Stefan Grüner

Ensuring Economic Growth and Socioeconomic Stabilization: Industrial Policy in West Germany, 1950–1975

‘Industrial policy has one thing in common with other varieties of modern politics: it can be described, even conducted, without having been properly defined.’ These were the words with which a director of a department of the Federal Ministry of Economics characterized her job in the summer of 1979.1 And indeed, before the year 1968 no West German federal government had ever bothered to publically and officially define their principles of sectoral structural policy.2 Industrial policy was, and still is, very difficult to put into words properly, and it is a matter of constant political debate, not only in Germany. These two facts may well be considered important reasons for the delayed attempts at the definition mentioned above.