Local government in a post-war national socialist Norway

The reshaping of local government was of vital interest for the Nasjonal Samling (NS), the Norwegian national socialist party (1933-45) and the NS dominated puppet government established by the German occupants in September 1940. The purges started soon after the assumption of power. 'Disloyal' civil servants and local politicians were gradually removed and replaced - preferably by NS party members. Through a municipality act of December 1940, the Fuhrer Principle was introduced in local and regional self-governing bodies. The NS party organisation was to shadow and control public administration at all levels. The focus of this article, however, is long-term reform ambitions, the plans for a post-war national socialist Norway. A number of reforms were prepared, one of them being territorial division. Local government was still based on the established system of regions (fylke) and municipalities, but NS wanted to 'clean up' a highly differentiated system of local political bodies and arms of central sectoral agencies. These were to be unified within one body on both regional and municipality levels. Two established functions - the governor (fylkesmannen) and the mayor - were transformed to Fuhrers, responsible only to authorities on a higher level. The local and regional political institutions previously based on local elections were to be transformed to consultative bodies, based on the principles of corporativism. Thus, the - under the 'old regime' - fundamental difference between state power and local self-government was abolished (or made irrelevant). A main goal was to create organisations with strengthened capacity and a system with a minimum of sectoral autonomy. The plans for administrative decentralisation - especially to the regional level - were highly ambitious. NS regarded municipalities primarily as instruments of the central state. Local and regional government should serve an authoritarian, autocratic and strongly hierarchic state. The acceptance of divergences in attitudes, politics and in practice - was low.