Kristen Nygaard - Other Activities

Other Activities

In 1984 and 1985 Nygaard was chairman of the Informatics Committee of the University of Oslo, and active in the design of the university's plan for developing research, education and computing and communication facilities at all faculties of the university.

He was the first chairman of the Environment Protection Committee of the Norwegian Association for the Protection of Nature.

He was for 10 years (in the 1970s) Norwegian representative in the OECD activities on information technology. He has been a member of the Research Committee of the Norwegian Federation of Trade Unions, and cooperated with unions in a number of countries.

He was for several years engaged in running an experimental social institution trying new ways of creating humane living conditions for socially outcast alcoholics.

Nygaard was active in Norwegian politics. In the mid and late 1960s he was a member of the National Executive Committee of the Norwegian liberal party Venstre, and chair of that party's Strategy Committee. During the intense political fight before the 1972 referendum on whether Norway should become a member of the European Common Market (later the European Union), he worked as coordinator for the many youth organisations that worked against membership.

From 1971 to 2001 Nygaard was a member of the Labour Party, and he was a member of committees on research policies in that party.

In November 1988, he became chair of the Information Committee on Norway and the EEC, in August 1990 reorganized as Nei til EF an organization disseminating information about Norway's relation to the Common Market, and coordinating the efforts to keep Norway outside. (No to European Union membership for Norway, literally "No to the EU"). In 1993 when the EEC ratified the Maastricht treaty and became the European Union the organization changed its name to reflect this. Nei til EF became the largest political organization in Norway (145,000 members in 1994, from a population of 4 million). Nygaard worked with Anne Enger Lahnstein, leader of the anti-EU Centre Party, in this campaign. In the referendum on November 28, 1994, "Nei til EU" succeeded: 52.2% of the electorate voted "No", and the voter participation was the highest ever in Norway's history - 88.8%. The strategy of the campaign, insisted by Nygaard, was that it had to be for something as well as against, i.e. the Scandinavian welfare state Nygaard considered threatened by the Maastricht Agreement.

He resigned as chair in 1995, and was later the chair of the organization's strategy committee and member of its Council.

In 1996 and 1997 Nygaard was the coordinator of the efforts to establish The European Anti-Maastricht Movement (TEAM), a cooperative network between national organizations opposing the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union (EMU) and the Maastricht Treaty in European countries within and outside the EU. TEAM was successfully started March 3, 1997.