Openness Must Be Handled Carefully

Openness is an important watchword in our modern Europe.

The reason we got the European Union in place was that people in Western Europe wanted to see a productive and beneficial openness between their different countries. Goods, services, labor, students, capital, but also knowledge and culture would move more easily between countries on a continent that has often been plagued by contradictions and conflicts throughout history.

And we Europeans love our openness. We also take it for granted. We take it for granted that we should be able to travel freely on our continent. We take it for granted that Europe’s different populations should feel a natural community and loyalty to each other.

However, all this should not prevent us from also daring to see that openness, paradoxically enough, sometimes creates a greater need for control and regulation. We must therefore dare to admit that openness can be counterproductive if it is not handled carefully.

A clear example is the extensive illegal immigration we have had into Europe. The fact that it has been allowed to become so large is because European politicians cherish our dear openness. Politicians, opinion leaders and many ordinary citizens have not wanted to see that a Europe with open internal borders requires a Europe with strictly controlled external borders. Ideological wishful thinking about openness and immigration has meant that the external borders have not been guarded in the way they should.

Far too many Europeans opposed the idea of ​​erecting any walls against the outside world. Europe should not become a “fortress Europe” that shuts people out. Europe also had an obligation to always help people in need, regardless of the possible consequences for the Europeans themselves. That is why we let our guard down. That is why we did not live up to the demands that internal openness places on keeping our external borders in order.

But let us also take a more specific example. For several decades, Sweden has had a generous system for establishing private schools. The funding that municipalities would spend on individual schoolchildren in publicly run schools can be transferred to private actors if they are granted permission to run their own private school. In addition, the private actors can extract a profit from the operation, even though it is basically financed by public funds.

This has resulted in the school market literally exploding in Sweden. Private organizations, foundations and companies have started schools and now offer a variety of alternatives to the publicly run schools that still exist.

The so-called “free school system” has existed for about thirty years. But now complaints are being heard increasingly often. Private schools sometimes give higher grades to give the impression that their teaching is better. Some private actors have taken out remarkably high profits, money that could have gone back into the school operations themselves. And the segregation between good and bad schools only seems to increase over time.

So now the system must be regulated. Freedom and openness were good. Many agree that the free school system has made Sweden’s schools better, but there is also a limit.

The possibility of starting private schools has meant that many new quality schools have been started. But it is also a fact that other schools have become worse. The high-quality schools attract the best students and the best teachers. Which has resulted in the weakest students and weakest teachers being concentrated in other schools. Even political parties that once pushed for the creation of a school market in Sweden now say that it must be regulated.

Freedom and openness did a lot of good. But deregulation ultimately also created a need to control and regulate a market that previously did not exist.

So, what can we learn? Should we stop believing in openness and free markets? Of course not. The alternative is socialism, regulations and poverty.

But we must dare to see that freedom and deregulation can create new needs for controls and regulations. Freedom must simply be nurtured. Openness must be handled carefully.

Free markets may need to be regulated to protect people from the sometimes-inevitable negative effects of markets. And here a conservative political right can contribute wisdom and prudence where the neoliberal right has tended to turn a blind eye to the positive effects of openness.

We want openness, but we must also handle it carefully.