Before and after: terror, extremism and the not-so-new Norway

On 22 July 2011 a white, Norwegian extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, committed the worst attack in Norway's history since World War II claiming 77 lives. The tragic events revealed the fault lines in dominant narratives of Norwegian unity and challenged the country's reputation as a peace-loving nation. In this essay, I argue that this incident exposes the fundamental distortions of European multiculturalism, which cloak the workings of racist ideologies. I consider Denmark–Norway's overlooked colonial history, which I maintain is at odds with dominant narratives of Norway as an international moral leader and reinforces commonly held assumptions that Norwegian nationalism was unaffected by the vast temporal and spatial upheavals of the colonial period. In the present, such amnesia shifts the focus away from the everyday nature of Breivik's identity, and spares Norwegians from the disagreeable task of reckoning with what his identity may reveal about the terms of national belonging.