The Norwegian Minister of Culture Turid Birkeland's Fridtjof Nansen memorial lecture in Athens, Wednesday 19th March

The will to humanitarianism

Ladies and gentlemen,
Fridtjof Nansen died almost 70 years ago. His life-work belonged to a different age, but the nearer we get to the millennium, the more clearly we see that we are facing some of the same challenges he encountered.

Nansen was unique, achieving things we can hardly comprehend were accomplished by a single man. He is, however, an example from which we can still derive many lessons.

Because Nansen was a polymath - a person of varied learning - he gives us the opportunity to bring out so many of his different aspects. He is the explorer, the scientist, the humanist and the embodiment of willpower.

I will concentrate here on Nansen as the embodiment of willpower.

It is well-known that Nansen in no circumstances would allow himself to be called a politician, even though in many ways he was just that. Politics is about will and action. But what Nansen willed was in most areas on a level far above ordinary politics. It was not his way to yield in the face of what other people would call an insoluble problem. He never delegated responsibility; when he saw a need, he rolled up his own sleeves to solve it. The fundamental principle of Nansen's life was thus to walk new paths and break down old conventions.

Fridjtof Nansen was born in Norway's capital Christiania, now Oslo, in 1861. Even in his childhood he showed great interest in science and winter sports.

In 1888, at the age of 27, he was ready for his first major expedition.

His crossing of Greenland on skis had become a legend before he even returned. This was an expedition that another language would have called kamikaze; Nansen's plan was to cross from one coast to the other with no possibility of retreat if anything went wrong. The ship set Nansen and his companions ashore on the east coast and sailed home immediately.

When Nansen sailed into Oslo the following May, the capital's harbour was full of every kind of vessel, all gathered to welcome home their hero. There were sailships, steamships and 60,000 people to cheer him up our main boulevard, the Karl Johan.

This admiration has a resonance from one of our most popular folk tales, the story of the three brothers Per, Pål and Espen Askeladd, a tale that is the key to many Norwegians' self-understanding. Espen's big brothers are arrogant, they are sure they can deal with all the challenges that come their way. But home they come with their tails between their legs, clearly defeated. Espen Askeladd - a kind of male Cinderella - is the one everyone laughs at, but who has the last laugh himself. It is he who succeeds against all the odds, whether with the king who makes him herd his hares, or in an eating contest with the troll.

Espen Askeladd knows what is needed - wisdom. The will to listen to others, even if it is only a troll grandmother with her nose stuck in a treestump, or a beggar who asks for a little food. It is quickly revealed that these figures have powers and abilities that his self-satisfied brothers overlooked when they were asked for help. And so they paid for their selfishness.

Nansen was this kind of Askeladd in all the great deeds for which he is famous. His triumphs were to succeed in something that other people had already thought of or attempted, but failed in.

If it were "only" a matter of Nansen's feats in the Arctic ice, we would not be gathered here for the annual lecture that bears his name. At the same time it is clear that it was the enormous respect he earned as a natural scientist, athlete and explorer that opened the doors to international politics and made him the authority of his age. His discoveries in the polar region and his studies of the nervous system of the tiny hagfish, for which he obtained his doctorate, were both pathbreaking scientific accomplishments upon which researchers have continued to build up to our own day.

Nansen transferred his attention from expeditions to diplomacy. He was an important player in the crisis of 1905, when the union between Norway and Sweden was collapsing and no one knew what the outcome would be. Nansen's most important role was to convince the Great Powers that Norway was viable as an independent nation; the union was then dissolved without a drop of blood being shed. The debt of gratitude was repaid by the appointment of Nansen as Norway's first ambassador to London the following year.

The elder Nansen applied his enormous willpower and thirst for action when he entered the international arena. In 1920, 61 years old, Nansen was a natural choice as member of the Norwegian delegation to the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations.

Once again it is Askeladden who tries his hand at what his big brothers - in this case the leading nations - have failed to do.

In May 1920 Nansen took on the League's biggest commission: to lead the repatriation of prisoners of war from 26 countries. With minimal administration and extremely low costs, he organised the repatriation of 450,000 - yes, four hundred and fifty thousand - prisoners in the course of 18 months.

As if the repatriation were not a large enough job for one man, in August of the following year he tackled the famine in the Soviet Union. Two million Russian refugees needed help. This absorbed a good deal even of his energy; it was a humanitarian effort of which the world had never seen the like. But still had the time to organise, in 1921-22, the exchange of several hundred thousand Greeks and Turks. Nansen was convinced that the returning prisoners and refugees would contribute to a better and richer Greece. "The right people in the right place" was one of his principles. The Greek Government commissioned him to work for an understanding with Kemal Atatürk's Turkish Government. What they were to agree on was the transfer of about half a million ethnic Turks to Turkey, and twice as many Greeks in the opposite direction. The Greek opposition protested, thinking the plan far too radical. And the Turkish Government, which should have been satisfied, also wanted time to think about it. We should remember that this was up to then the greatest mass movement of people in history. That Nansen succeeded is shown by the fact that two streets in Athens are named after him.

We are accustomed nowadays to being able to mobilise large organisations to deal with most precarious situations. Nansen had no such "fire brigade". For example, he came home from the Volga region in 1921, having discovered that perhaps 30 million people were threatened with starvation and death. He had been there on behalf of the International Red Cross. When he gave a highly emotional speech to the League of Nations, the applause was deafening - but the jingle of coins was not. Everything petered out in the League's committees, and the League declared itself unwilling to assist a Communist country. So Nansen toured Europe, holding the hundreds of speeches that were required to finance the trainloads of grain bound for Russia. It has been calculated that between six and seven million people were saved from certain death in the Volga region and Ukraine.

Nansen's work was exhausting. What fatigued him most was the administrative and bureaucratic hurdles. He was never the flexible politician who through shifting alliances sought to achieve what little he could. He was made on a larger scale altogether, and he never put himself first. An example of what this might mean was when he was - most deservedly - awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922. A Danish publisher matched the sum, so that he ended up with 244,000 Norwegian kroner, a figure entirely comparable with the large sums given to today's prizewinners. Nansen spent the money neither on himself nor on his research projects but used it for humanitarian work, primarily in Ukraine.

Nansen is one of the few figures in history, or perhaps the only one, who has given people in need a passport. The passport bears his portrait. The Nansen Passport was the most important document of the hundreds of thousands who after the First World War lacked both a home and identity papers - Armenians, Syrians, Turks. It was Nansen himself who called the meeting which resolved to issue these identity certificates, which were accepted by 52 countries. Refugees were thereby enabled to travel from one country to another without losing the right to return to their original sanctuary. Almost every country adopted the rule that the passport should be issued by the first country where the refugee was given a residence permit. Nansen thus became their "state". When it was issued, the passport bore a stamp and a new one was added every year. The refugees who could afford it paid five gold francs for this renewal; the income financed the large-scale refugee work conducted from the Nansen Office in Geneva up to 1939 - nine years after Nansen's death.

Nansen met his Waterloo in Armenia in 1925. His objective here was the same as it had been in other areas where he had involved himself: not only to relieve distress and liberate Armenians from their sufferings, but ensure that the Armenians' 1918 declaration of intent to establish a separate Armenian state could be realised.

The Great Powers of the region, the Soviet Union and Turkey, were of a different opinion. For ten years the Turkish Government had been attempting to deport the Armenians to Mesopotamia. It has been calculated that between 1915 and 1923 a million Armenians died on the march or were massacred, and the survivors were left to die as well. Nansen's attempt to help by giving the Armenians a plains region in Soviet Armenia, was blocked by powerful and distant politicians such as Stalin, in a cynical game that might well have made a humanist like Nansen into a misanthrope. Depressed and bitter, he petitioned the League of Nations to be released from his Armenian commission.

The possibility of such reverses may have been one of the reasons why Nansen always praised the solitary man and the lonely places. In his own words: we must "kneel at the feet of eternity and listen to the silences of infinite space".

Fridtjof Nansen died on 13th May 1930 at his home Polhøgda outside Oslo. Until the day of his death Fridtjof Nansen was a committed humanist. Through his own practical efforts he demonstrated that there is a will to cooperation and fraternity among the people of the world, and that this will can be guided to achieve something positive for everybody.

For modern Norwegians, Nansen is a hard act to follow. He has helped to create our self-image; his name stands for someone who is willing to fight for ideas and against prejudices, the man of wisdom of knowledge who never abandons his crusade.

Little Norway and the other Nordic countries are in a situation that enables us to shoulder some of the moral responsibilities Nansen has laid on us. We have a fair consensus about foreign-policy goals, we have no imperialist past that creates suspicions of larger states, and we want to build more bridges, so as to create a fairer and better-organised world.

However, no one can think big until they have mastered the details. Each of us must see what we can best contribute to the diversity.

My Ministry endeavours to make a small, but important contribution in this direction. The test of how we tackle the challenges from immigrants, refugees and cultures foreign to us, is how well we can integrate. For if there is a lesson to be learnt from history, it is that cultural differences can both repel people and bring them closer together.

In Norway, we do not yet know enough about how minorities are integrated in cultural life, but we know that we want to do more for them. We want to know what obstacles there are, and what we can do to eliminate these.

Our own history is not all it should be, any more than other nations' history. There are blots on our own coat of arms, for example our treatment of our own minorities, the Sami, the Finns and the tinkers.

There is always a danger that cultural expressions that are not rooted in the culture of the majority are stigmatised as of lesser importance. Part of Nordic cultural history is, alas, the story of a lack of respect for minorities. By excluding groups from a cultural community, we are perpetrating a process that involves triple and quadruple oppression. Economic, political, social and cultural.

And so we see that the totality of such an expression does not benefit any of the partners. Definitely not the immigrant who finds that the identity he is searching for in a new country is something the inhabitants of that country do not want to give him. He may even find himself denied what is vital to every human being: job, family, friends, a feeling of being at least partly the master of his own fate.

Some groups no longer talk about repatriation as a positive option but as something to be forced upon every refugee or asylum-seeker - "Send 'em back!" Back to war, famine and misery? Not the critics' problem. Frontiers are closed and nations turn their backs. We are facing a situation in which a universal Nansen Passport may once again be the solution. Because we are forgetting that our foremost moral duty is to help, whether the help is given at our end or at theirs.

Salman Rushdie has said that people don't have roots, they have feet. That is to say: people are not created to stay forever in one place. Migration is also one of the dominant features of our century. We move, not only to escape war and misery, but also to seek impulses and ideas and achieve new insights - as Nansen did.

Using our feet, however, does not necessarily mean that we are to give up our roots. It is said that war is the continuation of politics by other means. In this case a good cultural policy should help to have the opposite effect. Culture is the glue that can keep us together when everything else is in flux. And culture is the dynamic force that creates new things out of this very difference and diversity.

Travel, and steadily more globalised media, have given us a different understanding of cultural reality. Thanks to this mobility and the media, Norwegians and Greeks of my generation probably have more in common with our contemporaries in Pakistan and Chile than we would have with our own great-grandparents, if we could meet them.

No one has said, however, that increasing similarity of cultural understanding in itself creates closer and better community between people and nations. When people like me have the opportunity to loaf about the Greek islands for years, make friends at the tip of South America and be forever discovering new restaurants with dishes from remote places in our own capital, it is only the beginning. The next step is to accept that the world outside our own can offer so much more, and it is the people from this outside world that bring us their treasures - with themselves thrown in.

Immigrants are a very mixed group, in both Norway and Greece. About half the Norwegian immigrant population comes from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Together with Eastern Europeans, it is these whose numbers have increased most in the last ten years. The Norwegian immigrant community - defined as people with two foreign-born parents - now consists of something over 200,000 people. Not so many really, only five per cent of our entire population.

Their education varies a good deal. Many have poor basic education. This is not a good enough basis, particularly for young people. It enables us to predict with confidence that they will find themselves at the end of the queue for jobs. The same youngsters are not fluent in our language, and they don't know how we work. As for those who do have education, they must often start at the bottom of the ladder because we are not good enough at evaluating their qualifications.

How can we solve such problems? We must start at the simplest end: we must find out what they lack, and which groups lack what. Our government has just submitted a proposal for a long-term programme, to run until the year 2001. There we propose that pupils in primary school learn to read and write their own language first, if their Norwegian is poor. Youngsters who have not been to Norwegian schools before, will be offered extra tuition. For what these young people are to do, is to live in two cultures. It is our choice whether this will cause them to experience anxiety and isolation or whether the meeting of two cultures will enrich both the majority and the minority.

I think it would be right to remind you of what the first alternative involves: racism is again infecting the awareness of many, and unfortunately we do not need to look far beyond our own borders to recognise attitudes to nationality, race and religion that we hoped had vanished for good after the Second World War. They haven't. New refugees and asylum-seekers are coming and hammering on the doors of every country. They are more obvious than before, and therefore perhaps more at risk. If, on top of this, they meet people who are afraid for their own futures, then all the cards are dealt for conflict. Racism is often fuelled by the host population's dissatisfaction with their own situation. For this reason, fundamental work against racism and for respect for human beings will always involve social levelling. A fairer distribution of wealth demands a policy of solidarity - and creates a climate of solidarity in society.

What we in Norway are most afraid of is perhaps the isolation that comes from alienation. If immigrant groups are isolated from the Norwegian society, they lose an important chance to participate. And we lose the opportunity to build our society further with their help. Extremism and fanaticism can arise among both the isolated and those doing the isolating. For this reason, I am seriously preoccupied with the need to create multi-cultural meeting-places for Norwegians and immigrants; places where we can meet in a natural way in order to discover that the differences can be the basis of an exciting diversity - and allow for new understanding and new opportunities to create contemporary art.

Culture is the glue of every society and a dynamic force. It is from culture identity is born and developed. It would be a hard task to firmly present to you the "Norwegian identity" - or any nation's! In our time, identity is created through multi-cultural impulses global-wide. Probably we have as many typical national identities as we have inhabitans. But the political task is to ensure the individuals the freedom to create their identity - and their right to a cultural historical belonging. That demands tolerance and respect for the different cultural expressions - as well as for the human being as such.

Especially small countries like ours face a particular challenge to prevent our common roots of culture - namely our languages. The cultural industries acknowledge no borders - and put national cultural institutions under high pressure. But in this, Europe should avoid the naive - and therefore dangerous approach - pretending that the commercial pressure is entirely an American phenomenon. Dear audience, the European culture industry exist and is fully capable of producing "plastic fantastic" - and glamorous entertainment. Not all of that can even be classified as low quality. But no one can expect the market to ensure protection of language, cultural heritage or even less-democratic values.

This is the main reason why we need a strong progressive public cultural policy. To make sure that the quality produced in our cultural life is able to compete - and thereby attract an audience.

A sustainable development demands lover consumption and other sets of values than the materialistic. Culture does not pollute, neither is it a danger to consumption, nor dose it lead to inflation. On the contrary, it stimulates human values, personal growth and in its nature the seed of ideas and co-operation. A green future is a multi-cultural future.

Culture is much more important than the budgets might have us believe. Culture is one of the Norwegian Government's main focus areas. We regard culture as a democratic right, not a hobby for a tiny elite. The spearheads are, of course, our great national institutions: theatres and museums, orchestras and large sports facilities. At the same time we want to spread culture to the entire country, this being the best way to withstand the commercial pressure that we also feel as a threat to our own language and cultural expression. It is a Norwegian tradition to be deeply involved in one's local community, perhaps less in what people here regard as "metropolitan" culture. We, however, consider these to be two sides of the same coin, and we will be starting national and local signpost programmes in order to get this message across. "Signposts" that show the pluralism of Norwegian culture - and create new arenas for co-operation between the different expressions. Everyone must have access to cultural experiences. Given the peculiar longstretched shape of our country, this is easiest to do by sending culture out on tour. Norwegians are used to seeing library-ships and book-buses, and they will be seeing even more in future. We have a travelling national theatre, and it is normal for the fine arts and music groups to follow the same itinerary. We will have even more of these in the coming years.

The challenge is also to ensure that a rich nationwide cultural life is stimulated through a strengthening of our many national institutions, so that we can achieve a higher quality and enhanced accessibility - and a synergy between different forms of expression, institutions and organisations, both professional and amateur. At the same time, we have proposed a cultural network to be established in Norway: an electronic linkage of all libraries, archives, museums, schools and other institutions, in which the many local public libraries will function as branches. The Internet and other new media are popular in Norway, not least among young people. Our job is to ensure that Norwegian knowledge and culture are just as easy to surf to as Microsoft's homepages. In this way we see that IT - which many people fear will create a more alienating society - can be used to link people together and make culture and knowledge more accessible. The new age will help us both to preserve the old and to create the future.

Local culture cannot be created by any government by itself. Without the many voluntary organisations our cultural life would be a shallow one, whether we are talking about sport, youth clubs or idealistic organisations. Voluntary organisations are one of the main elements of Norwegian society of which we are proudest - the capacity to rally round and pull together. We have a word for it, dugnad, with no real British equivalent; the Americans call it a "bee". It is when people come and build something for a neighbour or the community, without pay. The spirit of dugnad is common to the whole country. Whether a little rural district is to have a new social centre, or the nation is to host the Winter Olympics, a host of volunteers turn up and do the job.

The modern welfare model is based on the spirit of collective endeavour; it is our host of voluntary organisations that have enabled us to achieve a society with a high level of welfare provision. The tasks we have to face in future will depend on to what extent we succeed in preserving this cornerstone of our democracy.

Our challenge is to prevent national pride turning into blinkered nationalism. In other words: if we are to succeed in developing a multicultural society, we must start with the knowledge that we have always been exactly that - an open little society, dependent on impulses and influence from other countries - in order to develop both our welfare and culture.

Europe takes its name from the nymph Europa; she will always thrive best as a plurality of ideas and perceptions. Her worst moment is when the inhabitants of the continent start contemplating their own navels. There have been many such moments. She knows, therefore, that the potential for fresh evils and bloodbaths is always present, and can only be prevented by human will. This will still goes under the name of humanitarian politics.

We must focus on the best thing about Europe, which is the ability to open herself to change and new ideas, on the basis of the fundamental ideas of democracy and popular participation that first saw the light of day here, in the Athenian city-state. It was Athens, too, that saw the birth of the notion that creativity and development come from dialogue and the free competition of ideas. It was between the columns of the Lyceum that you have just rediscovered, that Aristotle developed entirely new branches of knowledge, and he could hardly have done this without the city-state's ability to absorb and refine his findings and those of his colleagues.

The city-state was a small community that thanks to the well-organised talents of its inhabitants managed to create something far greater than itself. That the cradle of Western civilisation continues to fascinate people is demonstrated by the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder's bestseller. His "Sofie's World" begins with the philosophers of ancient Athens. The book has familiarised new generations the world over with the meaning of philosophy, and with the obligations of being human. It also gives us Norwegians a modern example of where we belong and how dependent we are on impulses and ideas from others than ourselves.

Just as Nansen's thirst for exploration encompasses the ideas of humanitarianism, our thinking in the realm of cultural policy must do the same.