TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092589/09258900.027

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                                                                                PROFILE, Page 42

Norway's Radical Daughter


GRO HARLEM BRUNDTLAND, the Prime Minister, is a Postmodern
Green Neosocialist Philogynic Philosopher-Queen. But just call
her Gro

By Nancy Gibbs


    It had been a long day of campaigning, and the Prime
Minister had a cold. Wrapped in a violet overcoat, she leafed
through stump speeches as the 1953 Convair turboprop plane
bounced around over the stubby mountains of the Norwegian
coastline.

    Toward the back of the plane, one of the press
photographers was sliding lower in his seat, clutching his
stomach, turning gray. His worried colleagues were at a loss to
help him until someone remembered there was a doctor on board
-- and summoned the Prime Minister.

    Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland dropped her paperwork, moved to
the back of the plane, and for the next 45 minutes tended the
victim. She swaddled him in blankets on the floor of the narrow
aisle, administering oxygen, monitoring his pulse, ordering the
pilots to radio Oslo for an ambulance. When another photographer
tried to shoot the scene, her aides waved him off. This was not
a photo op.

    "I didn't want to overdramatize things," she told the
patient gently, once she had settled him into the ambulance,
"but you showed signs of going into shock." The following day,
as he prepared to undergo surgery for gallstones, a bouquet
arrived from the Prime Minister's office. Red roses. The symbol
of her Labor Party.

    "There is a very close connection between being a doctor
and being a politician," Brundtland observed the next day,
speaking in the earnest, faintly academic style that betrays
both her Harvard degree and her Calvinist roots. "The doctor
first tries to prevent illness, then tries to treat it if it
comes. It's exactly the same as what you try to do as a
politician, but with regard to society." Which may help explain
why this physician offers such a radical prescription for
running a country and restoring its health, and why last week's
national elections, in which her Labor Party dropped 6.5%,
stirred such interest.

    During her three years in office, Gro Brundtland has
succeeded in creating the most feminine, not to say feminist,
state anywhere in the world. After a decade in power, the more
conspicuous Mrs. Thatcher has named not a single woman to her
Cabinets. In Norway it is scarcely newsworthy anymore that every
other member of the Cabinet is a woman, and more than a third
of the parliament. Brundtland even toys with the idea of
changing the country's system of hereditary monarchy to allow
princesses as well as princes to inherit the throne. And in the
privacy of her own home, this socialist crusader is married to
a prominent conservative scholar and columnist, who raised their
four children while she sat in the Cabinet.

    "It was very tough in 1981," recalls Brundtland of her
first brief eight-month stint as Prime Minister, when it seemed
sometimes that the entire country was waiting for her to fail.
"In the worst times I always thought, If you get through this,
it will be much better for the next woman." As it turned out,
she was the next woman, and by 1986, when she returned to power,
her gender was no longer much of an issue. The collapse of oil
prices had left Norway high and dry and deep in debt: Brundtland
dazzled both friends and foes with a perilous high-wire act. On
one hand she capped wages, devalued the krone and clamped down
on consumer credit in an effort to restore Norway's export
markets. But at the same time she kept her promise to shorten
the workweek to 37 1/2 hours, extend paid maternity leave to 24
weeks, and maintain generally Norway's fine-weave "safety net."

    Her domestic policies guaranteed her a larger audience than
Norway's 4.2 million people. But what really hurled her center
stage was her appointment as chairman of the U.N. commission on
the environment in October 1984. Nine hundred days later, the
commission released what has come to be known as the Brundtland
Report, a document so blunt and sobering that it abruptly
forced the issue of global responsibility onto the international
agenda. Since then she has shuttled around the world,
addressing conferences, accepting prizes, chastising polluters,
cheering reformers and establishing her potential to become one
day the first woman ever to serve as U.N. Secretary-General.

    Her international triumphs have not protected her from some
searing reviews at home. "Norway has some of the most polluted
fjords in the world," charges Geir Wang-Andersen, a toxic-waste
activist for Greenpeace. "People abroad see her as this great
environmentalist -- but we just laugh a little, because we
don't see her that way."

    "Lies," retorts Gro. "I do not know of any environmental
group in any country that does not view its government as an
adversary." She realizes that her policies are being watched and
copied, but argues that it won't do any good for Norway to act
alone. "The climate will not change just because Norway changes
its policies. We must search for common agreements in order to
help carry others along."

    Some criticize the machinery of her welfare state, with its
lengthy waits for elective surgery and its vibrant black market
manned by people dodging heavy taxes. Voters who are struggling
under her austere economic policies complain of her largesse to
Third World countries -- one of the highest per capita foreign
aid budgets in the world. "We are world champions at solving
other countries' problems," charges the right-wing Progress
Party leader Carl Hagen. "We behave as though we are a
superpower."

    Her fans overseas do not share these views, and anyway, she
refuses to pander when voters challenge her judgment. She is,
by temperament, uncomfortable with easy promises or hand-knit
populism. Instead her rhetoric rings with noblesse oblige. "If
you are born strong, with parents who give you the best, you
have an even stronger responsibility for the people who didn't
get the same start."

    When the great experiment came up for inspection in the
elections, it was her countrymen -- not her disciples
worldwide, just her neighbors -- who went to the polls to decide
whether to let her continue. In the end she managed to pull in
34% of the vote, down from 40% four years ago but possibly
enough to let her form another minority government.

    Mother Gro is truly Norway's daughter, a product of the
society she is busy transforming. Perhaps it takes an innocent
country, rich, safe and peaceable, to provide a cushion for
radical change. From the din of New York or the haze of Los
Angeles, Norway looks very much like the invention of a hopeful
imagination. It has one of Europe's smallest police forces and
its longest life expectancy. The glassy northern air is clean,
and Cabinet ministers bicycle to work. Very few people are rich,
but few poor. Until last spring, skateboards were illegal. They
were considered too dangerous.

    Brundtland draws from this landscape some valuable raw
materials. In a land of taciturn people she learned to contain,
if not quite control, a mighty temper. In a country of
outdoorspeople she used to ski the 25 miles from her house to
her mountain cottage. In a seafaring nation she proved her
mettle by saving her husband's life when he was swept overboard
from their sailboat into the frigid North Sea. And in a society
devout in its faith in the family, she managed to raise four
children -- a diplomat, a lawyer, a law student and an
engineering student -- while setting an example of just what
people can accomplish when they set their minds to it.

    It is little wonder that Brundtland has such faith in
social engineering, since she is so much a product of it. The
daughter of a doctor who also served as a Laborite Defense
Minister, she still echoes the starchy conversations of a
social-democratic dinner table: "I was always asking, Why are
things so? Why can't we do more? There were always political and
intellectual challenges." And the challenges were apportioned
equally, whether debating policy or chopping wood or playing
football with the boys. "My parents conveyed a kind of obvious
and natural atmosphere of equality," she says, observing with
gratitude how they let her be a tomboy, and then let her outgrow
it. "I think many girls find that they are asked to be so
equal," she says, "they are not allowed to develop those
feminine traits which all of us have." When she made up her mind
early on that she wanted a family and a medical career, no one
told her that she couldn't have both. Seven months after she
married Arne Olav Brundtland, she bore her first child and
nursed him between classes in medical school. A year later, when
Arne Olav got his degree, he took over most of the parenting:
dropping the baby off at day care and bringing him home in the
afternoon, along with a briefcase full of work.

    As her family grew, her rise to political power had an
exquisite logic to it. She took a feminist, family issue --
abortion -- and applied her medical experience to bring about
political change. Her outspoken pro-choice lobbying brought her
into the public eye in the early '70s, and the Labor Party
welcomed the attractive young activist with open arms. She was
named Environment Minister in 1974, party leader in 1981. And
as her political career outran the medical one, the domestic
experiments in role reversal kept pace.

    "When she called me and told me about the appointment to
the Cabinet," Arne Olav recalls, "I made a deal with her. I said
O.K., you do it, and I'll take care of the home front. But on
one condition. We do it my way." In the downstairs hall of
their comfortable four-bedroom suburban home he hung a sign that
he picked up in a Virginia airport. A HOUSE MUST BE CLEAN ENOUGH
TO BE HEALTHY AND DIRTY ENOUGH TO BE HAPPY.

    From time to time, opponents have pointed to her
conservative husband and tried to use this domestic detente
against her. DO AS GRO DID, said one campaign poster, CHOOSE A
CONSERVATIVE. Gro wasn't having any. "Do as Arne Olav did," she
shot back. "Choose Gro." Arne Olav himself discounts this as a
political issue. "My field is analysis of international
relations," he says. "Her field is doing international
relations. That makes for very good morning seminars." It also
made for an unlikely endorsement this time around. A week before
election day, Arne Olav announced his intention to vote for his
wife -- for the first time ever.

    Others have needled her about leading the Labor Party while
living the good life in a swanky suburb. When, like her
predecessors, she used a military plane on a state trip to
Finland, some voters let her know they did not approve. In
recent months, Arne Olav reports, she has become handy with the
cement mixer and toolbox, as the family remodels the cottage in
the woods. "She still will do things out of sight," says Geir
Salvesen, a political writer for the conservative daily
Aftenposten. "We were together in New York at the U.N. session
on disarmament, and she sneaked away to Saks to buy a cocktail
dress. She said she had overslept and hadn't had time to pack.
But she was guilty about that. It hurts her proletarian image."

    What is debated now, heatedly, is the vision she brings of
the country's future. Like its social-democratic cousins, Norway
has had to re-evaluate the effects on ingenuity and investment
of a top tax rate of 62% and a state that spends more than half
of the GNP. From birth to death, the bureaucracy is attentive
to needs and forgiving of failure. How to avoid spoiling people
into indolence? How to save compassion from complacency? "This
is a dilemma of any society," admits Gro. "The issue is deciding
how much effort the state should make to support the rights of
all, and what to require from each person to show that they are
using the benefits in a good way."

    That decision may not be hers if the conservatives manage
to improvise an alternative government in the weeks to come. But
no one imagines that her influence will be erased just because
she is back to leading the opposition. Her stage is too wide and
well lighted, her performances too gripping for her audience at
home and abroad to leave her lingering long in the wings.