Germany is preparing for economic war
By
Peter Schwarz
8 February 2019
The “National Industrial Strategy 2030,” presented to the press by Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) on Tuesday, is the economic policy counterpart to the 2016 “ White Paper on Security Policy .” In the White Paper, the grand coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats had committed itself to a massive rearmament of the Bundeswehr (armed forces) to impose Germany’s worldwide interests by military means. Now Berlin is putting economic policy on a war footing.
Altmaier’s strategic guidelines break with the mantra of “free competition,” which had previously characterised the policy of the German bourgeoisie. While the paper still references the “market economy,” it makes significant exceptions.
“Industrial policy strategies are experiencing a renaissance in many parts of the world, and there is hardly a successful country that relies solely and invariably on market forces to accomplish its tasks,” it states. “There are strategies of rapid expansion with the clear aim of conquering new markets for one’s own economy and, wherever possible, monopolizing them.”
This is what the Germany government is also aiming for. A German and European policy that suppressed these economic policy challenges and left them unanswered, “would leave one’s own companies weakened and alone in a difficult phase,” the paper states, which pursues the megalomaniacal goal of contributing to “industrial leadership at the national, European and global level in all relevant sectors … together with big business players.”
This is to be achieved mainly by two means:
On the one hand, the government wants to promote the emergence of financially powerful,…