INTRODUCTION

The idea of Scotland seeking to ‘establish itself along the lines of a Nordic model’, here reported by the Financial Times correspondent Richard Milne, has been a regular trope in Scottish political discourse, both before and after the reestablishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Milne's article, written in the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum, demonstrates most of the classic elements of this discourse (as well as the slightly odd implication that ‘Scotland’ sought previously, a ‘millennium ago’, to establish a Nordic model via Norse invasion). He notes the ‘superficial similarities’ between Scotland and Scandinavia, such as geographical proximity in Northern Europe, borrowed linguistic elements in Scots, ‘relatively small’ populations, and a shared dourness underpinned by a particular religious outlook. None of this is new, although the apparently enduring Norwegian success story has led some supporters of Scottish independence to idealise Norway as a model. Conversely, opponents have highlighted the very distinct circumstances around Norway's Oil Fund, which have allowed high levels of public spending to create a social welfare blueprint that is the envy of many ‘social democratic’ onlookers.

The Nordic region has played a prominent role in the debates on Scottish independence for over four decades. Prior to the 1979 Scottish Referendum, and again in the 1990s, Nordic states provided examples of ‘successful’ countries which gave a rhetorical counterbalance to the ‘great power’ discourse of the British State. In addition to this constitutional comparison, it is clear that – particularly in the 1990s and the period of ‘democratic deficit’ during the Thatcher years – the idealised notion of a Nordic welfare model provided a fascinating example for many Scottish politicians. On the independence side, the SNP had its own ‘social democratic’ wing, which eventually gained internal party hegemony, aspiring to perceived Nordic ideals of social equality.

INTRODUCTION: A RIGHT TO ROAM?

Norway and Scotland are North Sea neighbours with a similar population, geology and landscape. However, their inhabitants have had very different experiences of nature and access to the outdoors through education, sport, leisure and the use of weekend huts and wooden cabins.

Both countries have ‘right to roam’ laws, mountain bothies, National Parks and a tradition of distinctive winter sports. Dig deeper, though, and differences quickly appear.

Norway has forty-three National Parks, the first established in 1962. Scotland has two National Parks, the first established in 2002, and neither Scottish park is a wilderness area owned by the government. This example sets a theme that crops up in almost every comparison of nature and outdoor access in Scotland and Norway. Formal rights of access to the outdoors in Scotland have typically occurred half a century later than in Norway, have been less far-reaching and have not changed or challenged the dominance of private sporting estates.

The Norwegians have always practised allemannsretten or ‘freedom to roam’. In 1957, this was codified into an Outdoor Recreation Act giving the public rights of access to hike in the mountains, camp overnight, cycle on tracks and ski in forests during the winter – though not closer than 150 metres to any inhabited dwelling.

It took half a century longer for Scots to gain much the same package of legal access rights. Before that, Scots had the same long-standing belief in their traditional and informal ‘right to roam’, insisting trespass and ‘Private – Keep Out’ signs had no basis in Scots law. Some landowners – especially incomers with a different legal experience from south of the border – contested these customary rights, and during the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 farmers were accused of closing the countryside for longer than necessary. Nordic-style access laws were finally adopted in 2003 to resolve such disputes as part of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act. Yet despite this apparently similar customary and legal framework, the proportion of people actually using the outdoors today in Norway and Scotland is very different.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter is an attempt to tell Scottish readers how another small, peripheral country became a reasonably economically efficient but relatively egalitarian nation – in marked contrast to the kingdom of which Scotland is a part. My contribution is based on a lifelong study of the history of modern Norway, fieldwork in many different local communities – mostly in the northern part of my country, where I grew up – and serious participation in local and national politics. But I have learned a lot about Norway through fieldwork and shorter trips to comparable situations abroad, in Newfoundland, Iceland and Scotland, where I have had the good fortune of having friends and colleagues like the late Robert Storey, his wife the Gaelic scholar Lisa Storey and our common friend, John Bryden.

In April 1964, I spent a week on Vatersay, at the southern tip of the Outer Hebrides. At that time, I worked as a research assistant on the project ‘Human geography studies of North Norway’ at Tromsø Museum. The anthropologists at the University of Edinburgh invited me as a visiting ‘Northern Scholar’ for a month, including a grant for travelling around the country.

I must admit that I, as an agricultural economist with some social anthropology and sociology in my tool chest, was rather unprepared for my North Norway project, which I tried to develop in the direction of finding differences between declining coastal villages and those that seemed to be able to survive – comparing their access to natural resources, ability to raise capital, access to markets, and so on. But my observations and conversations with people on Vatersay and Barra were a very important impulse to expand my set of interacting explanatory categories beyond ecology and local culture. The decisive importance of the politically manipulable rules of the economic game became very easy to discover – like in fields such as fish marketing and subsistence agriculture – and the natural conditions in Vatersay were favourable as compared with many Arctic local communities, where people carrying on subsistence agriculture and seasonal fishing fifty years ago enjoyed a living standard indeed comparable with urban wage labour anywhere.