In the Arena

Politiken bärs av idéer Kulturdebatt SvD: "Röpke tecknar en helgjuten ideologisk motbild till ett kollektivistiskt högskattesamhälle som Sverige. Han talar om en ekonomi som borde vara genuint decentraliserad i det att resurserna har förts nedåt i samhället, från stora centrala system, till de enskilda hushållen. Detta inte främst av nationalekonomiska skäl--utan för att det civila samhället brister under trycket av en alltför resurskrävande statsmakt."

I understand this, but at the same time I don't understand it. KD seems then to be 'Nya Moderaterna' with Catholic subsidiarity. I have earlier understood that KD was intimate with the CDU in Germany but Germany has 16 "Länder" which account for their subsidiarity where Sweden is in the size of a "Land". CDU politics and KD politics is organisatorically religious, thereof the epithet 'Christian'. I don't think Sweden has to be broken up further. With modern communications, it should be governable as is.

The state is naturally a resource for the individual and the family in that it can provide information. If you want to subsidiarize a small state like Sweden, it is necessary to organize the country in domains which replace the need for high quality information about the world and about science and arts. It is not reasonable that a multi-system Sweden would be able to recreate a sufficient number of centers of learning which would mean that the otherwise 'lagom' country size Sweden would lose its relative enlightenment, losing successively its main newspapers and SVT edge.

Wilhelm Röpke was apparently important for the development of the German state but CDU has lost voters recently, just like KD. Could it be that building a state is different from operating a state. If CDU is organisatorical, there is not much left to organize and new talent has to be enlisted? On the other hand Germany has gone from a social democracy to a center-right environment and thus copied Röpke's personal natural history towards conservatism.

Personally, I believe that we have entered a new 'enlightenment' with the Internet and that moving towards a traditionally steered domain is premature and counter productive. Earlier discussions by Göran Hägglund, where he, like Erik Wallrup suggested, withdraws from our new and experimental environment, are understandable from the point of view displayed in the current article. Such a localization scheme would, contrary to what Hägglund seems to want, remove the debate from the main arena.

What I miss in this new era of enlightenment is a discussion of Anglo-American freedom. Especially freedom of thought, rather than "the lid on" mentality. You don't want to push the debate down to the kitchen table, where a Catholic patriarch is presiding, but rather have it all out in the arena.