The UAE leadership congratulates King Haakon VIII on his accession to the Norwegian throne.
A sailor, a Berkeley graduate and the fourth Glücksburg to take the oath, Norway’s new king inherits a crown that was voted into existence barely a century ago
President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan has sent a message of congratulation to King Haakon VIII on his accession to the throne of the Kingdom of Norway.
His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, and His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Presidential Court, sent similar messages to the new king.
The accession follows the death of King Harald V on 28 August at the age of 89, after a reign of thirty-five years. His son convened an extraordinary Council of State at the Royal Palace in Oslo the same morning, informing ministers of his father’s passing and of his own assumption of the government of Norway.
The name and the motto
He announced that he would reign as Haakon VIII, and that he would keep the motto carried by his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him: Alt for Norge, everything for Norway.
The continuity is the point. Four generations of the House of Glücksburg have now taken the same four words, and in a constitutional monarchy where the sovereign holds almost no practical power, the words are a substantial part of what the institution actually is.
Who he is
Haakon Magnus was born on 20 July 1973, the second child and only son of King Harald V and Queen Sonja. He is 53.
He is a trained naval officer, and as king becomes formally Supreme Commander of the Norwegian Armed Forces. He read political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and took a master’s in development studies at the London School of Economics, an unusually international education for a Scandinavian heir.
He has served as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme, and in 2006 co-founded Global Dignity with the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen and the American writer John Hope Bryant.
He married Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby in 2001. Their daughter, Ingrid Alexandra, becomes Crown Princess and will in time be Norway’s first reigning queen since the fourteenth century. Their son is Prince Sverre Magnus.
A crown older than the country that wears it
The Norwegian monarchy is one of Europe’s oldest institutions and, in its present form, one of its youngest.
The medieval line was formidable. Haakon IV Haakonsson, who reigned from 1217 to 1263, presided over what Norwegians still call the golden age, ending a century of civil war and extending Norwegian authority across Iceland, Greenland and the Northern Isles. He died in Kirkwall, in Orkney, on campaign. Haakon V moved the centre of gravity of the kingdom from Bergen to Oslo and built Akershus Fortress, which still stands above the harbour. Haakon VI, who reigned from 1343, was the last king of an independent medieval Norway.
Then it stopped. From 1387 the crown passed into Danish and later Swedish hands, and for more than five hundred years Norway had no monarch of its own.
What ended that was a vote. When the union with Sweden dissolved in 1905, Norwegians held a referendum on whether to be a monarchy at all, and having decided they would, the Storting elected a Danish prince. Prince Carl of Denmark took the Old Norse name Haakon and became Haakon VII, the first independent Norwegian sovereign since 1387.
He is remembered above all for 1940, when the German occupation demanded he legitimise a puppet government and he refused, saying he would abdicate first. His son Olav V reigned from 1957 to 1991, and Harald V from 1991 until last week.
King Haakon VIII therefore takes a throne that exists because the people chose it, held by a family that has kept it by consent rather than by right. The UAE’s messages arrive at the beginning of the fourth reign of that arrangement.