in the first Breivik v. State, he was convicted of mass murder and terrorism and sent to prison for the maximum sentence allowed under Norwegian law—21 years. But Norway is not done with him. Or, more accurately, he is not done with Norway. This time, Breivik came to court to sue the state for “violations of his human rights.”

For our own sanity, those of us living in Scandinavian countries with generally trustful relations between people and well-functioning economies and welfare states have wanted to move on from the brutality of attacks like Breivik’s. But every so often there comes an event—the bombings in Brussels this week, for example—that punctures our sense of security. For me, the return of the devil was one of them.

It is ironic that Breivik sued the Norwegian government, when families of the victims and survivors of the terrorist attacks have long considered filing their own suits against the state for failing to protect the children and more generally failing to protect its own citizens. The families of the victims have not had the energy to follow up before the courts, and they’ve been trying to get back to the lives they led before the July 22 attacks.

But certainly so many things changed with Breivik’s appearance on that clear and sunny summer day in 2011 in this otherwise fortunate corner of the world. Many people described it as a horror movie because it felt so surreal—the sight of Breivik dressed in a police uniform he tailored himself, contradicting the good intentions and camaraderie most Norwegians put their faith in, massacring the brightest of the next generation. This is why he has come to embody the devil himself here.

His actions made us realize how ill-prepared we were to deal with this type of evil. When Breivik set off the car bomb in Oslo, only four police officers—out of thousands—were on duty. In downtown Oslo, no obstacles prevented the terrorist from parking his car at the unguarded entry door to the government headquarters. He had plenty of time to drive to Utøya Island and conduct a manhunt against the children attending the Norwegian Labor Party summer camp. Neither a helicopter nor a boat could be organized in advance to stop Breivik’s massacre.

At the time of the attack, I myself was celebrating my daughter’s 13th birthday in the Swedish countryside. This peaceful scene was interrupted by a call from my editor at the Swiss Broadcasting Company, where I am the northern European correspondent. “Something strange is happening in Oslo,” she said. And then, for many weeks, I was plunged into a disturbing underworld seething with anti-government, anti-immigrant anger and violence that we hadn’t seen until it boiled over.

During the first iteration of Breivik v. State in 2012, I sat through the 10-week-long criminal proceedings at the Oslo Court. To me, his propaganda was as ridiculous as his frightening actions. Breivik said he was fighting to prevent the downfall of Western civilization at the hands of a Muslim takeover. “This country is my prison,” he said. His only regret, stated before the sentencing, was, “I did not succeed in killing even more of those people.” When Breivik got his life sentence on August 24, 2012, I felt relieved. But I did not feel relaxed; I knew that at some point he—or another kind of Breivik—would be back.

Breivik himself came back earlier than expected. His challenge against the state interested me because I think all of us, in the aftermath of his actions and sentencing, have wondered whether we have treated him according to the values we hold dear, even if his actions went beyond the limits of reason. Is it possible to deal fairly with a monster?

During the last four years, Breivik has basically been in his own prison, as he is deemed to be a danger to others and others are seen as a danger to him. A team of 49 people (including a doctor, a priest and gym coach) is taking care of him. He occupies three rooms: a sleeping room with ensuite shower, a study room with books and a typewriter (Breivik is an accredited student at Oslo University), and a private gym. Breiviks receives about 2,500 letters a year, many of them very long and requiring translation from Russian and other languages. Norwegian taxpayers have picked up the bills for damaged government ministries, new prison construction, lawyers, and translation, which have cost them more than a billion dollars so far.

To get to Skien, the former industrial hotspot that houses Breivik’s prison and the site of his most recent trial, I took a three-hour train ride from Oslo across beautiful fjords, along lakes, and through deep forests At the lower end of the famous Telemark Canal, I caught a taxi for the half-hour trip to the Skien High Security Prison. The distance from the original location of his crime felt like an important symbol to the people of Oslo: ”We keep him away from you.”

Skien Prison certainly felt like a prison: It had high walls, barbed wire, and control towers. However, there was a certain human touch to it, as all the guards I met were very friendly and welcoming. The sign outside the prison door noted it was a kriminalomsorgen, a ”care center” for criminals. After having suffered from and contributed to the extensive inhumanties of World War II, Norway developed a humane penal code, based on the idea that all wrongdoings can be corrected and every person should have a second chance for a decent life.

The prison’s sports hall had been turned into a courtroom for the four-day-proceeding. I could tell that when Breivik walked in, neatly dressed and with a fully shaved skull, he was enjoying being back in the spotlight. I found myself just a few meters behind this man, who by appearance and voice could be any person you might meet on the streets of the wealthy western parts of Oslo, where Breivik grew up. However, it soon became clear how different Breivik was from those people. He started by offering a Hitler greeting to the auditorium and then said to judge Helen Andenæs Sekulic,”I am the secretary general of the Nordic State Party.” A political party that exists only in his shaven head.

Skien Prison—a Norwegian kriminalomsorgen—converted its sports hall into a makeshift courtroom for the most recent proceedings of Breivik v. State.

In his three-hour long statement, Breivik compared himself to Hitler, Nelson Mandela, and Abraham Lincoln as “leaders who were ready for violent action when deemed necessary.” He asked the court to relax his prison regimen so he could more easily interact with fascist supporters around the world. The horror movie that unfolded after the attacks was taking a turn towards a farce. Here was a 37-year old terrorist, asking for compassion from a world he had savaged, turning the goodwill of the Norwegian people against them. And he didn’t see the irony.

But I understood more of what was at stake when I talked to the father of one of the girls killed on Utöya during a break in the trial. He, and other relatives and survivors, came because they wanted to know that they would be safe from this man.

Breivik proved to be worst witness for his own case against the Norwegian state. He verified the shocking fact that yes, there are human beings who are so inhuman that they never ever should be released again. So, when the devil himself got back into his handcuffs on day four of this trial, I was again relieved—the rule of law in Norway was working as it was supposed to. But I was also depressed because I couldn’t recognize anything familiar in this fellow human being.

I lost my way after I passed one of the exit checkpoints, ending up in the prison kitchen. There, a smiling cook offered me some fresh coffee and directions for how to get out of the prison. I was so glad to find my way back to a society where there is enough humanity and the ability to learn how to deal with the worst among us.

The post A Mass Murderer Is Testing the Limits of Scandinavian Goodwill appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The response to these attacks distinguished Norway, at first. In contrast to other Western governments that experienced similar crimes, the Norwegian leadership did not promise retaliation, did not yield to fear and impose new security rules that could have made the society more closed, and did not vow to launch a “war on terror.” Instead, the government recognized the attack as an assault on the country’s open-minded, democratic culture—Breivik, now 35, was sentenced to life in prison after a trial in which he claimed right-wing “political reasons”—and responded accordingly. Then-Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg declared that Norway would become “more democratic, more open, and more human” as a consequence of the country’s worst post-war atrocity. This official promise was supported by a huge majority of Norwegians and received applause from across the world.

I live in neighboring Sweden and covered the attacks and their immediate aftermath for Swiss National Radio. Returning now, three years later, has been sobering. Feelings are darker and harder than they were in the aftermath of the horror. And there is very little evidence that these democratic promises will be fulfilled.

Instead, Prime Minister Stoltenberg has lost popularity and credibility. Several commissions that investigated the attacks issued public criticisms—some even held Stoltenberg’s government responsible for failing to ensure the most basic forms of security and emergency response and thus enabling Breivik to blow up the central capital and conduct the Utöya massacre. As a result of the reports, all responsible ministers and security officials have been replaced over the past three years. That includes Stoltenberg, who moved on to a job as the next secretary general of an organization deeply involved in the “war on terror”: NATO.

Along with shaking up Norway’s leadership, concerns about the government’s emergency preparedness before the attacks also called into question the underpinnings of Norway’s welfare state. In the aftermath of the attacks, survivors and victims’ relatives received little public assistance. One survey found that almost half of all victims’ parents report being unable to return to a full work schedule. Norway’s leaders have refused requests for more direct assistance (both in finances and counseling) to families and for funds to research the problems of survivors and victims’ families—even as they pushed to create expensive memorials near Utöya and in Central Oslo. Survivors and relatives have criticized the planners for not consulting them on the design of these memorials.

There has been precious little discussion of how to advance Norwegian democracy, as was promised. The only clear action has been a comprehensive sealing-off from public access of the Capital’s public buildings. Throughout the country, government buildings have become much less accessible to citizens than they were before the attacks. As for the rebuilding of Central Oslo, the main response has been to delay a decision on what to do with the buildings around the former prime minister’s office.

Norway’s leaders have also dashed hopes for revitalizing the strict, party-based governance system and allowed opportunities to start a reform conversation to pass without action. A series of proposals to enhance voting rights and introduce direct democracy, timed to the bicentennial of the Norwegian Constitution, were rejected by both the governing conservative party and the Social Democrats. Instead of celebrating the first century of universal suffrage by extending political rights, the government recently declared an end to electronic voting (despite a promising trial period).

Instead, Norway has been drawing harder lines. It became the first European country to introduce mandatory military service for men and women. It also established the right for municipalities to ban beggars from other EU countries. Three years after the attacks, Norway has been changed in exactly the way its leaders feared. It is becoming a less open society.

The post How Anders Behring Breivik Changed Norway appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Lind Adamiak, who is a political science and history teacher at the local school and single mother of three, also participates in various local government committees. When I visited the island recently, she told me: “We are just about to introduce a democratic polity similar to the mainland.”

A Norwegian governor oversees the whole of Svalbard. “We have a great advantage here,” said Lind Adamiak. “We could start from scratch together here, but we all had some experiences from elsewhere. That makes for a great balance.”

Svalbard is an international archipelago made up of dozens of islands halfway between northern Norway and the North Pole. In 1920, the League of Nations approved the Svalbard Treaty, which granted Norway sovereignty over the various islands and a total area of 61,000 square kilometers. The treaty allowed all the signatories the same rights of access to this land far beyond the Arctic Circle. Since then, several countries, including Sweden, Poland, and the Soviet Union (and more recently the Russian Federation), have established settlements on Svalbard for economic and strategic reasons. But only Norway has been able to develop its coal mining settlements into full-fledged modern villages and towns, with Longyearbyen serving as the capital of the central island, Advent Fjord.

On my recent visit, I arrived after a three-hour flight north from Oslo. Since Longyearbyen’s main airport opened in 1975, the population of the world’s most northerly city has changed dramatically. ”Before that, just miners and their families lived here,” recalled Lind Adamiak. ”Now we have all kinds of people here.”

In fact, Svalbard is one of the very few territories across the globe where basically anyone is welcome to settle down. The Svalbard Treaty’s guarantees of open access supersede any and all limitations set by the laws of other countries, be they Norwegian statutes or E.U. rules.

There are still two former Soviet settlements on Svalbard, Barentsburg and Pyramiden, which are ruled by local Russian administrators. Barentsburg, a village of about 500 miners and their families from Ukraine and Russia, is still inhabited. But Pyramiden was abandoned in 1998. Two years earlier, a tragic air crash at Operafjellet mountain range killed 130 people from the Russian communities. The decision to abandon the village was made on very short notice, and everything was left behind. Due to the frigid Arctic climate, which acts as a preservative, the whole infrastructure of this former Soviet model village remains intact—and the well-built housing will likely be standing for another 500 years. Visitors encounter a fully equipped ghost town literally at the end of the world. Just a few Russian guards still live there to welcome day visitors from Longyearbyen, which is 50 kilometers and a four-hour boat trip away.

Longyearbyen offers a very different kind of experience. It hosts the planet’s most northerly university, University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), cultural institutions like Gallery Svalbard, and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (which houses “spare copies” of seeds held in gene banks worldwide). These institutions attract researchers, students, and their families from all over the world. Several budget airlines connect Svalbard with destinations across Europe and bring tens of thousands of tourists here every year. Most recently, the fact that the archipelago is a tax-free zone with cheap alcohol has helped make freezing Longyearbyen a most unlikely party destination.

For most of the last century, Longyearbyen was run by the CEOs of Store Norske, the state-owned coal mining company. In 2002, the people of Longyearbyen participated in their first free election. Since then, the community has been working step-by-step to develop a polity that resembles a Norwegian municipality.

Since most people stay in Svalbard for only a limited time for work and there are few services for elderly people, Longyearbyen and Svalbard remain places for the young, healthy, and entrepreneurial. But the outer world is never far away—as I learned when Aimée Lind Adamiak told me a story about her neighbor.

In summer 2011, Christin Kristoffersen almost lost her two sons in the attacks carried out by Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik that killed 77 people in Oslo and Utöya. Christin’s sons were taking part in the youth summer camp of the Norwegian Labor Party. Both were injured but survived. Two months after these attacks, which are commemorated by a local monument, Christin was elected the first female mayor of Longyearbyen.

“When it comes to how we live together and do our decisions, we want to become a more normal society like on mainland,” said Lind Amiak, “but when it comes to our very unique situation at the end of the world, we want to keep this great place as it is today for our children.”

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I was on my way back to Oslo five weeks after the July 22 attacks that made headlines around the world, covering the story for Swiss radio. A young man of Norwegian origin with a background in the political far right bombed the Oslo governmental blocks–leaving 8 people dead–and massacred 69 people at a summer cap of the ruling Labor Party. The morning of his attack, the 32-year-old terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, had uploaded his 1500-page manifesto onto the internet, in which he announced the start of a “global civil war” between Christianity and Islam. He described in the document how he had planned these attacks–the worst terrorist act in this peaceful and rich country since the Nazi occupation–for almost 10 years.

10 years.

This same decade was when the world experienced searing terrorist attacks that each got a shorthand: “9/11,” “M-11,” “Double Seven.” Thousands of people lost their lives in attempts by terrorists to trigger some sort of global civil war between ideologies, religious beliefs and cultures.

The reaction to this by the attacked countries has been strong and bold–new wars far from the sites of the original attacks and new limitations on freedoms at home.

This has produced a global politics of fear. The U.S., with its declaration by former President Bush of a “war on terror,” distinguished itself, for the worse, by meeting terrorist violence with state violence. But even on European soil, the March 11, 2004 bombings of suburban trains in Madrid and the July 7, 2005 bus bombings in London soil prompted governments to suspend some civic freedoms, boost surveillance and increase immigration controls. The reaction showed that terrorists had realized one of their goals: undermining democracy.

The Oslo attacks could have joined the list of terrorist successes. Except the Norwegians refuse to let them.

There are still seas of flowers around the main churches in the Norwegian capital, and the bombed headquarters of the national government will not be operational before early 2013. Yet what is most striking about Oslo is that people here are lowering barriers, not raising them.

My plane ride was only one example. After I landed in Oslo, I did not see any special security at Gardemoen Airport. The same picture in downtown Oslo: almost no police were out on the streets. Strategic buildings such as the Parliament, the Central Railway station and the Central Bank Headquarters remained unprotected by security and broadly open to the public.

All this is not by accident. The first reaction by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg to the bombings and massacre was not “We fight back.” He did not promise more security. No, the only things that Stoltenberg pledged were “more democracy” and “more openness.”

“We need to talk together much more than before and to express our views and opinions,” the prime minister said. He emphasized that no one should be isolated or left out: “An open political dialogue is the best insurance against any form of violence.”

There has been legitimate criticism of the Norwegian ability to detect terrorist attacks. Some naïveté has been exposed. When Anders Behring Breivik conducted his attacks on July 22, out of 2300 police officers in the Capital of Oslos, only four were on duty. The rest were on vacation or off duty, late on a typically quiet summer Friday afternoon.

And during the massacre at the Labor summer camp, the police had no helicopters or boats available to respond. Law enforcement could not communicate well with each other. These failures are now being examined by an independent commission. Some things may change. Police levels may be increased. Surveillance of extremist circles may be stepped up. The accessibility of some governmental buildings in downtown Oslo could be limited, slightly.

However, the government has made clear that it will limit any changes and stick to its strategy: keep society open and promote the political dialogue. The government has suggested that this might be the moment to consider broader political reform in Norway to make the system even more democratic.

This Norwegian approach offers a global counter-example of replacing the politics of deterrence, counter-attack and fear with the opposite: more openness.

This is not what terrorists would like to achieve. And that is why the Norwegian answer to terrorism is the only right one.

Bruno Kaufmann is a broadcast journalist based in Sweden, from where is covering Northern European Affairs for the Swiss Broadcasting Company. He can be contacted at kaufmann@mailbox.euromail.se.

*Photo courtesy of johsgrd.

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