Bilderberg, China, and the Rulers of the World
The Bilderberg Group is a secretive, elite membership club that meets once every year. It started in 1954, inviting 30 members from the US, 80 from Europe, and 10 from international organisations, representing decision-makers of politics, diplomacy, the financial community, and the mass media. They book a hotel and discuss how the world should be. They met in a Catalonian seaside resort of Sitges in 2010, and the meeting was of course, undisclosed.
There is a strict non-discretion rule imposed on participants, therefore, nothing is beyond a rumour or unidentified speculation when it comes to what was discussed and agreed. It is nonetheless an important conference that influences the course of modernity. European integration, war on terror, invasion of Iraq, global climate change – many have been speculated that Bilderberg was the mastermind. It’s often observed to be the necessary ritual for leaders-to-be. Suspect attendees include Tony Blair right before becoming the Prime Minister, Bill Clinton before swearing in as the President. President Bush attended the Italy meeting in 2004, Secretary Rice and Chancellor Paulson attended in 2008 in Virginia. The 2009 meeting in Greece was attended by Secretary of Treasury Geithner and the World Bank president Zoellick. Geithner denied his attendance but his alibi during the two days was blank, and Zoellick doesn’t bother to lie.
If Geithner has indeed participated, then the reason is obvious. The grand theme of the 2009 meeting was the great depression triggered by US financial crisis. Geithner was summoned by the West’s elites to answer his economic policy.
The World Government, Really?
According to the Times of London, the Bilderberg secretariat had sent out a booklet containing essays for discussion. As a prescription for the global depression, it suggested two options. One was to endure the decade-long depression. The other was to end the depression earlier by structural transformation of the world economy which was to be accompanied by limited national sovereignty.
Most participants of Bilderberg are international capital owners and their advisors. The first option is inconceivable for them so the second option would be preferred. It was a conference of how to restrict the sovereignty of nation states in favour of more efficient world order.
This is not a revolutionary idea. Bilderberg has kept this idea of world government since 30 years. The basic outline is to expand the power of the UN and its agencies. The world economy will be more efficient than relying on the community of nation states. Frequent attendee PM Carl Bildt of Sweden argued that the WHO and the IMF should be promoted to World Government Ministry of Health and World Government Ministry of Treasury. It was coincided with the global epidemic of swine flu. Bilderberg certainly finds it favourable that the WHO now has increased normative authority in directing what the health offices of nation states should do. A number of conspiracy theory weblogs often claim pharmaceutical companies (Bilderberg members) spread the virus. Similar line of arguments can be found for the financial crisis.
The UN, under the current system, is financed by the maintenance fees paid by member states. It cannot assume superiority over nations. Bilderberg ponders to change this situation by carbon tax for petrol and solidarity tax for air tickets to finance the UN.
Capitalism Demands Growth
For the dissidents of Bilderberg, both from the left and right camps, criticise the new world order as a system of capital concentration to the Western capital owners while leaving the poor poorer. Liberals perceive it as a biumvirate order between Rockefeller (representing the US) and the Rothschild (representing Europe). In the conservative logic, Bilderberg is a conspirator organisation by Zionists and communists (note: to them both are Jewish).
But if the rich wishes to make more money, they don’t need to create a new world government. If Obama reverses Bush’s self-destructive policies to restore US hegemony, and if the G7 resists against the G20, the old Anglocentric world order will return. To me, Bilderberg’s world government aims to destroy this old order. If the emerging markets which were previously put in the periphery are integrated to the core of the world economy, the aggregate growth potential of the world will be higher.
Currently, the IMF is discussing the review of China’s voting rights. By IMF’s founding charter, voting rights are distributed according to the size and the maturity of the economy. For long, the US occupied the single largest voting share, followed by Japan and Germany. Nations are discussing whether to give China second largest voting rights by 2011. The veto right by the US (important issues must be supported by 85% of the votes thus the US with 17% of voting rights is the only veto state) is expected to be abolished too. Bilderberg wishes to transform the IMF to the world’s central bank, which will no longer be controlled by America and its allies but by the G2.
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz suggests IMF’s Special Drawing Rights to become the international reserve currency instead of the dollar. France and even Britain have shown interests in this ambitious plan.
Why is Bilderberg, a club of elites from the West, acting against the current Anglo-American world system? Do the international capital owners really wish development and profits in the US and Europe? If their primary interest is the development and profits in the global scale, the current petit equilibrium of Anglocentric world system should be replaced with the one in which developing countries can freely advance their economies. The old Anglocentric world was established by the free trade under the British Empire, whose benefits spilled to the US, Europe and Japan, and the rest was kept in poverty or contained as the Eastern Bloc. This petit equilibrium started to face limitations in the 1960s when the economies of the Triad matured. Grand strategists of Bilderberg felt the need for the transformation to the grand equilibrium such that the world economy would include the developing nations and the Eastern bloc. This was materialised by the Sino-US normalisation in the 1970s and the end of the cold war in the 1980s.
Is Bilderberg Neocon?
Popular conspiracy theory goes that only the super-elites are admitted to the covert meetings of Bilderberg, where they decide the actual dealings for the world. I disagree. Bilderberg was created by the British intelligence during the 1950s, in an attempt to lure the world elites to pro-British strategies in the cold war system. Now, Bilderberg speaks of the world government, which is effectively in conflict with Britain’s global political management. Participants of Bilderberg are not united in one agenda – they represent divergent political economic ideologies.
Mr. Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank Group and a regular participant of Bilderberg, is one of the quintessential neocon. He was hired by the military-industry complex during the late 1970s to reverse the détente. After the cold war, he was the man behind the draft concept of War on Terror – the second-coming of the cold war. His goal, however, doesn’t seem to revitalise the old Anglocentric world systems. As a deputy secretary of state in the Bush administration, he advocated to support China to become ‘a responsible superpower’ nation. If Bilderberg’s understanding of neoconservatism is the one based on Prof. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, their expectation is wrong.
Bilderberg, unlike the World Economic Forum, is reserved for Europeans and Americans. In the 1970s, Rockefeller tried to invite the Japanese to transform Bilderberg from a ‘Euro-American club’ to an ‘industrialised nations elite club’. But he couldn’t win the consensus, so he instead created the Triad Committee. An exception was Ms. Sadako Ogata, but she wasn’t invited as a Japanese representative but as an expert of refugee and interventions issues. It is also observed that Bilderberg aimed to bring China to might, but they have never invited the Chinese as regulars. The rise of China may not be the consequence of China’s own efforts but is the consequence of the strategy by the international capitalists.
The G7 has given its way to the G20, where the BRIC exerts much more influence. Similarly, Bilderberg is also losing its prowess. More opportunities are now available to more open and multiethnic fora such as the Davos Conference (in Switzerland) or its offshoot the Boao Forum (in Hainang, China).
Who Created the Bilderberg, After All? (note: this section is more speculative)
Bilderberg was held for the first time in Bilderberg Hotel in a Dutch city of Arnhem in 1954. The name got its root from this hotel. The organiser was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who owned the hotel. Prince Bernhard was a controversial figure in the Netherlands, with his origin in the German aristocracy, married the Dutch princess Beatrix (now Queen), flirted with Nazism, later changed his mind, and was known to have a flamboyant personality and aristocratic attitude. He was the chairperson of the Bilderberg until 1976, when he was involved in the Lockheed Scandal, in which he was said to have appropriated a million dollars to syndicate aircraft contracts.
Prince Bernhard was a mediator of the Bilderberg, but was not instrumental to the actual formation of the elite network. The origin of Bilderberg traces to the WWII, when the Polish and Belgian political exiles in Britain were put together by the Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), to discuss the post-war European politics. It was a useful continental network for Britain, who had an ambition to design the European economic integration. The first Bilderberg meeting was three years before the creation of the European Economic Community. Since the Napoleonic Wars, the primary purpose of the British intelligence in Europe had been ‘balance and rule’ so that no single power would challenge Britain again. Prince Bernhard’s creation of Bilderberg is a derivative of this political tradition. As a reward, the Prince was never questioned by the Allied nations about his past sympathy towards Germany and Nazism. His resignation as a chairperson in 1976 coincided with the downfall of many of the polypolarist politicians. (Though this happened a few years before), Nixon, who reconciled with China, was given the Watergate, and the Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka, who followed Nixon’s path with China, had to resign amidst his own involvement in the Lockheed incident. Similar government meltdown occurred in West Germany and Italy.
