Norwegian National Identity and the Purges of Quislings: Parliamentary debates 1945-50.
According to influential 19th century historian Ernst Sars, Norwegian independence from Denmark in 1814 had not produced enough bloodshed to build a Norwegian national identity. As even less blood was shed in the peaceful dissolution of the personal union with Sweden in 1905, it was rather the Second World War, an event that took place almost a century and a half after independence, that came to produce what Norwegian historians has referred to as the Foundational Patriotic Narrative of the nation (cf. Grimnes 2009; Fure 1999). However, as the German occupation (1940-45) became a definitional moment of what the nation was (heroic, liberal, law-abiding, antifascist, etc.) this was based as much on determining what it was not: Quislings, collaborators, anti-democratic, unlawful, and so on. And the principal actors in defining the content of these terms were not historians, but actors within the political institutions.
The battle to define the Norwegian nation started during the war. On May 16 1940, while the war was still being fought on Norwegian soil, the Norwegian National Socialist Newspaper Fritt Folk declared that through collaboration with Nazi Germany, the Norwegian NS-party was to “complete what Harald the Fair haired started – despite all the ‘laws’ that the party system has canonised as sacred.” (Fritt Folk 16.5.1940). When the Act of State introduced the Führer-principle on February 1 1942, NS argued that it was rooted in the old Norse tradition of primogeniture, and that the aim of the party was to restore the true institutions and ideas of the 1814-constitution that had been perverted ever since by the political system (Sørensen & Brandal 2018).NS-attempts at redefining Norwegian identity were mirrored by the acts of the Government-in-Exile in London and the resistance movement in occupied Norway. A prime example are the provisional decrees issued by the government-in-exile to influence public sentiments and counter Nazi propaganda. The most consequential was the Landssvik-decree of 1944, which introduced a new category of crime: ‘Landssvik’ – a more severe form of treason and collaboration and contained new forms of punishments such as loss of public trust, the right to vote, own property and work in certain professions. By defining not just what was unlawful, but also what was unjustifiable, it also defined what it meant to be a ‘good Norwegian’ in a cultural, social, moral, and political sense (Brandal 2023). Similarly, two political programs negotiated among the pre-war political elites; the Joint Political Program [Fellesprogrammet] negotiated among the pre-war political elites and the Labour Movements Blue Book [Framtidens Norge], consciously combined narratives of wartime experience with a vision for a new Norwegian society that was to emerge after the war.
The seminal role of the political system in shaping public discourse on who was considered to be a ‘good Norwegian’ continued in the post war era, albeit with a difference. As this paper will show, the parliamentary debates on the legal purges of traitors and collaborators and reports from the Military- and Civilian Commissions of Inquiry, were also negotiations about the Norwegian national identity with competing and evolving ideas about what it meant to be ‘Norwegian’, where arguments centred around what were seminal constitutional events in Norwegian history, how to interpret these and what customs, traits and traditions were ingrained as foundational for Norwegian culture. As such, the parliamentary debates about the purges of Quislings were also a debate about Norwegian national identity, in addition to matters regarding penal codes and law. According to Minister for Justice, O. C. Gundersen, NS had attempted to change “our way of life and culture from the bottom up” (Forh. O. nr. 3, 1948). In the first parliamentary debate after the war, three years earlier, the Christian Democrat Nils Lavik had similarly argued that the role of the legal purges was to “create a clear line between the lawlessness of the past and the rule of law of the present” (Forh. O. nr. 3 1945).
While increasing attention has been paid to the role played by historians in forging the national narrative from the war time experiences in the post-war era, little attention has been paid to the role of the political actors. As I will show, this is even more striking given that the post-war public discourse has to a large extent been informed by the terminology and definitions of what acts and attitudes were to be considered unjust and just, in both a legal and moral sense, created by the political actors during and immediately after the war.
Literature
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Brandal, N. (2023). Norway. In L. Stan & N. Nedelsky (eds.), Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice. Cambridge U.P.
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Biography
Nik. Brandal is a historian and Associate Professor at Oslo New University College, Institute for Political Science and International Relations, specializing in radicalization, genocide studies, social democracy, and the Nordic Model. Among his publications are ‘Norway’ (Cambridge U.P. 2023 in Stan & Nedelsky (eds.), Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, vol. 4); ‘Surveillance in Scandinavia during World War One’ (Routledge 2021, w/ E. Brazier & O. Teige in Marklund & Skouvig, eds., Histories of Surveillance from Antiquity to the Digital Era: The Eyes and Ears of Power); ‘Between Communitarianism and Individualism: The Nordic Way of Doing Politics’ (Routledge 2018, w/ D.E. Thorsen in Witoszek & Midtun, eds., Sustainable Modernity); Det norske demokratiet og dets fiender [Norwegian Democracy & It’s Enemies] (Dreyer 2018, w/ Ö. Sörensen); Nasjonale minoriteter og urfolk i norsk politikk fra 1900 til 2016 [Norwegian Policies toward National Minorities and Indigenous People 1900-2016] (Cappelen Akademisk 2017, ed. w/ I.T Plesner & C.A. Døving); ‘Cousins Divided? Path dependence and political kinship between Scotland og Norway’ (Edinburgh U.P. 2015, w/ Ø. Bratberg in Bryden [et al] (eds.), Northern Neighbours – Scotland og Norway since the Middle Ages), and The Nordic Model of Social Democracy (Palgrave MacMillan 2013, w/ Ö. Bratberg & D.E. Thorsen).