For any scientific experiment to be valid, there has be a control. The control is the thing that doesn't get experimented on. It gives you a basis for comparison, so you can measure the effects of whatever operation you have performed, writes Fintan O'Toole.
And for a small nation such as Ireland, looking at the results of our experiment with extreme globalisation, the control is Norway. I was there for a while recently as the EU Constitution was heading for disaster, and it struck me that the comparison between Ireland, which embraced globalisation through the EU, and Norway, which has twice (in 1972 and 1994) voted to stay out of the EU, is a useful way of measuring the effects of the European project at a moment of crisis. We went in, they stayed out - who has made the better choices?
Norway is a good control for the Irish experiment because it shares so much with us. We are both northwestern European countries on the periphery of the continent. They have four and a half million people; we have just over four. Our political cultures were both shaped by 19th century nationalism, with national theatres, revived national epics and reinventions of a national language. We both exported a significant section of our population to the US in the second half of the 19th century. We both became independent in the first decades of the 20th century. (Norway broke away from Sweden in 1905). We both remained heavily agricultural societies for longer than most of western Europe, and both retained very strong economic links with Britain.
It is hard to say who was dealt the better initial hand by history. The Norwegians were in some respects luckier. The Reformation was efficiently imposed in the 16th century, and the dominance ever since of the established Lutheran Church meant that Norway avoided Ireland's sectarian divisions. Its separation from Sweden was managed through peaceful negotiation, sparing it the distortions and traumas of violence. On the other hand, though, Norway was somewhat poorer than Ireland at the time of its independence (we had 62 per cent of Britain's per capita product in 1910; they had 60 per cent). And Norway suffered one huge blow that Ireland was spared: it had a significant fascist movement, was occupied by the Nazis for five years, and produced a collaborationist leader, Vidkun Quisling, whose name became a byword for treachery. All in all, the historical legacies the two small independent nations have had to deal with probably balance each other out.
Yet the Norwegians made a far better fist of independence than we did. On the best measure of success, the UN Development Programme's Human Development Index, Norway comes first. We come 10th. Of the 17 OECD countries ranked for levels of poverty, Norway is the second best and we're the second worst. Norwegians can expect to live two years longer than we do. Norway has managed to combine obvious economic wealth (one of the most advanced telecommunications networks in Europe; an excellent public transport network; almost twice our level of internet connections) with a strong egalitarian ethic and arguably the highest quality of life in the world. The simplistic way to explain all of this is oil. The discovery of North Sea oil in 1970 is a huge factor in Norway's prosperity. But much more important than the discovery of oil is the way it has been exploited for the benefit of the nation as a whole.
The Norwegians took their independence seriously. They kept control over their natural resources - fish, forestry, aluminium, ferrous alloys and hydro-electricity. They did most of the things that free-market globalisation abhors, creating a big, interventionist state with a serious degree of central planning, large public works projects and above all a very extensive welfare state. When they found the oil, they used state companies (Statoil and Norsk Hydro) to create an indigenous oil industry. The contrast with our decision to throw away our vast fishing resources and to effectively donate our offshore gas resources to multinational companies could not be greater.
It would be no less simplistic, however, to conclude that Norway has done better than us because it stayed out of the EU and we didn't. What's significant about Norway's decision to stay out is that it had a real choice. It made itself strong enough, both by creating a relatively egalitarian society and by creating a state with meaningful economic power, to have the genuine options denied to us by our weakness. The Norwegians grasped something we have never quite managed to get our heads around: that what really matters about sovereignty is how you use it. They used their independence well enough to be able to choose how much of it to give up and when.
Most Norwegians I spoke to believe they will, in time, join the EU. When they do so, they will bring with them an insight it desperately needs if it is to get the European project back on track: that there are ways of responding to global forces that don't involve a mere surrender to them.