“Competition abroad - cooperation at home” was the leitmotif of German manufacturing business through most of the past century. In the years before World War I, German industry developed along liberal capitalistic principles with the important qualification of a powerful protectionism resting on the two pillars of tariffs and cartels, both of which were manifestations of a deliberate government policy to curtail competition and to engineer a socially peaceful and stable transition to an industrial society dominated by the old elites. Given the extraordinary success of industrial growth and performance in Imperial Germany, this model won wide support among German industrialists as much as among the public at large. It was a point of reference through the years of upheaval to come and only gradually gave way to the acceptance of the more free-trade, neocorporatist model of today.

The watershed in this development is to be found somewhere in the late 1950s or early 1960s when the politically enforced reorientation of German business toward the principle of open markets finally won wide acceptance among management and became the cherished ideal of most of West German industrialists, ever more so since they felt they could outcompete many of their European rivals on an equal footing.

This was not the end of cooperation to be sure, but formal cooperation, the trademark of German industry over most of its history, lost much of its legal and institutional foundations through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the coming of the Common Market.