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BDI’s Position Paper: The Same Old Tune for Forty Years

Sep. 25, 2026

The BDI has presented a position paper, „Principles of Economic and Trade Policy,“ meant to rally 38 member associations and roughly 100,000 companies behind it. Its real analytical value, however, lies not in what it demands, but in what it omits, obscures, or plays off against itself at the decisive points — and in the instruments it repeats, unrevised, from a space of experience that still dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. A reading against the grain that treats a consensus document as an inadvertent confession.

On September 23, the Federation of German Industries (BDI) published a position paper titled „Principles of Economic and Trade Policy.“ According to BDI Director General Tanja Gönner, it is meant as a „reassurance for ourselves“ — a shared set of guidelines for the 38 member associations for the years ahead. The occasion is uncontroversial: „Germany as a business location,“ the paper states, is „under massive pressure,“ which is why „new economic-policy course corrections are needed in many fields.“

But if one reads the roughly 30 numbered principles not as a catalogue of demands but as what it actually is — a consensus document produced by 38 partly conflicting interest groups — the analytical payoff shifts. The interesting finding is not the wording itself, but the places where the paper hedges, contradicts itself, or falls silent. These gaps are not carelessness. They mark precisely the points at which a concrete commitment would have pitted one member association against another.

Derisking, Not Decoupling: The Unspoken Distributional Question on China

The paper calls for Germany and Europe to „more consistently push back“ dependencies on China — at least according to the public summary. The original text is both more precise and more restrained: it consistently speaks of „derisking,“ not decoupling, and states that „economic and technological exchange with China“ remains „of continued high importance,“ but must be „aligned more clearly with strategic interests.“ The paper even explicitly names the costs of this course — derisking causes costs, „among other things in the form of retaliatory measures“ — but argues that passivity would be „far more costly economically in the long run, and irresponsible from a security standpoint.“

What is missing from this weighing-up is any position on the distributional question that underlies every China policy: the automotive industry depends on China as a sales market, while other sectors suffer under Chinese dominance over intermediate goods and raw materials. A course that „pushes back“ dependencies affects these two groups very differently — one loses revenue, the other gains supply security. The paper does not resolve this conflict of interest; it wraps it in a formula that both sides can sign onto precisely because it commits to nothing concrete.

The Wished-For Partner: The United States

What stands out is how the China passage is linked to the passage on the United States: the paper proposes an „intensified transatlantic derisking dialogue“ to develop shared priorities with the US on critical technologies and supply chains — in the same document that elsewhere wants to examine European countermeasures „where protectionist US measures impair the competitiveness of European companies.“ The BDI thus wants a „more self-confident stance“ toward a partner whose trade policy is named as a problem in the same document, even as that same partner is envisioned as an ally against China. Left unsaid is what this self-confident stance is supposed to rest on, given that the paper itself diagnoses an ongoing security dependency on the United States.

Two Chapters, One Contradiction: Fiscal Policy Against Climate Policy

In its fiscal-policy section, the paper demands strict budget consolidation and explicitly upholds the constitutionally enshrined debt brake — „loosening or expanding“ it is „not expedient,“ since the interest-rate pressure from existing debt is already being felt. Defense spending, set to „soon reach five percent of economic output,“ must be „brought into the regular budget over the medium term,“ which „requires consolidation of the same magnitude.“ The only legitimate response to rising security spending, in other words, is to cut elsewhere.

In the climate-policy chapter, however, the same paper demands „short-term relief to strengthen competitiveness,“ a „reduction in the general levy burden,“ and „improved financial incentives for investment in transformation technologies“ — measures that would further burden the budget or reduce revenue, with no financing offset even hinted at. A paper that demands fidelity to the debt brake and spending cuts in one chapter, and tax cuts and investment incentives in the next, is engaging in exactly the kind of cherry-picking it implicitly criticizes elsewhere.

There is also a design flaw within the climate passage itself: the BDI wants a „balance between the steering effect of the CO2 price and, at the same time, a limit on its burden effect“ — two goals that are mechanically incompatible unless some compensating mechanism is named. A CO2 price’s steering effect arises precisely from the burden it creates; an instrument meant to steer strongly while burdening little would need a third component — a rebate mechanism, for instance — that the paper does not mention.

Boilerplate Without Institutional Memory: Digital Policy

The paper’s digital-policy section reads as though assembled from stock phrases accumulated over the past decade: „technology-open,“ „innovation-friendly“ framework conditions, „shared European data spaces,“ „interoperable standards,“ „regulatory sandboxes,“ an „unbureaucratic“ funding landscape. What stands out is what’s missing: neither Gaia-X nor Catena-X is mentioned — the two flagship projects in which BDI member companies were themselves deeply involved, and which were supposed to deliver exactly the federated, interoperable data infrastructure the paper is once again calling for.

Both projects have documented, concrete weaknesses that map directly onto the goals stated in the paper: Gaia-X was announced as a sovereignty project for the Mittelstand, but in practice evolved into a federated web of certification bodies that has produced few functioning services, while large cloud and consulting providers dominate its governance. Catena-X, in turn, requires paid association membership and technical onboarding that constitute a real barrier to entry for the „industrial Mittelstand“ the paper names as a key actor, while practical benefit has so far remained largely confined to isolated pilot use cases. A paper that restates the same goals as these two precursor projects without processing their experience is, at its core, calling for a repeat performance — without specifying the conditions under which this time would go differently.

Forty-Year-Old Answers to a New Chip Dependency

The section on the semiconductor value chain likewise formulates a diagnosis whose tone and toolkit barely differ from Europe’s chip programs of the 1980s. The demand that Germany and Europe „strategically secure and expand their capabilities along the entire semiconductor value chain,“ backed by clusters, transfer instruments, and state funding programs, is structurally similar in aim and method to West Germany’s 1984 Mikroelektronik-Programm and the European JESSI initiative (Joint European Submicron Silicon Initiative, launched 1989) — the latter wound down in 1996 without Europe achieving the intended position in chip manufacturing. The paper does not mention this historical precursor, even though it would be the most obvious blueprint for the question of under what conditions comparable programs succeed or fail.

The claim that European sovereignty is realistic „only through strategic partnerships with like-minded countries and regions along the value chain“ likewise carries an older institutional signature: in form, it echoes the allied export-control coordination organized during the Cold War through the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom, 1949–1994). The same logic — coordinated export restrictions among „like-minded“ states rather than unilateral measures — is currently being reactivated in practice in the semiconductor sector, for instance in the coordination among the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands on export restrictions for lithography equipment. The paper presents this return to a historically already-tested institutional form as a new strategy, without disclosing its connection to its own prior history.

The Biggest Gap: Energy Costs and Security of Supply

The most striking finding, however, concerns the energy chapter itself. The chapter on „Energy and Climate Policy“ consists essentially of a single subsection on climate policy. Neither electricity prices nor gas prices, neither grid fees nor an industrial electricity price, neither security of supply nor the baseload question, neither power-plant strategy nor grid expansion is addressed anywhere in the paper. This is remarkable, because energy costs and security of supply appear in virtually every business-location survey of recent years — including the associations‘ own surveys — as the most frequently cited competitive disadvantage of German industry, well ahead of bureaucracy or the shortage of skilled labor.

The explanation likely lies in exactly the distributional logic that runs through the entire paper: energy-intensive sectors such as chemicals, steel, glass, or cement have an existential interest in low, potentially subsidized electricity prices and secured baseload capacity, while other member associations set different priorities, and a stance favoring fossil transitional capacity is harder to defend on climate grounds. A common denominator on grid fees or an industrial-electricity-price model would therefore have raised exactly the distributional question among the 38 member associations that the paper already sidesteps elsewhere. That the very topic companies most frequently cite as a burden in surveys is practically absent from the position paper is, in itself, already a finding.

What the Gaps Add Up To

None of the findings described here — the quiet differentiation on China, the wishful transatlantic framing, the contradiction between the fiscal and climate chapters, the boilerplate without institutional memory, the forty-year-old chip-policy rhetoric, the silence on energy costs — can be dismissed in isolation as an individual lapse. Taken together, they form a pattern: wherever a concrete commitment would have pitted individual member associations against each other, or would have uncomfortably recalled one of the BDI’s own institutional precursors (Gaia-X, Catena-X, JESSI), the text stays abstract, contradicts itself, or falls silent altogether.

This is not a statement about the BDI’s lack of honesty, but about the structural limits of what an umbrella association with a highly heterogeneous membership can formulate by consensus. The more concrete a demand, the more likely it is to affect different parts of the membership unevenly — and the less likely it is to make it into a paper explicitly conceived as a „reassurance for ourselves.“

An Involuntary Confession

This lets the finding be stated even more sharply. A position paper that claims cross-industry consensus, yet in its most concrete passages reaches for instruments and formulations already tried in the past and found wanting there — chip-cluster funding modeled on the Mikroelektronik-Programm and JESSI, federated data infrastructure modeled on Gaia-X and Catena-X, transfer programs and funding architectures whose effectiveness has never been systematically demonstrated even within the association’s own ranks — thereby inadvertently reveals that its toolkit has remained the same for decades. Not as a deliberate admission, but as a symptom: when a paper, despite available experience of the same approaches failing or stalling, repeats those approaches unchanged, it signals that no revision of this toolkit has yet taken place within the association’s own framework — for the same reasons the paper’s other fault lines go unnamed: such a revision would have to name which past projects failed, and who carried them.

The historian Reinhart Koselleck coined two concepts in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1979) that sharpen this finding: the „space of experience“ — the accumulated stock of knowledge, distilled from past action, about how things have actually unfolded — and the „horizon of expectation“ — the sum of future-directed hopes and goals within which new action is conceived. Koselleck’s own thesis was that in modernity the two increasingly come apart, because experience becomes obsolete through accelerating change faster than it can feed into new expectations.

The present case can be pinned down more precisely with this pair of concepts by asking which space of experience actually underlies the paper. It is not primarily the space of experience of the past five or ten years — that would be the relevant territory for JESSI, Gaia-X, and Catena-X, and, as shown, they do not appear. The space of experience that actually seems operative lies further back: in the 1970s and 1980s, when export-driven growth, a functioning corporatist social partnership, and an unchallenged technological leadership position for German industry were still the norm, and state-backed technology programs such as the Mikroelektronik-Programm or ESPRIT counted as plausible responses fitting that era’s model of success. It is from this space of experience that the recurring, unrevised figures of thought in the paper derive: the value chain as an organizing principle, the cluster as a funding instrument, associational consensus as the institution through which industrial policy gets shaped.

The paper’s horizon of expectation — chip sovereignty, European data spaces, renewed competitiveness alongside transformation — is designed out of exactly this old space of experience, without the intervening four decades having visibly corrected it. This explains why neither JESSI’s failure nor the weaknesses of Gaia-X and Catena-X need to be named at all: they are not suppressed because they would be uncomfortable, but simply not perceived as data points that could call the underlying space of experience into question — because that space of experience has barely been updated since the 1970s and 1980s. This sets the finding apart from Koselleck’s own diagnosis of modernity: there, the gap between experience and expectation arises because experience becomes obsolete through accelerating change faster than new expectations can catch up with it. Here it is the reverse: the space of experience itself has stood still, and a horizon of expectation that is, at its core, forty years old is being projected unchanged onto a present that — China’s shift from sales market to systemic architectural rival, the relocation of chip manufacturing to Taiwan and Korea, a cost base transformed by the energy transition, an increasingly unstable transatlantic alliance — has long since structurally detached itself from that of the 1970s and 1980s.

Ralf Keuper 

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