[CTRL] The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification

[Kris Millegan]

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The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification

Mike Peters

Introduction


Despite their reputation for 'empiricism', British academics have tended
to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than
empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and
groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief
efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called 'Establishment' in
the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain became diverted from empirical
investigation of power, as the study of national and international
power-structures became conducted under the aegis of increasingly
abstract theoretical categories derived from Marxism, and in particular
by a wave of concepts based on Poulantzas's 'structuralist' critique of
Miliband, and was followed by ever more esoteric discussions of the
'theory' of the state (e.g. Jessop, 1990), culminating in the hegemony
of a post-Marxist version of Gramsci's conception of 'hegemony' - in
which 'struggle' is posited without any identifiable human beings as its
active protagonists, and with the stakes reduced to ideas rather than
concrete interests.

This was in sharp contrast with the USA, where the impetus of C. Wright
Mills's pioneering study of the network of interests involved in the
Cold War (Mills, 1956) was continued by a flourishing group of scholars.
There has been nothing in Britain of comparable scope or detail to the
work conducted in the USA by G. W. Domhoff, Thomas Dye, Mark Mizruchi or
Noam Chomsky, etc.

The present article is concerned with one specific facet of American
power-structure research which, I believe, has important implications
for the study of power in the UK. This is the subject of power-elite
networks and forums, conceptualised as arenas for the conduct of
intra-capitalist and inter-corporate strategic debates and long-range
social planning, from which wider 'democratic' interference is carefully
excluded.

The particular institution about which I will present information is the
so-called 'Bilderberg Group', which is an interesting example of this
kind of power-elite forum. It is one among a number of little-publicised
institutions which have played an important role providing a means for
debates and discussions to take place amongst different capitalist
groups and different national governments over long-term planning issues
and, especially, in Co-ordinating strategic policy at an international
level. Other such bodies on this trans-national scale include the
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the USA, with its UK sister
organisation, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (otherwise
known simply as Chatham House) and the Trilateral Commission (which its
elf grew out of Bilderberg meetings and has been essentially a more
globalist version of the latter, since it incorporates Japanese
representatives). Each of these bodies will be mentioned in what
follows.

One of the 'functions' such institutions appear to serve is that of
'mediating' between the economic interests of private capital and the
requirement of a general interest on the part of the capitalist class as
a whole. I shall suggest that much of the theorising about the 'state'
in the tradition of structural Marxism since the 1970s has confused this
relation between capital and national governments, owing to the tendency
to reify the abstraction called �the state' and posit it as enjoying a
virtual autonomy vis-�-vis capital; whereas the empirical evidence lends
more support to the rather hastily dismissed (and often grotesquely
caricatured) model called 'instrumentalism�.

To anticipate what will be said later, I believe that one of the key
assumptions often made by structural Marxists, namely that the
capitalist class is always divided into competing fractions which have
no mechanisms for co-ordination other than the state, is not empirically
sustainable. Part of this misconception, it could be said, derives from
an over-literal understanding of the concept of the 'market' as
constituting the only social relation amongst different fractions of
capital. At least as far as the very large, and above all, the
international (or as we would say in today's jargon, the �global�)
corporations are concerned, this is definitely not the case: very
sophisticated organs do exist whereby these capitalist interests can and
do hammer out common lines of strategy. Bilderberg is one of these
mechanisms.
The Context


As the second world war drew to a close, the capitalist class in Western
Europe was under severe threat from an upsurge of working class
radicalism, the management of which required a strategy more
sophisticated than conventional repression, and the first steps were
taken, by political panes of both left and right, to develop
'corporatist' programmes based on a kind of national protectionism. By
contrast, in the USA, the war had brought to dominance an
internationally-oriented capitalist class who saw very clearly that
their interests lay in a thorough 'liberalisation' (1) of the world
market, abolition of tariffs etc.. Only the false wisdom of hindsight
could make the eventual Atlantic Alliance system that emerged by 1950
seem preordained by 'objective' historical forces. Indeed, so used have
we become to hearing phrases like 'American imperialism' and witnessing
US interventions throughout the world that we can forget just how
difficult it was for this internationally oriented fraction of the
American capitalist class to impose its agenda upon the US state: the
deep-rooted tendency of American political culture has always been what
Europeans call Isolationist' and it took extensive political work to
drag the Americans into these foreign entanglements. In this paper I
will not be looking in any detail at how these interests influenced the
US government during and after the Second World War, but rather at how
they succeeded in effecting the integration of the Western European
capitalist class into a new Atlantic alliance system

The period 1945-50 is highly complex and debate still rages over the
origin and nature of the 'Cold War': for example over the degree to
which the US was acting offensively or defensively against a (real or
imagined) Soviet threat, as well as over the relation between the
external or geopolitical aspect of the Cold War on the one hand and its
domestic, ideological or 'class' aspect. And die recent work of. Alan
Milward, for example, has thrown into question many of the received
assumptions about the causes and consequences of the 'supranational'
institutions created in Europe in the aftermath of the war (Milward,
1984 and 1994; Anderson, 1996).

The beginnings of a clarification of these events were made with the
pioneering analysis of Kees Van der Pijl, in conjunction with other
Dutch Marxist scholars (Fennema, Overbeek etc.) ten years ago, together
with the detailed empirical work of US power-researchers (e.g. the
journal Critical Sociology). With the collapse of the USSR and the
subsequent 'coming out' of veteran anti-Communists now prepared to open
up some of their dubious accomplishments to outside scrutiny (Peter
Coleman, Brian Crozier e.g.), more direct documentary evidence of the
scope and intensity of covert US involvement in European politics in the
post-war period is now available.
The Marshall Plan and NATO


The official version of the history of the creation of the Atlantic
system reads like the 'lives and teachings of saints (Milward, 1992). in
these school textbook accounts, each of the pillars of the post-war
world order has its great founding father, whose photographs invariably
appear in magazine articles:

* the IMF and the World Bank are the work of Keynes

* European economic recovery is the work of General Marshall

* NATO is the work of Ernest Bevin, and

* the European Community is the work of Jean Monnet (with his faithful
discipline Schuman)

These are not just myths; they are, in intelligence parlance, more like
'cover stories'.

The Marshall Plan is named after the speech on June 5 1947 by US
Secretary of State Marshall, which invited European countries to join in
a co-operative plan for economic reconstruction, with explicit
requirements for trade liberalisation and increases in productivity.
Over the next ten months there emerged the Foreign Assistance Act of
1948, which set up the Economic Co-operation Agency (ECA) to administer
the European Recovery Programme (ERP) - the so-called 'Marshall Aid' -
which gave $13 billion in aid to 16 western European states. In four
years, the ECA was superseded by the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) in
1951 which in turn was transformed into the Foreign Operations Agency
(FOA) in 1954, later the International Co-operation Agency (ICA) in 1955
and finally the Agency for International Development (AID) in 196l
(Carew 1987 p. 6ff). it is generally recognised that this aid had a
decidedly militaristic purpose, being essentially a prerequisite for the
development of NATO. (2)

It is less generally acknowledged, however, that this unprecedented
exercise of international generosity (dubbed by Churchill the 'most
unsordid act in history') served direct economic purposes for the
internationally oriented US corporations which promoted it. William
Clayton, for example, the Under-secretary for Economic Affairs, whose
tour of Europe and letters sent back to Washington played a key role in
preparing the plan, and who pushed it through Congress, personally
profited to the tune of $700,000 a year; and his own company, Anderson,
Clayton & Co. secured $10 million of Marshall, Plan orders up to the
summer of 1949. (Schuman 1954 p. 240). General Motors similarly got $5.5
million worth of orders between July 1950 and 1951 (14.7% of the total)
and they Ford Motor Company got $1 million (4.2% of the total).
Roots in the Council on Foreign Relations


The origins of the Marshall Plan are in fact to be found in the 'War and
Peace Study Groups' instituted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
in 1939. (For the details see Shoup & Minter p. 117 ff). on December 6
1939 the Rockefeller Foundation granted the Council nearly $50,000 to
finance the first year of the project. Well over 120 influential
individuals (academics and business leaders), at least 5 cabinet levels
departments and 12 separate government agencies, bureaux or offices were
involved in this. There were altogether 362 meetings and no less than
682 separate documents produced. I find it frankly astonishing that
virtually none of the British academic scholarship on this period even
acknowledges the existence of the CFR, let alone the War and Peace Study
Groups. Evidence is surely required to show that they had no influence,
if that is what scholars believe.

The plan which Marshall presented in his speech had already been
outlined in the proposals of a CFR study group of 1946 headed by the
lawyer Charles M. Spofford and David Rockefeller, entitled
'Reconstruction in Western Europe'; and the specific proposal for
unifying the Western European coal and steel basin as a bulwark against
the USSR was made by John Foster Dulles in January 1947.

To trace the origin of the movement for European unification, however,
requires that we go back to May 8 1946 and an address given at Chatham
House by a Pole named Joseph Retinger. In this talk he outlined a plan
for a federal Europe in which the states would relinquish part of their
sovereignty. At the time, Retinger was secretary general of the
Independent League for European Co-operation (ILEC), run by the Belgian
Prime Minister Paul van Zeeland. During the war Retinger worked closely
with van Zeeland and other exile leaders who would become prominent in
the Bilderberg network, (including Paul Rijkens, whom we will meet again
shortly). (3) Out of these connections was born in 1942-3 the Benelux
customs union, a kind of prototype of the Common Market.

The ideas adumbrated by Retinger were not new: there is a whole history
of such projects for European unification and for even larger global
schemes. One might just note here the assumption of the need for a
'great power' status as well as the almost taken-for-granted racism
which informed Retinger's thinking:

'The end of the period during which the white man spread his activities
over the whole globe saw the Continent itself undergoing a process of
internal disruption........ there are no big powers left in continental
Europe....... [whose] inhabitants after all, represent the most valuable
human element in the world.' (Retinger 1946, p. 7)

Shortly after this speech, Retinger was invited by the US ambassador,
Averell Harriman, to the USA to secure American support for ILEC.

'I found in America a unanimous approval for our ideas among financiers,
businessmen and politicians. Mr Leffingwell, senior partner in J. P.
Morgan's [bank], Nelson and David Rockefeller, Alfred Sloan [chair of
General Motors], Charles Hook, President of the American Rolling Mills
Company, Sir William Wiseman, [British SIS and] partner in Kuhn Loeb
[New York investment bank], George Franklin and especially my old friend
Adolf Berle Jr [CFR], were all in favour, and Berle agreed to lead the
American section [of ILEC]. John Foster Dulles also agreed to help.
(Pomian 1972, p. 212)

Thus was formed the European Movement (whose first congress at the Hague
in 1948 is- the origin of the Council of Europe), which received
substantial contributions from US government secret funds as well as
private sources via the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE).
The names mentioned above are significant in the present context:
Leffingwell preceded John McCloy and David Rockefeller as CFR chair,
1946-53, and had been a CFR director since 1927, while Franklin was
executive director of the CFR 1953-7 and was later a Trilateral
Commission Co-ordinator: also, incidentally an in-law of the
Rockefellers.

US funding for the European Movement extended beyond 1952, most of it
going to the European Youth Campaign, initiated by John McCloy, whose
own career virtually personifies the Atlantic ruling class as a whole: a
corporate lawyer of relatively humble origins, he became, through his
contacts at Harvard, assistant Secretary of War 1941-45 and first
President of the World Bank (IBRD), which he revamped to suit the
interests of Wall Street; and then US High Commissioner for Germany
1949-52 (where, among other things, he enabled Krupp to regain control
of his steel companies, advising on the establishment of the
Krupp-Stiftung, modelled on the Ford Foundation - he was connected to
Adenauer through his German wife, whose sister married Lewis Douglas, J.
P. Morgan financier and later US ambassador to Britain), after which he
became a director of both the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Ford
Foundation in 1953. He was also an active member of the Bilderberg
Group, becoming chair of the Council on Foreign Relations itself.

As for ACUE, its chair was William Donovan (who ran OSS - forerunner of
the CLA during the war) and its vice-chair was Allen Dulles (who was a
leading figure in the CFR War and Peace Study Group during the early
part of the war, and later the director of the CIA); and it was run in
Europe by another CIA executive, Thomas W. Braden.
The Bilderberg Group


'The Treaty of Rome [1957], which brought the Common Market into being,
was nurtured at Bilderberg meetings.' (George McGhee, former US
ambassador to West Germany)

'Bilderberg' takes its name from the hotel, belonging to Prince Bernhard
of the Netherlands, near Arnhem, where, in May 1954 the first meeting
took place of what has ever since been called the Bilderberg Group.
While the name persisted, its meetings are held at different locations.
Prince Bernhard himself (who, incidentally, was actually German not
Dutch) was chair until 1976 when he was forced to resign because of the
Lockheed bribery scandal. The possible significance of this group may be
gleaned from the status of its participants: the membership comprises
those individuals who would, on most definitions, be regarded as members
of the 'ruling class' in Western Europe and North America-In particular,
the conferences brought together important figures in most of the
largest international corporations with leading politicians and
prominent intellectuals (in both academia and journalism).

Moreover, virtually all the European institutions we take for granted
today, or treat as if they 'emerged' as a matter of course, from the
ECSC, EEC and Euratom down to the present European Union, were
conceived, designed and brought into existence through the agency of the
people involved in Bilderberg.
Secrecy


What Gill has referred to, with disarming brevity, as its 'almost
completely secretive' character (Gill 1990, p. 129) is neither
incidental nor superficial but integral to its functioning. It is
essential that these discussions be kept out of the public sphere. The
lengths to which the organisers go are quite astonishing. An entire
hotel is taken over in advance (existing guests being moved out) and a
whole caravanserai, including special catering staff and armed security
guards, descend on the site several days in advance. I recommend the
amusing account by Robert Eringer - to my knowledge the only
journalistic investigation yet conducted (Eringer 1980). The maintenance
of this secrecy has been remarkably effective. In 1967, Cecil King, then
chair of the International Publishing Corporation (at the time the press
group with the largest circulation in the UK) and chair of the Newspaper
Proprietors Association, formally requested his fellow proprietors to
see to it that 'on no account should any report or even speculation
about the content of the conferences be printed' (quoted in Sklar 1980,
p. 178).

On one of the few occasions when Bilderberg meetings were mentioned in a
major British newspaper, the outcome was quite interesting. In the
'Lombard' column of the Financial Times, C. Gordon Tether wrote on May 6
1975: 'If the Bilderberg Group is not a conspiracy of some sort, it is
conducted in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation of one.'
In a column written almost a year later, for the March 3 l976 edition,
Tether wrote: 'The Bilderbergers have always insisted upon clothing
their comings and goings in the closest secrecy. Until a few years back,
this was carried to such lengths that their annual conclave went
entirely unmarked in the world's press. In the more recent past, the
veil has been raised to the extent of letting it be known that the me
etings were taking place. But the total ban on the reporting of what
went on has remained in force....Any conspiratologist who has the
Bilderbergers in his sights will proceed to ask why it is that, if there
is so little to hide, so much effort is devoted to hiding it.'

This column never appeared: it was censored by the Financial Times
editor Mark Fisher (himself a member of the Trilateral Commission), and
Tether was finally dismissed from the 'Lombard' column in August 1976.
What goes on at Bilderberg?


It is important at the outset to distinguish the active, on-going
membership from the various people who are occasionally invited to
attend. Many of those invited to come along, perhaps to report on
matters pertaining to their expertise, have little idea there is a
formally constituted group at all, let alone one with its own grand
agenda. Hence the rather dismissive remarks by people like sixties media
guru Marshall McLuhan, who attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1969 in
Denmark, that he was 'nearly suffocated at the banality and
irrelevance,' describing them as 'uniformly nineteenth century minds
pretending to relate to the twentieth century'. Another of those who
have attended, Christopher Price, then Labour MP for Lewisham West,
found it 'all very fatuous.... icing on the cake with nothing to do with
the cake.' (Eringer 1980, p. 26). Denis Healey, on the other hand, who
was in from the beginning and later acted as British convenor, says that
'the most valuable [meetings] to me while I was in opposition were the
 Bilderberg Conferences'. (Healey 1990, p. 195)

Bilderberg from the beginning has been administered by a small core
group, constituted since 1956 as a steering committee, consisting of a
permanent chair, a US chair, European and North American secretaries and
a treasurer. Invitations are 'only sent to important and generally
respected people who through their special knowledge or experience,
their personal contacts and their influence in national and
international circles can further the aims set by Bilderberg.'
(Retinger, cited in Sklar p. 168)

John Pomian, Retinger's secretary observed that:

'...during the first 3 or 4 years the all-important selection of
participants was a delicate and difficult task. This was particularly so
as regards politicians. It was not easy to persuade the top office
holders to come Retinger displayed great skill and an uncanny ability to
pick out people who in a few years time were to accede to the highest
offices in their respective countries today there are very few figures
among governments on both sides of the Atlantic who have not attended at
least one of these meetings.' (Pomian, pp. 254-5)

The Bilderberg discussions are organised on the principle of reaching
consensus rather than through formal resolutions and voting. Such is the
influence and standing of the active members that, if consensus for
action is arrived at, one might expect this to be carried out and the
resulting decision to be implemented in the West as a whole. But the
exact position of the group, and that of other such groups, is only
discernible by a close scrutiny of the specific careers and connections
of the individual participants. Here, one has to say that social
theorists seem convinced of the irrelevance of this kind of information,
which would be called 'prosopographic' (i.e. data pertaining to concrete
individuals, which companies they represent, their family connections
etc.). This is somewhat contradictory, of course, because in their
every-day roles, social theorists are just as interested in this kind of
information as anyone else, and display a keen sense of its political
relevance when it comes to conducting their own careers: but it has it
nonetheless become almost a matter of principle to denounce use of this
kind of data in social science itself. This tendency seems to come from
a reification of the concept of 'roles' (as if these were real rather
than constructs) and possibly from a functionalist assumption that
social systems are subject to laws; with concrete human actors having no
significance in shaping outcomes.
Origins of Bilderberg


The initiative for the first convocation came from Joseph Retinger, in
conjunction with Paul Rijkens, President of Unilever. Retinger has
already been introduced; and the significance of Unilever needs to be
examined briefly. Unilever is one of the largest and most powerful
multinational corporations in the world and one of the top European
capitalist companies. In the 1950's the advisory directors of Unilever
were as follows (and I'm drawing attention to the links with the
Rotterdam Bank and Philips, the electrical firm):

� H.M. Hirschfield: also on the board of Philips and Rotterdam Bank and
with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs during the war, and after it
Commissioner for the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands;

� K.P. Van der Mandel, also on the board of Rotterdam Bank;

� Paul Rijkens: also on the board of Rotterdam Bank;

� H.L. Wolterson: also chair of Philips and on the board of Heldring and
Pearson (linked with the Rotterdam Bank);

� P S.F Otten: also President of Philips (and married to a member of the
Philips family)

One of the unusual features of Unilever is its bi-national structure
(Stokman et al, 1985): it is a jointly-owned AngloDutch company, with a
50/r0 structure and a unitary board. This was a very useful device
during the war, when operations could be shifted easily from the
Netherlands to the UK. Philips had a similar arrangement under a Dutch
law called the Corvo Law, whereby in an emergency it could divide itself
into two parts, which it did when the Germans invaded: one with its HQ
in Germany and the other American. Both these parts got large military
contracts during the war, playing a role on both sides (Aaronovitch
1961, pp. 110-11). Unilever's financial advisers are the US investment
bank Lazard Freres, which handles the private financial affairs of many
of the world's wealthy families, including the Agnellis of Fiat. (See
Koenig, 1990, Reich. 1983, Business Week June 18 1984).

Unilever's chief adviser on international affairs was David Mitrany,
whose book, A Working Peace Svstem, published in 1943, secured him this
post. (He also worked for Chatham House). it was Mitrany who coined the
term 'functionalism' to refer to the strategy of supra-national
integration through a series of sectoral processes of
internationalisation, designed to set in motion an autonomous logic,
making inevitable further integration and ultimately making national
states obsolete (Groom and Taylor p. 125 ff.). In the post-war period
there were three basic models for European union: alongside the
'functionalists' (in this sense), were the 'inter-governmentalists'
(e.g. Spaak) and the 'federalists' (e.g. Monnet himself). In the 1960s
the functionalists used the slogan 'Atlantic Partnership' as the
framework for the integration or synchronisation of US and European
interests.

The immediate chain of events leading to the setting up of the first
conference was as follows. Prince Bernhard set off for the USA in 1952
to visit his old friend Walter Bedell Smith, director of the
newly-formed CIA. Smith put the organisation of the American end into
the hands of Charles D. Jackson (special assistant for psychological
warfare to the US President), who appointed John S. Coleman (president
of the Burroughs Corporation. and a member of the Committee for a
National Trade Policy), who in turn briefly became US chair of
Bilderberg.

Charles Jackson was president of the Committee for a Free Europe
(forerunner of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) whose extensive
operations financing and organising anti-Communist social democratic
political intellectuals has only recently been fully documented (see
Coleman 1989); and ran the CIA-financed Radio Free Europe in Germany.
Earlier he had been publisher of Fortune magazine and managing director
of Time/Life, and during the war was deputy head of psychological
warfare for Eisenhower. At the time of Bernhard's visit he was working
with a committee of businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic which
approved the European Payments Union.

It was thus a European initiative, and its aim was, in official bland
language, to 'strengthen links' between Western Europe and the USA. A
selected list of people to be invited to the first conference was drawn
up by Retinger, with Prince Bernhard and Rijkens, from the European
countries of NATO plus Sweden. The resulting group consisted of the
Belgian and Italian prime ministers, Paul van Zeeland and Alcide de
Gasperi (CDU), from France both the right wing prime minister Antoine
Pinay and the Socialist leader Guy Mollet; diplomats like Pietro Quaroni
of Italy and Panavotis Pipinelis of Greece; top German corporate lawyer
Rudolf Miller and the industrialist Otto Wolff von Amerongen and the
Danish foreign minister Ole Bjorn Kraft (publisher of Denmark�s top dai
ly newspaper); and from England came Denis Healey and Hugh Gaitskell
from the Labour Party, Robert Boothby from the Conservative Party, Sir
Oliver Franks from the British state, and Sir Colin Gubbins, who had
headed the Special Operations Executive (SOL) during the war.

On the American side, the members of the first Bilderberg assembly
included:

� George Ball, who was head of Lehman Brothers, a former high State
Department official, where he was architect of the policy of Atlantic
Partnership, and later member of the Trilateral Commission. Ball was
closely associated with Jean Monnet, owing to his work as legal counsel
for the ECSC and the French delegation to the Schuman Plan negotiations.


� David Rockefeller was the key American member of Bilderberg. Space
only permits the briefest sketch of his direct economic and political
involvements: head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, member of the Business Council, the US council of the
International Chamber of Commerce, and, of course, the founder of the
Trilateral Commission.

� Dean Rusk: US Secretary of State 1961-69, earlier President of the
Rockefeller Foundation 1952-60, having succeeded John Foster Dulles,
himself an earlier Secretary of State and - this is not at all a
coincidence - a close personal friend of Jean Monnet whom he had first
met at Versailles in 1918 as well as of Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary
of State and the true author of the Marshall Plan.

The final list was 67. Since then, the group enlarged somewhat, but the
steering group remained the same size. (4)

After Retinger's death in 1960, the role of secretary was taken over by
E. H. van der Beugel, who had headed the Dutch bureau for the Marshall
Plan and later became president of KLM airlines and the International
Institute for Strategic Studies in London. After the resignation of
Prince Bernhard, the role of chair was taken by British ex-prime
minister Lord Home.

The status of the group and its meetings is ostensibly 'private'. Gill
names it simply 'a private international relations council', but nothing
could be more misleading than this name private, unless in its sense of
�secret� When political leaders gather together with a view to arriving
at consensus, in conjunction with leaders of industry and finance and
press magnates and leading journalists, then this is not the same kind
of thing as an assembly of ordinary private citizens. The vocabulary of
pluralist political science ('lobbies', 'non-governmental organisations'
etc.) systematically distorts the actual power relations at work in
these different kinds of associations. It is even questionable whether
Bilderberg meetings are really 'private' in the legal sense of
non-governmental. Robert Eringer, for example, having received an
official reply that 'government officials attend in a personal and not
an official capacity', found that in fact officials had attended
Bilderberg conferences at government expense and in their official
capacity. The British Foreign Office responded to his queries by saying
'we can find no trace of the Bilderberg Group in any of our reference
works on international organisations', while he later learnt that the
Foreign Office had paid for British members to attend Bilderberg
conferences.

Van der Pijl's assessment of the role of Bilderberg seems about as
accurate as the available information would allow:

'Rather than constituting an all-powerful secret Atlantic directorate,
Bilderberg served, at best, as the environment for developing ideas in
that direction, and secrecy was necessary for allowing the articulation
of differences rather than for keeping clear-cut projects from public
knowledge. In this sense Bilderberg functioned as the testing ground for
new initiatives for Atlantic unity.' (Van der Pijl p. 183)

But on occasions the group is known to have exerted real power. An
(unnamed) German participant at the 1974 conference held six months
after the Arab Israeli War at Edmond de Rothschild's hotel at Megeve in
France, commented:

'Half a dozen knowledgeable people had managed, in effect, to set the
world's monetary system wolfing again [after OPEC's quadrupling of oil
prices], and it was important to try to knit together our networks of
personal contacts. We had to resist institutionalism, bureaucratic
red-tape, and the creation of new procedures and committees. Official
bodies should be put in the position of ratifying what had been jointly
prepared in advance.' (Sklar, p. 171)
The European 'Community'


The Treaty of Rome signed on March 25 1957 created the 'common market'
(the European Economic Community) and its roots were laid down in the
ECSC (the European Coal and Steel Community) established on April 18
1951, based on the Schuman Plan of May 9 1950 (Vaughan 1976, Milward
1984). It is not implausible to suggest that the route from the one to
the other in fact passed through the first five Bilderberg conferences,
May 1954 at Oosterbeek (Netherlands), March 1955 at Barbizon (France),
September the same year at Garmisch (Germany), May 1956 at Fredensborg
(Denmark) and finally in February 1957 at St. Simon's Island (Georgia,
USA); and that these secret meetings played a decisive role in
overcoming the opposing, centrifugal tendencies symbolised by the
collapse of the European Defence Community in 1954, the Hungarian
revolution and its suppression and the fiasco of the Anglo-French
adventure at Suez in 1956 - the last gasp of independent European
imperialism.

Even more important the 'protectionism' implicit in the European
unification project was successfully subordinated to the �liberalising�
hegemony of the Americans, through the close involvement of the key US
players at every stage. The evidence for this is entirely
circumstantial, and this hypothesis must remain speculative, but I
believe there is a prima facie case to launch an investigation. It
should be clear from the details recounted earlier that not all the
possible roads led to the Rome Treaty, and that there is far more to the
politics of European 'integration' than the legislative enactments
already known about.
Monnet's network


Monet himself, who mentions-neither Retinger nor Bilderberg in his
memoirs (Monnet 1978), cannot have been unaware of the activities of
these crucial constituents of his programme. However much he may be
portrayed in the hagiographies as a far-sighted idealist, Monnet was,
first and foremost, an international financier, with an extensive
network of connections on both sides of the Atlantic, occupying a
particular place in the configuration of capitalist interests forming
what Van der Pijl calls the Atlantic circuit of money capital (Van der
Pijl 1984). He was, for example, a close friend of all the key figures
in the US power structure; but, more importantly, his network centred
around the New York investment banks Lazard Freres (run by Andre Meyer
who was also on the board of Rockefeller's Chase International Bank),
and Goldmann Sachs, which, after the war gravitated into the Rockefeller
orbit. Monnet's right-hand man, Pierre Uri, was European director of
Lehman Brothers; and Robert Marjolin, one of Monnet's assistants in the
first modernisation plan, subsequently joined the board of the Chase
Manhattan Bank. Uri and Marjolin were also active in Bilderberg.

When Monnet resigned from his position of 'High Authority' in the ECSC
in 1955 to run his Action Committee for a United States of Europe
(ACUSE), his secretary at ECSC, Max Kohnstamm who had earlier been
private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina, (i.e. Prince Bernhard's
mother-in-law), and then Dutch representative in the Schuman Plan
negotiations, became the vice-president of ACUSE, which had extensive
overlaps with Bilderberg. Kohnstamm, for example, later became a member
of the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, and Georges
Berthoin, who was Monnet's private secretary at the ECSC 1951-55, took
over Kohnstamm's place on the Trilateral Commission in 197S. Francois
Duchene and Paul Delouvner, who both worked for ECSC in the fifties (and
joined the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s), Guy Mollet and Antoine
Pinay were in the Bilderberg network (5)
Europe since the fifties


It would be simply too large and complex a matter to trace the twists
and turns in the politics of European unification since the period from
the fifties to the present. Too much water has flowed under the bridge,
and it is doubtful that it is any longer even the same bridge, so many
times has Europe' or the European idea' had to be periodically
'relaunched'. Instead of even attempting this in broad outline, I will
draw attention very briefly to the role played by secretive and
unaccountable organisations of members of the European economic and
political elites.

One little-reported group, for example, which seems to wield immense
influence is the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). To my
knowledge there have only been two or three reports of this group in the
British press, and yet in articulating the demands and interests of the
largest and most powerful European multinational corporations, it surely
calls for close study. I suspect this is the same group as that
mentioned in passing in Charles Grant's biography of Jacques Delors.
Delors' arrival as European Commissioner in 198S, he says, could not
have occurred at a more propitious moment: he had spent the autumn of
1984 searching for a 'Big Idea' to relaunch the EEC.

'That autumn, in Brussels, Delors had met a group of officials and
industrialists brought together by Max Kohnstamm, who had been Monnet's
chief assistant. After Monnet's death in 1979, Kohnstamm had become one
of the guardians of the sacred name of federalism. The Kohnstamm group
advised Delors to make the internal market his priority and to lay down
a timetable of eight years (the life of two Commissions) for its
achievement...... At the same time Wisse Dekker, the chairman of
Philips, made several speeches calling for the EEC to remove its
internal barriers by 1990.' (Grant 1994, p. 66)

If this is in fact referring to the same group as that known as the
European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), then we have an example of
a continuity between the fifties and today. This ERT comprises the
chairs/CEOs of the leading European multinational corporations and it is
by no means a mere assembly of dignitaries. This is an extremely
powerful body. According to research conducted by the ASEED collective,
its reports feed directly into the European Commission decision making
process. One of its first reports, for example, entitled 'Missing
Links', urged the immediate construction of a series of large-scale
transport projects, including the Channel Tunnel. As well as Dekker of
Philips, other leading figures in the ERT are Agnelli of Flat,
Gyllenhammer of Volvo, and Denys Henderson of ICI.
Theoretical Excursus


A persistent problem with theories of power over the last 20 years has
been their lack of engagement with empirical evidence, compounded by the
demonstrable empirical ignorance of theorists. It is as if every
academic feels able to develop theories about power, and engage in
debates it, without any requirement for relevant information, or at any
rate with a tacit assumption that everyone at has such information.

One possible place to start an attempt to 'theorise' the role of
Bilderberg and other international power-elite forums, might be to
re-enter an old debate at the beginning of the present century: this is
the debate between Lenin and Kautsky over imperialism.

Lenin�s theory of imperialism sought to explain the first world war by
reference to what he called inter-imperialist rivalries. While this
theory has had an enormous influence during this century (it under-pins,
for example, much contemporary discussion of the relations between 'the
West' and the 'Developing World, in which it is assumed that power
operates between geographically-defined regions, and that nation-states
act at the behest of nationally-based capitalist classes), it is
nevertheless demonstrably false in a number of crucial particulars. For
example, one of the difficulties in Lenin's theory is reconciling it
with the increasing interpenetration of national economies by
trans-national capitalist blocs. To put this issue simply: wars take
place between states, but inter-capitalist rivalries do not necessarily
coincide with the territories between states, especially where
international or trans-national corporations have developed. The
material presented here, I would suggest, is of just this kind: it shows
an inter-penetration of capitalist interests between the USA and Western
Europe, and indicates a field of 'political struggle' within and between
states, entirely outside that of the public sphere.

What is far less well-known today, however, is Kautsky's alternative
conception which explicitly addressed this issue, and can be summed up
by his notion of ultra-imperialism (Fennema, 1982). The simple
hypothesis is that rival capitalist interests may, at least for a time,
be able to coalesce into a relatively unified hegemonic bloc. Now this
idea of a tendency towards stabilisation on a global scale may sound
unrealistic today, but arguably this was what was achieved for fifty
years, at least in the American-dominated half of the world, after 1945.
It could even be said that the demise of the other half permits its
universalization. Where are the 'inter-imperialist rivalries in the
world today'?
Silence of the Academics


When first asked for a title for this paper, I briefly entertained the
idea of using the above sub-heading, (paraphrasing a recent film-title),
and I do believe it is important to ask why certain topics rather than
others are deemed worthy of investigation. The material presented here
is certainly 'dated' and therefore unfashionable, but similar
information about the present could be investigated. It is surprising
and somewhat depressing that such investigations no longer seem to be
being carried out in universities today. (6) Academics often represent
themselves somewhat flatteringly as 'critical' intellectuals,
independent from or even determinedly opposed to the established systems
of power in society, willing to face personal or professional risks in
the pursuit of truth. Maybe they are more like lambs.
Footnotes


(1) The term 'liberal' signifies policies opposed to restrictions on
international trade. The distinction between 'free trade' and
'protectionism' in international trade does not correspond exactly with
the theoretical opposition of 'competition' and 'monopoly'. None of
these concepts have straightforward empirical reference. The 1992 NAFTA
(North American Free Trade Agreement) for example, is in fact profoundly
'protectionist' in relation to such matters as intellectual property
rights (software, patents for seeds, drugs etc.) with elaborate 'rules
of origin' designed to keep out foreign competitors etc. see Dawkins
1993.

(2) If the Marshall Plan had military objectives (containment of Soviet
influence) as much as economic ones (creation of markers for US
industry), then NATO has a civilian, political and ideological role as
much as a military one. NATO has been relatively neglected by students
of 'supranational' organisations, and it is often Presumed to be just a
treaty rather than a quasigovernmental organisation in its own right.
Its highest political body, the North Atlantic Council, covers foreign
policy issues as well as strictly military questions, and the North
Atlantic Assembly works to influence the parliamentary members of
individual countries. It falls within the brief of NATO to conduct
propaganda and defend states the 'infiltration of ideas'. Few citizens
of NATO countries are aware of the whole apparatus to which membership
commits them - e.g. Plans 10 G and 100-1 under which in 'emergency
situations' special US units would be activated to suppress any movement
'threatening to US strategic interests'.

(3) It is extremely difficult to define the exact status of Retinger.
One Polish war-time exile leader has been quoted as saying that Retinger
was 'suspected of being in close touch not so much with British politics
as with certain of its discrete institutions'. Presumably SIS. See
Korbonski p. 20.

(4) Later American participants included Robert MacNamara, US Secretary
of Defence under Kennedy and Johnson (earlier chair of the Ford Motor
Company, and later President of the World Bank); and McGeorge Bundy, who
worked on the Marshall Plan, was US National Security Adviser and later
special foreign policy adviser to Kennedy and Johnson 1960-65, and
became President of the Ford Foundation 1966-79. His brother, William
Bundy, was with the CIA 1951-61 and later managed the CFR journal
Foreign Affairs from 1979, after working at the Pentagon 1964-69. He
married Dean Acheson's daughter. Finally, all three Directors of the CIA
in this period were also members of Bilderberg: Allen Dulles (John
Foster Dulles's brother), John McCone and Richard Helms. Needless to say
, all these figures were also members of the CFR. For more details of
participants see the essay by Thompson in Sklar ed. 1980, and Eringer
1980.

(5) Pinay, who was French Prime Minister in 1951, figures rather
allusively in Brian Crozier's memoirs (Crozier, 1993 ch. XV) as the
eminence grise of the controversial 'Pinay Cercle', an anti-communist
intelligence outfit in the 1970s and 80s (Ramsay & Dorril 1986, p. 39
and Teacher 1989).

(6) It is ironic that while the initial research which discovered the
existence of the Bilderberg network and explored its ramifications
within the power structure of Atlantic capitalism came entirely from
Marxist and left-inclined scholars in the USA, the whole subject has now
been virtually taken over by the US far right as the centre piece of its
own bizarre world-view. These writers of the far right (Anthony Sutton,
Lyndon La Rouche, Spool and the Liberty Lobby etc.) have added virtually
nothing to our understanding or knowledge of the phenomenon, and
accordingly, are not referenced in the bibliography below. They have,
however, contaminated the topic with their confusion. Since around the
mid-1980s, the American Left has dropped the whole issue like a hot
potato. For a singular exception sec Brandt 1993, which is essentially a
response to Bcrlet, 1992.
Bibliography


Aaronovitch, Sam The Ruling Class, Lawrence & Wishart 1961

Anderson, Perry 'Under the Sign of the Interim', London Review of Books,
4 January 1996

Ayala, Cesar J. 'Theories of Big Business in American Society' Critical
Sociology, Vol.16 No. 2-3, Summer-Fall 1989

Beret, Chip Right Woos Left, Political Research Associates, October 1992


Brandt, Daniel 'Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite', NameBase
Newsline, October- December, 1993

Businessweek, June 18 1984

Carew, Anthony Labour under the Marshall Plan Manchester University
Press, 1987

Chomsky, Noam Necessary Illusions, South End Press, 1989

Chomsky, Noam What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian Press, 1993

Chomsky, Noam Secrets, Lies and Democracy, Odonian Press, 1994

Chomsky, Noam Powers and Prospects, South End Press, 1996 Coleman, Peter
A Liberal Conspiracy, Macmillan 1989

Crozier, Brian Free Agent, Harper Collins, 1993

Cumings, Bruce 'Chinatown: Foreign Policy and Elite Realignment' in
Ferguson, Thomas & Rogers, Joel (ads.) The Hidden Election, Random
House, 1981

Hawkins. Kristin NAFTA: The New Rules of Corporate Conquest Open
Magazine, 1993

Domhoff, G. William The Power Elite and the State, Aldine de Gruyter,
1990

Eringer, Robert The Global Manipulators, Pentacle Books, 1980

Fennema, Meindert International Networks of Banks and Industry Maninus
Nijhoff, 1982

Fennema, Meindert & van der Pijl, Kees 'International Bank Capital and
the New Liberalism' in Mizruchi, Mark & Schwartz, Michael (eds.)
Inter-corporate Relations, Cambridge University, 1987

Freitag, Peter J. 'The Cabinet and Big Business: A Study of Interlocks',
Social Problems Vol. 23, 1975

Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society, Polity Press, 1984

The Nation-State and Violence, Polity Press, 1985

Gill, Stephen American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge
University Press, 1990

Grant, Charles Delors, Nicholas Brealey, 1994

Groom. A. J. R. & Taylor, Paul beds.) Frameworks for International
Co-operation, Pinter, 1990

Hatch, Alden HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Harrap, 1972

Healey, Denis The Time of My life, Penguin, 1990

Isaacson, Walter and Thomas, Evan The Wise Men, Simon & Schuster, 1986

Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri The CIA and American Democracy Yale University
Press, 1989

Jessop, Bob State Theory, Polity Press, 1990

Koenig, Peter 'A prince among bankers who wears Lazard's triple crown'
Independent on Sunday, 11 February 1990

Korbonski, Stefan Warsaw in Exile, Allen and Unwin, 1966

Milward, Alan The Reconstruction of Federal Europe, Methuen, 1981

The European Rescue of the Nation State, Routledge, 1992

Milward, Alan et al The Frontier of national Sovereignty, Routledge,
1994

Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 1956

Mizruchi, Mark The American Corporate Network 1904-1971 Sage, 1982

Monnet, Jean Memoirs Collins, 1978

Pisani, Sally The CIA and the Marshall Plan University of, Edinburgh
Press, 1992

Pomian, John (ed.) Joseph Retinger: Memoirs of an Eminence Grise Sussex
University Press, 1972

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril, Stephen Lobster 11, April 1986

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril, Stephen 'The Pinay Circle' Lobster 17, 8
November 1988

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril Stephen 'In a Common Cause: the AntiCommunist
Crusade in Britain 1945-60' Lobster 19, May 1990

Reich, Cary Financier: the biography of Andre Meyer Quill, 1983

Retinger, Joseph The European Continent? Hodge, 1946

Schuman, Frederick The Commonwealth of Man Robert Hale 1954

Shoup, Laurence H. & Minter, William Imperial Brain Trust Monthly Review
Press, I977

Sklar, Holly (ed.) Trilateralism South End Press, l980

Stokman. Frans et al. (eds.) Networks of Corporate Power Polity Press,
1985

Teacher, David The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe' Lobster
18, October 1989

Tether, C. Gordon The Banned Articles of C Gordon Tether Hetheringstoke,
1976

Van der Pijl, Kees The Mating of an Atlantic Ruling Class Verso, 1984

Vaughan, Richard Post-War Integration in Europe Edward Arnold 1976
Preceeding article is copyright The Lobster, a most readable
intelligence oriented journal from Humberside in North East England


Contact: Robin Ramsay (Dept. W)
214 Westbourne Avenue
Hull HU5 3JB
United Kingdom

UK tel: 01482 447558
Int'l tel: +44 1482 447558

Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]



------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Uniting the West' - by Denis Healey (extract)

>From his autobiography 'The Time of My Life'.  Published by Penguin,
1989.


[Talking about contradictions in the post-war Labour party]

Before long a benign providence developed another mechanism for
assisting impecunious European socialists to learn something of the
outside world - the international conference.  Konigswinter performed
this function for Germany. The Council of Europe covered Western Europe
as a whole.  The NATO Parliamentarians Conference brought politicians
from Europe, the United States, and Canada together once a year.  Before
long there was also an annual meeting in Bermuda of British MP's and
members of Congress. Then the great American foundations of Ford and
Rockefeller took a hand.  There was a proliferation of cultural
conferences in all parts of the world, including the Congress for
Cultural Freedom, where I could meet people less directly involved in
politics such as the poet Stephen Spender, the philosopher Raymond Aron,
and the novelist Mary McCarthy. I later discovered that the Congress for
Cultural Freedom, like Encounter magazine, was financed by the CIA; both
nevertheless made a useful contribution to the quality of Western life
at that time.

Of all these meetings, the most valuable to me while I was in opposition
were the Bilderberg Conferences - so called after the Bilderberg Hotel
near Arnhem, where the first was held in 1954.  They were the
brain-child of Joseph Retinger, a Pole who had settled in England after
the Great War, married the daughter of the socialist intellectual, E.D.
Morel, and worked as a secretary to Joseph Conrad, another Polish
ex-patriate.

Retinger was a small wizened man, with a pince-nez on a wrinkled brown
face.  He was crippled by polio. During the war he had been an aide to
General Sikorski, and despite his extreme physical disability was
parachuted into Poland to make contact with the Home Army.  After the
war he organised the Congress of the Hague, which launched the European
Movement.  Convinced of the need for a similar forum to strengthen unity
between Europe and North America, he approached Hugh Gaitskell, General
Colin Gubbins, who had commanded SOE during the war, and several leading
politicians and businessmen who were concerned to strengthen Atlantic
cooperation.  They asked Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to act as
Chairman, because they rightly thought it would be difficult to find
a politician whose objectivity would be above suspicion, and who could
call Cabinet ministers from any country to order without causing
offence.

I was invited to the first meeting and later acted as convener of the
British who attended; Reggie Maudling and I were the British members of
the Steering Committee.  Retinger and his successor, the Dutch Socialist
Ernst van der Beughel, who later became Chairman of KLM, were
extraordinarily successful in persuading busy men to give up a weekend
for private discussions, though they found it more difficult to attract
ministers than politicians out of office.

The Bilderberg conferences inevitably aroused jealousy, because they
were exclusive, and suspicion, because they were private.  In America
they were attacked as a left-wing plot to subvert the United States, in
Europe as a capitalist plot to undermine socialism.  They were neither.
 Immense care was taken to invite a fair balance from all political
parties, and to include trade unionists as well as businessmen.  Though
the discussions were more carefully prepared than at many such meetings
- I myself wrote a paper for most conferences - their real value, as
always, was in the personal contacts made outside the conference hall.
 Industrialists like Gianni Agnelli and Otto Wolf von Amerongen had to
listen to socialists and trade unionists - and vice versa.  Experience
has taught me that lack of understanding is the main cause of all evil
in public affairs - as in private life.  Nothing is more likely to
produce understanding than the sort of personal contact which involves
people not just as officials or representatives, but also as human
beings.  That is why the Commonwealth Scholarships, which bring students
from America and the Commonwealth to Britain, have made a contribution
to good relations between the Anglo-Saxon democracies out of all
proportion to their cost.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris

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