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A historical discussion on the foreign policy relationship between Norway and the United States and its future perspectives. The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), founded in 1959, can legitimately be called a child of the Cold War. During the 1950's Norway's main focus was to stand between the two super powers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Already in the 1960's this role began to diminish due to improvements in weapon technology and became even smaller in the 1970's when Norwegian left leaning parties started to openly oppose the United States. In the 1980's Norway tried its best to become visible for Washington, a project that somewhat failed due to Ronald Regan's focus on the internal economy and rolling back communism abroad. Overall the relationship to the United States has almost exclusively been based on foreign policy even if cultural ties have made Norway the most Americanized country in Europe. Adapted from the source document.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is probably one of the most oftreferred books today in the United States. It is widely seen as the best book ever written on this country, its words endlessly quoted by different political camps which claim the book as their own. This article examines the ways in which the American have read this magnum opus of the Frenchman, especially during the last few decades, on the assumption that their reading is reflecting their perceptions on contemporary American society and its future. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it tries to show that Democracy has long been read in America as an (or, in not a few cases, the) important source to reflect on a remedy for an increasingly "individualistic" and thus "despotic" American society. What the American have commonly found a solution to this problem out of reading the book is the restoration of the tradition of self-government, which is highly hailed by Tocqueville as an admirable feature of American society. Second, this article aims at showing that, although the different political views between conservatives and liberals (one of the most visible political divisions in this society today) are surely affecting the American reading of Democracy, this is only one aspect of the story. Many Americans, whatever their political tendencies are, end up calling for the revival of a self-governed American society as a consequence of studying the book. This common 'conclusion' derived from their reading could be interpreted as a proof that the image that America is the country built on citizens' active participation in public affairs is widely shared among the American themselves. In this considerably diverse society that could fragment at any time potentially, the image has thus been contributing to keeping it in unity, probably to not a small extent.