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Choosing the Periphery 85
gain of stable access to industrial markets against the costs of relinquishing national
control of primary industries was fundamentally the same for all three applications.
The Norwegian authorities set conditions for an accession agreement that
were incompatible with the Community's own regulations. The minimum bargaining
objective was an extended period of transition before the movement of capital
could be liberalised. The maximum bargaining objective was to be granted permanent
special schemes for agriculture and fishery. The dilemma the Norwegian positions
represented was at its roots a political one, not an economic one, due to the
very fact that Community membership challenged the wide set of compromises
that constituted the national political economy. In the short term, Norwegian governments
anticipated resistance from groups feeling threatened by EC membership.
In the long term, restructuring the political economy would topple the socio-political
balance and consequently launch unpredictable political trends. This obtrusive
dilemma was one of the reasons why the Norwegian applications were late in 1962
and 1967 compared with other applicants to the EEC. However, on neither occasion
did the dilemma come to a head. In 1962 two hearings were held with the
Community at the ministerial level – none in 1967 – but no real negotiations were
initiated. After the 1970 application negotiations were carried on for eighteen
months. Twenty-seven official negotiation meetings were held, ten of which at the
ministerial level and seventeen at deputy level, in addition to innumerable discussions
at the expert level. Not unexpectedly, agriculture and fisheries were the major
stumbling blocks during the negotiations, and only in January 1972 did the parties
reach agreement on the fisheries protocol. In the end, the Labour government yielded
on so many conditions during the negotiations that the electorate turned down
the treaty a few months later.
The formulation of national preferences and eventually the country's policy options,
I argue, stemmed from the set of entangled compromises the political economy
implied in Norway. This does not entail a rejection of the ideological or cultural
motivations underlying Norway's choice. Actually, the political economy was legitimised
by the building of the welfare state, probably the post-war institution that
most strongly maintained national identity. The defence of the primary industries
also implied a defence of the national identity constructs that had been in the making
throughout the 1800s. Hence, the defence of the political economy was fully
compatible with nationalism as ideology.
II. The Political Economy and its Foundations
In the 1960s no domestic threats existed against Norway's definition of its political
economy. The non-Socialist coalition that assumed power in 1965 continued
Labour's policy with only minor modifications. Labour, in office since 1945, had
deliberately included corporative organisations in the government. Thus, institutionalised
corporatism helped to sustain the national consensus. Nor was there a