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http://www.angelfire.com/wv2/blueridgeprint/
THE ANGLO-AMERICAN BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER,
A WORLD FEDERAL UNION CALLED - the UNITED STATES OF MAN (originally entitled UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN) - by Clarence K. Streit, 1941, author also of UNION NOW
This work, at the outset of Hitler’s rise, led to the establishment of the United Nations and its relevance to post-9/11 geo-political foreign policy by the governments of the United States and Great Britain is evident--the precise formula being executed by Bush and Blair governments!
UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN was Streit’s second edition and expanded version of UNION NOW, which was widely distributed and read during WWII in America and England, what George Orwell called “this much-discussed book”.
Now more obscure, this publisher, upon discovery, saw immediately the relevance of this book to post-9/11 events and thought it needed new distribution to warn of this master blueprint for Novus Ordo Seclorum—a new world order. The relevance of UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN can be readily observed by the Bush-Blair response and Anglo-American governments coalition to launch a global “War on Terrorism” to ”reorder the world” after September 11, 2001 under the guise of establishing “democracy”, “peace”, and “freedom” in the world.
NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM: PAX AMERICANA (Union Now with Britain)
Read this historical treatise and see how the events of 9/11 have accelerated this blueprint for an American-led new world order!
"Out of these troubled times [Iraq/Kuwait conflict], our fifth objective -- a new world order can emerge: a new era...We're now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders." September 11, 1990 - Iraq Speech by President George H. W. Bush
"Our mission is clear: to rid the world of evil" - Pres. George W. Bush, post-Sept. 11, 2001
"Out of the shadow of this evil [9/11], should emerge lasting good... This is a moment to seize...let us re-order this world around us." - British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Oct. 2, 2001 (BBC)
http://www.angelfire.com/wv2/blueridgeprint/
The Bilderberg Group & the project of European unification
Nato=Nazi - link four - click here for next
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The Bilderberg Group and the project of
European unification
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 itself 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-à-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.
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 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).
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 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.
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 meetings 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.
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.
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 daily 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 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.
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)
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.
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'?
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.
(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.
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
Contact: Robin Ramsay (Dept. W)
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UK tel: 01482 447558
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The Single Market programme was the 1980's relaunch of the economic and ultimately political integration of Europe. So-called Father of the EU, [see Mike Peters' paper for more on his role] Jean Monnet, had always felt it crucial to rein back big business. The single market programme turned this policy on its head. The relaunch document (see below) was prepared by Philips Industries in Holland and researched by unnamed Philips staff. The staff were told to "imagine yourselves to be dictators of Europe."
Few realise how pivotal the 2000 Bilderberg chairman, Viscount Etienne Davignon, was in this process. As European Commissioner for Industry and the Internal Market from 1977 to 1980 he was perfectly placed to put big business in the driving seat of European policy. In 1985, as Industry Commissioner, he challenged Pehr Gyllenhammar, CEO of Volvo, (also administrator of United Technologies, Vice President of the Aspen Institute and one of the five partners of Kissinger Associates) to organise a group of the top European businessmen to lobby the Commission. Davignon argued that the Commission would be obliged to respond to the demands of some of the largest European industrialists. The Gyllenhammar group was to become the highly influential European Round Table of Industrialists or ERT, drawing up policy for Europe.
On January 11, 1985, in Brussels, Wisse Dekker, CEO of Phillips, unveiled a plan, "Europe 1990", before an audience of 500 people including many of the newly appointed EC commissioners. The plan laid out in precise terms the steps needed in four key areas - trade facilitation (elimination of border formalities), opening up of public procurement markets, harmonization of technical standards, and fiscal harmonization (elimination of the fiscal VAT frontiers) -- to open up a European Market in five years. For the first time a plan was produced which identified some 50 measures needed to eliminate non-tariff barriers to trade and to relaunch the European Market. The Dekker paper was revolutionary -- not only because it was proposed by the head of a major multinational, but because it produced what had escaped national and European policymakers -- a simple plan for a unified market.
The Dekker paper was an internal Philips project led by Dekker's government affairs representative in Brussels, Coen Ramaer. It was the result of the company's growing dissatisfaction with the inability of government officials -- national or EC -- to produce a concrete proposal for a European market. While Mitterrand was promoting an industrial initiative, there were no specifics to the French President's plan. Moreover, when the Commission did produce a comprehensive package of proposals in late 1984, there was no outpouring of support for the initiative. The Commission document developed by Commissioner Narjes listed hundreds of pre-existing pieces of legislation -- ranging from standardisation to social actions to environmental issues -- deemed necessary for the creation of an internal market. Business leaders, while pleased that a package was produced, found the Commission package "unwieldy" and lacking "a precise time-table." Moreover, there was no strategy to ensure its implementation and no rationale for industrial growth. It became apparent to the heads of multinationals that industry needed to produce its own concrete program.
With Dekker's support, Ramaer assembled four Philips experts who had long dealt with the four key areas later outlined in the Dekker speech. As Ramaer explains, he instructed the men to:
"imagine yourselves to be dictators of Europe and that you have decided that the job must be done in five years. And they [the experts] started out "but this is impossible! Be realistic!" And I told them that I couldn't care less if we were realistic or not.Once they had picked up this idea, they found it fascinating. And they discovered that it could be done -- given the political will, of course." [Interview, September 24th 1992]
Some of the experts set up informal meetings with their counterparts in the Commission to discuss the project and to hammer out key problems. Dekker stressed to Ramaer that the proposals had to be complete -- he did not want the outcome to be simply another speech on the necessity of European integration.
"Europe 1990" was not simply another speech. In addition to introducing a precise agenda, the paper introduced a number of new conceptualisations of what a unified European market might entail. In the trade facilitation area, for example, the "ultimate goal" of the plan was to create "frontiers without formalities for goods traffic and the replacement of paper documents by data transmission via a telecommunications network used by traders, transporters, banks and statistical and tax authorities..." Of course, to implement this strategy, member states would also be required to allow for the development of a trans-European telecommunications network. The paper left little doubt of the importance of creating a united European market. As Dekker noted in his introduction: "The survival of Europe is in fact at stake."
When the "Europe 1990" plan was presented, it was not for Brussels' consumption alone. Dekker sent the plan, along with a letter, to the heads of government and state of the European Community. One letter went to The Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher, January 7th 1985, from Dr. Wisse Dekker. The letter opens as follows "Europe's industries - both large and small - will have little future if the common market is not created as intended by the Treaties of Rome. This we all know..." Dekker concludes by submitting "these proposals for the consideration of you and your government, hoping that you will promote the action necessary to get Europe out of the deadlock in which it has been for a number of years. You will agree that this is an urgent matter. There is little time left to correct the consequences of a lack of dynamism in the past decade.
[from footnote - Margaret Thatcher refused to meet with ERT who were promoting 'Europe 2000'.]
Any research into the subject of the Common Market is immediately confronted by a veil of confusing acronyms: E-this, E-that and E-the other. True, the Common Market - or the EEC, or the EC, or the EU (it transpires that they are all the same at different stages of evolvement) - must be one of the most complex, if not the most complex bureaucracy ever created. That complexity and the constant political bickering over its very raison d'etre has tended to distract public attention away from a proper understanding of it - and to achieve this understanding, it is essential to recapitulate the events leading to its birth - viewed from within the context of the political/economic situation of the post-World War 2 period
The political situation was one of ideological confrontation between the West and the USSR: between Capitalism and Marxism (the question as to whether the USSR was a marxist state or not is irrelevant here inasmuch as the West - and particularly America - perceived it to be such). Again, the term 'confrontation' may at first seem to be an overstatement as the West and the USSR had just emerged from a war in which they had been allies, but it must be recalled that this alliance had been one of circumstance and convenience, as events in the immediate pre-war period clearly demonstrated. The French and the British had favoured a policy of appeasement towards Germany, whereas the USSR - well aware that it was Hitler's target (see Mein Kampf) - favoured a policy of confrontation backed by an alliance with France and Britain. As disclosed in the Alger Hiss trial in 1949, the US Ambassador ot France, William Bullitt, in January 1938, had reported to his State Department that the French Foreign Minister, Yvon Delbos, had told him that the Soviet Ambassador had just informed him (Delbos) that "..if France should begin serious negotiations with Germany, the Soviet Union would come to terms with Germany at once". That France and Britain did not heed that warning until Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia - when by then it was too late - can only be explained by the fact that their policy of appeasement was governed by the anti-communist bias they shared with Germany. They were certainly in no position to claim that they had not been warned when, in August 1939, the Soviet-German non-aggression Pact was signed! It is necessary at this point to recall that the intellectual dichotomy between Capitalism and Marxism of the late nineteenth century had become political confrontation with the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. This invalidates the popularised view of the Cold War as being a post-WW 2 phenomenon.
Another popular misconception is that at the end of the war it was the USSR that had reneged on decisions reached by the Allies (The Big Three) at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 - particularly over the question of the future of Poland. Indeed, this was precisely the reason given, more than once, by the West for their subsequent policy of 'going their own way' - one of the results being the Common Market. It therefore calls for a closer look. The American Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius (FDR's right-hand man at Yalta) later records: "The Soviet Union made more concessions to the United States and Great Britain than were made to the Soviet Union.". Again, on the 27th of February 1945 Churchill, in his speech to the House of Commons, stated: " I know of no government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly that the Soviet Government.". Given this background, it is extraordinary that on the 23rd of April 1945, a fortnight after Roosevelt's death and while Molotov was in America en route to the Founding Conference of the UN, Truman summoned him (Molotov) to the White House and berated him (in Missouri mule-driver's language, to quote the columnist Drew Pearson), accusing the Soviets of failing to adhere to the Yalta agreements, agreements that had been reached only two months previously - and the war was still being fought! (It is not difficult to imagine what Truman's response to the Soviets would have been had the roles of the protagonists in this situation been reversed: mule-driver's language would most certainly have been used!). Furthermore, the following month, immediately after VE Day, Truman cancelled Lend-Lease aid to the USSR, a country that had pledged at Yalta to declare war against Japan 3 months after Germany's defeat - namely, on the 8th of August...on the 6th of August the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, without previously notifying their Soviet ally of their intention so to do.
So why this public switch in America's attitude? It must be appreciated that the US was then (as it still is) a corporate state. In his first two years in office, of the 125 administrative posts appointed by Truman: 49 were bankers, industrialists and financiers; 17 were corporate lawyers; and 31 were high-ranking military officers. True, he had inherited a similarly oriented administration from Roosevelt, but the war had been profitable enough to sedate the latter's corporate cohorts - and Roosevelt an excellent diplomat. Now, the European war was over, Roosevelt dead, and a successfully tested atomic bomb to hand. And when it is recalled that in July 1941, Truman, on learning of the German invasion of the USSR, had stated that: " if we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia; and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way let them kill as many as possible." (as reported in the New York Times on the 24th of July 1941), then the Americans' actions noted above are comprehensible. There would certainly be no more co-operation with the Red Enemy!
Talk of international unity was relegated to the posturings of diplomats and officials within the halls of the UN - much as it had been under the League of Nations between the wars. European integration was the call heard more frequently in the world outside. This call was by no means a new one, but before 1939 it had been of an amorphous nature with religious (mainly Catholic) overtones - hardly surprising given the Vatican's centuries-long dominion over Europe under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire which, in an historical sense, had not long ended. The Pan-European Union (Pan Europa) formed by the Habsburgian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 was such a one. During the war there had been other instances of movement towards European unity or federation which, because of their common aim, contributed something towards the eventual birth of the Common Market - even though it may not have been of a direct nature. After all, there would be the inevitable intermingling of ideas of those participating within the various groups formed. The call by André Malraux and Georges Bidault in 1941 for a post-war federal style European New Deal - excluding the Soviet Union - was such a one. There were others, but there was no possibilty of fulfilment before war's end, anway.
At war's end, the West European nations emerged economically bankrupted; the USSR with its infrastructure decimated; and America with three-quarters of the world's invested capital and two-thirds of the world's industrial capacity (thanks in no small measure to the war). On the one hand, a group of nations in desperate need of reconstruction - and on the other hand a rich nation with the capacity to satisfy that need. On the face of it, the problem so posited carried within it a built-in solution - but there was one main obstacle to such a resolution: namely, one of those nations was the USSR. The problem here for corporate America was that, although it had no intention of acceding to the Soviet's request for assistance, both countries were still part of the Big Three Alliance. Indeed, at the Potsdam Conference in mid-july 1945, the USSR had acceded to the American's call for the establishment of a Council of Ministers which was duly set up, and although relations between West and East became more strained with each subsequent Foreign ministerial meeting, peace treaties with the ex-Nazi satellite nations (Italy, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary and Romania) were signed by the Big-Three in October 1946.
To appreciate more fully the events that followed, it must be recalled that Britain at the end of the war had, by military intervention, supplanted the popular left-wing Greek movement EAM with the right-wing dictatorship of Tsaldaris - and had thereby found itself enmeshed in a civil war it could no longer afford to finance. On the 24th of February 1947 it notified America of its intention to withdraw from Greece, and Truman immediately told Clark Clifford, a corporate lawyer (later to be special attorney to Du Pont, GE, Standard Oil, TWA and RCA), to draft what was subsequently known as the Truman Doctrine Speech.
The next Foreign ministers meeting in Moscow, beginning on the 10th of March 1947, turned out to be a critical one in East-West relations. In the afterglow of the Satellite Peace Treaties signed some 5 months previously, the negotiators and staff met in Moscow in a hopeful mood to discuss such questions as German unity, disarmament, and an end to the Soviet occupation of Austria. As eye-witness correspondent Howard K. Smith wrote: " Molotov proved uncommonly conciliatory in the opening discussion on rules and procedure and yielded his own suggestions first to those of Marshall, then to those of Bevin. The Russians had undoubtedly assumed that all was well and that things would go according to prescription. Stalin even told Secretary of State Marshall that ..'these were only the first skirmishes and brushes of recconnaisance forces'..Then, right on top of the Conference - two days after it had opened - burst the bombshell of the Truman doctrine speech in which President Truman had said that 'nearly every nation must choose between' the two worlds. It sounded like an ultimatum to the rest of Europe to be with us or be counted against us. That wiped the smiles off the Russian's faces. "
That had, indeed, been Truman's message to his Congress - and the USSR. Now the main obstacle to the flow of American capital investment into Europe had been removed and was now to be activated by means of the Marshall Plan as proclaimed by Marshall at Harvard University 3 months later on the 5th of June 1947. This speech called upon the Europeans to draw up plans for economic recovery which the Americans would then finance. He had also stated in his speech that: " our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos". But in saying this had he forgotten that two months before, as later revealed by Walt Rostrow (Special Assistant to the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Europe from 1947 to 1949): " On April the 29th, the day after his report to the nation on the failure of the Moscow Conference, Secretary Marshall instructed the Policy Planning Staff to prepare a general plan for American aid in the reconstruction of Western Europe "? No mention here of Eastern Europe or the USSR. But in any case, had not the United Nations been created with just such a scenario in mind? So why by-pass it? Again,Walt Rostow:"..there was even in being an organisation dedicated to European economic co-operation - the Economic Commission for Europe - the ECE was, however, an organisation of the United Nations, with Soviet and Eastern European countries as members. Its very existence posed a basic question. Should an effort be made to embrace all of Europe in a new enterprise of reconstruction, or should the lesson of the Moscow Conference be read as indicating that the only realistic alternative was for the West to accept the split and to strengthen the area outside Stalin's grip? ".(Remember, Rostow had served in the ECE). This decision to by-pass the UN aroused the suspicions of the Soviets, suspicions that were confirmed at the Paris Conference of the Committee of European Economic Co-operation (CEEC) called in July 1947 to discuss the administration of Marshall aid. Molotov walked out after two days attendance.
A closer look at Marshall's planning staff is revealing. The committee charged with formulating the Marshall Plan was as follows: Chairman - Henry Stimson (ex-Sec. of State & war; Wall st. lawyer; Dir. of Council on Foreign Relations); Exec. C'tte. Chm. - Robert Patterson (ex-Sec. of War); Exec. C'tte. - Dean Acheson (Under Sec. of State; corporate lawyer of Covington & Burling); Winthrop Aldrich (Banker & uncle of Rockefeller bros.); James Carey (CIO Sec. Treasurer); Herbert Lehman (Lehman Bros. Investment); Philip Reed (GE Exec.); Herbert Bayard Swope (ex-Editor & brother of ex-Pres. GE); David Dubinsky (Labor Leader). The composition of this planning group confirms what has already been referred to: that the American executive administration had, since the mid-thirties been heavily staffed with corporate executives - men who, because they were unaccountable to the democratic processes of the country, could more readily act in their own corporate interests. Interests, moreover, that were co-ordinated to a high degree by interlinked membership of numerous advisory councils, Foundations and other forms of quangoes whose common affinity was obeisance to Profit.
Here, two points need to be emphasised: the importance that America attached to the Marshall Plan, and the fact that the Common Market could not have evolved into the form it subsequently adopted without the Marshall aid. The US Congress duly authorized this aid by passing the Economic Co-operation Act (ECA) on the 3rd of April 1948, and Paul Hoffman (Studebaker, Ford Foundation & co-founder of the Committee for Economic Development in 1942) was subsequently appointed Administrator of the aid program - and since ECA approval was required before such aid funds could be supplied, this allowed US planners to influence directly the direction of economic change in Europe.
Meamwhile, as a result of the above-mentioned CEEC Conference in Paris, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) was formed in order to determine the allocation of Marshall aid. The American desire was for a more integrated organisation than the Europeans were prepared to accept. As Paul Hoffman put it: "The substance of such integration would be the formation of a large single market within such quantative restrictions of movement of goods, monetary barriers to the flow of payments and eventually all tarrifs are permanently swept away". This was a scenario within which corporate America could move its capital at will, and, as such, a statement reflecting blatant self interest. Indeed, this message was further driven home by another ECA official, Richard Bissel, at whose instigation the OEEC set up the European Payments Union (EPU) in September 1950 in order to facilitate intra-European trade, and provide a basis for European integration and monetary union. (One interesting point here: good ecenomist he may have been, in1950, Bissel was no military strategist when, in 1961, as CIA Deputy Director of Planning, he oversaw the Cuban Bay-of-Pigs fiasco!). The Europeans, some of whom were still in the time-warp of Empire, and reluctant to relinquish any of their individual sovereign rights, opposed further integration. This not only meant that the aid became a scramble for dollars, but, more crucially , posed an obstacle to the American's aim as laid out by Hoffman. This called for a change of mind on the part of the dissedent Europeans, which would eventually be accomplished primarily through economic necessity - but also by a little-help-from-my-friends. Help that, initially, would be of a non-governmental nature, given the already noted opposition of governments whose hands, in any case, would be full coping with their day-to-day, short-term problems. Use would be made of the numerous lobbying groups formed in the aftermath of the war as a result of earlier calls for European Union.
The earliest of these groups, and one which was to play a significant role in alleviating any discord among the Europeans, was the Independent League for Economic Co-operation (ILEC) - still in existence today, but now known as the European League for Economic Co-operation). This lobby group, ostensibly motivated by its desire to find an economic solution to Europes' problems - as implied by its title - was responsible for the subsequent establishment in May 1949 of the Council of Europe (COE) which, contrary to the aspirations of those who had laid the foundation for it at the Congress for Europe the previous year, ended up as a purely consultative body with no economic mandate, due primarily to the reluctance of Britain and the Scandinavians (as noted above). Be that as it may, the COE was established in Strasbourg with all the key Europeans onboard - and is still in existence today. Indeed, it is often referred to as the Mother of the Common Market - with some justification: was not its flag adopted by the EC in May 1986? To gain a clearer understanding of the above, it is necessary to take a closer look at the means by which the ILEC evolved into the COE. ILEC was the brainchild of a 60-year-old Pole, Dr. Josef Hieronym Retinger, a man with a history intriguing enough to warrant a biography. Suffice it to say here that, as a result of comprehensive political dealings in both Europe and the New World stretching from pre-WW 1 to post-WW 2, he had become the archetypal broker - an eminence grise. In Sir Edward Beddington-Behren's words: " I remember in the US his picking up the telephone and immediately making an appointment with the President ; and in Europe he had complete entrée in every political circle as a kind of right". Having set up the ILEC with the assistance of Paul Van Zeeland (Belgian Prime Minister-tobe), Retinger went to America at the end of 1946 seeking financial backing for the group. In his own words ( as reported by his biographer and Personal Assistant, John Pomian): " At that time I found in America a unanimous approval for our ideas among financiers, businessmen and politicians: Mr. Leffingwell, senior partner in J.P.Morgan's; Nelson and David Rockefeller; Alfred Sloan, Director of the Dodge Motor Company...(et al)...and especially my old friend Adolph Berle Jnr. were all in favour, and Berle agreed to lead the American section". (Berle was a prestigious corporate lawyer).
In March 1947, ILEC was established at a meeting in New York, with Van Zeeland as President of the Central Council and Retinger as General Secretary. In December 1947, as a result of Retinger's approaches to a number of other groups of similar aims of European unity - either of a co-operative or federalist nature (Churchill's UEM; Coudenhove-Kalergi's IPU; the Catholic NEI; the CFEU and the UEF), the the International Committee of the Movement for European Unity (ICMEU) was formed, with Duncan-Sandys (Churchill's son-in-law) as Chairman and Retinger as Honorary Secretary. This Committee, more commonly known as the European Movement (EM), convened the Congress of Europe in the Hague in May 1948 which, in turn, established the Council of Europe (COE) by the Treaty of Westminster in May 1949 (as already noted).
In July 1948 Retinger and Duncan-Sandys went to America to seek financial backing for the EM, accompanied by Winston Churchill and Paul Henri Spaak, the Belgian Prime Minister. This resulted in the launching of the American Committee on a United Europe (ACUE) at a luncheon in honour of Churchill on the 29th of March 1949. The significance of ACUE lay in its stewardship: Chairman: William Donovan (ex-Director of the OSS); Vice-Chairman: Allen Dulles (then Deputy Director of the CIA); Secretary: George Franklin (Director of the Council for Foreign Relations); and Executive Director: Thomas Braden (Head of CIA Division on International Organisations). Funds for the EM (by now transformed into the COE) were soon flowing into the COE's headquarters in Brussels - most of it from State Department's secret funds. ACUE was also the channel subsequently used to fund the Youth Campaign for European Unity, formed in1950 by Retinger and Duncan-Sandys as a result of a deal they had made with John McCloy US High Commissioner for Germany (later Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank), and Robert Murphy, US Ambassador in Brussels (later consultant on Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board). Between 1951 and 1959 this group received approximately 1.5 million pounds.
Perhaps the most intriguing of Retinger's contacts during this period was Dr. Hermann Josef Abs, who then set up the German section of ILEC. Abs, as Director of the Deutsche Bank during the Third Reich, had been responsible for laying out the economic base the Nazis would adopt on attaining hegemony over Europe and the USSR. Arrested for war crimes in January 1946, he was released three months later on the intervention of the British - who then appointed him economic advisor in their zone! More pertinently, in March 1948 Abs was appointed Deputy Head of the Loan Corporation as well as President of Bank Deutsche Lander, and, as such, was in charge of the allocation of Marshall aid to German industry. Another fascinating link was that, among the 40-or-so Directorships Abs had held, one was in the I.G.Farben conglomerate which had been a client of the corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell - whose senior partners were the Dulles brothers.
The end result of the foregoing was the Council of Europe which, although it had failed to create an economic climate in Europe amenable to the free flow of American capital, was nonetheless the first post-war organisation of European unity, and, as such, was of political importance. From now on, in order to create the necessary economic climate, the dissident British and Scandavians would be by-passed. This was accomplished by the formation of the European Coal & Steel Community (ECSC) in April 1951, the result of the French Prime Minister Paul Schuman's call the previous year for the placing of French and German coal & steel production under the control of a supranational body, by which means the French hoped to gain some control over the future of Germany, and thus, at the very least, hinder the American's plan to re-arm the latter. Schuman, born in the Alsace region, served in the German army in WW 1 and subsequently adopted French nationality. He later joined the right-wing group Energie of professor Louis de Fur - who was later to serve under Pétain during the Vichy régime.
In July 1967 the six ECSC members, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Holland, formed two more analagous bodies: the European Economic Community (EEC - or Common Market), and the European Atomic Energy Committee (EURATOM). Thus, in spite of the non-membership of Britain and the Scandinavians, the Common Market was born - later to evolve into the European Community (EC) in 1986, and finally into the European Union (EU) in 1992.
The ECSC (or Schuman Plan), which entailed a close Franco-German relationship, exemplified on the one hand the important role played by the coal and steel industries in their respective countries, and on the other hand the role played by post-war American aid in the resurrection of those industries. But it must be kept in mind that aid was being distributed as early as 1946, primarily in the form of grants, and prior to the distribution of Marshall aid. The popular conception of this aid is that it was primarily for the reconstruction of West European democracies ravaged by war. This was not so. From 1946 to 1951 five right-wing dictatorhips (Greece, Turkey, South Vietnam, South Korea and Formosa), with a total population of 75 million, received more American economic aid in grants than Western Europe, which had a larger population. Again, the five dictatorships received 7.9 billion dollars in military aid (this excludes such aid to South Korea during the war there) - whereas Europe received 7.5 billion dollars in military aid, of which 4 billion dollars went to France (2.5 billion dollars of which was for her war in Indochina), and 0.5 billion dollars for fascist Spain (which had received 1 billion dollars in economic aid). From 1946 to 1953 West Germany received 3.6 billion dollars in economic aid. It is thus hardly surprising that it was debtor France who formulated the idea leading to the ECSC (an organisation whose federalist structure conformed to America's wishes), and that fellow-debtor Germany was a willing accomplice.
The aid so allocated reflected corporate America's political orientation in a nutshell, and a further example was the warning given by Secretary of State Marshall - aimed primarily at France and Italy - that no aid would be forthcoming if communists gained any positions of political power. Result: the Italian communists lost the general election in 1948 (which they were expected to win); and French communists were removed from cabinet posts they already held. Then, one year after the implementation of the Marshall Plan, NATO was created, ostensibly to act as a shield against Soviet expansion westwards. However, the Americans were well aware that the Soviets posed no serious military threat in the post-war period: had they not for the last three years of the war been supplying the USSR, under the Lend-Lease program, with military equipment that the latter lacked? Moreover it is inconceivable that they were not aware of the devastation caused by the strategy of Total War waged by the German army on Soviet soil. A cursory glance at the statistics of that devastation would have been enough to convince them of the improbability of any military aggression from that quarter. The passage of time has proved that NATO's purpose was primarily political, not military. Had it been the latter, it would have been made redundant on the collapse of the USSR. Its political role assumed two functions: primarily to ensure the hegemony of American capital (or American Leadership as propounded by all post-war US Presidents - and most recently by Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in her address to the House); and secondarily, to satisfy the more immediate need (at the time of its foundation) for an organisation that would embrace all the key European nations, including Germany and the then dissident Britain.
The Truman doctrine of containment of the USSR having struck a sympathetic chord among some European governments, and Marshall Aid having bolstered that sympathy with the added sense of indebtedness, NATO was the logical outcome. As noted above, this would be an ostensibly military organisation with a command structure fenced with statutory clauses which ensured American control - to say nothing of the financial largesse that would accompany it - but the American's plan to induct Germany into the organisation and thereby re-arm her met with stiff European resistance. And the setting up by the French of the ECSC and its supplementary European Defence Community (EDC) did not help matters. Enter Josef Hieronym Retinger - once again. As a result of his approaches in the early 1950's to the most influential West European leaders, he and Prince Bernhard of Holland went to Washington in 1953 to lobby support from Walter Bedell Smith (Dir. of the CIA) and Charles Jackson (National Security Advisor to Eisenhower) for a group that would serve as a forum for lobbying at the highest political level in order to ensure that consensual policies would be adopted by the members of NATO in particular. A US committee was formed: John Coleman (Chm. Burroughs Corp.), David Rockefeller (Chase Manhattan Bank), Dean Rusk (Rockefeller Foundation), Henry Heinz II, Joseph Johnson (Pres. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), and George Ball (Corporate lawyer & partner of Lehman Bros.). This committee, in turn, resulted in the formation of the Bilberberg Group in May 1954. Since that date, all doors to the seats of power in the West have been accessible to the Bilderberg. According to George McGhee (ex-US Ambassador to West Germany), who attended all Bilderberg meetings from 1955 to 1967: " The Treaty of Rome which brought the Common Market into being, was nutrured at the Bilderberg meetings.".. Germany Joined NATO on the 6th of May 1955. The movement of American capital could now be facilitated.
This calls for the posing of a very common-sensical question: who benefitted most from the Common Market?. The answer to this question was spelt out clearly by the French newspaper owner Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in his well-researched book "The American Challenge" of 1967. (In fairness, it should be noted here that the message of the book was the somewhat naive one that Europe should copy the American way of doing-business!). The following are taken from that book, and, unless otherwise noted, are as of the year 1967:
(1) America had invested 14 billion dollars in fixed assets in Europe - working capital being as much again (US Dept. of Commerce).
(2) From 1958 to 1957 " American corporations have invested 10 billion dollars in Western Europe - more than a third of their total investment abroad. Of the 6000 new businesses started overseas by Americans during that period, half were in Europe."
(3) " The US Department of Commerce finds it 'striking' that from1965 to 1966 American investment rose by 17 percent in the US, 21 percent in the rest of the world, and 40 percent in the Common Market".
(4) By1963 "American firms in France controlled 40 percent of the petroleum market, 65 percent of films & photographic paper, 65 percent of farm machinery, 65 percent of telecommunications equipment, and 45 percent of synthetic rubber. (quoted from Foreign Investment in France by Giles Bertain)."
(5) "As early as 1965 the Commerzbank estimated American-controlled investments in Germany at 2 billion dollars, while the gross capital of all firms quoted on the German stock exchange was only 3.5 billion dollars".
(6) "More than half of the US subsidiaries in Europe belong to the 340 American firms appearing on the list of the 500 largest corporations in the world. Three American giants are responsible for 40 percent of direct American investment in France, Germany and Britain.
(7) "During 1965 the Americans invested 4 billion dollars in Europe. This is where the money came from:
1. Loans from the European capital market (Euro-issues) and direct credits
from European countries - 55 percent.
2. Subsidies from European governments and internal financing from local
earnings - 35 percent.
3. Direct dollar transfers from the United States - 10 percent. Thus, nine-tenths
of American investment in Europe is financed from European sources. In other
words, we pay them to buy us".
(8) "In the words of M. Boyer de la Giroday of the Brussels Commission: 'American investment in Europe has its own special nature. When we set up the European Economic Committee (EEC) we did something useful, but simple and still incomplete. So far its major result has been to speed our economic prosperity by creating the most favourable climate for a growing invasion of American industries. They are the only ones to have acted on the logic of the Common Market'".
Implicit in the truism that the child is the product of its parents is the equally valid truism that in order to know the child well, one must know its parents. In the case of the Common Market, in view of the incestuous nature of its parentage (to say nothing of the strange midwives attending its birth), it is hardly surprising that it turned out to ba a most uncommom market.
The following statistics illustrating US direct investment abroad in more recent times (in millions of dollars) will be seen to be of direct pertinence to the above critique - to say nothing of exposing the true nature of Britain's Special Relationship with America!
| 1980 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | |
| Europe | 96287 | 214739 | 235163 | 248744 | 280506 | 300177 |
| France | 9347 | 19164 | 21569 | 25157 | 24281 | 27894 |
| Germany | 15419 | 27609 | 32411 | 33003 | 36879 | 39886 |
| Britain | 28460 | 72707 | 70819 | 85176 | 104313 | 102244 |
| Latin America | 114986 |
C.William Domhoff : Higher Circles (Vintage Books 1971)
Robert Eringer: The Global Manipulators (Pentacle Books 1980)
David Horowitz: The Free World Colossus (Hill & Wang 1965)
John Pomian: Joseph Retinger (Sussex University Press 1972)
W.W.Rostow: The US in the World Arena (Harper 1960)
J-J Servan-Schreiber: The American Challenge (Hamish Hamilton 1968)
John Chabot Smith: Alger Hiss (Penguin Books 1977)
H.K.Smith: The State of Europe (Knopf 1949)
Alexander Werth: Russia at War (Pan Books 1965)
Pasymowski & Gilbert: Bilderberg, Rockefeller & the CIA (Temple Free Press 1968)
Statistical Abstract of the US 1996 - 116th Edition (The National Data Book)
On September 12, 1939, the Council on Foreign Relations began to take control of the Department of State. On that day Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Editor of Foreign Affairs, and Walter H. Mallory, Executive Director of the Council on Foreign Relations, paid a visit to the State Department. The Council proposed forming groups of experts to proceed with research in the general areas of Security, Armament, Economic, Political, and Territorial problems. The State Department accepted the proposal. The project (1939-1945) was called Council on Foreign Relations War and Peace Studies. Hamilton Fish Armstrong was Executive director.
In February 1941 the CFR officially became part of the State Department. The Department of State established the Division of Special Research. It was organized just like the Council on Foreign Relations War and Peace Studies project. It was divided into Economic, Political, Territorial, and Security Sections. The Research Secretaries serving with the Council groups were hired by the State Department to work in the new division. These men also were permitted to continue serving as Research Secretaries to their respective Council groups. Leo Pasvolsky was appointed Director of Research.
In 1942 the relationship between the Department of State and the Council on Foreign Relations strengthened again. The Department organized an Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policies. The Chairman was Secretary Cordell Hull, the vice chairman, Under Secretary Sumner Wells, Dr. Leo Pasvolsky (director of the Division of Special Research) was appointed Executive Officer. Several experts were brought in from outside the Department. The outside experts were Council on Foreign Relations War and Peace Studies members; Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Isaiah Bowman, Benjamin V. Cohen, Norman H. Davis, and James T. Shotwell.
In total there were 362 meetings of the War and Peace Studies groups. The meetings were held at Council on Foreign Relations headquarters -- the Harold Pratt house, Fifty-Eight East Sixty-Eighth Street, New York City. The Council's wartime work was confidential.17
In 1944 members of the Council on Foreign Relations The War and Peace Studies Political Group were invited to be active members at the Dumbarton Oaks conference on world economic arrangements. In 1945 these men and members of Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs were active at the San Francisco conference which ensured the establishment of the United Nations.
In 1947 Council on Foreign Relations members George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, Paul Nitze, Dean Achenson, and Walter Krock took part in a psycho-political operation forcing the Marshall Plan on the American public. The PSYOP included a "anonymous" letter credited to a Mr. X, which appeared in the Council on Foreign Relations magazine FOREIGN AFFAIRS. The letter opened the door for the CFR controlled Truman administration to take a hard line against the threat of Soviet expansion. George Kennan was the author of the letter. The Marshall Plan should have been called the Council on Foreign Relations Plan. The so-called Marshall Plan and the ensuing North Atlantic Treaty Organization defined the role of the United States in world politics for the rest of the century.
In 1950 another PSYOP resulted in NSC-68, a key cold war document. The NSC (National Security Council) didn't write it -- the Department of State Policy Planning Staff did. The cast of characters included CFR members George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and Dean Achenson. NSC-68 was given to Truman on April 7, 1950. NSC-68 was a practical extension of the Truman doctrine. It had the US assume the role of world policeman and use 20 per cent of its gross national product ($50 billion in 1953) for arms. NSC-68 provided the justification -- the WORLD WIDE COMMUNIST THREAT!
NSC-68 realized a major Council on Foreign Relations aim -- building the largest military establishment in Peace Time History. Within a year of drafting NSC-68, the security-related budget leaped to $22 billion, armed forces manpower was up to a million -- CFR medicine, munition, food, and media businesses were humming again. The following year the NSC-68 budget rose to $44 billion. In fiscal 1953 it jumped to $50 billion. Today (1997) we are still running $300 billion dollar defense budgets despite Russia giving up because it went bankrupt.
America would never turn back from the road of huge military spending. Spending that included the purchase of radioactive fallout on American citizens in the 50's, and buying thermonuclear waste from the Russians as we approach the year 2000. Spending resulting in a national debt of $5.5 Trillion Dollars that continues to grow, and interest payments of over $270 billion a year. Is the Council on Foreign Relations trying to make the United States economically vulnerable to influence from outside sources? Isn't that treason? Is the Royal Institute of International Affairs doing the same thing to Britain?
roundtable
Visit the Roundtable Web Page: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2807
E-mail: roundtable@mail.geocities.com
How many Secretaries of State belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations? See CFR Secretaries of State http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2807/wwcfrsos.html
Do bear in mind that Stephen Dorril
revealed - in his book: 'MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations' published
by Fourth Estate, London, 2000 - that Retinger was an MI6 asset (agent).
[ed.]
Retinger is on the right
1952 started badly. The Cold War was at its height. Pressure for German rearmament was mounting and was creating tensions and stresses in Europe. The Korean war dragged on, and so did war in Indo-China. While neutralist feelings were spreading in Europe, McCarthyism was growing in the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic there was good deal of reciprocal mistrust. The newly born Atlantic Alliance and NATO were seriously threatened as a result. A rift between a scared and confused Europe and an America over-confident in its power boded ill for the future. Everything that had been so painfully built up in the West since the War would be adversely affected.
Many people, including Retinger, were concerned about this situation, but could see no solution. What could possibly be done on both sides of the Atlantic at a moment when governments themselves seemed to be drifting apart?
Retinger always believed that public opinion follows the lead of influential individuals. He much preferred working through a few carefully selected people to publicity on a massive scale. Perhaps it would be possible to bring together a group of people, from among the most influential men in their respective fields, and cause them to take an active interest in redressing the situation both in Europe and America. but although few would disagree with this admirable aim, most people would be reluctant to devote much time to something so vague, Any proposal would, therefore, have to be sufficiently attractive and, above all, demonstrate that it was effective.
In the early part of 1952 Retinger consulted some of his friends and in particular Paul van Zeeland and Paul Rykens, who was then Chairman of Unilever. They shared his views and offered some advice. It seemed that the problem was real and serious enough and many people were concerned about it. It affected every country and every party alike. But for that very reason anything that might be done about it could appear suspect should it be identified with any major country or any political party. The principal difficulty was, therefore, to find the right kind of person to play a leading part. Retinger thought about Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, whom he had met briefly during the War and later during the Congress of the Hague. The Prince was interested in politics and supported European Unity. His official position of prince Consort limited his freedom of action but he was always ready to help good causes. He was universally liked and was popular in America. His support would be invaluable.
And so, in May, Paul Rykens, who had the ear of the Prince, arranged an appointment. During their first meeting, the Prince was sympathetic and intrigued by the project. He wanted to think it over and consult his advisers and friends. Other meetings took place, more people were consulted and soon a small select group of people became involved. In addition to Dr Rykens and Mr van Zeeland it comprised Signor de Gasperi and Ambassador Pietro Quaroni for Italy, Hugh Gaitskell and Sir Colin Gubbins for Great Britain, Antoine Pinay and Guy Mollet for France, Max Brauer, the Mayor of Hamburg, and Rudolf Mueller for Germany, Panajotis Pipinelis for Greece and Ole Bjorn Kraft for Denmark.
The first meeting was arranged in Paris on 25 September 1952. Although de Gasperi could not come, the presence of all the others was more than enough to draw attention and create a stir. Paris under the Fourth Republic - when France was involved in colonial wars and government crises succeeded one another rapidly - lived in an atmosphere of permanent conspiracy and intrigue. However ridiculous it might be everybody had to take it into account and play the part. In our case it was said that should it be known that Mr Pinay was meeting Mr Mollet grave trouble would result for both. But also if anybody asked questions it would be extremely difficult to explain what the meeting was all about and why so many important people were taking part. It was purely exploratory and it was too early to say what the outcome would be. In the circumstances it was thought preferable to keep it all as discreet as possible.
The meeting went very well and everybody agreed that there was an urgent need to do something to improve relations with the United States. The method of doing so would gradually become clearer. In any case it was necessary to have further consultations and establish contacts in the United States. In the meantime more people and more countries should be brought into the circle and papers should be prepared on the feelings and position in each European county. It would set people thinking and might yield interesting results.
Many years later, Ambassador Quaroni, writing on Retinger, described this occasion as follows:
"I also recall the first meeting to which I was invited. We were squeezed round a very large table in a tiny room; we agreed on the principle, but did not know how to execute it, how to organize things, whom to turn to, how to find the wherewithal. It was not very clear-cut. Suggestions issued forth from Retinger's mouth like machine gun fire. They were not all excellent, it is true, but when one was refuted, he had ten more up his sleeve. He was probably the only one among us who had really studied the question on both sides of the Atlantic and who had specific ideas on the subject. With his pleasant, old schemer's manners, he persuaded us to accept most of what he wanted.'
The whole of 1953 was spent on further contacts and consultations - there were more meetings - and a couple of visits to the United States. There, things were a little slow to start, mainly because people were absorbed in the Presidential elections. Once these were over everything went smoothly. General Eisenhower, the new President, as well as some of his closest collaborators had a recent experience of Europe and appreciated its problems. Also they knew Prince Bernhard well and held him in high esteem. As a result an American group was quickly brought together under the Chairmanship of the late Mr John Coleman, President of the Burroughs Corporation, assisted by Mr Joseph Johnson, Director of the Carnegie Foundation.
Then in May 1954 the first conference took place in a secluded hotel called the Bilderberg, near Arnhem in Holland. There were about eighty participants, including some twenty Americans. It was a very high-powered gathering of prominent politicians, industrialists, bankers and eminent public figures, writers, trade unionists and scholars. Prince Bernhard, Paul van Zeeland and John Coleman took the Chair in turn. A certain atmosphere of tense expectation, noticeable when people who are gathered together for the first time warily feel their way, was soon dissipated, thanks largely to the charm, easy manner and sense of humour of the Prince. Speakers were only allowed five minutes at a time which helped to liven up debates, while the pungent interventions of C.D. Jackson, Denis Healey, Lord Boothby and a few others added bite to the discussions.
In addition to the plenary meetings, meals and drinks were occasions for some of the most interesting, stimulating and often amusing exchanges. After three days of living together in this secluded place, which participants left only once, when Prince Bernhard invited them to cocktails at the Royal Palace nearby,m a certain faint but discernible bond was created. A new entity was born. But it was difficult to define what it was. Its purpose, its methods and its structure were new and original. They did not bear any analogy and did not fit into any known category. For the time being, for lack of any better term, it was called the Bilderberg Group after the name of the hotel in which the first meeting took place.
This name has stuck and is still used today. Since the first conference in 1954 many others have been held under the Chairmanship of Prince Bernhard, usually at yearly intervals and each time in a different country, including the United States and Canada. The subjects discussed vary, but always cover the problems which confront the Western countries and which are apt to create friction and divergencies between them. It is perhaps the best forum possible to debate the great issues of the day. It is certainly one of the best informed assemblies, and after a Bilderberg week-end one leaves with a feeling of knowing not only the points of view within the different countries but, what is more important, having had an insight into the inner feelings of the principal actors.
Yet the importance of the Bilderberg Group stems from the people who take part. At each successive meeting, new persons are invited. The circle thus grows larger and never gets stale. Only the inner circle, called the Steering Committee, which is responsible for the preparation of the meetings, remains the same and even there a change of guard occasionally takes place. During the first three or four 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 top office holders to come. The occasion was interesting and pleasant enough but was it worth a four day foreign journey? Here 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. In this way after a few years, when the fame of the conferences began to spread, getting people to come was no longer a problem. Rather the opposite was the case. Then the most frequent problem was how to keep them out without creating offence.
After several years the Bilderberg Group could claim an impressive array of statesmen and potentates of all sorts, who at one stage or another have been brought into its circle. No names need be quoted - and indeed the rule was not to - but it would suffice to say that today there are very few key figures among governments on both sides of the Atlantic who have not attended at least one of these meetings. What is perhaps more important is that everyone is flattered to receive an invitation.
The character, the strength and the vitality of any group depends on the growth of a network of personal relations between its members. In the early days Retinger was largely the focus and the intermediary in addition to being the moving spirit of it all. He had plenty of initiative and was full of ideas - sometimes too much so for less adventurous spirits. But also, involved as he was in many affairs, he often had things up his sleeve which were of real or potential advantage to many members of the Group.
Within a few years, however, Prince Bernhard became the true centre of all the loyalties and affective bonds. At first, he had to step warily, establishing precedents and getting to know people, most of whom, by the very nature of things, felt diffident towards their royal Chairman. Time was needed to build confidence an that intimate mutual understanding necessary for sure-footed management.
To build the whole group around the person of the Prince was a master-stroke on the part of Retinger. Prince Bernhard has great qualities of heart and mind, whose harmonious blend results in an enormous personal charm which few people can resist. Also his position is unique. As a royal prince he naturally takes precedence without arousing anybody's envy. He is politically impartial, while the fact that he represents a small country is also reassuring. There were also many intangible but very real and very great advantages in having a royal prince as Chairman, and to illustrate this it might not be inappropriate to quote from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta:
Though men of rank may useless seem,
They do good in their generation,
They make the wealthy upstart teem
With Christian love and self-negation;
The bitterest tongue that ever lashed
Man's folly, drops with milk and honey,
While Scandal hides her head, abashed,
Brought face to face with Rank and Money!
Although taken out of context this little rhyme makes a point which is likely to remain valid for many generations to come.
How useful and effective have the Bilderberg Conferences really been? Much , of course, depended on the circumstances at the time. The meeting held in Florida in February 1957 was, for instance, very much apropos to help heal the bruises after the Suez disaster. Lord Kilmuir, who was then Lord Chancellor, recalls in his memoirs, that having been expressly sent there by the Prime Minister, Mr Macmillan, he found it an immensely useful occasion for talks with high-ranking Americans.
Certainly it created countless extremely helpful contacts between people who bore some of the principal responsibilities for the affairs of their countries both in politics and in economics. Although completely intangible, this is a very important factor in international affairs which sometimes leads to great results. European Unity would not have been possible without a enormous number of personal contacts and confrontations between the political and economic leaders of European countries. There is much less of this between Europe and America and therefore occasions where it takes place are all the more precious.
Moreover, the relationship between the United States and its European partners suffers from a disparity of power, and this is further aggravated by the sheer physical distance between America and Europe. It is a very real factor and whatever the issues of the day might be its influence is constantly felt. Inside Europe, political opinion within a country can be influenced by the views and wishes of other European nations. Governments have to take note of what others think. A good deal of pressure can be brought on a country who is out of step with its partners, and this is almost always effective enough as none is sufficiently strong to disregard others for long. That is why the Common Market or any other European grouping can be made to work.
General de Gaulle was no exception to this rule. It might have seemed as if he could get away with more than anybody else but, in fact, by means of his very skilful diplomacy he managed to bring others round to share his views.
America is in an altogether different position. It towers in the distance, and Europeans, of whatever country, enmeshed as they are in a network of treaties of which America is always the hub, simply feel that they cannot exert the kind of influence nor bring the degree of pressure which their own involvement requires. They can pray, hope and watch but there is not much they can do. Any occasion of talking fully and frankly to top American leaders is particularly useful and important. Hence the very fact that the Bilderberg exists is in itself a factor of some consequence in Atlantic relations.
I remember that, while making a modest start in politics, I tried to explain what to me seemed the most important aspect of some problem to Mr Paul de Auer, an old and experienced Hungarian diplomatist. I must have appeared too intent and gone on for too long. When I finished, Mr de Auer wearily waved his hand and said: 'Monsieur Pomian, in politics those things are important which important people think are important.' By this simple rule the Bilderberg Group is certainly important.
Since the first meeting in Paris in 1952, a slight air of mystery has surrounded the Bilderberg Group. Neither what was said, nor who the participants were, were ever divulged to the Press. Publicity was shunned. Sometimes. Sometimes this contributed to stir curiosity and imagination, sometimes to spread fame, sometimes to spread stories. On many occasions it gave rise to a great variety of amusing incidents.
An innocent one occurred in July 1956. Till then no Turks had participated in the meetings. This gap had to be repaired and Prince Bernhard, who was on good terms with Prime Ministermenderes agreed to introduce Retinger to explain what was wanted. For a variety of reasons the meeting could not be arranged until one day, Prince Bernhard, who was leaving on an African safari, rang up. He had just spoken about it to the Turkish Minister at the Hague and an appointment had been fixed in Turkey in a fortnight's time. The line was bad and Retinger was not sure whether he had understood everything correctly. And so, on our way to istanbul we passed through the Hague to check the arrangements and also to discover how much the Turks knew about the purpose of the visit. They Turkish Minister was most helpful and had organized everything very well, but although he seemed very impressed with the importance of the mission he knew little of what it was about or who on earth Retinger was. On one or two occasions he addressed Retinger as Professor, instead of his usual title of Doctor, but this seemed irrelevant.
In Istanbul, where we arrived the same day, an impressive welcome awaited us, and here again everybody addressed Retinger as Professor. The same thing happened in Ankara, where Retinger first called on the Foreign Minister. All our Turkish hosts were so hospitable and so deferential towards Retinger that we let pass this slip which, after all, seemed perfectly inconsequential. The talk with the Foreign Minister took a good half-hour longer than scheduled. We emerged from it to be greeted by our guide, a pleasant young man from the Protocol Department, who, with a worried look announced that we must hurry as we were late for our next appointment. This was news to us as none had been expected. It turned out that our hosts thought it would please Retinger, who was in Turkey for the first time, to meet his colleagues .... other Professors at the University. It was too late to react. We could not explain that it was all a mistake. Too many people to whom we were indebted for a most hospitable reception would be embarrassed. We set off exchanging worried glances.
At the University we were greeted by the Dean of the Faculty of Law and Economics, accompanied by some twenty professors. Drinks were served and an animated conversation started. Retinger was particulary voluble and I, too, tried to second him as best I could. Our sole aim was not to let any of our hosts ask from which university Professor Retinger came. That would have been awful, for everybody would have lost face. Happily we stood our ground for a good three-quarters of an hour. Suddenly, lunch was announced; but that was too much. We could face it no longer. Retinger pleaded some previous engagement and, exhausted, we beat a hasty retreat to the bar of our hotel where the biggest whiskies were promptly ordered!
Otherwise the visit to Turkey proved very successful, largely thanks to the help and understanding of a very able diplomatist, Ambassador Nuri Birgi who, at that time, was Secretary-General of the Foreign Ministry. Two years later the Turks played host to a Bilderberg Conference in a secluded hotel on the magical shores of the Bosphorus.
Although the Bilderberg Group was mainly concerned with problems facing the Atlantic Alliance, Retinger remained, as before, primarily attached to European Unity. His views did not change nor did his involvement get less. His field of action grew wider and as a result he could do more in European affairs. Unfortunately the opportunities to do so were now fewer. Progress in Europe was limited to the Six and all efforts were concentrated on this area. The failure of the European Defence Community in 1955 was followed by the Messina Conference which gave birth to the Common Market. Again Britain refused to join. Instead, seeing the results, she took the initiative of forming the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) grouping the Scandinavian countries, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal who were like-minded in their attitude to European unification. Then followed an attempt to join the two together. It threatened the purpose and existence of the newly formed Common Market and General de Gaulle, who by then had come to power in France, objected. At the same time he firmly set his face against any further extension of the supranational principle. The next phase was to be 'L'Europe des Patries' which at the same time was the Europe of Governments.
The Bilderberg Group was, naturally, a great political asset for Retinger. Thanks to it he could intervene and help most effectively in many matters. Many of his friends sought his advice and since he never refused to help, he participated in the organizing and developing of many undertakings. They all had to do either with 'Europe' or the 'Atlantic'. Among these the European Cultural Foundation and the Atlantic Congress loomed larger as far as time and effort were concerned.
There were also many things he launched himself. One of them had to do with Asia. He sought to find a way of establishing a dialogue between the West and the East, in which philosophers, theologians and political thinkers would take part. Much time and effort was spent on it and many people became involved. The brilliant book L'Aventure Occidentale de l'Homme by his friend Denis de Rougemont, who participated in it all, will long remain as a lone monument connected with this venture. Otherwise it came to nothing.
Then there was also Eastern Europe. After the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, it seemed that a wind of change was beginning to blow throughout the Soviet bloc. Perhaps the evolution might even go far enough for the Bilderberg experience to become relevant to EastWest relations. Retinger always like to proceed empirically and gradually test the ground. In this case it would take a long time and in the meantime he needed to build up his own personal renown. For the first time in his like he felt in need of some publicity for himself. He needed to be noticed and be in a position to impress people in the Eastern bloc. The Nobel Peace prize occurred to him as the best way to do so and some of his friends began to canvass support. But Right at that time priests rather than politicians were getting all the prizes and nothing came of it. Earlier on, in 1956, a letter he wrote to Mr Cyrankiewicz, the then Polish Prime Minister, whom he knew of old, asking for a visa to Poland, remained unanswered. Altogether, in the late fifties, any moves in the direction of Eastern Europe were, in fact, premature. I like to think that in this case as in so many others he anticipated the course of events.
All along Retinger worked closely with Prince Bernhard, to whom he was very deeply devoted. He served his prince faithfully and unsparingly as a kind of self-appointed political courtier, and in turn the Prince was always a most loyal and faithful friend and ally.
In
1957 his health began to decline. It worried him but he did little about
it. When he finally retired at the end of 1959 his health was very poor.
Yet until a few weeks before he died, on the 12 June 1950, he was sill active.
Although he no longer had any responsibilities he never cease making plans
with regard to the various causes that were dear to his heart. There was
a sharp decline during his last few weeks but even that had no vi