Reproduction and the Welfare State: Notes on Norwegian Biopolitics

Home , Kjell Ingolf Ropstad, Progress Party (Norway), Sylvi Listhaug

(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

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.

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 is that we need to ease the way for these families. If it is the case that you really want to give birth to one child, then we as a society should ease the way for you to be able to give birth to two children,” the Christian Democrat said (Aftenposten 2019).

Contextualizing biopolitics Why do these incidents matter? On the one hand, they illustrate the tensions and contradictions likely to exist within all coalition governments, which are typically held together by uneasy alliances and truces that often threaten to splinter and collapse. Beginning in January 2019, Norway was governed by a coalition composed of the center-right Conservative Party, the right-wing Progress Party, the centrist Liberal Party, and the traditionalist Christian Democratic Party. While united along a number of political-economic concerns, including what one might broadly term a neoliberal agenda, favoring lowered taxation and constrained social spending, significant cleavages also existed between the parties. Fertility was merely one significant flashpoint. On the other hand, the natalist

2 Multiple pregnancies are more risk-filled than single gestations; in the words of one medical review, they “constitute significant risk to both mother and fetuses” (Norwitz, Edusa and Park 2005).

4 question in Norway broaches more general issues of statecraft, concerning what it means to occupy a position of biopolitical power in the late-modern era: the political figureheads discussed above played on fertility as a way to mount a defense of the welfare state but in variegated ways expressive of their contrasting, at times divergent, political positions. Their focus on fertility could helpfully be analyzed using Foucault’s now well-known concept of biopolitics (Foucault 1990; 2008). Biopolitics is, as multiple scholars have pointed out, a thorny and occasionally vague concept within Foucault’s wider oeuvre (Lemke, Casper and Moore 2011; Dean 2013). Still, Foucault’s foundational definition is reasonably clear: “Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem” (Foucault 2003: 245). Through this optic, biopolitics becomes concerned with the figure of the population more than the individual body. A politics operative at the scalar level of the population shifts attention onto a diverse set of objects that need to be regulated, monitored, and normalized in the policymaking process. For Foucault, these objects of concern include, inter alia, life expectancy, health, marriage age, birth rates, and mortality rates (Foucault 1990: 139). In highlighting these issues, we focus on how, in three coalition partners within the Norwegian government, fertility rates have become a rhetorical site wherein each party uses demographic trends as a means of flagging their specific brand of politics. 3 Foucault’s notion of biopolitics can be a useful analytical tool in highlighting certain trends in contemporary Norwegian politics. We do not, however, offer a comprehensive analysis of the Norwegian political landscape as such; instead, we assess how fertility is used as a rhetorical device by these three political parties to frame their respective brand of politics. Second, we argue that the focus on fertility is constructed in entanglement with the trope of “defending the welfare state.” Each party, then, deploys fertility as a means to bolster the concept of “the welfare state,” even as this entity comes to be understood along divergent ethical, political, and economic lines. As such, this article discusses the contradictory uses of biopolitics within the context of a social-democratic welfare state transitioning into a (moderate) form of neoliberal political economy (see e.g. Shammas 2018), in which ethnonationalism and individual responsibility are mobilized to raise public, moral, and political support for the political agendas of the three respective parties under discussion here. Rather than assigning blame for various social ills to

3 The Christian Democrats joined Erna Solberg’s coalition government on 22 January 2019, at the peak of the unfolding debates discussed here.

5 the exponents of neoliberalism themselves, these politicians engage in a strategic use of what Adorno (2000: 48) calls “social blinding”—the misattribution of causal factors to non-causal forces, a “resentment which...is directed not against the causes but against those who really or supposedly profit from them” (ibid.)—to direct attention away from the curtailment of the welfare state and roll-back of a protective, decommodifying political economy. As the retrenchment of the welfare state gets underway, these biopolitical concerns are only likely to grow in relevance. There is another crucial tension at the intersection between neoliberalism and ethnonationalism, which is that of individualization (in place of structural policies) and collective group identity (in place of liberal individualism). The Prime Minister’s New Year’s address clearly articulates an individualized responsibility of correcting falling fertility rates: in an attempt at levity, the Norwegian Prime Minister at one point quipped that she did not “need to tell anyone how” to raise the fertility rate and that the government was not “not thinking of issuing any orders!” (Solberg 2019), excluding any attempts at structural interventions in e.g. labor and housing markets, which might ease the way of young couples considering bringing children into the world. On the other hand, the Progress Party’s position is predicated more upon ethnonationalist collectivism, positing antagonistic relationships between diverse ethnic groups. The uneasy tension between the Conservative Party’s individualization and the Progress Party’s ethnonationalism illustrates an emerging entanglement of neoliberalism with ethnonationalism in this era, even as these make for uneasy partners. In Capital, Marx reminds us that biological reproduction remains one of the fundamental political problems of capitalism: “The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power” (Marx 1976: 275). Without a biological reproduction of working populations, there can be no social reproduction, which means maintaining and upholding the legitimacy of the capitalist economic order as such. Enlightened capitalists therefore have a self-interested stake in ensuring that workers are housed, clothed, fed, and minimally satisfied, so that they will continue to replenish the human stock that capitalism avails itself of in the process of production and accumulation; more specifically, capitalism require a biopolitics capable of supplying factories, warehouses, office towers, and more with a steady stream of fresh, docile labor. The specifically social-democratic invariant of this theory postulates that the welfare state requires a replenishment of the population not merely qua labor-power—though it includes this as well—but qua taxpayers, and, more broadly,

“prosocial” citizens willing and able to enter into the sorts of relations of mutuality undergirding universalist welfarism.

Productive reproduction: The Conservative Party The idea that the Norwegian welfare state is threatened by demographic forces stretches back to the 1990s. Third Way social democrats at century’s end believed that aging populations— or the “elderly wave” (eldrebølgen) as it became known in public discourse—combined with low fertility, would undermine certain central pillars of the welfare state, such as generous retirement provisions and other social protections, while leading to shortages in labor- intensive sectors such as the public healthcare system. This widespread fear, driven by perceptions of demographic inevitability, resulted in a major overhaul of Norway’s state pension system, as with the so-called Pension Reform (Pensjonsreformen) in 2011, which effectively reduced pension payments and thereby lightened a fiscal burden made heavier by a series of governments unwilling to raise income tax levels. It is against this backdrop that the Conservative Party Prime Minister Erna Solberg took to the podium on the first day of 2019 and addressed the Norwegian people:

In the past, it was your family that took care of you when you were old. Now, the local authorities and the health service are becoming increasingly important. But the solidarity between generations is still the same. The wheels of our society keep turning because adults look after children. And those who are able to work ensure that the elderly can be cared for. In the coming decades, we will encounter problems with this model. Norwegians are having fewer children (Solberg 2019).

We can use Hannah Arendt’s work on the tripate unity of labor, work, and action as a useful lens before linking the prime minister’s neoliberal framings more closely to Michel Foucault. Arendt states, “Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time” (Arendt 1998: 8). However metaphysical Arendt’s statement might seem, Solberg’s speech is redolent of the intimate link between the individual, the welfare state, and labor; the three stand in an antagonistic relationship, wherein too little or too much labor or people might threaten to undermine the entire system of which the people, state, and labor are a part. Labor, in Solberg’s speech, will not ensure the survival of the species; rather it will ensure the survival of the welfare state. However, labor and the continual and correct reproductive metrics will ensure a measure of

7 permanence to the welfare state and, similarly to Arendt, will bestow a certain quality of durability to the nation state. “Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task of providing and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers” (Arendt 1998: 9). Arendt’s statement is particularly telling in as much as Solberg’s speech truly does bespeak of how labor and work is rooted in reproduction. Solberg’s allusion to the fact that “we all need to have on average, a little over two children” in order to maintain the current population rate is a way of signaling that reproduction is the bedrock upon which all (non- automated) production rests. Another interesting biopolitical link lies in Solberg’s notion of “generational solidarity” and the idea of a “sustainable welfare state.” Once again, the work of Arendt is useful here. Arendt stated that labor and work is rooted in natality in so far as these universal and fundamental human activities, ensures in a way that the current generation foresee and reckon with the constant influx of children. However, Solberg’s biopolitical anxieties lies in the fact that this influx that Arendt so poetically shows us, might not be at a constant rather that the biopolitical calculus between birthrates, size of the workforce, elderly people in need of state care and pensions and finally, death rates will be at “an unsustainable level” for the welfare state. According to Foucault, liberal and (later) neoliberal governments took as one of their central problems the “problem of the population” (Foucault 2007: 351), which could be related to such metrics as population size, birth rates, docile bodies, and mortality rates (Foucault 2007: 105). However, in the liberal and (now) neoliberal state, for which Solberg is a spokesperson, the population also becomes relative to wages, the possibility of and for work, and to prices (Foucault 2007: 351). Wealth and population in this calculus become enmeshed in a way in which they both move around, are transformed, increase, or diminish (Foucault 2007: 351). In the current moment, it seems as though Foucault’s dictum of “the optimization of the population,” that is, the ways in which the state and the individual can align their interests in such a way that the individual and consequently the state, becomes optimized in such a way that reproduction and production reach an ideal state suited to producing optimal levels of surplus value. In light of these insights, Solberg’s conservatism has a specifically social-democratic flavor, but given its pro-market inclinations, it also revolves around a hollow biopolitics, bereft of the traditional instruments that the Fordist-Keynesian welfare state had at its disposal: generous social spending, massive infrastructural projects, nationalized industry,

8 high marginal tax rates to redistribute income and wealth, and inheritance taxes to prevent the formation of intergenerational dynasties of extreme wealth. What remains is largely rhetorical sermonizing: exhortations to do better aimed at the individual (“Norway needs more children!”). There is little or no talk of intervening in the housing and labor market, even though some of the fundamental constraints on fertility rates spring from what Giddens termed “ontological insecurity,” which has only risen with flexibilized labor relations and spiraling housing costs. Both of these major structural factors, which both conspire to prevent the formation of childrearing families, are instrumental in the formation of fertility rates in Norway, and indeed across the Western world, at sub-replacement levels. But the Conservative Party agenda largely precludes any consolidated decommodifying interventions into the economic life of its ordinary citizens. The structural, political instruments capable of redressing demographic problems are excluded at the level of ideology.

Ethnonationalist anxiety: The Progress Party Not all children are born equal in worth. As the former Minister of Justice Per Willy Amundsen noted,

I am interested in us having a population composition that is sustainable. Ethnic Norwegians have a declining birth rate. Prime Minister Erna Solberg and I agree that we have to do something about this. But the solution is not a larger immigration population. On the contrary, we have to make sure that the ethnic Norwegian population is maintained. I am very concerned that an increase in child benefits not become a hindrance to integration efforts. [Child benefits] will become a hindrance to integration efforts if we reward immigrants who have a fourth, fifth or sixth child (Jensen 2019).

Amundsen’s remarks were reminiscent of similar pronatalist, racializing, and individually responsibilizing tropes found in other ethnoracially charged contexts. As one Israeli human rights activist has noted, elements in Israeli society are “afraid of the Muslim womb” and some Israeli politicians view Palestinian and Israeli Arab populations as a “demographic threat” (Nurit Peled-Elhanan n. d.). Similarly, in South Africa under Apartheid, the state enforced demographic policies that were “explicitly designed to prevent…racial ‘swamping’ of the minority by the majority population” (Chimere-Dan 1993: 32), including encouraging “nonblack” immigration to South Africa and exhorting South African white women to bear more children. Racialized anxieties over an allegedly excessive fecundity were also mobilized in the run-up to the Bosnian War in the early 1990s; the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic “considered that the greatest danger to Bosnian Serbs was the Muslim ‘demographic bomb’,

9 meaning a Muslim population explosion” and claimed that “Muslim women were ‘production machines, each with ten or twelve children’” (O’Ballance cit. in Slack and Doyon 2001: 145). These sentiments fed into the genocidal “RAM Plan,” a military-strategic document effected by Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, which promised to “aim our action at the point where the religious and social structure is most fragile. We refer to the women, especially adolescents, and to the children” (cit. Tatum 2010: 76). More peaceably, but still dramatic, a key element in the Thatcherite project of individual responsibilization hinged on shaming “unwed mothers”: after her tenure as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher claimed that single mothers were so irresponsible that it would be “far better to put these children in the hands of a very good religious organisation, and the mother as well, so that they will be brought up with family values” (BBC 1998). Similarly, Reagan’s attack on “welfare queens” assailed supposedly irresponsible black women and mothers. At the height of the Reaganite attack on black women, the New York Times summarized the alleged features of this shadowy figure: “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands…Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000” (New York Times 1976). The political left, Greene (2018) writes, attacked Reagan for “stoking white voters’ latent racism” with a “stereotype of a black woman having endless kids and cheating the system.” When the state fails to provide full employment or uphold living standards, politicians often turn to women’s bodies as favored targets of moralistic sermonizing and biopolitical regulation. The racial anxieties invoked by ethnoracializers and ethnonationalists have a long history of playing on the notion that foreigners are overrunning their “homeland”—as in UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s infamous “Breaking Point” Brexit poster, which tarnished EU membership with the specter of an endless stream of immigrants—and at the heart of this problematic often lies the issue of fertility. Amundsen’s statement draws attention to a two-pronged strategy for safeguarding the welfare state by (i) incentivizing the population to produce more offspring through direct fiscal manipulation, while (ii) ensuring that incentivization is only extended to those that conform to the parameters of Amundsen’s ideal “ethnically Norwegian” population capable of exhibiting a modest, constrained fertility rate, with an idealized fecundity no greater than three children per woman. This contrasts with proposals such as that of the Hungarian far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who, only a month after Amundsen’s proposal, suggested that Hungarian women who have four or more children will be freed from the burden of having to pay income taxes. “In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the answer of the west

10 to this is migration,” Orbán said. “They want as many migrants to enter as there are missing kids, so that the numbers will add up. We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender” (Walker 2019). While the Hungarian prime minister wanted women to give birth to more than three children, expressly viewed as an alternative to immigration, Amundsen wanted a more modest fertility rate as a way of tacitly penalizing ethnoracial minorities who were seen as exceedingly fecund. While the details of their proposals differed in important ways, both were, in their own way, using a biopolitical rationale to promote their own ethonationalists agenda. The idea that Norway is on its way to having a population which is unsustainable is latent within this logic, as Amundsen claims that current demographic trends would guarantee that “ethnic Norwegians” would become a minority, which in turn would destabilize the very sustainability of the welfare state. The usage of the term “sustainable” connects with the concept of carrying capacity in modern ecological theory (see e.g. Barrett and Odum 2000). However, it is clear from Amundsen’s statements that Norway can only carry so many immigrants before its maximum carrying capacity is reached. The same is true for the number of ethnic Norwegians; the welfare state cannot “carry” too many immigrants while at the same time reducing its ethnic Norwegian population. Amundsen completed his proposal by stating that it would “primarily affect immigrant families with large families, where the birth rates are high. This is particularly true for Somalis, who are ranked in the top (in terms of birth rates) and have far higher birth rates than ethnic Norwegians have...It is primarily ethnic Norwegians that have declining birth rates. The solution is not to maintain high birth rates amongst immigrant through offering them high state sponsored benefits.” In stark terms, Amundsen professes a logic of biopolitical power which can be linked directly to Foucault’s statement that biopower is defined not by the sovereign’s ability to take a life but the regulation of a space between life and death. Ethnonational biopolitics à la Amundsen entails rolling out incentives and disincentives to shape the most intimate dimensions of human life such as childbearing. In Amundsen’s frame, the decision to intervene into the intimate lives of its citizens would be differentiated by the ethnic background of its population segments. Amundsen’s biopolitical is explicitly predicated on a logic of ethnonationalism. While Foucault never directly connected biopolitics to ethnonationalism, he did draw a connection between racism and biopolitics. Foucault brings biopolitics to bear on racism when he asks what racism “in fact is” (2003: 254): “It is primarily a way of introducing a

11 break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (ibid). Foucault goes on to note that racism has two functions, the first of which is “to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower” (Foucault 2003: 255). The second aspect, which is of greater relevance to our case study, is the capacity of racism to

establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: ‘The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I—as species rather than individual—can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate.’ (Foucault 2003: 255)

The point here is not to connect Amundsen’s proposal to a direct racist discourse, but rather to show that the insights from Foucault that racism, or in our case, an ethnonationalism in the service of biopolitics, creates a dimension of (bio)ethnic competition. By specifically singling out ethnic Norwegians as being in danger of becoming a minority, while suggesting that declining birth rates among ethnic Norwegians is a sign of an “unsustainable” demographic turn for Norwegian culture and its welfare state as a whole, Amundsen’s ethnonationalism is one which, rather than proposing the killing of the Other (as in the Serbian RAM Plan), wants to severely curtail the Other. Rather than stating it in Foucault’s terms as being an instance of “the more I kill, the more I will live, the more vigorous I will be,” Amundsen’s proposal reformulates this slightly and seems to suggest that the more “we” (ethnic Norwegians) give birth, the more sustainable the welfare state will be and the less the immigrant Other reproduces, the more “we” (ethnic Norwegians) will proliferate. Amundsen’s statements are not thanatopolitical, viz. a biopolitics of death or a killing of the Other; rather, they instantiate an ethnonationalistic biopolitics that manipulates who should give birth, to which extent, and who, conversely, should restrain their (supposedly) exuberant fertility. Amundsen’s biopolitics is not the “right to death,” but the “right over birth,” proclaimed in a putative defense of the welfare state. We might here also note how the notion of “the right over birth” can be linked to eugenics and social Darwinism. If social Darwinism postulated that “superior races” would by default win over “inferior races” through competition, and that those individuals with the best hereditary material would reproduce efficiently, then this can be more easily reconciled with a neoliberalism that focuses on market competition, and a discourse that did not primarily lean

12 on state interventions. Eugenics on the other hand, was more focused on government policies aiming to select those fit for reproduction by way of social engineering. The former is compatible with neoliberalism, the latter is less obviously so. In light of this, Amundsen’s statement can perhaps be framed as being a biopolitics wherein state interventions are explicitly supported in order to secure what is perceived as a “sustainable fertility politics.” This might stand in contrast to the Prime Minister’s more individualizing rhetoric of personal responsibility for correcting falling birth rates. Taken to their respective logical conclusions, though not necessarily substantively expressed in policy terms, Amundsen’s ethnonationalist proposal partakes of a eugenic logic, while Solberg’s program of antistructural individual responsibilization carries a more social Darwinist in flavor. One final insight from Foucault emphasizes the gravity of introducing politically targeted birth disincentives. Foucault states that “broadly speaking, racism justifies the death- function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others make one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality” (Foucault 2003: 258). However, thanatopolitics does not necessarily involve the death of the Other in ethnonational ideology but the confinement, expulsion, and restriction laid upon an ethnoracial Other in the name of “sustainability.” Amundsen’s proposal, then, is an example of how the biopolitics of birth, when coupled with ethnonationalism, produces not the death of the Other, as Foucault’s account of racism would suggest but a discourse wherein the Other is never even born in the first place.

Conservative Christian ethics: The Christian Democratic Party The rise of populist ethnonationalism has entailed the reactivation of familiar tropes from Norway’s history of state Lutheran Christianity. One of the Progress Party’s leading figures, Sylvi Listhaug, prominently wore a crucifix during her tenure as Minister of Immigration and Minister of Justice between 2015 and 2017. When questioned about this unusual display of religiosity in one of Europe’s most secularized countries, Listhaug replied: “The crucifix means a lot to me because it belonged to my grandmother. She received it as a gift from my grandfather when they were engaged” (Fossheim and Talsnes 2016). But as many media commentators observed, Listhaug’s use of this crucial Christian symbol seemed strategic, aimed at luring voters away from the Christian Democrats while reasserting a traditionalist religiosity in crisis following the separation of church and state in 2012, which put an end to a nearly half-millennium-long history of state-administered Protestantism. Indeed, the New

Testament itself offers a powerful rebuttal to such outward displays of piety aimed at bolstering the individual believer’s prestige and power: “But they do all their deeds to be noticed by men; for they broaden their phylacteries and lengthen the tassels of their garments” (Matt. 23:5). Another prominent Progress Party politician, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, emphasized the central importance of “our Christian heritage,” noting that his party was “the foremost defender of these values in all policy formation. The Christian cultural heritage is the very foundation. It must be defended and retransmitted. At the same time, this means that other belief systems will have to occupy a less prominent place” (Tybring-Gjedde 2018). Both Listhaug’s and Tybring-Gjedde’s statements show, if only anecdotally, how ethnonational politics fuse a symbolic politics of religion and ancestry; indeed in the quote from Tybring- Gjedde, the idea that a Christian cultural heritage needs to be retransmitted also ties into the issue of generational links between the older and younger generation, of the literal, biological reproduction of Protestant citizens. Connecting this to the biopolitics of Amundsen’s statements on limiting immigrant reproduction, while increasing ethnic Norwegian birth rates, within this biopolitics of reproduction, there is a clear onus on increasing ethnic, Christian, Norwegians, while at the same time, reducing immigrant birth rates. Speaking to Tybring- Gjedde’s notion that “other belief systems will have to occupy a less prominent place,” if we take the Progress Party’s biopolitics seriously, it is not only other belief systems that will have to occupy a less prominent place, but indeed other ethnic groups will have to occupy a less prominent place by the very drastic biopolitical intervention of limiting their children. Within the demographic panopticon of census data, urban geography, and other metrics of population demographics, immigrants, through restricting their birth rates will indeed become less visible and prominent. As such, in our analytical frame the Progress Party’s entanglement of ethnonational biopolitics and a Christian cultural heritage rhetoric bespeaks a politics which is not racist in Foucault’s sense of the notion. Rather, as we have alluded to, the biopolitics of reproduction here is not the mastery over the “right to take life,” and perhaps not even so much about the “right to life”; rather, it occupies a space between life and death, involving the governance of who is to be born in the first place, and who is not. Reproductive space has always been that space wherein potential life meets death; from the potential of dying in labor, to the promise of new life symbolized through the child, reproduction and power over reproduction occupy a third space within the biopolitical economy of governmentality.

Ropstad’s statement that “if you can carry one [child], then you can carry two [children]” in relationship to the Christian Democrats’ partial opposition to liberal abortion laws—particularly the right to selective or multifetal reduction, a procedure by which the number of fetuses is reduced in multiple pregnancies—is another instance of biopolitics. However, rather than the connection to productivity, as seen in the Prime Minister’s speech, or the ethnonationalism embedded in the Progress Party’s proposal to restrict child benefits, Ropstad’s statement embeds a conservative Christian ethics within the biopolitics of reproduction. Far from a unique stand to take within rightist Christian conservatism, what is perhaps more telling is how this position stands in partial contrast to the coalition partners such as the Progress Party’s stance on the issues of immigrant reproduction. While Ropstad’s statement drew the ire of pro-choice groups, his position springs from the Christian Democrats’ ideology, which clearly states that it should be up to individual families to decide how many children they want, and that “very serious arguments” should be made “before the state intervenes” in the freedom of families to choose how to make reproductive decisions (KrF 2017: 22). While Ropstad’s statement is clearly a biopolitics of “the right to life”—a conservative Christian mantra—his party’s position thus would logically state that the right for families to independently, and without state intervention, should decide how many children they want. This means on the one hand that immigrants should also be accorded this right, and thus stands in clear opposition to the Progress Party’s suggestion of limiting the birth rates of immigrant families with four or more children. Ironically, however, the Christian Democrats’ biopolitics, while propounding the view that it is up to families themselves to decide how many children they want and maintaining that the state should create a supportive environment to ensure that families can have as many children as they want, still limits this reproductive choice. Families can only choose the number of children they want as long as it is within the logic of a conservative Christian biopolitics. The freedom to choose remains free so long as it adheres to the constraints laid down by the party’s ideologues. Allowing for multifetal abortion is a case in point: the autonomy of the family—including, crucially, the female body—is only biopolitically guaranteed so long as it remains within the ambit of a conservative Christian view on the “right to life.” Just as the Progress Party’s biopolitics of ethnonationalism aims to circumscribe the freedom to choose, the Christian Democrats’ view on legitimate state interventions foreclose certain reproductive actions while enabling others.

Conclusion

In recent years, the so-called demographic transition—the movement from high birth and mortality rates to lowered mortality and birth rates—has attracted the attention of social scientists, political leaders, and social commentators, as birth rates across the postindustrialized world have declined. One of the underexplored origins of the formation of what we might call the “low-birth society” is the neoliberalization of political economy since the 1980s. Neoliberalism entails social insecurity: future life-course trajectories become more uncertain as work becomes flexibilized, housing markets are liberalized, social security deteriorates, and universal welfare goods, such as education and healthcare, are commodified. In Norway, these issues returned with a vengeance to the political agenda in early 2019 as governing center-right politicians attempted to stymie the country’s turn to low birth rates in recent years. This is not to say that Norway’s turn to neoliberalism in the realm of political economy—and therefore in the domain of the biopolitical—has been total: income inequality still remains relatively low, universal welfare goods are still widely available, and the welfare state continues to provide social security to the sick, disabled, elderly, and unemployed, albeit in a fashion that seems likely to deteriorate under the twin pressures of market efficiency and workfarist discipline. One of the unexpected expressions of this state of affairs is to be found in the statistical tables over declining fertility rates in this northern European country. As one report from Statistics Norway, the official Norwegian statistics agency, emphasizes, one of the most powerful explanations of declining fertility rates in recent years has been “heightened economic insecurity” (Dommermuth and Lappegård 2017). Precluded from utilizing the powerful state-centered tools available to early social democrats, owing to their ideological filiations, the center-right politicians discussed above have instead adopted a series of rhetorical biopolitical postures, revolving around producerist moral exhortations, ethnonational exclusion, and conservative Christian discourse. When the welfare state retreats, a form of sermonizing biopolitics seems to surface and take its place. In the midst of this increasingly polarized community, then, three discourses— biopolitical producerism, ethnonationalist panic, and conservative Christianity—enter and engage with one another to fill the vacuum left behind by Keynesian Fordism. But this defense of the welfare state in the name of neoliberalism seems likely to fail insofar as only a politics of social democracy could recreate the social democracy that these politicians seem, both tacitly and overtly, to long for: in short, these physicians of the polity would seem to prescribe the wrong cure for a wholly misdiagnosed illness.

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