Competition with China and the USA: With this industrial strategy Europe should catch up

  "In the end, EU Internal Market Commissioner Breton - apparently with the backing of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen - prevailed in many ways. According to the Commission's wishes, the EU should continue on the path to a more active industrial policy and intervene more strongly in the market, it is about the targeted government funding of certain branches of industry in order to keep production in the EU or to bring it back to Europe. 

  The model for this is the battery alliance, which the previous commission already announced. The Commission approved around 3 billion euros in government funding - including from Germany - in January. 

Breton is also driving a semiconductor alliance to boost production of the currently chronically scarce chips and to increase the EU's share of global production from 10 to 20 percent. 

He's working on an alliance for hydrogen. 

Other alliances for cloud applications, the use of industrial data, emission-free aviation, the pharmaceutical industry and space projects are to follow. 

“Alliances are a fantastic tool,” emphasizes Breton. According to Breton, the corona crisis has shown how dangerous it is when the EU becomes too dependent on foreign supply chains. This is not primarily about China. "We have learned that the partners of yore are not necessarily the partners of today," emphasized Breton, referring to the export restrictions for vaccines by the USA or Great Britain. The EU shouldn't be naive. 

Breton has therefore commissioned the responsible directorate-general within the Commission to check 5,200 imported products, from the preliminary product to the raw material - always from the point of view of whether the EU is too dependent on imports. According to the Commission, this is the case for 137. Almost half of them come from China, followed by Vietnam and Brazil. Depending on the product, countermeasures need to be taken, for example through our own extraction of raw materials, research, recycling, diversification of supply chains or industrial alliances. However, the dependency is only really problematic for just under 30 products, emphasized Dombrovskis. This is what the EU must concentrate on, he demanded, and in doing so easily differentiated itself from Breton. 

However, Breton does not have to expect any resistance from the federal government. Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) has long supported the approach of making the EU more autonomous with industrial alliances. The Federation of German Industries (BDI) praised the commission: "More resilience and more support in the ecological and digital transformation are the right levers." In addition, Chinese companies in key industries are heavily subsidized by the state. 

“If the EU just accepts it, then it will be left out in the long run,” warns Harald Fadinger, economics professor at the University of Mannheim. For too long the commission has been naïve that the market will fix it." 

Where is Lithuania's place in these plans? Will we make cheap furniture for the Germans and fight the Russians in words? Or maybe we will have enough brains to reorganize our life and participate in the pharmaceutical alliance? This should start now with universities.