Prince of Belgium have both attended, as have more unlikely candidates such as Jonathon Porritt from Friends of the Earth. There’s no suggestion that Prince Charles has joined the club yet.
Members of the Bilderberg Group stress that it’s only an upmarket talking-shop, but it’s hard to believe that members do not influence each other or that the guest list is not manipulated to put the right people together. Will Hutton, editor of the
If Hutton is correct, then the Group will have surpassed its creators’ intentions. The original aim was to bring America and a united Europe closer together in the face of the emerging threat from Stalin’s Soviet Union and post-war anti-American feeling. The first meeting was masterminded by one Joseph Retinger, a Polish American with contacts in the top ranks of governments and the military, who believed peace was too important to be left to democratic means and was best brokered by powerful multinational organizations. The chosen group met in May 1954 at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeck, near Arnhem, and was hosted by former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.
Since then it has met annually, and occasionally twice a year, to encourage trans-Atlantic co-operation, always with the CIA on hand to handle security (guaranteed to get any conspiracy theorist’s blood racing) and sheltered from prying eyes by a self-imposed ban by the world’s media; newspaper editors and media moguls are also invited to attend. It is this need for absolute privacy which seems to stick in the throats of Bilderberg’s critics. Tony Gosling, a former journalist and organizer of an anti-Bilderberg website, puts his fears succinctly: “My main problem is the secrecy. When so many people with so much power get together in one place I think we are owed an explanation of what is going on… One of the first places I heard about the determination of the US forces to attack Iraq was from leaks that came out of the 2002 Bilderberg meeting.”
According to conspiracy-theory students David Southwell and Sean Twist, the way the secrecy is maintained also suggests there is more than a polite discussion of current affairs going on behind those closed doors. They cite the occasion of the 2003 Bilderberg meeting in Versailles, which almost coincided with the beginning of a Group of Seven meeting of finance ministers in nearby Paris. The proximity of the two events made local French security police uneasy and they tried to have the Bilderberg meeting cancelled. Someone in the force even went so far as to leak an internal memo complaining of the huge numbers of mercenaries being used to protect members, and hinted they believed the event was merely a front for something “much more sinister”.
On the other hand, defenders of the Group would say that, in the face of often biased reporting from the world’s press, business leaders and politicians have much to gain from being able to voice opinions freely without the risk of their views being taken out of context, and it is this honesty which allows a greater understanding of political situations to be reached.
Is the average citizen to assume, then, that all that happens at the Bilderberg’s meetings is talk with no action? Some credit the Group with responsibility for the creation of the Treaty of Rome in 1957; only 18 months earlier, the Group’s 1955 meeting had concluded there was a pressing need for a closely knit European market. Others say that the 1996 delegation, which included Valery Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Kohl, Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher, plotted the war in Kosovo that would ultimately bring down Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, a view apparently broadcast by Serbian news agencies at the time.
On other occasions it would appear that a mere invitation is enough to set a train of events in motion. Bill Clinton was brought to the 1991 meeting in Germany when Governor of Arkansas; two years later he was US President. Tony Blair got his call to address the meeting in 1993. Good talent-spotting on the part of the Bilderberg committee, or a cynical boost to those politicians whose views are friendly to big business?
As the machinations of multinational boardrooms remain beyond the realm of “public interest”, there is no way of telling what effect the Group’s meetings have had on the business and financial worlds. Company directors are not democratically elected and are accountable only to their shareholders, but the same cannot be said of the politicians who count themselves as Bilderbergers. These people are the democratic leaders of the Western world, accountable to millions of people and supposedly upholders of free speech and open government. Why then would they need to discuss major issues “off the record”? The answer may lie in the very economic system which they claim is integral to democracy. As conspiracy-theory journalist Alasdair Spark says, “The idea that a shadowy clique is running the world is nothing new… Shouldn’t we expect that the rich and powerful organize things in their own interests? It’s called capitalism.”
Brian Crozer,
Robert Eringer,
Dennis Healey,
Robin Ramsay,
David Rockefeller,
Jon Ronson,
www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3773019.st m
www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas /4290944.stm
DOCUMENT:
Delegates & Agenda, 47th Bilderberg Meeting, June 3–6 1999
The forty-seventh Bilderberg Meeting was held at the Caesar Park Hotel, Penha Longa, Sintra, Portugal, from June 3–6 1999. There were 111 participants from 24 countries. The participants represented government, diplomacy, politics, business, law, education, journalism and institutes specializing in national and international studies. All participants spoke in a personal capacity, not as representatives of their national governments or employers. As is usual at Bilderberg Meetings, in order to permit frank and open discussion, no public reporting of the conference took place.
This booklet is an account of the 1999 Bilderberg Meeting and is distributed only to participants of this and past conferences and to prospective participants of future conferences. It represents a summary of the panellists’ opening remarks for each session, and of the comments and interventions in the subsequent discussion.
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Participants
HONORARY CHAIRMAN
Etienne Davignon Chairman, Societe Generale de Belgique
HONORARY SECRETARY GENERAL
Victor Halberstadt Professor of Economics, Leiden University
PARTICIPANTS
Umberto Agnelli Chairman, IFIL-Finanziaraia di Partecipazioni
Esperanza Aguirre y Gil de Biedma President of the Spanish Senate
