European Politics in the 1930s.

For the next month or so, I'll be writing blog posts on the Norwegian experience during the Second World War.  In order to make sense of what happened during World War II, we'll have to spend some time talking about what had been happening in Europe as a whole politically during the decade prior to the outbreak of war. 

(Note: in the 1930s and 1940s, there was a nation called the Soviet Union, which was composed of what is today Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and a number of other countries.  At the time, people used the term Soviet Union and Russia pretty much interchangeably, and, for the purposes of this blog, so will I).

Map of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
From: http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/EU/EU14-01.html

In the 1930s, different European countries had very different kinds of governments--some countries were democracies, one country was communist, and still others were fascist.

Some European governments were democratic--that is, they held free elections on a regular basis.  In these countries, people were free to express their political opinions without fear of arrest and newspapers were not afraid to criticize the government.  Many western European countries--Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway--fell into this category.

Other countries, instead of being democratic, were communist or fascist.  Let's talk about the communist country first--the Soviet Union--otherwise known as the U.S.S.R (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).

What does it mean when we say a country is communist?   Communism is a philosophy that traces its origins to the 1800s.  Communists believed that in a modern industrial free-market economy, factory owners became fabulously wealthy by exploiting their workers, who in turn were left impoverished.  Communists argued that the way to remedy this inequality was to have a revolution in which the workers would seize control of the government and the factories and where these workers would then make sure that there were no extremes of poverty or wealth.  

At the start of the 1930s, the only communist regime (or government) in Europe was the Soviet Union.  In the Soviet Union, the factories were run by the government, and over the course of the 1930s the government confiscated the private land owned by peasants in order to form giant state-run farms.   The Soviet government was extremely repressive, or authoritarian.   The Communist party was the only legal political party.  There were no free elections.  Newspapers were controlled by the government.  The dictator of the Soviet Union was Joseph Stalin, who was so worried that someone might try to overthrow him that his regime arrested countless Soviet citizens suspected of disloyalty and executed them or consigned them to grim imprisonment.   Those jailed or shot by the Soviet regime in the 1930s ranged from army officers (Stalin was afraid of a military coup) to peasants (especially those who protested when the government seized their land) to artists and writers (Stalin feared their influence).

Joseph Stalin at work.

From: http://europe.stanford.edu/news/norman_naimark_redefines_genocide_20100928/

Stalin's secret police maintained a corps of undercover informers ready to denounce their fellow citizens for disloyalty to the government.

The intense press censorship concealed many of the worst aspects of life in the Soviet Union from people in other countries, and the government-controlled media portrayed life in Russia as safe, happy, and prosperous.   The combination of censorship and propaganda helps explain why some people in other parts of Europe looked at the Soviet system as a role model.  In democratic countries such as France, Denmark, and Norway, there were small communist parties that ran candidates for office.   But these parties remained a definite minority--most Europeans, feared communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular.

Other countries in Europe were fascist in nature.  Fascism is a political movement that became prominent in the 1920s.  Fascists argued that democratic governments were weak and ineffectual and that the most effective type of governance was a dictatorship.  There was no need to have free elections or civil liberties once a proper dictator was in power--elections and dissent would only hinder a leader in doing what needed to be done for the good of the country.   Fascists were racist--they believed that humanity was divided into different races, and a typical fascist would maintain that the race to which he or she supposedly belonged was superior to other races.  Fascists usually thought that the natural state of human affairs was war, and that this was a good thing, as they believed that war cleaned society of impurities.

Fascists condemned communism as tyrannical and the Soviet Union as a threat to the rest of Europe.  One of the reason that fascists were able to win as much pubic support as they did in the 1930s is because they were so emphatic in their denunciations of communism (or, as it was also known, Bolshevism).

Two major countries had fascist governments in the 1930s: Italy and Germany.  Italy was ruled by Benito Mussolini, who was head of and founder of the Fascist party in that country.  Mussolini jailed his political opponents, muzzled the media, glorified war, and sought to demonstrate the superiority of Italy by invading Ethiopia in 1935.

Benito Mussolini.

From: http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/dof/italy/captioned/horse.htm

In 1933, another country succumbed to fascism--Germany.  Since 1919, Germany had been, more or less, a democratic nation.  But in January of 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany (a position akin to the presidency in the U.S.) and quickly acquired dictatorial powers.  Many of his political opponents were beaten, arrested, or murdered, while others fled abroad.  All non-Nazi political parties were banned, while newspapers, movies, and the radio were censored by the government.

Hitler in a 1938 speech.

From: http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/images/thumbnails/

What was distinctive about the Nazi regime (or government) was the virulence of its racism.   Hitler believed that Germans belonged to a racial group called Nordics who he believed were biologically superior to other groups.   In particular, Hitler thought that the peoples who lived to the east of Germany, such as Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, were inferior to Nordics.   Hitler's greatest hatred, however, was reserved for Jews, who he believed were genetically inferior and a threat to Germany.  Once Hitler came to power, his followers sought to inculcate this these ideas among German youth, issuing anti-Semitic and racist books to be used in school classrooms.  Hitler's racism guided his foreign policy.  His overarching goal was to create a massive empire for Germany in Eastern Europe.   In the 1920s, he had written that Germany needed additional lebensraum (a German word which roughly translates as living space) to the east; Hitler's goal was to take control of what is today Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, displace the people who lived there, and resettle the land with Germans.   In his own mind, he sought to justify this by contending that the people who lived in these areas--Jews, Poles, and Russians--were subhuman races who had no right to this land.   To achieve these goals--and also to fend off Britain and France, if they proved troublesome--Hitler dramatically expanded the German army, navy, and air force in the 1930s.  At the same time, he avoided voicing publicly his desire for such an empire, as this would have made neighboring countries nervous.

In other European countries, small fascist parties, very similar to their German and Italian counterparts, sprang up--in Britain there was the British Union of Fascists, and in Norway, there was the Nasjonal Samling party, founded by the eccentric Vidkun Quisling in 1933.  Nasjonal Samling translates as National Unity, and was abbreviated as NS.

Quisling as he appeared on the cover of a 1932 publication.  The following year he would found the Nasjonal Samling (National Union) party.  From: http://www.quislingutstillinga.no/indresikkerhet.html

Even before he founded the Nasjonal Samling, Quisling, like Hitler, had adopted an obsession with what both politicians termed the Nordic race.  In 1931, Quisling claimed that "our civilization, created and borne forward by the Nordic race and by Nordic elements in other races, is now threatened by the devastating activities of inferior races." (Qtd. in Fascism, 208-209).  As it turned out, Quisling's shortcomings helped doom his party to obscurity--at least in the 1930s.  As one historian noted, Quisling "was decidedly mediocre as an orator, [and] even worse as an organizer" (Kearsaudy, 39).  During the elections of the 1930s, the Nasjonal Samling never received more than 3 percent of the vote (Loock, 667-668). 

These fascist parties in places such as Norway and Britain admired Nazi Germany, but for the most part, Europeans grew alarmed about the increasingly repressive nature of the Nazi regime and about the rapid increase in German military might.  One of the most vociferous critics of Nazi Germany was a British politician named Winston Churchill, who urged that his country rearm rapidly to counter the growing German threat.

One of the most famous photographs of Winston Churchill, taken in 1941.

From: Library and Archives Canada: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/index-e.html

Britain and France did begin updating their armed forces, but containing Hitler proved to be a difficult task--largely because of the huge lack of trust between, on the one hand, the communist Soviet Union, and on the other, democratic Britain and France.  Though most Britons and French citizens viewed Hitler with alarm, they similarly regarded the Soviet Union as dangerous.  For his part, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin seems to have mistrusted the British almost as much as he did Nazi Germany.   Had the Soviets, the British, and the French been able to put aside their--quite substantial--differences, they could have created a coalition that would have more easily contained Hitler--but the tension between democratic and communist systems kept this from happening until Germany had already conquered much of the continent of Europe.

For its part, Norway, though more inclined to support Britain than Germany, still hoped to remain neutral should war break out.  In the late 1930s, it did begin revitalizing its armed forces.  Aside from Vidkun Quisling and his NS party, few Norwegians sympathized with Germany, and some were quite trenchant and prescient in their criticism of the German leader.  In 1933, a Norwegian psychiatrist, Johan Scharffenberg, authored a series of newspaper articles providing a psychological history and profile of Hitler.  "Is he [Hitler] going to be the savior of Germany, what millions of Germans hope and believe," asked Scharffenberg, "or is he just a seducer, a sick fool who is leading the country towards catastrophe?"  The psychiatrist concluded that the latter was the case, suggesting that the hardships and difficulties that Hitler had faced earlier in life had perhaps been the cause of his mental illness.  The German embassy in Norway complained about the articles and protested to the Norwegian government, but to no avail, at least initially.

Psychiatrist Johan Scharffenberg: Norwegian critic of Hitler.

From: http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/11/06/kultur/litteratur/bok/ideer/biografi/14168780/

In an article published in 1934, Scharffenberg characterized Hitler as follows: "I do not consider him normal; it is far more probable that he is a psychopath whose actions are determined by paranoid ideas."  (Quotes from Lavik).  The German embassy continued to protest, and eventually the Norwegian authorities interviewed the outspoken psychiatrist but declined to take legal action against him. 

Works cited:

Fascism. Roger Griffin, editor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Kearsaudy, François.  Norway 1940.  London: William Collins and Sons, 1990.

Lavik, Nils Johan. "A Psychiatrist Who Confronted Nazism." Political Psychology 10 (December 1989), 757-765.

Loock, Hans-Dietrich.  "Support for Nasjonal Samling in the Thirties." in Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism. Bergen:  Universitetsforlaget, 1980.

Snow! Snø!

It's been snowing quite a bit here over the past month--here are some photos I've taken of Kristiansand.

The above is at the University of Agder.

One of my wife's Norwegian friends provided her with the following charts of snø-related terminology--

Agder refers to the region in which Kristiansand is located. 

Mark and Walter have also been sledding and have been trying ice skating and skiing for the first time.   Below are pictures of Walter at a frozen lake in the nearby Jegersberg park.

The Missing Recipient.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee just formally awarded its 2010 prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in a ceremony in Oslo.  Xiaobo, who is being honored for his pro-democracy activism, is currently in a Chinese prison and was not able to attend the ceremony.

Here's how the New York Times covered the event--

    The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, next to the empty chair where Liu Xiaobo would have sat. 

December 10, 2010

Winner’s Chair Remains Empty at Nobel Event

By SARAH LYALL

OSLO — Imprisoned and incommunicado in China, the Chinese writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, his absence marked at the prize ceremony here by an empty chair.

For the first time since the 1935 prize, when the laureate, Carl von Ossietzky, languished in a concentration camp and Hitler forbade any sympathizers to attend the ceremony, no relative or representative of the winner was present to accept the award or the $1.5 million check it comes with. Nor was Mr. Liu able to provide a speech, even in absentia.

Guests at the ceremony in Oslo’s City Hall listened instead to a recitation of his defiant yet gentle statement to a Chinese court before his incarceration last year. “I have no enemies and no hatred,” Mr. Liu said in "I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court," read aloud by the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann. “Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience.”

Through his wife, Liu Xia, Mr. Liu sent word that he wanted to dedicate the award to the “lost souls” massacred in 1989 in Tiananmen Square.

Mr. Liu, 54, a professor, poet, essayist and campaigner for human rights, has been an irritant to the Chinese authorities since helping resolve confrontations between the police and students in Tiananmen Square. Mr. Liu was detained in December 2008, after co-writing the Charter 08 call for human rights and reform, and is currently serving an 11-year sentence for the crime of “incitement to the overthrow of the state power and socialist system and the people’s democratic dictatorship.”

He was named this year’s laureate because of his heroic and nonviolent struggles on behalf of democracy and human rights, said Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, adding that China needed to learn that with economic power came social and political responsibility.

“We can to a certain degree say that China with its 1.3 billion people is carrying mankind’s fate on its shoulders,” Mr. Jagland said in a speech at the ceremony. “If the country proves capable of developing a social market economy with full civil rights, this will have a huge favorable impact on the world.”

He added, “Many will ask whether China’s weakness — for all the strength the country is currently showing — is not manifested in the need to imprison a man for 11 years merely for expressing his opinions on how his country should be governed.”

The Tiananmen Square mentioned in the above article refers to the site in Beijing of a massive pro-democracy rally held in 1989 that was violently suppressed by government security forces. 

And here's a video clip from the Associated Press--

The Norwegian Language.

Here are a few words on the Norwegian language--

A lot of words in Norwegian look or sound like words in English.  The words on the right are the Norwegian equivalents of the English words on the left--

snow: snø
grass: gress
open: åpen
school: skøle
fish: fisk
thirsty: tørst
frog: frosk
egg: egg

It turns out that the Norwegian and English languages are distant relatives of one another (both are classified as belonging to the Germanic family of languages, along with a number of other languages, including Danish and Dutch.)

Some of the similarity between English and Norwegian also stems from the fact that the Vikings occupied part of England centuries ago, and brought with them some words--such as egg--which became incorporated into English.

The Norwegian alphabet has 29 letters--the three additional letters are  æ, å, and ø.

There are two versions of Norwegian: Nynorsk and Bokmål.  Bokmål, which is very similar to Danish, is by far the more common, and is what most books are printed in.  Nynorsk is preferred in some rural areas of the country. 

Google Translate has been a valuable tool as I work to help my sons learn their lessons.  Their textbooks (save for the textbook for their English class) are all in Norwegian, so I've been sitting down at the computer typing in phrases to help them translate their lessons.  In these sessions, I'm trying to help them both learn the content of the lessons and to learn Norwegian words and phrases.   I've found that history, which tends to be written in a straightforward style, is easier to translate than fictional stories, which sometimes have a bit of Norwegian slang or idiom that Google Translate simply doesn't fathom.  Here's some text from Mark's history textbook--can you figure it out without resorting to electronic solutions? 

Gjennom Egypt renner elva Nilen.   Den er verdens lengste elv....For over 5000 år siden begynte egypterne å bygge diker og kanaler. 

At the same time, guessing what a word is based on its apparent resemblance to an English word has its hazards.  For example, applesinjuice is not apple juice, but rather orange juice. 

We can also have our computer do an instantaneous translation of the online edition of the local newspaper.  However, the sometimes mystifying results demonstrate the shortcomings of electronic translation.   One article about the recent midterm elections in America had the following headline:

"Displays willingness to swallowing tax camel after election."

Norwegians make it a point to teach English to students in grade school.  People who work in stores and banks usually have some varying degree of familiarity with English.   Walter's and Mark's classmates, for example, have a class in the English language.  The goal is to help Norwegian kids navigate the rest of the world.  I've been able to go shopping, run errands, and have conversations with the parents of other schoolkids while using English.

The weather is getting gradually colder.  So far, there has only been a little bit of snø, and that melted immediately.

Hiking north of Kristiansand.

My son Mark and I have done a bit of hiking in the park north of Kristiansand over the past month or so.  This park is a mixture of pine and deciduous forest (lots of white-barked birch trees), with some swamp mixed in.  There are quite a few lakes, although these to some extent are the result of man-made dams. 

Here is Mark--he's holding the map, which we consulted frequently.

Mark identified this as a bilberry.

A big mushroom.

This is from a trail that we took up a hill.  Mark pointed out the grains of rock and suggested that they were the result of erosion.

2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Announced.

A few days ago, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 was awarded to Chinese dissident and pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.  Every year, the Nobel Committee, an organization headquartered in Oslo, Norway, gives the prize to someone whose life work has benefited humanity.  Here's a picture of Xiaobo:

Photo: Will Burgess/Reuters/SCANPIX from the Nobel Peace Prize website.

Last year, as a reward for his incessant advocacy of civil liberties and democracy, the Chinese government sentenced Xiaobo to eleven years in prison.  His crime was "inciting subversion of the state."  Xiaobo had helped author Charter 08, which had advocated that China adopt a democratic form of government.

The Peace Prize can trace its origins to the nineteenth-century Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (pictured below) who became immensely wealthy from devising and marketing high explosives--he invented dynamite.  Nobel died in 1896, and in his will he instructed that his fortune be used to award prizes in a variety of fields, including the promotion of peace.

Image from the Nobel Peace Prize website.

Past winners have been awarded not only for their efforts to foster peace between nations, but for efforts to stop government repression and end poverty.  Previous recipients include author Elie Wiesel, whose writings eloquently depict the barbarism of the Holocaust, Martin Luther King, Jr. for his leadership in the struggle against racial segregation, and in 1905 to Austrian peace activist Bertha von Suttner.   Suttner, one of the earliest recipients of the prize, is largely forgotten today, but she presciently forecast that future wars would be monstrous high-tech affairs. 

Much of the time, the prize goes to "agitators"--that is, writers or activists whose life goal is to highlight injustice.  This was presumably the Nobel Committee's thinking when it awarded the peace prize in 1975 to Russian physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, whose work on behalf of human rights challenged the Soviet Union's repressive policies.  Once in a while, the Committee awards the prize to powerful politicians who in its judgment have made important contributions to humankind--an example of this would be when the American President Theodore Roosevelt was given the prize in 1906 for his efforts to broker an end to the Russo-Japanese War. 

In any case, this year's award has really ticked off the Chinese government, which is making its displeasure known.  Bloomberg News reports:

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu violates the prize’s purpose and will hurt Norway’s relations with China, Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a statement on its website today....China summoned Norway’s ambassador Svein O. Saether to a meeting earlier today, Ragnhild Imerslund, a spokeswoman at the Oslo-based Foreign Ministry, said by phone. China’s Ambassador to Norway, Tang Guoqiang, also met with state secretary Erik Lahnstein, she said.

The New York Times:

As presidents, religious figures and rights advocates around the world praised the Nobel Committee and called on the Chinese government to release Mr. Liu, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, the Chinese government reacted with unrestrained ire.  They called in the Norwegian ambassador in Beijing for a dressing down, placed scores of dissidents under house arrest and angrily described the decision to honor Mr. Liu as “blasphemy” and an insult to the Chinese people.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports the following from China:

The world's newest Nobel Peace Prize winner remained unreachable in a Chinese prison Saturday, while his wife's mobile phone was cut off and the authoritarian government continued to censor reports about democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo's honor.  Police kept reporters away from the prison where Liu is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion, and his lawyer said that Liu's wife — who had been hoping to visit him Saturday and tell him the news of the award — has "disappeared" and he is worried she may be in police custody.  Chinese authorities, who called Liu a criminal shortly after his award Friday and said his winning "desecrates the prize," sank Saturday into official silence.

Sources used in this post:
The official Nobel Committee website is here: http://nobelpeaceprize.org/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-08/nobel-peace-prize-for-dissident-liu-has-china-warning-norway-on-relations.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/world/asia/10china.html?hp
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39588135/ns/world_news-asiapacific/  (AP news article)

Oil and transportation.

As of 2008, Norway was the world's 11th largest producer of oil, and since the Norwegian population is less than five million people, the vast majority of the oil drilled by Norway is exported, making Norway the world's fifth largest net oil exporter.  Norway gets its oil from offshore rigs, such as the one featured below, most of which are located in the North Sea. 

 

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/world/europe/22norway.html

The discovery of oil in North Sea in 1969 helped transform a country that was poor by western European standards into one of the wealthiest nations in the world.   A number of Norwegians we have talked to have noted that not long ago, their nation was much less prosperous than it is today.

Oddly enough, despite this surplus of oil, gasoline in Norway is much more expensive than in the United States.  

At the Kristiansand Shell station whose sign is featured here, bensin (i.e., gasoline) was 12.58 kroner per liter.  Given that there are about 3.79 liters in a gallon, and that the current exchange rate is about 6.3 kroner to the dollar, this means that a gallon of gas in Norway would cost more than $7.50!

This high gasoline price is due to high government taxes.  This decision to tax gasoline at a high rate has helped to shape Norwegian society in distinctive ways.

When gasoline is expensive, people are less likely to use it.   So, Norwegians in many cases simply ditch their cars and instead either walk or take a bus or train (which per passenger, use less gasoline per mile traveled than do cars).  The self-imposed high gasoline prices help explain why so many people walk or ride bicycles to get around here.   It's quite a common sight to see middle-aged or older people tooling around in Kristiansand on bicycles.

The presence of baskets or bags on so many bicycles around here testifies as to the utilitarian, rather than purely recreational, function of bicycling here.

(In some cases, you can get a larger version of the photograph by clicking on it.) 
In some parts of Kristiansand, the sidewalk is divided into pedestrian and bicycle lanes.  If you're a pedestrian, it's a good idea to stay out of the bike lane, as some bicyclists zip around pretty fast.

And while lots of people do have automobiles, it's much more common for people here to take buses to get around.   Likewise, when people travel from one city to another, they will very often use trains or buses instead of hopping in a car.   And while in U.S. cities the average bus rider is often lower-income, it's typical for middle-class Norwegians to take the bus.

Since fewer Norwegians use cars, many shoppers here place a premium on being able to get to their store easily by bus, bike or foot.  As a result, grocery-store chains set up lots of different postage-stamp sized stores throughout a city to cater to the people who don't have or otherwise don't use a car.  Here's some exterior and interior shots of one of these small grocery stores, which is located in a residential area not far from the University of Agder--

The blue and yellow signs on the side announce this to be a Coop Prix store, which is a grocery chain here.

In America, by contrast, grocery store chains set up stores that are much larger and farther apart--the additional distance doesn't bother Americans, since an extra few miles to the store only means a few more minutes driving.

The greater reliance on public transportation, walking, and bikes helps explain why the average Norwegian only uses about 1.9 gallons of gas per day, as compared to the average American, who uses about two and a half gallons per day and probably helps account for why Norway has a lower obesity rate (11% of the male adult population and 8% of the adult female population) than that of the United States (31.1% of the adult male population and 33.2% of the adult female population).

The Norwegian urban layout, with its relative dearth of cars, may seem like a completely alien way of doing things to Americans today, but it actually is very similar to the geography of American cities eighty years ago.  In the early twentieth century, relatively few Americans had cars, and residents of cities such as New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, got around by walking or by taking electric trolleys.   As celebrated in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, ("Clang Clang Clang Went the Trolley!") Americans in the first half of the twentieth century used trolleys a lot--St. Louis had hundreds of miles of trolley track as of 1900.  And to get from big city to big city, (say, Chicago to St. Louis) most people in the early twentieth century took steam trains.  And to get from cities that were close to one another, one could take what were called interurban trains--so one could go from St. Louis, for example, to Lebanon, Illinois, via interurbans.

Back to Norway.   In any case, the heavy gasoline taxes also help account for the fact that Norwegians generally drive smaller cars than do Americans.   Here are some parked cars I photographed around here:

There are lots of compact cars, small sedans, and station wagons, but relatively few sport utility vehicles or pickup trucks.  Tax policy again plays a role.  As the father of one of Walter's soccer mates explained to me a few days ago, the government imposes high taxes on heavy cars and on cars whose engines have a lot of horsepower, raising their purchase prices.  As a result, Norwegians are more reluctant to invest in big, heavy, vehicles.

At the same time, it's worth noting that a new shopping district located east of Kristiansand was clearly built to serve customers who arrive and depart by car.   Here are some photographs I took when I visited a few days ago--the layout here is similar to the shopping district that one might find off an American interstate--lots of "big-box" style stores with plenty of parking space. 

The ICA is a supermarket chain, whose store depicted above is a lot bigger that the Coop Prix shown earlier.

In any case, the North Sea oil bonanza will come to an end at some point, as Norwegian oil production from the North Sea either has peaked, is peaking, or will peak soon.  The following chart is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a federal agency that tracks oil production around the globe:

Chart from: http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=NO#pet

Norwegians, aware that their oil will dry up at some point, have used the oil revenues to create a special national savings account, called the sovereign wealth fund, which is worth more than 400 billion U.S. dollars.  Basically, it's money designed to cushion the economic blow when the North Sea oil runs out. 

Notes on sources:

Information on energy production and consumption came from the U.S. Energy Information Administration website and from the CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/)  The CIA Factbook is filled with valuable statistical information on countries around the world. 

Information on obesity rates came from the World Health Organization country-by-country downloadable guides: http://www.who.int/countries/en/