Refusing to Serve in the Military: Negotiating Peace Around the Topic of Conscientious Objection in Cold War Norway

Abstract

The thesis analyses how ideas around “peace” and “war” were formulated in Norway under the cultural and political framework of the Cold War. I argue that conscientious objectors had an active role in forming the discursive field on peace and war in this period, and that objecting military service became an important channel through which to express criticisms and resentment towards how Norwegian authorities positioned Norway politically in the Cold War system. As this thesis will illustrate, people in Norway drew highly different conclusions from the Cold War. Around the 1960s onwards, an increased number of objectors started giving mainly political reasons for refusing military service. These reasons were tied directly to Cold War realities and Norway’s position within these. At the core here was the NATO-membership, which many objectors argued made Norway complicit in the moral decay of the USA. The Vietnam War and the use of nuclear weapons as a tool of power were important elements in these accusations. While conscientious objectors promoted non-violence, peace research and international communication across military blocks, Norwegian authorities, on the other hand, put strong believe in military solutions to problems of war and peace. These different conclusions mounted to a clash of ideas that is highly visible around the problem of conscientious objection throughout the whole period under discussion. Periodically, the main focus of this thesis is roughly on the 1960s to the 1980s. However, strong elements of continuity have led on references to periods further back in time. This thesis suggests that the strong emphasis on military solutions is linked to the needs of the state –both of which have been important elements in Norwegian history since the Union with Sweden. This nationalistic focus has led to the marginalisation of conscientious objectors from the nineteenth century to the Cold War. This continuity furthers an understanding of the Cold War as a “container” if ideas rather than their origin and might help explain why conscientious objection has remained small in scope and size in Norwegian history and self-understanding. Lastly, the narrative presented in this thesis encourages a rethinking of some common conceptions about post-war Norway as a period of steady improvement under a liberal democratic state, as well as a vanguard for promoting peace.