Støre got home in time to join his family for dinner with some friends. The evening sun was warm and languid. It was completely calm. On the way home to their summer cabin, Støre and his family steered their boat out onto the clear waters of the fjord. An enormous sunset blazed away on their right. One member of the family shook her head and muttered that the blood-red sky did not bode well. ‘Red sky at night … ,’ thought Støre.
That same day, an article by Støre was published in Bergens Tidende and Stavanger Aftenblad under the title ‘Urolige tider’ [Uneasy times], in which he wrote: ‘When I read about great historical events, I often ponder what the people of the age were thinking immediately before history took an unexpected turn. In the early summer of 1914, leading politicians said that there were no clouds in the sky of high politics. A few weeks later, the First World War was under way.’2
Støre's uneasiness was linked to what the long-term political consequences might be of the crises in the eurozone and in US government spending. He envisaged a growing anger, the final form of which nobody could foresee, and he called for alertness:
I fear the social unrest that will come when new generations cannot get jobs […] and ordinary families have to face the bill for financial and political indulgences for which they never voted. [… L]arge parts of Europe and the USA will see this as deeply unfair. And they will seek out ways to express their anger.
We do not know today what such frustration will lead to, but the result of what we are seeing over the course of this summer makes me uneasy. I am glad that the Norwegian economy is in order, but we must be vigilant now.3
Over his years as foreign minister, Støre had led Norwegian efforts in Afghanistan and defended Norway's military involvement in the war in Libya. As an adviser for Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland in the nineties, he had built up an international section in the Office of the Prime Minister. He had later followed Gro to Geneva as her chief of staff when she led the World Health Organization. Støre had seen how the world had shrunk after the end of the Cold War. Internal affairs could become foreign affairs over the course of a couple of messages on Twitter or a blog post. Caricatures from a Danish newspaper went around the world, causing a commotion from Chad to Chechnya, due to the efforts of some enterprising activists and smart politicians flirting with fear and conflict. Foreign policy hit home in the form of sanctions against Norwegian business, coffins from Afghanistan or a Norwegian population with roots in other parts of the world. If there was flooding in Sri Lanka, the waves reached all the way to Oslo and Stavanger.
There were two ways to see this development, either as a threat to the traditional Norway or as an inevitable development that enriched Norway, if it was handled properly. Støre stressed the latter view. In domestic politics, Støre had promoted integration as a major issue and launched the concept of ‘the new Norwegian we’ to create a more inclusive Norwegian identity that was not focused exclusively on ethnicity, names and skin colour, and which accepted that people did not need to be only one thing. They could be Norwegian but also Sikh or Muslim, Norwegian but also Polish or Chilean.
While Støre had been Norway's most popular politician since 2005, he was at the same time the most hated among opponents of immigration and extreme critics of Islam. ‘The most dangerous man in Norway,’ according to Anders Behring Breivik. ‘Must we now follow Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre's order to the Norwegian people to “adapt” to the New Norway and the Greater We?’ asked a leaflet from the organization Stopp islamiseringen av Norge [Stop the Islamization of Norway]. ‘Is that what you want? Have you been asked?’
It was not just those sceptical towards immigration or critical of Islam who disliked what Støre stood for. At half past six in the evening on 14 January 2008, Støre was in Kabul. During a meeting with the leader of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, he heard a bang outside the hotel. The explosion was followed by salvos of shots and further explosions. The security guards in the room ordered everyone down onto the floor, including Støre. The guards drew their weapons and moved into position by the doors. In the lobby, which was on the floor above the meeting room, a man in a police uniform stormed in through the entrance door armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Another terrorist was left lying in the courtyard outside, killed in the exchange of fire with the hotel guards. A third died in the lobby when he set off the bomb in his vest. The terrorist shot at everything that moved. A Norwegian photographer came out of the lift and saw a policeman point a weapon at him. The photographer threw himself to the ground and avoided the shots. Two other Norwegians in the lobby were hit, Bjørn Svennungsen from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Carsten Thomassen, a journalist from Dagbladet. Thomassen later died of his injuries. An American diplomat was also killed, together with three of the hotel staff. While the attacker searched for more victims in the gym on the ground floor, Støre was evacuated to a bomb shelter at the bottom of the hotel complex. A few minutes later, the attack was over and the four terrorists were either killed or taken prisoner. It was never clarified whether Støre was the target of the Taliban's attack. He travelled home uninjured, but with the experience of having seen fanaticism at close quarters.
The AUF summer camp was a polar opposite to the hatred shown at the Serena Hotel. Together with the typically Norwegian faces of AUF members such as Ida Spjelkavik and Stine Håheim was not only the eagle-like face of Anzor from the Caucasus but also an abundance of faces with Arab, Tamil, Persian, Latin, Albanian, African, South-East Asian and Polynesian features. On the surface it looked as if Støre's ‘new Norwegian we’ was taking shape. The question was perhaps whether there was a deeper reality behind it, or whether Utøya was a kind of saccharine, state-subsidized utopia in the Tyrifjord that would fall apart the day it became real.
Ida and Stine had been going to Utøya for more than a decade and knew that determined long-term work led to results. They did not feel part of an abstract new Norwegian we, made up in a column in Aftenposten. On Utøya it was just ‘we’. Back in the nineties, the AUF defined its aim of becoming the most inclusive, multicultural organization in Norway. That entailed positive discrimination in favour of minorities when it came to choosing positions and duties in the organization. Since Utøya was the way into the AUF, a low-threshold event, everything was arranged to facilitate the participation of young people from minority backgrounds. Pork was not served at the summer camp, so everyone would eat the same food (unless they were vegetarians). An alcohol ban was already in place, and the shower rules were changed to make it clear which facilities and times were for the girls and which were for the boys. The AUF actively recruited in places with many immigrants, and some of the Utøya participants still lived in reception centres for asylum seekers. The children of first-generation immigrants were beginning to take part, and some of them were leader types who brought others in with them. After Mani Hosseini got involved in the AUF, there was a wave of new Kurdish members in Akershus county. Similar things happened elsewhere.
Through its hard work, and by building on the internationalist foundation of the labour movement itself, Marx and Engels’ slogan ‘Workers of the world, unite!’, the AUF was reforging the Norwegian labour movement. Utøya's rainbow race might have looked artificially perfect, but it also communicated that the labour movement was drawing energy from the growing pains Norway was going through in connection with immigration and integration. Many of the second-generation immigrants on Utøya had experienced discrimination, poverty and conflict and had a more concrete relationship to the values of the labour movement than many of the typically Norwegian children of the welfare state.