Bilderberg participants
Bilderberg participants
Retinger paints this portrait of Bilderberg participants : “Any citizen of a country that believes in defending Western ethical and cultural values and who himself shares these ideals, is eligible to be invited to Bilderberg meetings.” But, “the success of the meetings depends primarily on the level of the participants.” So 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 help to further the aims set by Bilderberg.” Retinger curiously omits specific mention of bankers, who are among Bilderberg’s most influential participants. Needless to say, when Retinger speaks of the “general opinion” he means only elite opinion. Retinger’s long-time secretary, John Pomian, observes:
....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 very 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.
Bilderbergers have played key roles in the development of the European Movement, the unsuccessful European Defence Community, and various organisations - ECSC, EEC, and EURATOM, the European Atomic Energy Commission - subsumed under the European Community. These supranational quasi-technical bodies have real powers of executive action which extend well beyond national political processes.
When the European Coal and Steel Community came into being in 1952, Jean Monnet became its “High Authority.” Max Kohnstamm, private secretary to Prince Bernhard’s mother-in-law, Queen Wilhemina, until 1948, and then head of the German Bureau of the Dutch Foreign Office and Dutch representative in the Schuman Plan (ECSC) negotiations, became “Secretary to High Authority” under Monnet. Monnet resigned from the ECSC in 1955 to push for further unification through his Action Committee for a United States of Europe (ACUSE).
Kohnstamm became the vice-president of ACUSE which had extensive overlaps with Bilderberg. In 1973 Kohnstamm became the first European chairman of the Trilateral Commission, until his resignation at the end of 1975.
George Berthoin is another important Bilderberger. He went from the prefecture of Alsace-Lorraine, France to become Monnet’s private secretary at the ECSC, 1951-55. Then he left to represent the ECSC and later the European Community in London. Berthoin has replaced Kohnstamm as European chairman of the Trilateral Commission.
Officials of the European Community – normally as the president goes - have attended all Bilderberg meetings. A few of these officials include: Walter Hallstein, first EEC president and former German Foreign Affairs Minister; Jean Ray, first president of the unified European Communities; and Rolf Dahrendorf, former Commissioner for External Affairs.
Similarly, officials from the OECD, NATO, the IMF, World Bank, and GATT regularly attend. It should come as no surprise, then, that when asked by Prince Bernhard’s biographer for an example of a Bilderberg accomplishment, steering committee member, George McGhee (past chairman of policy planning council in the State Department and then under-secretary of state for political affairs in the Kennedy Administration) replied: “I believe you could say the (1957) Treaty of Rome which brought the Common Market into being, was nurtured at these meetings.”
From the early 1960’s the OECD - Japan joined in 1964 - developed into an official forum in which the West worked out global economic issues before taking their common positions to negotiations and forums where Third World and socialist-bloc countries would be represented. Thorkil Kristensen , first OECD secretary general participated in Bilderberg meetings. With Bilderberg guidance, the OECD has solidified its role as the rich nations club; the Trilateral Commission has put forth recommendations for further enhancing the OECD’s role.
The European and US authors of The Reform of International Institutions,the 1976 trilateral report in which the OECD is discussed, are Bilderbergers: George Berthoin and Fred Bergsten, former US assistant secretary of the treasury for international affairs.
Let’s look more closely at how Bilderberg meetings function. At the meetings “subjects...are introduced by reporters’ who have prepared papers that are circulated before the meetings...A confidential report is drafted after each conference” for all living participants and past participants. “No names are mentioned,” just the speaker’s nationality and a short summary of his contributions. Speakers at the meetings are supposed to limit themselves to five minutes.
While some the participants have known each other for decades, efforts are made to deepen and broaden contacts among Bilderbergers. There is “the unwritten rule that anybody who has ever been to a Bilderberg Conference should be able to feel that he can, in a private capacity, call on any former member he has met.”
Moreover one sees “at lease twenty percent new faces at each meeting” which “makes possible an expanding continuation of association,” undoubtedly easing the difficulties of collective management of Western institutions in times of crisis. Informal discussions may well be more significant than formal discussions. “To establish closer contact between participants, it is considered of the utmost importance to have a hotel in a secluded location...at the exclusive disposal of the participants.” The only time participants left the Bilderberg Hotel at the first meeting was to go to Prince Bernhard’s palace for cocktails. The need for a secluded hotel is usually easily met by each national group that organises a conference, there being plenty of hotel-owning Bilderbergers (EG., the 1974 meeting was held at Edmond de Rothschild’s Mont d’Arbois Hotel, Megeve, France).
Bilderberg works through a consensus process rather than through formal resolutions and voting. Bilderbergers are in positions of such executive power that if a consensus is reached and acted upon, the advanced capitalist west is likely to act more or less as a unit. Where there is no such consensus, the real interests at stake, and the constantly repeated injunction not to act divisively can produce a similar cohesive effect. At the 1974 Bilderberg conference in France - six months after the October War and the oil price rise - a British keynote speaker gave “credit for the constructive handling of such a wide range of economic and monetary problems...to the emergence of transnational forces, ie, effective relationships among individuals and organisations in the private and public sectors.”
A German participant remarked:
Half a dozen knowledgeable people had managed, in effect, to set the world’s monetary system working again, (after the oil price rise quadrupled OPEC revenues) 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.