The Pakistani Norwegians
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Fortnight, January 1997
[Image] If they are yearning for that pristine and unspoilt
nature country depicted on postcards, with its pale and
About this site undiluted population descended in direct line from
Vikings, visitors to Norway are in for a rude awakening
[Image] the moment they land at Fornebu International Airport.
Not only is the airport an unspectacular one; a drab and
Relational downscaled version of Heathrow or Schiphol. The chances
index are also that the taxi driver who takes one into town is
far from a blue-eyed Viking son, but instead a brown man
[Image] with a Subcontinental accent: a member, the visitor will
eventually discover, of Norway's healthy Pakistani
Thematic index community.
[Image] Numbering more than 20,000, the Pakistani are the largest
immigrant group in Norway, slightly more numerous than
Alphabetic the Swedes. Since the late 1960s, when Norway decided to
index do as the Germans, French, Britons and Swedes had already
done and import a few planeloads of cheap unskilled
[Image] labour for its least prestigious menial tasks, the
Pakistani community has grown steadily. After 1975,
Recent however, the growth has taken place chiefly through
internal reproduction and family reunions as Norway at
the time imposed a ban on labour migration. Today, Norway
[Image] has a total of 220,000 immigrants, accounting for five
per cent of the population, but half of them come from
World rich, white countries and are never thought of as
immigrants. The other half originate in over a hundred
countries. During the 1980s and 1990s, the main flow has
consisted of refugees from war-torn or politically
authoritarian societies such as Iran, Somalia, Vietnam
and Sri Lanka.
The Pakistani are in a special position not only because
they are the largest community, but also because they
came first. Thousands of Pakistani-Norwegian children and
teenagers living in the urban centres today have grown up
in Norway, speak the language without an accent and
consider themselves Norwegians. This presents the ongoing
construction of Norwegian nationhood with new challenges.
The integration of immigrants into Norwegian society has
not been unproblematic. The country has traditionally
been geographically and economically marginal and
relatively isolated. Apart from the indigenous Sami
(Lapps) in the far north, the population was considered
-- and considered itself -- homogeneous. Indeed, the
entire project of nation-building, as it evolved from the
mid-nineteenth century, culminating in full independence
from Sweden in 1905, emphasised the indivisible and
unitary nature of the Norwegian population. Norwegian
nationalism and national imagery have always been
oriented towards a mythical pastoral idyll. The rooted,
traditional peasant has been depicted as the archetypal
Norwegian, and although three quarters of the population
now live in urbanised areas, Norwegians still tend to see
themselves as an essentially rural people of peasants and
fishermen. This kind of national identity, which stresses
the continuity with the past, traditional authenticity
and the rural way of life, is not immediately compatible
with an urban minority of Punjabi- and Urdu-speaking
Muslims from a country with which Norway has no
historical ties.
The state has by and large pursued a straightforward
policy of assimilation vis-α-vis the Pakistani. Their
integration into the labour market has been taken for
granted; after all, they came here to work. Their
children attend ordinary Norwegian schools, although some
concessions have been made in granting them a few classes
in their maternal language. In general, a successful
Pakistani according to the values of the majority is by
definition a Norwegianised Pakistani.
State policies in Norway are in principle not racist.
Norwegian citizenship, for example, can be acquired after
seven years of residence. However, it is beyond dispute
that state policies are culturalist in favouring
Norwegian culture over everything else. It has been
notoriously difficult for immigrant minorities to defend
religious and linguistic rights, which makes their
political situation quite unlike the case of northern
Norway, where the linguistic rights of the Sami, who
speak a language unrelated to Norwegian, have been firmly
established in schools, in cultural life and even in the
local administration.
The reluctance on the part of the Norwegian state to
allow immigrants to retain their cultural heritage can be
described as a simultaneous application of Enlightenment
and Romantic ideas: Romantic nationalism praises the
virtues of a particular traditional culture and fails to
see the virtues of others; while the Enlightenment idea
of social justice conflates equality with similarity.
Indeed, in the Norwegian language, the term likhet covers
both. According to a common view, therefore, in order to
achieve equal rights, one has to become culturally
similar first.
At the same time, it is well known that immigrants are
systematically discriminated against in the labour market
-- in both public and private sectors -- and that
Pakistani, in particular, are a disadvantaged group.
There is considerable everyday racism, although the
militant anti-immigrant groups are small. In other words,
at the level of civil society, animosity against
immigrants is a common phenomenon.
The Pakistani in Norway, most of whom live in Oslo and
neighbouring Drammen, have reacted to this situation in
different ways. Most of them have become strongly
Norwegianised, although it would be fair to say that many
"live in two worlds". Some regard themselves simply as
brown, Islamic Norwegians. However, the exclusion taking
place in civil society and the state pressure to
assimilate have also led to counterreactions. Whereas the
trade unions formed the natural focal point of political
organisation in the early years, there has been a recent
shift towards religious organisation. Islam is in this
way becoming politicised in Norway in the 1990s, and a
growing number of immigrants are turning towards it as an
alternative to other political fora. The Pakistani
population is thus divided between a secular, modernist
tendency and a traditionalist tendency, which rejects the
society in which they no longer feel that they are
wanted. Religious entrenchment of this kind would
obviously have been much less likely if Norwegian society
had been able to offer true equality and, conversely, did
not require total similarity. Instead, it has been the
other way around, as similarity has been seen as a means
to acquire equality. Thirty years of experience has shown
that this is wrong: in the early years, newly arrived
Pakistani were immediately employed, while many
culturally integrated second generation immigrants (or
first generation Norwegian) are now rejected by
employers, ostensibly because of "cultural differences".
This is the kind of situation which understandably, but
regrettably, inspires Islamic revitalisation.
⌐Thomas Hylland Eriksen 1997
[Image]
Nexus