From open borders to ‘rasisit’: libertarianism and populism on the Scandinavian periphery (1980 – 1994)

ABSTRACT

In 1980s Norway, a group committed to libertarian ideology became influential within Fremskrittspartiet. This new party became known for its opposition not only to taxation and public spending, but also to non-western immigration. The libertarians within the same party, however, advocated open borders. The libertarians were ousted from the party in 1994, but libertarianism has remained a key plank in the party’s otherwise national-conservative ideology. Crossovers and alliances between cosmopolitan libertarians and nationalistic anti-immigration groups have become commonplace, and through an analysis of the Norwegian libertarian movement, I argue that these are possible due to the idea of open borders only holding a peripheral position within libertarian ideology. The issue of open borders was given some attention in debates between libertarians and populists within FrP, but was not an important ideological concept for the intellectuals behind the libertarian journal Ideer om Frihet. The article thus argues that a commitment to what we may call cosmopolitanism does exist within libertarianism and may be used to make sense of core concepts such as individualism, freedom and markets, but is nonetheless expendable for most libertarians, as they were for the Norwegian libertarians who found a home in the country’s most nativist political party.

KEYWORDS:

• libertarianism
• populism
• Norway
• immigration
• open borders
• neoliberalism
• cosmopolitanism
• nativism

Introduction

In March 2019, Norwegian police went to the unprecedented measure of raiding the private residence of its top political leadership, the house of Norway’s then justice minister Tor Mikkel Wara. The house had been under surveillance for some time, due to threats being made to Wara and his partner. The police decided to raid the premises when they had evidence that the threats had been fabricated by Wara’s partner herself. The threats included menacing letters and the word ‘rasisit’, a deliberate misspelling of the Norwegian word for ‘racist’, spray-painted onto the couple’s wall, in an attempt to frame a group of artists that Wara’s partner was in conflict with, some of which were of non-Norwegian descent. The group’s theatre production Ways of Seeing from the year before had included footage of the couple’s residence, along with allegations that they formed part of an influential elite harbouring racist and anti-immigrant sentiments. This is what started Wara’s partner’s vendetta against the artists, and Wara resigned his position as minister of justice only a few days after police had raided his home.¹

The association between Wara and anti-immigration sentiment, whether justified or not, was of a recent date. As an up-and-coming politician in the 1980s, he had instead been an outspoken libertarian advocating for open borders. Young libertarians like Wara nonetheless found their party-political home in Fremskrittspartiet (‘The Progress Party’ - FrP), a new party which became known as opponents of public spending and non-western immigration in equal measure. Seemingly contradictory alliances between supposedly cosmopolitan libertarians and various nativist groups, or a ‘pipeline’ from one to the other, have been analysed in recent times by Quinn Slobodian and Melinda Cooper. Slobodian charts a schism within Austrian economics between those who emphasized cosmopolitan values and the freedom of all kinds of individuals, and others who advanced a cultural interpretation of libertarianism in which individualism was seen as a Western rather than a universal value. The consequence of the latter position is a more nativist type of libertarianism, which opposes non-western immigration and celebrates Western individualism as the bedrock of market civilization.² Janek Wasserman also describes this schism, and the roots of American libertarianism in Austrian economics in his group biography The Marginal Revolutionaries.³ The cosmopolitan half of this split within Austrian economics does not necessarily identify as ‘libertarian’; however, a more common denomination these days appears to be ‘Hayekian’,⁴ and Melinda Cooper has argued that the enduring alliance in the US between those who still proclaim to be libertarians and so-called palaeo-conservatives solves an inherent ideological problem for libertarians. In her view, the economic freedom preached by libertarians is bound to rest on some sort of (state) coercion, if only for the establishment of property rights. By disavowing coercion as such, libertarians face an ‘intrinsic contradiction’ which is solved by giving in to what she calls ‘the fascist temptation’: Embracing coercion as a prerequisite for the individual freedom of a select few, at the expense of universalist notions of freedom for all.⁵

This article contributes to the literature on the seemingly contradictory phenomenon of libertarians allying with anti-immigration groups through an analysis of the libertarian movement in a peripheral European country – Norway. In Libertarianism. What Everyone Needs to Know, Jason Brennan writes that libertarians ‘believe everyone has the right to take employment in any other country, regardless of citizenship’ and that ‘governments may not forbid citizens from leaving a country, nor may governments forbid foreigners from entering.’⁶ Bas van der Vossen, in the first paragraph of his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on libertarianism, lists ‘open borders’ as one of five main causes libertarians endorse.⁷ A close reading of the 1980s Norwegian libertarian journal Ideer om Frihet, however, shows that the topic was hardly mentioned. This contributed to the relative ease with which avid readers of the journal could find a home within an anti-immigration party, but the meeting between young libertarians, on the one hand, and populists and national conservatives, on the other, also meant that the issue of open borders was activated, as it was in the Norwegian public sphere as a whole in the end of the 1980s. The question of immigration policy was to some extent forced on FrP libertarians by the changed context and the fact that they belonged to an anti-immigration party, but the ensuing debates were nonetheless handled without major problems and the ousting of these ‘liberals’ in 1994 was mainly related to other issues. Cosmopolitanism, defined by Britannica as ‘the belief that all people are entitled to equal respect and consideration, no matter what their citizenship status or other affiliations happen to be’, never became more than a peripheral concept⁸ in the political thought of Norwegian libertarians, something which explains the coexistence of libertarianism and populist national conservatism in FrP that continues until this day, and sheds light on similar alliances and crossovers in other countries.

The Bergen libertarian Society

The Norwegian libertarian revival of the 1980s began in Bergen. Achieving independence only in 1905, after centuries of Danish and Swedish rule, Norway is often seen as having been a relatively homogenous place until at least the 1970s. The city of Bergen could be seen as something of an exception, however, with status as a Hanseatic port from 1240 to the middle of the 18th century and a long history of influx of people, products and ideas from surrounding areas.⁹ In the latter part of the 1970s, a group of young students at what was then called The Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH)¹⁰ founded the Bergen Libertarian Society. For them, it felt as if something big was happening in the world, that their peers, professors and political leaders were utterly unaware of. Coinciding with the early beginnings of migration to Norway from the Global South,¹¹ the Norwegian post-war social democratic settlement was experiencing the same economic difficulties as other Western societies. But the fact that Friedrich Hayek had won a Bank of Sweden Nobel memorial prize in economics in 1974, and that the same honour had been bestowed upon Milton Friedman only two years later seemed not to matter in Norway, as the names of the economists that the Norwegian libertarians idolized were not spoken in classes on macroeconomics. This was so, even though the institution in Bergen, the capital city from 1070 to 1299, was considered to offer a more liberal economics education than that which was given at the department of social economics at the University of Oslo,¹² which had been founded by none other than Ragnar Frisch in 1934 – the father of econometrics and a key figure in the post-war marriage between economics and social democracy in Norway.¹³

While professors at the NHH in Bergen were indeed more liberal leaning than the former students of Frisch and Trygve Haavelmo in Oslo, incoming students Lars Peder Nordbakken and Hans Chr. Garmann Johnsen still found their economics education wanting in the face of both changed economic realities and the rise to prominence of neoliberal ideas at the highest echelon of the international economics profession. When Garmann Johnsen suggested utilizing the monetary theories of Milton Friedman for a dissertation, his advisor informed him that Friedman was considered in Norway to be a ‘crackpot’.¹⁴ In spite of Norwegian economists’ disavowals of Friedman, the introduction of Chicago school ideas such as monetarism, public choice theory and supply side economics into mainstream economics did reach Norwegian economists and policy-makers in watered down forms, in turn influencing the ways in which the 1970s economic crisis led to a market turn also in Norway.¹⁵ When the Norwegian government joined other OECD countries in abandoning counter-cyclical spending in 1978, it became the starting point for a wide range of gradual market reforms of the Norwegian economy,¹⁶ although the name Milton Friedman remained mostly unspoken both in lecture halls and in the halls of power.

This was nonetheless ‘too little, too late’ for Nordbakken and Garmann Johnsen, who founded a libertarian society and eventually began publishing the journal Ideer om Frihet (‘Ideas about freedom’) together with Ayn Rand acolytes Sigmund Knag and Jan Sommerfelt Pettersen. In a short first editorial namechecking Friedman, Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner, Nordbakken wrote: ‘(…) it is not enough that we, individually, are convinced that the libertarian principles are correct. The idea must be spread (…).’.¹⁷ Within the small group, debates did rage between followers of Rand’s objectivism and the economics students who preferred what they saw as the utilitarian approach of Mises. Economic issues were nevertheless at the forefront of the journal, and the Randian approach favoured by some of the group’s members was summarized by Knag as ‘“no one has a right to make me do something I haven’t chosen” or “what is mine is mine“’. This was a somewhat radical view in the light of both the collectivist traditions of Norwegian social democracy, but also the social brand of liberalism from the late 19th century upon which the former had arguably been built.¹⁸ In spite of disagreements on Rand, the group always concluded through their discussions that ‘Property is A Good Thing’, and producing Ideer om Frihet became a way to ‘do something about it’¹⁹ from the relative periphery of Norway’s second largest city, separated from the capital by some 500 kilometres of fjords and rugged mountain terrain. Knag took over the editorship from Nordbakken, and later left it to Sommerfelt Pettersen, as the journal grew from a photo-copied fanzine in 1980, to what by 1983 had become a glossy magazine with nationwide distribution and a graphic profile to rival those of their competitors on the shelves of Narvesen, Norway’s dominant chain of news agencies.

The content of the journal nonetheless remained reasonably ‘high-brow’ with essays and in-depth interviews by, on and with libertarian thinkers taking centre stage. What the ‘libertarian principle’, which Nordbakken described as having a ‘take-off’ internationally in the 1970s with ‘astonishing financial support’, really amounted to was less than straight-forward, however.²⁰ The difference between a Chicago school economist like Milton Friedman working within the mainstream of neoclassical economics and thinkers belonging to the more heterodox Austrian tradition was perhaps the most pronounced between the thinkers mentioned in Nordbakken’s short editorial. Even within so-called Austrianism, differences were clear by 1980 between actual Austrians like Hayek, on the one hand, and Mises and his new American disciples Rothbard and Kirzner on the other.²¹ Nordbakken nonetheless considered these thinkers as belonging to the same ‘libertarian principle’, and the journal listed the various institutions and outfits promoting these ideas in the same ‘index of liberty’, an alphabetical list appearing in each edition of the journal, described as ‘An international directory of Institutions and Publications Promoting Reason & Liberty’. It mostly included US-based outfits – everything from the American Enterprise Institute to Ergo, an ‘Objectivist weekly paper published by students at Harvard University’ – mixed with a few UK-based institutions and the odd bookshop in Amsterdam.²² The existence of what Nordbakken called ‘the libertarian movement’ seemed itself to be defining the content of libertarian ideology.

What connected most of the thinkers and outlets deemed to be libertarian by the Bergen Libertarian Society was connections of different types to the neoliberal project institutionalized by the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. One Norwegian had been present at that occasion, the economist Trygve J.B. Hoff, who published the journal Farmand and had personal relationships with men like Mises, Hayek and Friedman²³ (Friedman wrote the article ‘Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects’ for Farmand in 1951).²⁴ Having been a student member of the business funded interest group Libertas, which was founded in 1947 to fight socialization of the Norwegian economy and among other activities funded Farmand,²⁵ Nordbakken already had some connections within the world of think tanks, journals and institutions with ties to the Mont Pelerin Society. He and Garmann Johnsen wrote many letters in those days, including one to Trygve Hoff, through which they hoped they might be given an invitation to join the Mont Pelerin Society. Hoff gave them no such thing, however, and the contact between the old guard of Norwegian neoliberalism and the new group in Bergen remained limited.²⁶

They had more luck abroad. At the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, Nordbakken attended meetings and evening lectures on liberalism with luminaries such as James Buchanan and Israel Kirzner and had tea and biscuits with the institute’s joint founder president, Arthur Seldon. Seldon opened doors for Nordbakken, and in 1978 he travelled to the US to visit both Leonard Read and Henry Hazlitt of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).²⁷ FEE interested Nordbakken especially because he considered it the base of Mises, whose Austrian business cycle theory from the interwar years he found especially convincing in explaining the economic predicaments of the 1970s.²⁸ Nordbakken and Garmann Johnsen also entered into correspondence with Leonard Liggio, then of the Institute for Humane Studies but later an executive both of the Mont Pelerin Society and the Atlas Network. Liggio even visited Norway, and later put Garman Johnsen into contact with Israel Kirzner. In 1981 the former was able to spend a semester with Kirzner at NYU, where he was introduced to leading lights of the Austrian school, such as Murray Rothbard and Fritz Machlup. Garman Johnsen also visited the Manhattan Institute, and he would later enter into correspondence with Friedrich Hayek and visit him in Freiburg.²⁹

Regardless of the emphasis on which writers like Brennan and Van der Bassen put on open borders and the extension of libertarian principles also to migrants, these topics hardly appeared on the pages of Ideer om Frihet. This could have something to do with the context of Norway in the 1980s. While immigration from non-western countries had become a hot issue with the arrival of workers from countries such as Pakistan, Turkey and Morocco in the early 1970s, a cap on immigration instated in 1974 contributed to a lessening of interest in the issue of immigration in the wider public sphere in the second half of the decade. The absence of this topic is nonetheless striking, and if one widens the net and looks through Ideer om Frihet searching for positively charged phrases connected to something like ‘cosmopolitanism’, one can mainly find the odd evocation of the adjective ‘frisinnet’, meaning something like openminded, and the word ‘tolerance’ being used from time to time. The latter mostly with reference to a ‘classical liberal’ tradition and John Locke’s writings on religion from the 17th century,³⁰ (a time long before a concept like ‘liberalism’ even existed³¹) or used also to simply refer to the heterogeneity within libertarianism itself, and to the Bergen Libertarian Society’s own ability to tolerate differences of opinion.³² When these themes were evoked, they were mostly linked to particular economic philosophies and policies, and not taken to be the starting point of analyses or as important concepts in and of themselves. In a 1984 editorial tribute to Trygve Hoff’s son Ole Jacob Hoff, who had recently taken over the editorship of Farmand after his father and was also listed as an editorial board member of Ideer om Frihet alongside names like Leonard Liggio, Arhur Seldon and Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation, Sommerfelt Pettersen did make a rare venture beyond economics: Hoff was praised as a ‘freedom fighter’ who championed causes such as voluntary conscription, the legalization of drugs and the fight against police power and ‘totalitarian’ child protection services in Sweden.³³ These topics went beyond the usual themes of Ideer om Frihet, where articles usually focused on concrete economic policies and their connection to abstract concepts of freedom and individualism. That such a list did not include anything related to immigration, free movement or the likes suggests that these themes remained peripheral for the editors and contributors of Ideer om Frihet, and that their main role, if any, was to help make sense of ideological core and adjacent concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘individualism’ and ‘the market (economy)’.³⁴

The progress party

The 1980s saw several competing strands of interpretation around the question of what would constitute a free Norwegian society, as ‘ideas about freedom’ were discussed also beyond the confines of NHH and the Bergen Libertarian Society. With the election victory of Kåre Willoch and the conservative party Høyre in 1981, the so-called ‘høyrebølge’ (‘right wave’) swept over a nation that had been run almost continuously by social democrats since 1945. Ideological concepts connected to libertarianism, such as individualism and freedom, became important in this period, in a similar fashion to what was the case during the rise of ‘The New Right’ in the US at the same time (analysed by Garmann Johnsen in Ideer om Frihet 1&2 in 1981).³⁵ An ambiguous but potent combination of market liberalism and social conservatism allowed Høyre to profit both from the 1968-inspired anti-establishment revolt against a paternalistic post-war order, and from the conservative backlash against the perceived radicalism of the same ideas.³⁶ Whether one was concerned about the divorce rate or the rate of inflation, ‘the state’ emerged as the main culprit. The economic downturn of the 1970s also gave Høyre a chance to portray themselves as the guarantors of a return to the good old days of post-war stability, whilst simultaneously being the ones who would reform an inefficient system of economic planning.³⁷ The ‘right wave’ also included the birth of a new party positioned even further to the right,³⁸ and this was to become the clearest parliamentary expression of Norwegian libertarianism. Originally named Anders Lange’s party for the severe lowering of taxes and duties upon foundation in 1973, the party changed its name to Fremskrittspartiet (FrP) in 1977. As the original name would suggest, the party founded by Anders Lange already had something of a libertarian outlook as part of a ‘populist anti-tax revolt’.³⁹ FrP has been claimed to build on an ‘authoritarian individualism’,⁴⁰ and Lange published articles about Ayn Rand in between news items about dog breeding in his own private newspaper.⁴¹ Lange was very controversial, not just because of his affinities to libertarianism, a very radical idea in 1970s Norway, but also because of his support of the South African apartheid regime, which it later transpired had financed the party’s first election campaign in the year of its inception.⁴² In this election, the party surprisingly won a vote share of 5% nationwide, resulting in four members of parliament. In a TV interview from the election night that year, Lange responded ‘Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman’ when asked who ‘his’ political philosophers were.⁴³ Lange died in 1978, leaving his party in the hands of the charismatic businessman Carl I. Hagen, who was joined in parliament by the law professor Fridtjof Frank Gundersen, an active ideologist who considered himself a liberal ‘with a Norwegian twist’, and who like Lange was a strong opponent of non-western immigration as well as an apologist for the South African apartheid regime.⁴⁴

United within the persona of Gundersen, then, were the two of the most recognizable traits of Fremskrittspartiet: economic libertarianism on the one hand, and a virulent opposition to immigration which often crossed over into outright cultural racism on the other.⁴⁵ One of the reasons why the Bergen Libertarian Society appear to not have taken much of an interest in open borders and the cosmopolitan aspect of libertarianism may be that they were rarely confronted with anti-immigrant views or with the issue at all, and so could focus their attention on economic questions and an individualism concerned mainly with the rights of the type of individuals that they themselves happened to be (educated white males in a rich country). The young libertarians who eventually started filling the ranks of FrP’s youth wing FpU, however, would have to actively work together with non-tolerant and even racist members of their own party. As we will see, this meant that the libertarians who had chosen to become members of a party known for its anti-immigration positions were forced, somewhat ironically, to give more attention to the peripheral themes of cosmopolitanism and open borders than what was the case with the Bergen libertarians.⁴⁶ The issue of non-western migration would resurface in Norwegian debate towards the end of 1980s, with Fremskrittspartiet at the centre of controversy.

The linkages between Ideer om Frihet and the libertarian cadre flocking to FpU were many. Tor Geir Høien and Anne Merete Thunem are said to have been the first young libertarians in FpU, and especially Høien owed much of his political education to the journal he had discovered in the shelves of Narvesen as early as 1981.⁴⁷ Both he and Thunem would write several articles for Ideer om frihet in the years to come, while also writing copiously for the party newspaper Fremskritt, where Thunem was the editor of the ‘youth-page’. The nick name ‘Fridtjof Frank Friedman’ for Gundersen was popularized on these pages,⁴⁸ as the youth wing sought to carve out a distinct libertarian identity for itself, while also allying with party veterans like Gundersen. The nickname further showed that although the FpU libertarians were not economics students like so many in the libertarian group in Bergen, and probably preferred a trade publication like Capitalism and Freedom to Friedman’s technical work on the Federal Reserve, economists and economic ideas were of vital importance also for them. The ideas of FpU were perhaps more related to the ideological fervour of Ayn Rand’s novels than the economics papers of Mont Pelerin Society members, but as second, third or even fourth- hand dealers of ideas, they too idolized the economists who had started the neoliberal movement decades earlier.

Høien and Thumen would be followed by more libertarians in the ranks of FpU. Jan Arild Snoen came to Oslo from rural Toten as a 21-year-old in 1985 and was introduced to libertarianism through journals like Ideer om Frihet and Farmand and the writings of Fridtjof Frank Gundersen, all of which were available in select bookstores in Oslo owned by Ivar Tøsti, a former associate of Anders Lange.⁴⁹ Another bookshop by the name of ‘Bredrup Bokhandel’ became an important meeting point, and as it was owned by Libertas,⁵⁰ certain linkages did exist between the old guard of Norwegian business-funded libertarianism and the new movement arising in FrP in the 1980s. Snoen later recalled that libertarians like himself chose to join FrP over the liberal Venstre and the conservative Høyre because these parties were both seen as being too enmeshed in the old system of post-war social democracy.⁵¹ Tor Mikkel Wara arrived in Oslo from Vadsø, close to Norway’s far north border with the Soviet Union around the same time as Snoen, and would rise to become editor of Fremskritt in 1986, chairman of FpU from 1987 and a member of parliament and vice president of FrP from 1989. As the young libertarians, or simply ‘liberals’ as they now liked to be called, rose through the ranks of the organization, the party itself became steadily more popular, albeit not necessarily due to the influence of libertarian ideology. The libertarians had originally been welcomed into the party and protected by the authority of Carl I. Hagen,⁵² later described by Snoen as a man with ‘a relaxed relationship to ideology’,⁵³ but they were not the only group within FrP. The liberals had to share space in the party with a more conservative fraction and also a ‘populist’ fraction with perhaps a lesser degree of ideological coherency in their positions than the libertarians, but also a much stronger ability to garner votes and popular support.⁵⁴

Of the populist fraction, many were nonetheless a type of ‘practical liberals’ who had not studied liberal or libertarian thinkers, but were drawn in a libertarian direction by populism’s performance based non-theoretical appeal to instincts. As a ‘thin’ ideology dependent on ‘thick’ ideologies, populism is believed to be adaptable to many different circumstances.⁵⁵ FrP populists’ disdain for local and state bureaucracies, and the individualist desire to be ‘left alone’ made libertarianism a logical ally. In a later recollection, Odvar Nordli, who had been prime minister for the Labour party between 1976 and 1981, commented that already in the 1970s he had attempted to deregulate that which did not compose ‘the commanding heights’ of the economy, for instance trying to get rid of phenomena such as public authorities having to decide ‘the angle on the roof of a house in the countryside’.⁵⁶ Nordli believed himself to have been unsuccessful in his endeavours, and what could only be considered a very fertile breeding ground for state scepticism led to a united front between the populists and the libertarians, the latter being referred to by other FrP members as ‘book-liberals’.⁵⁷

One possible bone of contention, however, was the question of immigration. In his ‘history of Norwegian liberalism’, former FpU libertarian Vegard Martinsen writes that the party had four different groups: ‘intellectual liberals, racists, social democrats who primarily wanted to spend more money on the old and sick’ and ‘ordinary people who were against bureaucracy and high taxes’.⁵⁸ The alliance between young libertarians and groups who were strongly opposed to non-western migration meant that the peripheral yet nonetheless existing concept of cosmopolitanism within libertarian ideology was given more attention than what had been the case on the pages of Ideer om Frihet. Confronted with anti-immigration policies and rhetoric from populist and conservative members of their own party, FpU libertarians were forced to consider the limits of core concepts such as individual freedom. This led to certain proclamations of faith in the idea of open borders, which ran directly opposite to FrP’s policies on immigration. During a presentation on ideology for FpU-members in 1984, for instance, Tor Geir Høien claimed the ‘human right to choose which country one wants to live in’, an argument he made with references to Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek.⁵⁹ This was reported in Fremskritt and caused some debate as this was in no way the position of FrP, which since its inception had been known as an anti-immigration party.⁶⁰ Free immigration would be ‘the end of us as a people and a nation’ wrote outraged party member Knut Johansen in March 1983, but the debate was hardly wide-ranging. The conflict was largely navigated without spectacular problems in this early period, and even Johansen noted that Høien had taken some ‘purely economic’ precautions against his own ideal of open borders.⁶¹ This was key: As long as immigration was treated as an economic issue, and anti-immigration rhetoric focused on immigration as an additional expense for a bloated state bureaucracy, the liberals could agree to strict immigration policies.⁶² FpU libertarians seemed to adapt a proviso to their principle of free movement, namely that immigrants should not cost the state any money. While their 1987 programme contained proclamations about how immigration ‘strengthens the economy and enlarges individual freedom’, it also stated that borders could only be open for immigrants who held an imagined private insurance which would also ‘cover repatriation in case of long-term unemployment or criminal acts’.⁶³ The support for immigration thus remained rather theoretical, and FpU libertarians were able to rise to important positions and exert a large influence in an anti-immigration party, which included members with ties to explicitly racist organizations.

The number of non-western immigrants arriving in Norway, especially as asylum seekers, was on the rise in the second half of the 1980s and the issue again became salient in political debate. Just a few days before the 1987 election, Hagen presented a letter he alleged had been sent him by a Muslim immigrant named ‘Mohamed Mustafa’, detailing how Islam was going to take over the country. The letter was later shown to be forged, but the stirring of anti-immigrant sentiment and anxieties of cultural decline, proved successful for FrP in the polls. With 12,3% of the vote, the 1987 election marked both FrP’s big breakthrough, and the start of a new era in Norwegian politics in which immigration from non-western countries would be a top issue.⁶⁴ The combination of libertarian or liberal economic policies, and anti-immigration rhetoric was cemented as the party’s brand, right at the time of their final breakthrough.⁶⁵ The liberals within the party often ended up seeing themselves as tempering the latent racism of many FrP politicians, attempting to steer Hagen away from the cultural aspects of anti-immigration policies and keeping the issue ‘economic’.⁶⁶

Ideer om Frihet’s days as a glossy magazine on newsstands countrywide ended in 1986. In a photocopied newsletter signed ‘laissez-faire’, editor Jan Sommerfelt Pettersen informed readers that the market for free-market ideas in print had shown itself to be smaller than expected, but that the journal’s ‘hardly 300’ subscribers would receive a 4-page newsletter every other month. The creation of a FrP think tank would offer a new outlet for libertarian writing, however. Where the Bergen libertarian society had looked to somewhat academically inclined think tanks such as the IEA and FEE for inspiration, Snoen and other FpU libertarians entered into contact with more policy-oriented outfits such as the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation in the US and the Adam Smith Institute and Centre for Policy Research in the UK. Snoen invited Ed Crane of the Cato Institute to speak in Oslo, and Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute visited Norway annually between 1988 and 1990. With funding from the Norwegian billionaire Christian Sveaas, Fremskrittspartiets Utredningsinstitutt (FUI) began operations in 1988 and was led by Snoen with a staff of two, including Sigmund Knag. The idea of creating a think tank of their own had been present for some time in the increasingly intertwined libertarian scenes of Bergen and FpU. Writing in Ideer om Frihet 2/85, for instance, Anne Mette Thunem asked ‘what can we learn from Foundation for Economic Education, Institute for Humane Studies and Cato Institute?’. Thunem had received scholarships from all three institutions to attend their summer schools in 1984 and concluded the article by saying that the three think tanks had a division of labour (FEE for the common man, IHS for intellectuals and Cato for policy-makers) and that they all contributed to ‘rolling back state-power in the struggle for a freer society’.⁶⁷

FUI’s newsletter was entitled Laissez-faire,⁶⁸ and Snoen would commission both Lars Peder Nordbakken and Hans Chr. Garmann Johnsen to write reports for the outfit. In spite of the party’s credentials as economically liberal however, the pair was reluctant to have their views connected with FrP. Nordbakken’s report ‘The Crisis in The Norwegian Economy’ (with the somewhat leading subtitle ‘A result of failed economic policies or free market forces?’) had originally been meant for publication in Ideer om Frihet, and Nordbakken took great care to distance himself from FrP in his preface, writing that the party think tank should be seen purely as an outlet for analysis and that he was independent of any political party. The same manoeuvring took place during the launch of Garmann Johnsen’s 1990 report ‘Culture without politics’.⁶⁹ In an interview with regional newspaper Fedrelandsvennen on the release of the report, Garmann Johnsen went to great lengths to announce that he was ‘not FrP’s chief ideologist’, but admitted that he had influenced some of the party’s younger members and met from time to time with Wara and rising star Pål Atle Skjervengen. In the interview, Garmann Johnsen singled out the immigration policies of FrP as the thing he most opposed about the party.⁷⁰ Snoen had assumed the editorship of Ideer om Frihet in 1990, and so the entanglements between the Bergen group and FrP were many, but the reluctance of Nordbakken and Garmann Johnsen to be associated with FrP speaks volumes of the low regard with which the party was held in many circles at the time, primarily due to the perceived populism of the party – herein included their controversial stances on immigration. In the interview, Garmann Johnsen, who now ran his family’s business venture and had become the chairman of the chamber of commerce in his hometown of Kristiansand, maintained that within FrP there were nonetheless ‘very positive young people representing something completely different from the media picture of lowbrow bullies with muggy attitudes’ (my translation).⁷¹

Rupture

During the 1990s, the difference between ‘liberals’ like Wara and the rest of the party eventually became too large. Immigration and cosmopolitanism were not important issues in the intra-party conflicts which eventually boiled over, however, although the issues carried important symbolic weight.⁷² In 1989, Wara had been elected into parliament along with three other young libertarian men. Wara was also made vice-chairman of the party, but tensions would grow between FpU liberals and the mother party in 1990, when FpU codified their principles into a staunch libertarian programme which, among other things, advocated free immigration.⁷³ Fåne was elected leader of FpU and also took over the role as editor of Fremskritt. Unlike his predecessor Wara, Fåne adopted an adversarial approach towards the other wings of FrP. In a motion to the FpU congress in 1990, he tackled the immigration issue head-on and stated that ‘A country’s government should not be able to restrict the economic and political freedoms of human beings, nor their ability to travel freely across borders’. The motion passed with references to liberal ideology and formed part of an offensive in which FpU attempted to be a libertarian corrective to FrP.⁷⁴ In spite of episodes such as this, however, the tacit agreement between the liberals and the rest of the party on opposing migration based purely on economic arguments was kept more or less in place. There were some debates about immigration in the party newspaper, but apart from a few symbolic statements, the libertarians appear to have kept rather quiet on the issue. When the seven other parties, from the radical Rød Valgallianse to the conservative Høyre launched and anti-racist campaign after the 1987 election, partly directed explicitly at FrP, FpU libertarians defended their parent organization vigorously: On the pages of Fremskritt, both Skjervengen and Fåne chose to interpret it as an attack on the party’s 250.000 voters and claimed to be taking the matter to court.⁷⁵

As disagreements within the party on immigration were kept under control, other issues arose to divide the libertarians from the rest of the party. One of these was gay partnership, and when an advocacy group approached the FpU libertarians represented in parliament about support for a bill, an issue which FpU supported in their 1990 programme, the libertarians saw no other option than to give their support, thus breaking with the other FrP parliamentarians and causing a media scandal.⁷⁶ On the question of welfare policies, the wings of the party were largely united in promoting privatizations, especially within health care. This was an ideological issue for the libertarians, whereas conservatives and populists rallied to the cause of privatizations as a practical way to improve health care for all. The wings of the party thus had opposing reasons for supporting privatizations, and ahead of the 1991 party congress, Snoen criticized the party’s social policies spokesperson, the conservative Jon Alvheim, for trying to ‘outbid’ the other parties in health policies.⁷⁷ The issue which would ultimately lead to a split, however, was the question of Norwegian membership in the European Economic Community (EEC). Since its inception, European neoliberals of different stripes had disagreed amongst themselves on the topic of EEC. Wilhelm Röpke in the early post-war years and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s both saw the European integration project as leading to a potential superstate, designed to impose regulations and carry out economic planning on an international level. On the other hand, a number of thinkers in the neoliberal tradition have seen the EEC as a project to expand the reach of markets (and insulate cross-border flows of capital and labour from democratic decision-making on the national level).⁷⁸ The latter became the position of the FpU liberals, who in the early 1990s welcomed the possibility of Norwegian EEC membership on the grounds that it would lead to liberalization and marketization of the Norwegian economy.

Populists and conservatives in the party were not necessarily against such things, but they were concerned with the loss of national sovereignty involved in joining the EEC. Twentieth-century Norwegian conservatives had always been pro-capitalism and markets, but the important concept of national interest has also meant that the conservative embrace of an increasingly transnational capitalism tended to be half-hearted.⁷⁹ The FpU libertarians, on the other hand, embraced the EEC in line with a libertarian, ideological vision of capitalism and markets as progressive and unifying forces, and pushed the issue fervently. In an infamous poster campaign, pictures of prominent Norwegian politicians who were against EEC membership were imposed on a Nazi-style background together with Arne Myrdal, a violent right-wing extremist and founder of Folkebevegelsen mot Innvandring (‘People’s movement against immigration’). The slogan on the poster read: ‘The no-comrades urge national unification against EEC-membership. With protectionism and selfishness goes the crusade into the dark side of human nature’ (my translation).⁸⁰ ‘National unification’ (Nasjonal samling) had been the name of Vidkun Quisling’s Norwegian Nazi party, which was disbanded in 1945, and while politicians from other parties were perhaps used to provocations from FpU libertarians, EEC-opponents within FrP were outraged by the comparisons.

To large protests, the liberal position in favour of Norwegian EEC-membership nonetheless carried the day within the party, but the process itself, with its many re-matches and what Snoen later called a ‘lack of reflection’ on issues pertaining to nationalism and the benefits of markets, became the final straw for both Wara, Skjervengen and Snoen, who all resigned from the party within the space of a year in 1992–93, as Hagen sought to ‘compensate’ for the EEC position by turning more nationalist on other issues.⁸¹ The liberal wing of the party had thus already been significantly reduced when Hagen decided to mount an all-out attack on it before the 1994 party conference. At a live TV-debate in November the preceding year, Hagen had called his own party colleagues ‘intellectual, radical liberalists’, intending it to be a slur.⁸² This was the same Hagen who had been taken by Snoen to the 1990 International Society of Individual Liberty’s annual meeting in San Francisco, where Hagen had headlined the conference alongside Milton Friedman and stated in his speech that he was a libertarian ‘at heart’.⁸³ Hagen’s relationship to libertarianism had always been instrumental, however, and it deteriorated further after Snoen, in 1997, release a sound recording of Hagen’s speech from the San Francisco conference, during which he had said he supported the legalization of drugs.⁸⁴

Libertarianism had seemed a useful wave for Hagen to ride through the 1980s, but by 1994 he was ready to quash the troublemakers and regain full control of his party. Before the 1994 conference, all local branches were asked to adopt a resolution written by Hagen, in which immigration policies became a key issue for the party and ‘theoretical liberalism’ was reserved only for economic policies, and not something meant to influence ‘other fields’. FpU fought against Hagen’s attempt to delineate liberalism to questions deemed to be purely economic, but ended up losing. After the national conference rejected a motion to clarify the party’s official position on EEC-membership, the liberal vice-chairman of the party, Ellen Wibe resigned on the first day of the conference. The four liberal members of parliament asked the conference’s approval to carry out their parliamentary term on FrP’s previous programme, but this was also rejected, and they eventually broke from the party completely. FpU decided to permanently dissolve its organization, but it was resurrected almost immediately by other young FrP members loyal to Hagen.⁸⁵

Some break-away members of parliament and many former FpU figures quickly founded the party FRI-demokratene (The Free Democrats), described by Snoen as ‘more of a grief group than a party’.⁸⁶ The MP Ellen Christine Christiansen (who was married to Snoen) became the party’s first leader, but after receiving less than 2000 votes nationwide in the 1995 local elections, the organization abandoned parliamentary politics. FrP, on the other hand, received 12% popular support in the same election. A party called Det Liberale Folkeparti, DLF (The Liberal People’s Party) had been founded in 1992 and attracted some members from FrP after the split. DLF had its roots in various other splits within the social liberal party Venstre since the 1970s, but moved towards more libertarian positions in these years. DLF had no success at the polls either and functioned more as a study group.⁸⁷ Influential FrP liberals, like the Christiansen/Snoen couple and Heidi Nordby Lunde would join the conservative party Høyre in the second half of the 1990s,⁸⁸ whereas Wara, Schjervengen, Høien and Thunem all left party politics and pursued careers in business instead (Wara also wrote an MA thesis in philosophy on the topic of evolution and morality⁸⁹). As for the Bergen libertarians, Nordbakken would abandon party political independence and join Venstre, while Garmann Johnsen became an economics professor at a regional university.

While the immigration issue was not a deciding factor in the split, nor really the issue that had caused most problems between the libertarians and other wings of Frp prior, the 1994 purges did open space for the party to become (even) more outspokenly anti-immigration and ‘nationally conservative’ in its outlook. Leading FrP politicians like the MP Øystein Hedstrøm, for instance, colluded with elements of the extreme right at a time of growing neo-nazi mobilization in Norway, something which was seen to increase the party’s popularity in the polls.⁹⁰ Several former FrP libertarians vented strong criticisms of FrP’s immigration policies in this period, and in a 1995 article on communitarianism in Ideer om Frihet, Snoen wrote that the party’s focus had changed ‘radically from economic liberalism to the group community of The Nation and Norwegian Culture (read: race)’ ⁹¹ (my translation, Snoen’s parenthesis). These sorts of retreospective declarations, along with the few examples of actual intra-party dispute around immigration policies before 1994, can lead to an assumption that the libertarians split from FrP because of their cosmopolitan outlook and correspondingly positive view of immigration. This appears to not necessarily have been the case, however, and what transpires is instead that libertarians in FrP were mostly content to belong to an anti-immigration party, mainly finding the time ripe to criticize FrP’s immigration policies after they had been ousted for other reasons.

The period of influence of libertarian ideas in FrP was considered by many Norwegian commentators at the time as an ‘almost successful coup’ on the part of the libertarians.⁹² They were a small group with unpopular policies, who nonetheless exercised tremendous influence over a party of some size, a party which sometimes played the role of king maker in Norwegian politics during the period in question. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the libertarian influence in FrP ended in 1994. The party has stuck with the label ‘liberal’, while often making good use of Hagen’s attempted distinction between ‘economic liberalism’ and other forms of liberalism. A pamphlet from FrP’s ‘ideology course’ for party members from 2006, for instance, is structured as an introduction to liberalism, listing John Locke, Baron de Montescieu, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and Murray Rothbard as the leading thinkers influencing the party.⁹³ The 1994 purges opened space for a young Siv Jensen, who in 2006 would become FrP’s first non-Carl I. Hagen chairman.⁹⁴ Jensen has cited Ayn Rand as her favourite author, and as she rose to become Norway’s minister of finance in 2013, it became clear that the rumours of the death of libertarianism in FrP had been greatly exaggerated.

The neoliberal network harking back to Mont Pelerin which was so important for the Norwegian brand of libertarianism, played an important part in bringing FrP and Jensen to the halls of power in 2013. The small party started by Anders Lange in 1978 had grown to be so important by that time that they could announce their refusal before elections to support any government they did not themselves form part of. Including FrP in government had at that point been unthinkable for other parties, precisely due to their controversial stands on the steadily more important issue of immigration and the fact that they appealed to racist elements within the population. After the turn of the millennium, FrP won over 20% of the nationwide vote share in both the 2005 and 2009 parliamentary elections, and the so-called respectable parties on the Norwegian right, the conservative Høyre, the liberal Venstre and the Christian Democrats of Kristelig Folkeparti, had to find a way to explicitly cooperate with them if they wanted to achieve a parliamentary majority.

A new institution thus arose to unite the parties of the right through a common belief in markets and liberalism: Civita was founded as a think tank in 2001, with inspiration from the title of Wilhelm Röpke’s 1944 book Civitas Humana.⁹⁵ The idea for the name came from none other than Lars Peder Nordbakken, who eventually became a member of the Mont Pelerin Society some years later, and part of the funding came from the still remaining funds of Libertas that were managed by a foundation called Liberalt Forskningsinstitutt (LIFO) with Nordbakken as a board member.⁹⁶ Civita became a member of the ATLAS network of neoliberal think tanks, but inspired by Nordbakken’s conversion to ordoliberalism, and perhaps also his membership in Venstre, it often took on more moderate positions in Norwegian public debate than for instance those of its predecessor Libertas or the corresponding think tank Timbro in Sweden.⁹⁷ Civita has been credited with uniting the Norwegian right, which in practice meant getting the other parties to accept FrP, and Civita’s president Kristin Clemet is considered one of the chief architects behind Høyre’s Erna Solberg’s time as a prime minister in multi-party coalition governments between 2013 and 2021, with Jensen as Norway’s first Ayn Rand-acolyte finance minister until 2020.⁹⁸ When Wara announced his return to politics to become minister of justice under Solberg and Jensen in 2018, he also made a statement saying he had changed his views on immigration and that he had never believed in open borders anyway.⁹⁹

Conclusion

So-called strange bedfellows are a common occurrence on the political right, as well as on the left. It is nonetheless remarkable that Norway has an important and powerful political party famous for two things: On the one hand, libertarianism, or in their own words ‘liberalism’, and on the other hand anti-immigration sentiments bordering on outright racism. Although there was a split in FrP in 1994, in which the young libertarians who had exercised influence within the party up until that point were forced out, libertarian ideas blended with a populist approach to politics existed in the party before they joined, and they remained important afterwards. The libertarian move away from pro-immigration policies and what I have called ‘cosmopolitan’ values, described in other national contexts by both Slobodian and Cooper, seems to suggest a privileging of certain aspects of libertarian ideology at the expense of the idea of open borders. If we consider cosmopolitanism as one of many ‘concepts’ in libertarian ideology, we can make sense of this move by using Michael Freeden’s morphology and seeing cosmopolitanism as a peripheral concept in libertarian ideology: It exists, but mainly to give meaning to core and adjacent concepts, and it makes sense that it can thus be sacrificed in order to solve intrinsic contradictions (Cooper) or adjust to updated dogma regarding universalism (Slobodian).

In the Norwegian context, it seems clear that occurrences of at least theoretical support for migration being voiced by FpU members were provoked by the alliance in FrP between libertarians and anti-immigration populists in a historical context in which non-western immigration became a steadily more important issue. This pushed some FpU libertarians into considering the limits of their principles of freedom and non-coercion, but what could have been an intensely contentious issue within the party was seldom discussed on the pages of Fremskritt, nor was it a topic in Ideer om Frihet. The caveat that borders could only be open for immigrants with private insurances which would pay all welfare expenses, including their eventual repatriation in the case of unemployment, made the libertarian stance for free movement a purely theoretical one. The dominance of anti-immigration views within FrP did not really seem to bother FpU libertarians all that much either, as long as they could influence the party on what Hagen would later call ‘economic liberalism’. The slogan ‘Born free – Taxed to death’ summarized FpU’s mainly economic approach to libertarian individualism,¹⁰⁰ and when choosing between the principle of free movement and opposition to the state spending that actual immigration would lead to, FrP libertarians chose the latter. When the split finally came, the most intense debates between ‘book liberals’ on one side and conservatives and populists on the other were on the topic of Norway’s relationship to the European common market and not on the increasingly hot topic of non-western immigration.¹⁰¹ Where Swedish libertarian activists were in some cases known to hide illegal migrants and advocate more staunchly for free movement,¹⁰² no such activity appears to have been recorded in Norway. Open borders and free migration were never an important part of the libertarian programme in Norway, and a later Norwegian example of what Slobodian has referred to as the pipeline from libertarianism to the new alt-right would be Hans Jørgen Lysglimt Johansen, who chaired FRIdemokratene between 2000 and 2003, and founded a Norwegian ‘Mises Institute’ some years later. At the time of writing, Johansen is one of the most outspoken members of the Norwegian far-right, through his organization Alliansen – Alternativ for Norge. The holocaust-denying Johansen is an outlier and an extremist, but it is a fact that Norwegian libertarianism found a home in the most nativist political party in the country, which remains strongly influenced by libertarian ideology to this day.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editors of and the other contributors to this special issue for their valuable feedback on this manuscript in several rounds of workshops and discussions. Thank you also to the participants at the workshop hosted by CRISP in Nottingham, and especially Daniel Bessner who prepared remarks on a draft of the paper. Thank you also to the interviewees who kindly agreed to be interviewed and also answered several follow-ups via e-mail later, to Professor Øystein Sørensen who gave valuable advice at an early stage of the project, and to Martin van Soest for enlightening conversations and some assistance with archival material.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. P.M. Roll, H. Benammar & Sara Baban, Jeg skulle si storm – boken om Ways of Seeing (Oslo: Oktober forlag, 2022).

2. Q. Slobodian, ‘Anti-’68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right’, Cultural Politics 15, nr. 3 (2019), pp. 372–86.

3. J. Wasserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries – How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

4. See for instance P. Boettke, F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). In Europe, however, prominent members of various think tanks named after Hayek have also been instrumental in building nativist far-right parties such as the AfD in Germany and FPÖ in Austria. See Q. Slobodian, ‘Hayek’s Bastards – The Populist Right’s Neoliberal Roots’, Tribune, 15. juni 2021, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/06/hayeks-bastards-the-populist-rights-neoliberal-roots.

5. M. Cooper, ‘The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation’, Theory, Culture & Society 38, nr. 6 (2021), pp. 29–50.

6. J. Brennan, Libertarianism. What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p 42.

7. The four others are ‘strong rights to individual liberty and private property’, ‘civil liberties like equal rights for homosexuals’, drug decriminalization” and opposition to ‘most military interventions’. B. Van der Vossen, ‘Libertarianism’, i Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, California: Stanford University, 2019), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/.

8. M. Freeden, ‘Ideology and Political Theory’, Journal of Political Ideologies 11, nr. 1 (2006), pp 3–22, https://doi.org/I: 10.1080/13569310500395834; Michael Freeden, Ideology – A Very Short Introduction (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

9. R. Dyer Ånensen, ‘Myter om det homogene Norge’, Norsk sosiologisk tidsskrift 5, nr. 6 (1. November 2021), p 2.

10. The institution is called Norges Handelshøyskole (NHH) in Norwegian. It had used the above mentioned English name for some time in the 1970’s, but ‘Business Administration’ was removed in 2001. ‘Norges Handelshøyskole 25 år − 1936–1991’, Bedriftsøkonomen, Nr. 68, 1961.

11. G. Brochmann & K. Kjeldstadli, Innvandringen til Norge, 900–2010 (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 2013).

12. T. Bergh & T. J. Hanisch, Vitenskap og politikk – linjer i norsk sosialøkonomi gjennom 150 år (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1984), p 147.

13. O. Bjerkholt, Kunnskapens krav (Oslo – Kongsvinger: Statistisk sentralbyrå, 2000), 10–16; Even Lange, Samling om felles mål (1935–70), Aschehougs norgeshistorie 11 (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1998), pp 12–32.

14. It appears the English word was used although the full sentence was delivered in Norwegian. H. Chr. Garmann Johnsen, ‘Ideer om frihet i ti år – noen personlige refleksjoner’, Ideer om frihet 1 (1990), p 10.

15. O. Innset, Markedsvendingen – Nyliberalismens historie i Norge (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2020), pp 106–15.

16. E. Lie, Norsk økonomisk politikk etter 1905 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2012), pp 126–32.

17. J. A. Snoen (ed.), Liberalisme på norsk: ideer om frihet 1980 – 2000 (Oslo: Ideer om frihet, 2001), p 7.

18. See for instance Rune Slagstad’s analysis of continuity between the post-war, social democratic order dominated by the Labour party and the social order defined by the liberal party Venstre around the turn of the century. R. Slagstad, De nasjonale strateger (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 1998).

19. S. Knag, ‘Hvordan begynner det?’, in Snoen (ed.) op cit., Ref 17, pp 9–12.

20. Snoen (ed.), op. cit. Ref 17, p 7.

21. Wasserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries – How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas.

22. ‘Frisinnede i alle land’, Ideer om Frihet 2/82, (Nasjonalbiblioteket)

23. L. Mjøset, ‘Nyliberalisme, økonomisk teori og kapitalismens mangfold : noen historiske linjer og en norsk kasusstudie’, Agora 29, nr. 1 (2015), pp 54–94.

24. M. Friedman, ‘Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects’, Farmand, nr. 17 (1951), pp 89–93.

25. S. Langeteig, ‘Den Norske stiftelsen Libertas. Påvirkning på den polititiske utviklingen i Norge 1947–1960’ (Oslo, 2020).

26. H. Chr. Garman Johnsen, interviewed 11.05.2021.

27. L. P. Nordbakken, interviewed 1.06.2021.

28. H. Chr. Garman Johnsen, interviewed 11.05.2021.

29. H. Chr. Garman Johnsen, interviewed 11.05.2021.

30. H. Chr. Garmann Johnsen, ‘Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992)’, in Snoen (ed.), op.cit., Ref 17, pp 103–112; Bent Andreassen, ‘Fremvektsen av den klassiske liberalismen’, in Snoen (ed.), op.cit., Ref 17, pp 79–102.

31. D. Bell, ‘What Is Liberalism?’, Political Theory 42, nr. 6 (1. desember 2014), pp 682–715.

32. Garmann Johnsen, ‘Ideer om frihet i ti år – noen personlige refleksjoner’. in Snoen (ed.), op.cit., Ref 17, pp 13–16

33. Jan Sommerfelt Pettersen, ‘Frihetskjempere’, Ideer om frihet, 1984, (Nasjonalbiblioteket)

34. Freeden, Ideology – A Very Short Introduction, pp 60–66.

35. H. Chr. Garmann Johnsen, ‘The New Right’, Ideer om frihet 2, nr. 1 & 2 (1981), (Nasjonalbiblioteket) pp 10–14.

36. This is related to how the same phenomenon played out in the US, as analysed by Melinda Cooper in M. Cooper, Family Values – Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017).

37. H. Notaker, Høyres historie 1975 – 2005 (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2012), pp 65–66.

38. See also B. Hagtvet & T. Bjørklund, ‘Høyrebølgen’, i Kåre Willoch – et debattskrift (Oslo: Kagge forlag, 2008), pp 254–83.

39. A. Ravik Jupskås, ‘Mangfoldig mobilisering og velsmurt valkampmaskineri’, Nytt norsk tidsskrift 30, nr. 1 (2013), p 8.

40. A. Todal Jensen, ‘Norsk høyrepopulisme ved veis ende?’, Nytt norsk tidsskrift 34, nr. 3 (2017), p 234.

41. H. Kvanmo & Arild Rygnestad, Anders Langes saga (Oslo: Samlaget, 1993), p 164.

42. This source of this information was the memoir of a South African politician. E. M. Roodie, The Real Information Scandal (London: Orbis Publishing, 1983). FrP denied the allegations in 2013: https://www.tv2.no/nyheter/-politikk/apartheid-fotnote-far-frp-til-a-se-rodt/13605775/

43. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqnjZ5QKZJU

44. F. F. Gundersen, Fri og frank på tinget: liberalisme med en norsk vri (Oslo: Self-published, 1985), pp 35–40.

45. J. A. Snoen, interviewed 5.8.2021.

46. See also M van Soest, 'Cosmopolitans in the European Periphery: The Rise of a Modern, Norwegian Libertarian Movement, 1980-2008.' Culture and History: Student Research Papers, 6(2) (2022), 57–75. https://doi.org/10.7146/chku.v6i2.134568.

47. J. A. Snoen, interviewed 5.8.2021.

48. Fremskritt 13.07.1981: 3 (Nasjonalbiblioteket)

49. J. A. Snoen, interviewed 5.8.2021.

50. LIFO, ‘Stiftelsen Liberas (1947 – 1988)’, Liberalt Forskningsinstitutt (blog), n.d., http://lifo.no/index.php?sideID=86&ledd1=87.

51. J. A. Snoen, interviewed 5.8.2021.

52. V. Martinsen, Frihet, likhet, brorskap – kapitalismen i teori og praksis (Oslo: Kontekst forlag, 2004), pp 352–53.

53. J. O. Ekeberg & Jan Arild Snoen, Kong Carl – en uautorisert biografi om Carl I. Hagen (Oslo: Kagge forlag, 2001), p 136.

54. Ekeberg & Snoen, Ibid., p 136.

55. P. Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University press, 2000), p 2.

56. O. Nordli, interviewed by Forum for samtidshistories intervjuprosjekt 2005, 24. juni 2005, 31, Riksarkivet.

57. J. A. Snoen, interviewed 5.8.2021.

58. Martinsen, op. cit., Ref. 51, p 353.

59. S. L. Holbek, ‘“Det er forskjell å drive en ideologisk sekt og et politisk parti” - En analyse av Fremskrittspartiets liberalistiske ideologi i perioden 1984–1994’ (Master thesis, Oslo, University of Oslo, 2014), 45.

60. E. Solheim & T. Lorentzen, Den sterkestes rett: Et oppgjør med Fremskrittspartiet (Oslo: Sosialistisk opplysningsforbund, 1988), pp 45–48.

61. Fremskritt no. 3, 1984 (Nasjonalbiblioteket)

62. Martinsen, op. cit., Ref. 51, p 353.

63. Fremskritt no. 1, 1988 (Nasjonalbiblioteket), p 2.

64. Holbek, op. cit., Ref. 58, p 6.

65. Ekeberg & Snoen, op.cit., Ref. 52, pp 144–46.

66. J. A. Snoen, interviewed 5.8.2021.

67. A. Thunem, ‘Libertarianske ‘think tanks’ i USA”, Ideer om Frihet 2/85, (Nasjonalbiblioteket). The issue also had a write-up by Thunem on Israel Kirzner and the Austrian Economic Program at NYU, where Høien had followed in the foot-steps of Garmann Johnsen as a visiting Norwegian student.

68. Martinsen, op. cit., Ref. 51, p.355

69. Nordbakken and Knag were listed as co-authors along with Fréderic Bastiat and the Australian author John Harper-Nelson, since excerpts of the latter two’s writings were reproduced as part of the publication

70. P. L. Salvesen, ‘− Jeg er ikke Frps sjefsideolog’, Fedrelandsvennen, mai 1990.

71. Salvesen, ibid..

72. E. Skarsbø Moen, Profet i eget land – Historien om Carl I. Hagen (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2006), p 194.

73. Ekeberg & Snoen, op.cit., Ref. 52, p 180.

74. Holbek, op. cit., Ref. 58, p 51.

75. Fremskritt no. 39, 1987 (Nasjonalbiblioteket): pp 1–2.

76. Ekeberg & Snoen, op.cit., Ref. 52, p 180–82.

77. Skarsbø Moen, op. cit., Ref. 71, p 216.

78. Q. Slobodian, Globalists – The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018).

79. H. Brede Aven & O. Innset, ‘Konservatisme, nyliberalisme og statsdrift – Høyres syn på statseid industri, 1945 – 1981’, Historisk Tidsskrift 97, nr. 2 (2018): p 132–51.

80. Skarsbø Moen, op. cit., Ref. 71, p 217.

81. J. A. Snoen, interviewed 5.8.2021.

82. Ekeberg & Snoen, op.cit., Ref. 52, p 237.

83. Ekeberg & Snoen, op.cit., Ref. 52, p 183.

84. Martinsen, op. cit., Ref. 51, p 356.

85. Ekeberg & Snoen, op.cit., Ref. 52, p 240–56.

86. J. A. Snoen, interviewed 5.8.2021.

87. DLF disbanded in 2017, leaving Liberalistene, who use ‘Capitalist Party’ as their English name, as the current libertarian group within Norwegian politics – albeit without elected officials at any level of government.

88. S. Aabø, ‘Nå lager de Høyre-politikk. Før var de Carl I. Hagens gutter’, Dagbladet, desember 1999.

89. T. M. Wara, ‘Undergraver evolusjonen moralsk realisme?’ (Oslo, Universitetet i Oslo, 2017).

90. A. Hagelund, ‘Kampen om anstendigheten’ (Oslo: Institutt for Samfunnsforskning, 1999), p 14.

91. J. A. Snoen, ‘Kommunitaristene kommer’, Ideer om frihet, nr. 2 (1995). http://www.ideeromfrihet.no/1995–6-snoen.php

92. Martinsen, op. cit., Ref. 51, p 358.

93. ‘Fremskrittspartiets ideologikurs 2006, Kurshefte’, (Nasjonalbiblioteket).

94. M. Aurdal, Siv – Portrett av en formann (Oslo: Kagge forlag, 2006), pp 116–17.

95. W. Röpke, Civitas Humana (London – Edinburgh – Glasgow: William Hodge and Company Limited, 1948).

96. L. P. Nordbakken, interviewed 1.06.2021.

97. Innset, op.cit., Ref. 15, pp 179–80.

98. K. Nykvist, ‘Civita-regjeringen’, Nationen, 20. februar 2019, https://www.nationen.no/motkultur/kommentar/civita-regjeringen/.

99. O. Leraan Skjetne mfl., ‘Wara: Har blitt strengere på innvandring’, VG, 4. April 2018, https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/Kvq6zM/wara-har-blitt-strengere-paa-innvandring. Snoen, in his interview for this article (5.8.2021), expressed a similar sentiment, citing 9/11 and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as developments that had led to his changed views on open borders.

100. See for instance Fremskritt, 1987 (Nasjonalbiblioteket)

101. Brochmann & Kjeldstadli, op. cit., Ref. 11.

102. See Jenny Andersson’s article in this special issue.