In 1804, a bishop associated the Norwegian lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge with the Islamic movement of Wahhabism. In this article, the author discusses how perceptions of Wahhabism circulated within a European-Oriental network of news, which Scandinavia was connected to. It is argued that the hegemonic image of Wahhabism at the time was a result of the political and ideological threats towards the Ottoman Empire and anti-Wahhabi perceptions created within an Ottoman context. Thus, Ottoman anti-Wahhabi images were imported and reproduced in Scandinavia, and could be activated as effective representations of religious otherness in a Lutheran religious-political context. This is also relevant to a wider understanding of how images of «others» are produced and circulated in general.

The article addresses the organizing of Norwegian socialist intellectuals into the Socialist Cultural Front in the years 1935 to 1937. For the first time the Cultural Front will be analyzed in an international, comparative perspective, which demonstrates how the Front reflected an international current among intellectuals, also present in the formation of related organizations in Denmark and Sweden. The cultural battle of the intellectuals was directed against the looming threat of fascism and Nazism, and was in part connected to Soviet Popular Front politics. The program of the cultural front movement aimed to uncover an underlying reactionary tendency in the existing bourgeois culture that subconsciously promoted fascist ideas among the public, and to replace this tendency with a humanistic, socialist culture originating in the working class. Unlike its Scandinavian relatives, the Norwegian Cultural Front was closely connected to the Labour Party and soon became entangled in factional activities leading to its forced dissolution. The article investigates the conflict leading to the Front’s downfall. Further, the article compares the rise and fall of the Norwegian Front with the development of related organizations in Denmark and Sweden.

It has been claimed that the Norwegian conservative party Høyre’s economic policies in the postwar years amounted to «stubbornly resisting, but eventually going along with» the Labour party, Arbeiderpartiet. This article shows how Høyre in fact actively supported state-owned industry in many cases, and found ways of defending this in line with their conservative ideals. Høyre’s policies in these years do not prove the infamous canard that «all Norwegians are social democrats,» but instead tells us something about how the content of labels like «social democratic» and «conservative» are unstable and historically contingent. In the postwar years it was unclear to most what a conservative economic policy really meant, and this article sees Høyre’s attempts at defining such a thing in conjunction with the simultaneous development of neoliberalism as a transnational political project, with which Høyre would only come into close contact some decades later. The early neoliberals, organized in The Mont Pèlerin Society from 1947, wanted a strong state to spread and safeguard market mechanisms. Our study thus exemplifies how the image of economic policies as a pendulum swinging between «state» and «market» is a simplification, and often misleading.