National belonging is in many ways a fiction. Belonging always happens locally, between specific people in specific places.
On Norway’s Constitution Day, May 17th, we hosted 110 people in our garden. About 30% of them were migrants: students, young professionals, people from England, Germany, Sweden, the USA, and other parts of Europe, building lives in Norway in ways the national day was never quite designed to accommodate.
The party was still getting going when a British man I was only just beginning to get to know pulled me aside. He told me he had only recently started to like May 17th. Last year was one of the first times he had been invited to a celebration like this, one of the first times he had felt properly included. Seven years in Norway before that, and the national day had made him feel his outsideness more sharply each year, not less. The flags, the ice cream, the uncomplicated joy of people who feel at home — it had been a yearly confirmation that he was not.
I was not particularly surprised by this. I have spent most of my adult life working and socializing with people who navigate the space between countries and cultures. What I kept underestimating was the actual cost, year after year, of being present at something that is not quite yours. May 17th is a particularly concentrated version of this. It is not just a public holiday but a performance of national identity — costumes, children’s parades, a level of collective feeling that has few equivalents elsewhere in Europe. For people who have not grown up inside that performance, the day can be genuinely difficult to navigate.
Norway does offer something worth naming. There is a tolerance for unconventional lives here, for people doing things their own way without serious consequences. That is not nothing. But tolerance is, at best, the absence of punishment. Welcoming is when someone actually reaches out to you, and Norway offers it far less readily.
What surprised me came at the end of the night. Most people had gone home, the fire was low, and a Norwegian woman I had met once or twice before found me at the campfire. She was born in Norway, with a dialect that was warm and recognizably so. She stood with tears in her eyes and told me that this was one of the first times she had felt able to be herself in a room full of people. It had moved her in a way she had not quite expected.
I have been thinking about what those two conversations say together that neither says alone. Both point to the same thing: what I would call the micropolitical dimension of belonging. Not the national day, not the paperwork, not the rhetoric — but the moment when those big structures land between specific people, in a specific place. In a garden. Around a fire.
Belonging is Local
Belonging is something I have come to think of as a local experience, not a national one. It happens between specific people, whether someone in a room decides to see you or look past you. National frameworks can create conditions for that, or make it harder. But the actual experience is always between people. It is never, frankly, a matter of paperwork.
Norway’s Constitution Day makes this visible in a particular way. The costumes, the parades, the anthems — you know immediately who the day is for. The national anthem opens with the words Ja, vi elsker (yes, we love). It is a question the day never actually answers: who is the we, and who do we love? The British man had known this for seven years. His experience had also shown him that tolerance and welcome are not the same thing. Norway has a great deal of the first. The second is much harder to find.
He described his first May 17th in Oslo. His Norwegian partner at the time had encouraged him to go into the city center: everyone would be out, warm, open and glad to be alive. He went. The city was celebrating, and he was invisible in it.
After that first year, he had not returned to the city center. When May 17th came, he would leave Oslo entirely — hiking, or visiting somewhere out of range of the parades. That avoidance had its own cost. Not belonging, and also not being able to bear witness to the not-belonging.
He also told me about a moment that has stayed with him longer. He was walking with a Norwegian friend when someone the friend knew appeared. They greeted each other, talked for a few minutes, and left. The person had not once glanced at him. He had simply not registered.
In British culture, he told me, this is considered rude — not aggressively, but at a basic level: you refused to acknowledge that I exist.
Norwegian social life, from my own observation and from what many international friends have described over the years, is built around groups that formed long ago. The friendships predate you. The warmth is real, but it is pointing somewhere else when you arrive. There is no hostility. There is also no obvious door.
There is a distinction worth holding on to here, between difference and otherness. His accent, where he came from, how he moved through the world —those are differences, facts that belong to him. Being invisible in a city in full celebration, being stood next to on the street as though he did not exist — that is otherness, and it is not a property of the person. It is something being done to him by the people around him. I find it useful to keep in mind that otherness is not found in people; it is constructed around them. Which means it can also be constructed differently.
When a small opening did come, it could be easy to misread. He described being invited to his first Norwegian friend’s birthday party, excited to finally meet the wider circle. The people there were friendly enough. But in the months that followed, nothing developed. He had attended an event; they had hosted him. He described it as climbing over hundreds of backs before finding people who were actually interested in connecting. The years in between were not dramatic. They were quietly exhausting.
Norway does offer something worth naming. There is a tolerance for unconventional lives here, for people doing things their own way without serious consequences. That is not nothing. But tolerance is, at best, the absence of punishment. Welcoming is when someone actually reaches out to you, and Norway offers it far less readily.
Building What You Cannot Find
After years of this, he stopped waiting for a community to accept him and started creating the conditions for one to form. He made himself visible, said clearly what he cared about, and waited to see who appeared.
Part of what he was reaching toward was also something specific: depth. Norwegian social life had given him a lot of surface. He had discovered, months after meeting people, that they were musicians, artists, people with interior lives they had never once mentioned — because you do not talk about what you are good at. It is almost a cultural rule. For him, sharing what you care about is how connection begins, not what comes later once trust is established. The room he eventually built was partly defined by being the opposite of that: people who would say what they were working on, what they were afraid of, what they actually thought.
What formed over time was not a community of migrants. It was people who were, in various ways, otherwise: some foreign, some Norwegian, some who had moved between places, some who had simply never fit the shape of Norwegian social life and had nowhere particular to take that. The diversity of where people came from was, in a sense, incidental — a byproduct of prioritizing a different kind of person: someone willing to show up not knowing everyone already, sit in a room with strangers, and say something real.
He had also come to think — and I find this persuasive — that national belonging is in many ways a fiction. Belonging always happens locally, between specific people in specific places. The national frame is a layer on top of that, one that can help or hinder but is never the thing itself. In a culture as uniform as Norway’s, feeling Norwegian and feeling at home among your neighbors can seem like one and the same. For people who came from elsewhere, the gap between those two things is hard to miss.
This is where the Norwegian woman at the campfire makes sense to me.
She had the passport, the language, every cultural marker the national story requires. She had the right dialect. And she still stood at the campfire with tears in her eyes, telling me this was one of the first times she had felt able to be herself. The same rules that had made the British man invisible — the unspoken ceiling on how much you share, the circles that closed before you arrived, the preference for surface over depth — had applied to her too, just from the inside. She was already inside, in every official sense. But inside had not been habitable.
This is the part I keep coming back to. The barriers that push migrants to the edges of Norwegian social life can close in on Norwegians too — particularly those who do not fit the emotional template the culture tends to reward. That is not a comparison that diminishes what migrants go through. It is an observation about the barriers themselves and where they come from. They are not primarily about foreignness. They are about a particular way Norwegian social life is organized, and who that organization leaves out.
Who Gets to Build
The man I spoke with built his community from a position of relative safety. He had language, confidence, freedom from fear, and years of stability to persist through the long stretch before anything cohered. It still took years.
Most migrants arrive with fewer of those resources, and some arrive with almost none. Someone navigating precarity and trauma, an asylum system that reads their presence primarily as a legal problem, does not have years to wait for things to cohere. And the act of reaching out does not look the same from all positions. He could approach strangers, invite people to things, put himself at the center of a room, and that was read as social confidence.
For a refugee from a country that Norwegian media has spent years associating with danger, the same behavior reads differently. Reaching out when you are already perceived as a risk is a different proposition. Sometimes you do not reach. You pull back toward the people who already know you.
There is also a more complicated version: people who arrive with a strongly national sense of self, an identity rooted in a particular place and way of being, sometimes find it harder to build across the lines the otherwise community requires. That identity often got them through displacement — it is frequently what allows people to survive what they have been through. I am not criticizing it. But it can make the next crossing harder.
Belonging, as a project, is not fair. The model of building what you cannot find is more available to some than others. That is worth knowing, even if it does not change the argument for building.
When I spoke with the Norwegian woman in the days after the party, she put a word to what the evening had been. Micropolitical, she said. A meeting between the political and the personal, between the structures that determine who belongs and the lived experience of actually feeling, in a specific room on a specific evening, that you do.
That word has been sitting with me since. What it captures is the layer that the big conversations about migration and belonging tend to skip over. No policy determines whether someone gets acknowledged on the street. No integration program reaches the moment at a birthday party when a host decides whether to follow up with the foreign guest in the weeks afterwards. Those are individual decisions, made in their thousands every day, and they form the texture of a life. They are what determine whether seven years in Norway feels like seven years of outsideness, or something else.
The structures that actually matter — at the level of whether a person feels at home — are built and rebuilt in every interaction, every room, every moment someone decides whether or not to acknowledge that you exist. A party is political. Inviting someone in is political. So is the years-long habit of not doing so.
Most of the people who co-created that room were Norwegian citizens. May 17th was our day too, in the official sense. But we had not organized around nationality. We had organized around community — around the specific people who were part of our lives, whatever passport those people carried. You do not invite someone because they have the right background. You invite them because they are your people, and they come because you are theirs.
Community can be larger than national belonging. But it has to be co-created, deliberately, by people who decide that is what they want — and the door is left open for others to find it.
Image: Jim Killock / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
