For a precise picture of the situation in Norway, it isn’t enough to refer to parallels with Denmark or other Scandinavian countries. Some differences immediately come to mind: Norway is one of the largest states in Europe, with a distance of over 3000 km from Oslo to the Russian border. The centres of the country lie far apart from one another, next to the greater Oslo area, which together with Bærum has about 900000 inhabitants, Bergen (220000), Trondheim (150000) and Stavanger (110000), there is no city with more than 100000 inhabitants. The country overall has a population of 4.5 million, despite its size thus less than Denmark and Sweden (www.leksikon.org). The trend towards larger urban centres – and the increasing depopulating of the North – has reinforced the dissimilarity of the political and economic development within the country since the end of the Second World War. The political centre Oslo – the former administrative centre of the Danish and Swedish domination – lies in the utmost south of the country. The significance of sub-centres, local traditions and conflicts is comparatively strong; the expression of that is not only the existence of a primeval indigenous population in the North, but also the late development of the nation state itself. The existence of two languages (the old colonial administrative language Bokmål and the “New Norwegian” Nynorsk) remind us of this circumstance.

The oil findings since the end of the 1960s turned Norway not only into the third-largest oil exporter of the world, but also into the society on the top of the UNDP-ranking of social, health and educational standards (UNDP 2002).The opening up of the oil resources as well has mainly been a task of the state: the Norwegian state, as the largest capitalist, alone was in the position of offering the necessary resources for the tapping of oil resources. But in contrast to other countries, Statoil, up to very few years ago a state enterprise, was at the same time one of the main profiteers from the oil exploitation. The oil funds until today is one of the most important income sources of the state budget. Norwegian capitalism was and is state-regulated in an even larger measure than in other European countries.