On that account we beg leave to move:
that the Riksdag, in an address to His Majesty, may announce its support of the declaration made by the Crown-Prince Regent in Joint Swedish and Norwegian Cabinet Council on April 5th this year with a view to bring about negotiations between the Swedish and Norwegian Governments concerning a new arrangement of the Union affairs.
Stockholm, April 12, 1905.
Carl Persson. Hans Andersson. Sixten von Friesen.
Ernst Lindblad. D. Persson i Tällberg. K. H. Gez. von Schéele.
T. Zetterstrand.
15.
The Norwegian Governments’ report of April 17th 1905.
His Excellency Michelsen, Prime Minister, and Chief of the Justice-Department, has in all humility made the following statement:
In making this matter the subject of a humble report the Department desires to state: As is well known the Norwegian people have made a unanimous demand for the establishment of a separate Norwegian Consular service and have with equal unanimity asserted that the decision of this matter, as lying outside the community established between the countries through the Act of Union, should be reserved to the Norwegian constitutional authorities. For the treatement of this matter the Norwegian Storthing has appointed a special Committee and in the immediate future, this committee will prepare a motion that, in the present sitting of the Storthing, a bill be to passed with regard to the establishment of a separate Consular service.
Inasmuch as the scheme propounded in Joint Cabinet Council should be based on the supposition that the further advancement of the Consular question should, for the present, be deferred Norway’s approval of such a supposition would, in the opinion of the Department be equivalent to giving up of the Norwegian people’s unanimous desire to now see a just right carried through which is due to Norway in her capacity of a Sovereign realm and is secured in her Constitution, and for a reform requested with cumulative force by the development and the conditions of industry, instead of entering into negotiations between the countries, which, after renewed experience, may unfortunately be apprehended to prove fruitless or at best, to delay the realisation of the matter.
For there is no denying the fact that the scheme for negotiations now propounded is nothing new, but that similar schemes in the earlier history of the Union have repeatedly been tried in vain. The three Committees affecting the Union and made up of Norwegian and Swedish men, that in the past century, after previous treatment in 1844, in 1867, and in 1898 propounded schemes for new regulations concerning the mutual relations of the countries did not lead to any positive result. The report of the first Committee was in 1847 subject to a treatment on the part of the Norwegian Government, but was afterwards not favoured by the Swedish Government; the report of the second Committee, which did not give expression to Norway’s equality in the Union was rejected by the vast majority of the Storthing in 1871 and in the third Committee no proposal of a future arrangement could obtain plurality among the Norwegian and the Swedish members.
With regard to the last-mentioned Committee we beg leave to draw particular attention to the fact, that all the Swedish members of the Committee certainly agreed upon founding the Union on the principle of parity and equality, inasmuch as they proposed that the Foreign affairs should be entrusted to the charge of a joint Foreign minister of Norwegian or Swedish nationality. But at the same time the two fractions wherein the Swedish members of the Committee were divided, proposed such an arrangement of the constitutional responsibility not only for those members of the separate Cabinet Councils of the countries, who at the side of the Foreign Minister take part in the treatment of diplomatic affairs, but also for the Foreign Minister himself, so that no member of the Norwegian Committee could in this respect support any of the Swedish schemes. In addition to the establishment of a joint Foreign Minister office, all the Swedish members recommended an extension of the constitutional community between the countries which no member of the Norwegian Committee could second and lastly, the scheme for a separate Foreign Office for each country which already was the expression of the opinion prevailing among the Norwegian people, could not gain any support from the Swedish side.