Norway was, within living memory, one of the poorer countries in western Europe. It is now among the richest per head anywhere, and Oslo’s opera house, museums, tunnels and waterfront are all downstream of one decision made in the 1990s.
But the story starts a long way before that.
The first Oslo
Founded around 1040, traditionally by Harald Hardrada — the king who died at Stamford Bridge in 1066 — at the mouth of the Alna river under the Ekeberg ridge, a kilometre and a half east of the modern centre.
It got a bishop around 1070 and became the capital under Håkon V in 1299, who built Akershus Fortress.
Then the Black Death arrived in 1349 and killed perhaps half to two-thirds of the population of Norway. The country entered union with Denmark in 1380 and stayed there for 434 years. Norwegian ceased to be a written language of administration; the court, the church and the money were in Copenhagen.
Oslo spent four centuries as a provincial town, and it burned repeatedly because it was made of wood.
The fire, and the new name
The fire of 1624 burned for three days and destroyed nearly all of it.
Christian IV came, looked at the ruins, and moved the city — west, under the fortress guns, on a grid, in brick and stone. He named it Christiania after himself.
The medieval site was abandoned. Its ruins are still there, in a park behind the Opera House.
The name Oslo was restored in 1925, twenty years after independence.
1814, and a constitution written in three weeks
Denmark backed Napoleon and lost. Under the Treaty of Kiel in January 1814, Norway was handed to Sweden like a chattel.
The Norwegians declined. A constituent assembly met at Eidsvoll, wrote a constitution in about six weeks, and adopted it on 17 May 1814 — a document strongly influenced by the American and French constitutions and, for its moment, one of the most liberal in Europe.
Sweden invaded, briefly. The compromise was a personal union — a shared king, a separate Norwegian constitution, parliament and laws.
17 May is still the national day, and it commemorates a constitution rather than a war or a monarch, which is unusual and revealing.
The national romantic century
Nineteenth-century Norway spent a great deal of energy working out what Norway was.
Ivar Aasen constructed a written Norwegian from rural dialects, which is why the country still has two official written forms — Bokmål and Nynorsk — and why that remains politically live.
Asbjørnsen and Moe collected the folk tales. Edvard Grieg wrote the music. Ibsen wrote the plays and then wrote plays attacking the whole project. Munch painted The Scream in 1893. Nansen crossed Greenland on skis in 1888 and drifted in the ice in Fram from 1893.
Polar exploration and national identity were the same enterprise. It is not an accident that the ski museum at Holmenkollen and the polar collections tell one story.
1905
The union was dissolved in 1905, peacefully, after a constitutional crisis over consular representation and a referendum in which the vote for dissolution was 368,208 to 184.
Norway then held a second referendum on whether to be a monarchy or a republic, chose monarchy, and imported a Danish prince who took the name Haakon VII.
Women got the vote in 1913, among the first in the world.
9 April 1940
Germany invaded a neutral country with a hollowed-out army.
At Oscarsborg, an obsolete fort with fifty-year-old guns, Colonel Birger Eriksen fired without orders and sank the cruiser Blücher. The delay let the King, the government and the gold reserves escape Oslo.
Because they escaped, Haakon VII could refuse to appoint Quisling — threatening to abdicate rather than do it — and Norway had a legitimate government in exile for five years rather than a collaborationist one.
The occupation cost Norway around 770 of its Jewish citizens, of whom fewer than forty survived; thousands of Soviet and Yugoslav prisoners died in camps in the north; and the retreating Germans burned Finnmark to the ground in 1944. The Resistance Museum at Akershus tells it properly.
The oil
On 23 December 1969, Phillips Petroleum confirmed the Ekofisk field in the North Sea. It was one of the largest offshore oil discoveries ever made.
What Norway did next is the part worth studying.
It kept control. Statoil was created in 1972 as a state company, alongside a regulator and a ministry, on the explicit principle that the resource belonged to the nation. The “ten oil commandments” adopted by parliament in 1971 set out that Norwegian industry should benefit, that the state should be involved at all levels, and that the resource should serve the whole society.
It taxed heavily. The marginal tax rate on petroleum profits is around 78 per cent.
Then, crucially, it did not spend the money. In 1990 parliament established what became the Government Pension Fund Global — the oil fund — and in 2001 adopted a fiscal rule limiting the government to spending roughly the fund’s expected real return, around three per cent, rather than the capital.
The fund is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, worth well over a trillion dollars, and it owns something like one and a half per cent of all listed equities on earth. Every Norwegian is, notionally, a krone millionaire because of it.
What that bought, and what it did not
It bought the tunnels under the harbour, the Opera House in 2008, MUNCH in 2021, the National Museum in 2022, the electric car fleet, and a welfare state that most of Europe cannot fund.
It did not buy consensus. Norway has voted twice — in 1972 and 1994 — against joining the European Union, and is in the EEA instead, which means adopting most EU law without a vote on it.
And the fund’s whole purpose is to outlast the oil, which means Norway is a petrostate that has legislated for its own obsolescence while continuing to drill. That contradiction is argued about constantly here, and it is the single most interesting political question in the country.
You are looking at all of it when you stand on the roof of the opera house.