Arne O. Holm says High North Politics Are Unlike Other Politics

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I won't paint a bleak picture of the situation in Eastern Finnmark, on the Norwegian border with Russia. They manage that all on their own, or as the County Mayor of Finnmark, Hans-Jacob Bønå, says succinctly: "The crisis is real."

Trivial shops

He may be right. In the fall, even the Salvation Army's thrift store Fretex gives up in Kirkenes after losing a contract with a municipal company. Biltema (a Nordic retail chain specializing in car and boat parts) is also packing and leaving – in the region where most work on their own cars. In reality, Russian customers kept the stores afloat. They are gone. The entirety of Russia is gone, but it is still intrusively and aggressively close.

Triviliates, perhaps, for those who have never set foot in the Northern Norwegian landscape. Yet, still symptoms of the Finnmark mayor's description.

The power companies' struggle to keep prices below production costs will weigh more heavily. Incomprehensible for those flooded with billions in public energy support further south in the country, but a reality for the municipal owners in the north, who are risking losing a considerable part of their income.

Russia, a neighboring country with perhaps as many as 1 million dead and wounded soldiers in the Ukraine War, according to the Norwegian Chief of Defense Eirik Kristoffersen. But it nevertheless keeps waging war. An aggression that makes PM Jonas Gahr Støre repeatedly prepare us for the fact that "we too may be affected by war."

"We must be honest," he told me during a pause in his security policy drag race through Northern Norway. He gives out an air operations center in Bodø, meets soldiers and commanders on the border that separates Finnmark from Putin, drags ministers and the NATO secretary general to the naval base in Ramsund further south, but still in the North, and he inspects the military aircraft park between Narvik and Harstad, to name a few.

Between fear and safety

"The patrols along the border see that we are not facing a military threat in the North," he adds.

"But Europe lives with threats to the power and water supply, for example. This could happen to us as well. We must not sugarcoat it, but balance this in a good way," said Støre.

A balancing act between fear and safety. Because how does one attract investors, not to mention families with children, to the part of the country where the prime minister's warning could first become reality?

This is, of course, known to Jonas Gahr Støre, who will also have to balance public measures or investments in the North against voters who do not live there. They are by far the majority, and although the national understanding that High North policy is a policy for the entire country may be increasing, it is by no means established to such an extent that the government has free rein.

Still, the price of a cucumber at the stores trumps every headline on what is being developed, or dismantled, in the North.

If not free rein, then the Armed Forces have at least a freedom they could only dream of 2-3 years ago. On the stage at the Kirkenes Conference sat four Nordic Chiefs of Defense in uniform. The room's atmosphere bordered on what one might experience during a catholic midnight mass. But what do I know?

Three of them have known each other since the mid-90s and are already mentally coordinated. Now, the work remains to make Norway, together with Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, stronger than Russia. What they lack in nuclear weapons, they make up for with other allies, but firstly, the battle is fought at the border.

Bulging defense budgets

To do that, they need more than bulging defense budgets. The spending must be balanced against a civilian population, again, most of whom live many and increasingly thousands of kroner in airfare away from the border in the North. It requires openness and dialogue, but also acceptance of a growing opposition to an arms race that until recently was unknown to most people living in the Nordic countries.

Because even with a defined and dangerous enemy, we must never get to the point that any purchase of weapons or any transfer of authority happens on political autopilot.

Or that opposition is met with shaking heads and arrogance, as the head of our foremost ally, the US, continues to do. To put it absolutely mildly.

The third balancing act is about the population—the most difficult. Allocating oneself out of the security policy danger zone is obviously easier than securing the population alternately referred to as living shields and the frontline.

The exceptional

An entire delegation, the East Finnmark Council (Øst-Finnmarkrådet), met Jonas Gahr Støre during the Kirkenes Conference. In advance, they had made a list of demands as extensive as the menu at a Chinese restaurant. I was not at the meeting, but they claimed afterwards that they went home empty-handed.

"We have reached a point where any measure is better than no measure," was the county mayor's message to the prime minister, who, if not booed, garnered loud murmuring when he reiterated that there were problems or challenges elsewhere in Norway, like in Inner Østfold.

Was the father of the High North policy also losing sight of the exceptional nature of the North?

The PM is unlikely to do that.

But then there was the matter of balancing the efforts in the North with the ignorance in the South.