Reproduction and the Welfare State: Notes on Norwegian Biopolitics
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(Forthcoming in Nordic Journal of Social Research) Reproduction and the Welfare State: Notes on Norwegian Biopolitics Victor L. Shammas1 and Tony Sandset2 1 Work Research Institute (AFI), Oslo Metropolitan University 2 Institute for Health and Society, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo ABSTRACT Norway has long been considered a bastion of social democracy on account of its strongly protective and decommodifying welfare state. However, with the rise of neoliberalism across the West and the current upswing in right-wing populist politics, this Northern European society has gradually shifted away from Keynesian Fordism to a moderate form of neoliberalism. This political-economic pivot has also resulted in a transformation of what Foucault termed biopolitics: a politics concerned with life itself. At the outset of 2019, leading politicians from Norway’s center-right coalition government placed the problem of declining fertility rates on the national agenda. These politicians framed the problem of biological reproduction in ways peculiar to their particular political-ideological outlook. While the Conservative Party discussed reproduction in terms of producerism, viz. the problem of supplying the welfare state with laboring, tax-paying citizens, the Progress Party emphasized ethnonational exclusion, engaging in racial denigration with the aim of ensuring the reproduction of “ethnic Norwegians”; the Christian Democrats, on the other hand, highlighted a conservative Christian “right to life” topos amidst growing secularization and pluralism. All three signaled a turn away from traditional social-democratic ideology. Neoliberalism proves itself malleable in its ability to fuse with a wide range of biopolitical programs, including moral exhortations, ethnonational exclusion, and religious discourse as ways of approaching the problem of reproduction. However, this post-social-democratic approach is largely unwilling to provide material security through large-scale social expenditures and universal welfare institutions, preferring instead to address the “hearts and minds” of the populace. In this way, the fundamental causes of sub-replacement fertility—the gradual proliferation of ontological insecurity—remain unaddressed. KEYWORDS biopolitics; Foucault; ethnonationalism; social democracy; neoliberalism; fertility 1 Introduction On the first day of 2019, the Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg used the political leader’s annual New Year’s Address to exhort the population to reproduce. It was important, the prime minister said, to raise the Norwegian fertility rate and thereby to counteract what she perceived as a demographic threat to the very future survival of the welfare state. “The wheels of our society keep turning because adults look after children,” Prime Minister Solberg (2019) said. “And those who are able to work ensure that the elderly can be cared for.” In the near future, the prime minister believed, “we will encounter problems with this model. Norwegians are having fewer children. In order to maintain our population, the average birth rate needs to be a little over two children per woman. Today the average birth rate is just 1.6. This means...there will be fewer young people to bear the increasingly heavy burden of the welfare state. Norway needs more children!”1 This rousing natalist rhetoric drew on a topos long familiar to mainstream political scientists, demographers, and political economists: the problems said to be posed by aging populations on the capacity of the state to provide adequate services, and, crucially, the alleged imbalance between working-age taxpayers and increasingly long-lived pensioners drawing on costly (state-run) retirement plans and healthcare services in an unsustainable fashion. While the Norwegian fertility rate stood at 2.50 children per woman in 1970, it had declined to 1.62 by 2017 (Statistics Norway 2018). The prime minister’s homily on fertility was an instantiation of what might be called producerist biopolitics, aimed at creating what she described as a “sustainable welfare society.” But crucially, it was an argument that relied on a particular framing of demographic necessity that is, as we shall see, not entirely unproblematic. 1 This essay offers an overview of a series of interlinked political developments that unfolded in Norway in the first three months of 2019. It does not offer an exhaustive account of the media coverage of these developments; rather, it provides a schematic by which certain key statements offered by central political actors might be read and interpreted. While media sociology has much to offer by way of formalized journalistic analysis (see e.g. Benson and Neveu 2005), this essay extracts media statements and takes them as signposts to a series of political-ideological routes taken by various Norwegian political actors in recent years. The analysis draws on the authors’ close reading of unfolding media debates, and the selection followed a “snowball sampling” strategy, wherein the authors followed the ensuing debate on fertility rates as a political issue. The analysis hews to an intertextual reading influenced by literary studies, focusing on the intertexual, heteroglossic connections between ongoing political debates. 2 Ten days after Solberg’s speech, Per-Willy Amundsen, a leading politician from the right-wing, populist Progress Party—the prime minister’s governing coalition partner—threw a counterpunch. His reproach was trained more narrowly on Norway’s immigrant population, railing against an allegedly excessive fecundity on its part. “I’m interested in having a sustainable population composition,” Amundsen said, before claiming that “egthnic Norwegians have a sinking birth rate. Like [Prime Minister] Erna Solberg, I believe we have to do something about it. But the solution is not a larger immigrant population. On the contrary, we need to ensure that the ethnically Norwegian population is maintained” (Jensen 2019). Amundsen, who belonged to a party that had criticized this northern European country’s immigration policies for being too liberal since its inception in the 1980s, claimed that Solberg’s diagnosis, while correct in the main, had overlooked a crucial ethnoracial component: fertility was low among “native” elements of the Norwegian population, certainly, but immigrants were compensating for this lack through an uncontrollable fertility – a fecundity run amok. For a party that wished explicitly to maintain the demographic majority position of “ethnic Norwegians,” this trend was tantamount to a slow national-cultural act of self-destruction, a glacial replacement of ethnonational insiders by a whole series of ethnoracial Others. Amundsen’s proposed solution would involve cutting state child benefits to families with three or more children. In Norway, families are paid a monthly allowance known as barnetrygd (“child benefits”), intended to subsidize the costs of childrearing. However, while the allowance is a universal welfare policy, not means-tested, it remains modest, constituting on average a scanty eight percent of a single-parent household’s earnings (NTB 2018). In other words, the allowance is a non-negligible but far from significant contribution to the fiscal well-being of families with children. Amundsen’s insinuated that immigrants were begetting offspring as a means of drawing on these (relatively insignificant) cash transfers from the state; capping payments at four children would remove this incentive to reproduce on the part of so-called “foreign” populations, the Norwegian Progress Party argued. Amundsen seized on the opportunity offered by Solberg’s natalist New Year’s Address to expound upon what he and his party considered a demographic threat to Norwegian culture: his proposed cap on payments to three children per household would “first and foremost be of significance to large immigrant families that have a large number of children, where birth production is high.” This latter phrase—“birth production” (or fødselsproduksjon in the original Norwegian)—suggested a kind of cold, rational, machinic fertility, evoking a relentless and 3 almost mechanical force. In particular, Amundsen claimed that “Somalis...have a far greater number of births than ethnic Norwegians do.” The problem, then, Amundsen mused, was not inadequate fertility tout court, as the prime minister had claimed, but an ethnoracially and ethnonationally skewed fertility pattern: too many children on “their” side, too few children on “his” own side. Finally, almost three weeks after the New Year’s address, another member of Prime Minister Solberg’s governing coalition, a leading Christian Democrat, Kjell Ingolf Ropstad, entered the debate. As a stout opponent of liberal abortion laws—in particular, the right to selective or multifetal reduction, a procedure wherein the number of fetuses is reduced in multiple pregnancies—Ropstad and the Christian Democrats had drawn the ire of the country’s pro-choice movement for opposing legislation permitting multifetal reduction measures: “If you’re able to bear one [child], you can manage two [children],” Ropstad had said during a televised debate, for which he was widely rebuked by liberal commentators and a broad sweep of Norwegian centrists and leftists alike, as his comments were read as an undue encroachment on women’s right to self-determination and an attack on the safety of women and unborn fetuses alike.2 Ropstad later backed down from his comments, apologizing for any offense he might have caused: “My point