An empty chair will represent jailed Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo at next Friday's awards ceremony and symbolize China's policies to isolate and repress dissidents. The gesture comes amid heightened rhetoric from Beijing, which has pressured international diplomats to boycott the ceremony and denounced the Norwegian Nobel Committee for giving one of the world's top accolades to Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an 11-year sentence for political activism.
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Two weeks before Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo receives the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia, Norwegians are looking warily east, wondering what the world's most populous mercantile power will do to them for honouring the jailed co-author of a pro-democracy manifesto. At least half a dozen countries appear to have buckled under Chinese pressure to stay away from the Dec. 10 award ceremony in Oslo. But before China lets the next shoe drop (possibly killing a free-trade deal with Norway) it ought to realize that the Nobel committee has elevated it to a club that includes the United States, Russia and Germany. Those countries all had to deal with peace-prize-winning dissidents who questioned national claims to superpowerdom. Without openly addressing the laments of King, Sakharov and Ossietzky, those countries would lack the global legitimacy they now enjoy -- frayed as it may be.
A new laddie magazine in Norway sent a reporter to Afghanistan and came back quoting a Norwegian soldier who thought killing Taliban soldiers was better than sex. Since Norway's government has been pretending that its mission in Afghanistan is to build schools and clinics, the account of rowdy Viking youths firing guns has caused a political furor just over a week before the Nobel Peace Prize is announced here. A little perspective was gained yesterday with reports of American soldiers on trial for killing random Afghans and collecting body parts as trophies. Time to bring the boys home, maybe?
When government ministers from around the world came to Oslo Monday to find a way out of the global unemployment mess, the first thing they noted was that there's no mess here. Norway's unemployment rate is about 3 percent -- well below its level before the financial crisis. The participants, including the prime ministers of chaotic Spain and Greece, heard that labour groups, employers and the government here cooperate closely on wage settlements; that more than 50 percent of the workforce is unionized; that the public sector hires when the private sector cuts back; and that oil revenues flow to all. Everyone agreed that all that is wonderful -- and completely irrelevant to their own economies.
The MV Nordic Barents set sail from Norway to China Saturday with 41,000 tonnes of iron ore. What's remarkable is the route. The ship is steaming through the Arctic Ocean, skirting what's left of the melting ice sheet. "We're pretty much going over the top," said John Sanderson, CEO of the Norwegian mine whose ore was on board. The journey is described as the first non-stop transit of Russia's Northern Sea Route by a non-Russian commercial vessel. The Arctic short cut will shave about eight days and 5,000 nautical miles from the usual southerly route to Asia.
Sweden has lept out of the post-crisis economic doldrums, reporting growth of 1.2 percent in the second quarter of 2010. It's growing faster than every other EU country except Slovakia. Non-member Norway is shuffling by comparison but at least it's headed the right way. Today it reported second-quarter GDP growth of 0.5 percent, not including its volatile oil sector. Even that weak rate beat analysts' expectations, as I reported here for Reuters. Denmark is expected to post its fourth consecutive quarter of recovery.
Scandinavian Airlines, the semi-official air carrier of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, seems to be neither big enough nor flexible enough to resist market incursions by its scrappy competitor, Norwegian. Having taken the local market by storm, Norwegian’s colorful boss, an ex-fighter pilot named Bjørn Kjos, now intends to pick off long-distance stretches, like Oslo-New York, that Scandinavian (a.k.a. SAS) has neglected or overpriced. Analysts see a major threat to SAS despite partial ownership by the three governments. SAS chief Mats Jansson has even begun responding to Kjos’s frequent zingers in the media, including a claim that SAS’s fleet was decrepit. “Kjos seems more like he’s in the communication and entertainment industry than the airlines,” Jansson told DN.no. “Our fleet is up-to-date, and we have no need to buy new planes.”
When it comes to the human body, Scandinavians are libertines and Americans are prudes. That’s been conventional knowledge at least since “I Am Curious (Yellow)” in 1967. But a new global survey by the travel search engine Skyscanner finds that 92 percent of Americans and 93 percent of Brits think topless sunbathing is fine, while 82 percent of Scandinavians agree. A little sunshine heals all rifts.
The currencies of Sweden and Norway have jumped in value against the euro as investors take note of the two countries’ speedy economic recovery and their relative insulation from the fiscal woes of Greece and several other unstable European Union countries. Local banking crises in the 1980s and 1990s spurred reforms that helped Sweden and Norway sail through the recent financial turmoil relatively unscathed, as reported in today’s Wall Street Journal, in an article headlined “Scandinavia Gains Currency.” Steve Barrow, an analyst at Standard Bank in London, told Dow Jones reporter Neil Shah: "If you're looking for a better currency to hold in Europe, the Scandinavians are probably the best.”
Support for Norway's Conservative Party has almost doubled since it was humbled by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's center-left coalition in the 2009 national elections. Now the Conservatives rank No. 1 when Norwegians are asked to name their favorite party, according to a survey conducted by TNS Gallup for TV2. That bodes well for the business-friendly party as it gears up for municipal and county elections in September.
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