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Financial Times FT.com

Power players gather to run the world

By Daniel Dombey in Brussels

Published: May 1 2005 19:42 | Last updated: May 1 2005 19:42

Behind closed doors in a Bavarian hotel, a group of powerful men and women will this week debate the future of the world.

The 120-strong gathering, known as the Bilderberg group after the Dutch hotel where it first met in 1954, has spawned countless conspiracy theories, fuelled by the gathering's off-the-record nature and the renown of its participants.

The group's steering committee includes Josef Ackermann of Deutsche Bank; Jorma Ollila of Nokia; Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser; Vernon Jordan, the confidant of former US president Bill Clinton; Jürgen Schrempp of DaimlerChrysler; Peter Sutherland of Goldman Sachs International; Daniel Vasella of Novartis; and James Wolfensohn of the World Bank.

Guests speakers have included Alan Greenspan, US Federal Reserve chairman, and Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence.

The wilder corners of the world wide web have speculated that projects such as the euro and the European Union itself have been hatched by the Bilder-bergers.

But the aim of the group's organisers is more modest than the hectic cyber-chatter might suggest. They see it as a forum in which officials, academics and businessmen from both sides of the Atlantic can speak frankly and come to understand each other a little more.

They have wrestled with many of the world's biggest topics from the rise of south-east Asia in 1956, to the technological gap between the US and Europe in 1967, to corporate fraud in 2004.

“It's not a capitalist plot to run the world,” says Etienne Davignon, Bilderberg's unpaid chairman and a former vice-president of the European Commission. “If we really believed we were running the world we would immediately resign in complete despair.”

For business people, a big attraction is the chance to make the kind of informal contacts that can be hard to achieve at other gatherings, where aides are likely to be present. This is particularly true for European executives who tend to be less well acquainted with political figures than their US counterparts.

However, despite the insistence that Bilderberg does not set out to shape a consensus among the world's movers and shakers, Mr Davignon and his predecessors have tried to steer the group towards the broad conclusion that Europe and the US need to engage more.

The hope is that even the most recalcitrant politicians and executives often specially selected by the steering committee will embrace a more collaborative approach.

The collective meals, the traditional informality the sports jackets of 20 years ago have been replaced by open-necked shirts and the ban on spouses are all meant to boost a spirit of camaraderie.

It does not always work. In 2003, tensions over the Iraq war boiled over, although last year's meeting was a calmer affair.

This year's event will open with a discussion chaired by Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, on the meaning of “freedom” - a hot topic since President George W. Bush's liberal use of the word in his inauguration speech sparked off speculation about a worldwide US agenda for regime change.

Natan Sharansky, the author of Mr Bush's favourite book on democracy, will participate, as will Bernard Kouchner, the founder of the charity Medecins sans Frontières and former United Nations envoy to Kosovo.

Other panels during the long weekend that stretches from Thursday dinner to Sunday lunch will address issues such as non-proliferation, the role of Russia, Israel-Palestine, US attempts at social security reform and Europe's benighted Lisbon agenda for economic liberalisation.

“We actually met in the late 1990s to see if we should still bother to have meetings now that the Berlin wall had fallen,” says Martin Taylor, Bilderberg's secretary-general and a former chief executive of Barclays. “But we decided rather presciently that the security issues had not gone away. The transatlantic relationship is not something to take for granted.”

The beginning of this century also saw the group reach out to the US's newly empowered Republicans, a move that caused some mutterings about the influence of neo-conservatives.

Yet figures such as Paul Wolfowitz, the controversial incoming president of the World Bank, are long-standing members, while a broad mass of participants from both Europe and the US have more traditional Atlanticist views.

As the years have passed, Bilderberg has softened its original focus on security and encompassed more economic and business themes.

Yet Mr Davignon believes that the task of eradicating the caricatures Europeans and Americans have of each other remains as vital as it was half a century ago.

“One rediscovers things occasionally,” he says, referring to the interplay of business and politics and the mutual dependence of Europe and the US. “Then when you look at them more deeply, you find out that they have always been there.”

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