If
they are yearning for that pristine and unspoilt nature country
depicted on postcards, with its pale and undiluted population descended
in direct line from Vikings, visitors to Norway are in for a rude
awakening the moment they land at Fornebu International Airport.
Not only is the airport an unspectacular one; a drab and downscaled
version of Heathrow or Schiphol. The chances are also that the taxi
driver who takes one into town is far from a blue-eyed Viking son,
but instead a brown man with a Subcontinental accent: a member,
the visitor will eventually discover, of Norway's healthy Pakistani
community.
Numbering more than 20,000, the Pakistani are the largest immigrant
group in Norway, slightly more numerous than the Swedes. Since the
late 1960s, when Norway decided to do as the Germans, French, Britons
and Swedes had already done and import a few planeloads of cheap
unskilled labour for its least prestigious menial tasks, the Pakistani
community has grown steadily. After 1975, however, the growth has
taken place chiefly through internal reproduction and family reunions
as Norway at the time imposed a ban on labour migration. Today,
Norway has a total of 220,000 immigrants, accounting for five per
cent of the population, but half of them come from rich, white countries
and are never thought of as immigrants. The other half originate
in over a hundred countries. During the 1980s and 1990s, the main
flow has consisted of refugees from war-torn or politically authoritarian
societies such as Iran, Somalia, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.
The Pakistani are in a special position not only because they are
the largest community, but also because they came first. Thousands
of Pakistani-Norwegian children and teenagers living in the urban
centres today have grown up in Norway, speak the language without
an accent and consider themselves Norwegians. This presents the
ongoing construction of Norwegian nationhood with new challenges.
The integration of immigrants into Norwegian society has not been
unproblematic. The country has traditionally been geographically
and economically marginal and relatively isolated. Apart from the
indigenous Sami (Lapps) in the far north, the population was considered
-- and considered itself -- homogeneous. Indeed, the entire project
of nation-building, as it evolved from the mid-nineteenth century,
culminating in full independence from Sweden in 1905, emphasised
the indivisible and unitary nature of the Norwegian population.
Norwegian nationalism and national imagery have always been oriented
towards a mythical pastoral idyll. The rooted, traditional peasant
has been depicted as the archetypal Norwegian, and although three
quarters of the population now live in urbanised areas, Norwegians
still tend to see themselves as an essentially rural people of peasants
and fishermen. This kind of national identity, which stresses the
continuity with the past, traditional authenticity and the rural
way of life, is not immediately compatible with an urban minority
of Punjabi- and Urdu-speaking Muslims from a country with which
Norway has no historical ties.
The state has by and large pursued a straightforward policy of assimilation
vis-à-vis the Pakistani. Their integration into the labour
market has been taken for granted; after all, they came here to
work. Their children attend ordinary Norwegian schools, although
some concessions have been made in granting them a few classes in
their maternal language. In general, a successful Pakistani according
to the values of the majority is by definition a Norwegianised Pakistani.
State policies in Norway are in principle not racist. Norwegian
citizenship, for example, can be acquired after seven years of residence.
However, it is beyond dispute that state policies are culturalist in favouring Norwegian culture over everything else. It has been
notoriously difficult for immigrant minorities to defend religious
and linguistic rights, which makes their political situation quite
unlike the case of northern Norway, where the linguistic rights
of the Sami, who speak a language unrelated to Norwegian, have been
firmly established in schools, in cultural life and even in the
local administration.
The reluctance on the part of the Norwegian state to allow immigrants
to retain their cultural heritage can be described as a simultaneous
application of Enlightenment and Romantic ideas: Romantic nationalism
praises the virtues of a particular traditional culture and fails
to see the virtues of others; while the Enlightenment idea of social
justice conflates equality with similarity. Indeed,
in the Norwegian language, the term likhet covers both. According
to a common view, therefore, in order to achieve equal rights, one
has to become culturally similar first.
At the same time, it is well known that immigrants are systematically
discriminated against in the labour market -- in both public and
private sectors -- and that Pakistani, in particular, are a disadvantaged
group. There is considerable everyday racism, although the militant
anti-immigrant groups are small. In other words, at the level of
civil society, animosity against immigrants is a common phenomenon.
The Pakistani in Norway, most of whom live in Oslo and neighbouring
Drammen, have reacted to this situation in different ways. Most
of them have become strongly Norwegianised, although it would be
fair to say that many "live in two worlds". Some regard
themselves simply as brown, Islamic Norwegians. However, the exclusion
taking place in civil society and the state pressure to assimilate
have also led to counterreactions. Whereas the trade unions formed
the natural focal point of political organisation in the early years,
there has been a recent shift towards religious organisation. Islam
is in this way becoming politicised in Norway in the 1990s, and
a growing number of immigrants are turning towards it as an alternative
to other political fora. The Pakistani population is thus divided
between a secular, modernist tendency and a traditionalist tendency,
which rejects the society in which they no longer feel that they
are wanted. Religious entrenchment of this kind would obviously
have been much less likely if Norwegian society had been able to
offer true equality and, conversely, did not require total similarity.
Instead, it has been the other way around, as similarity has been
seen as a means to acquire equality. Thirty years of experience
has shown that this is wrong: in the early years, newly arrived
Pakistani were immediately employed, while many culturally integrated
second generation immigrants (or first generation Norwegian) are
now rejected by employers, ostensibly because of "cultural
differences". This is the kind of situation which understandably,
but regrettably, inspires Islamic revitalisation. |
