Press Release: Germany: Germany and France agree to create working group on industrial policy

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and President Jacques Chirac will be holding regular meetings with German and French industrial leaders in the future. Schröder announced this at a press conference held after an informal meeting with Chirac at a location near the border between the two countries. This was the nineteenth in a series of informal meetings between the German and French heads of government and their foreign ministers. These meetings are known as the 'Blaesheim Process', initiated in 2001 in the town of Blaesheim in the Alsace-Lorraine region of eastern France. These meetings are held at regular intervals, do not have a fixed agenda, and are an expression of the close cooperative relationship that exists between Germany and France