The very concept of an elite class, with more influence than mostly everyone else, is deemed a relic of history. C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, explained that these understandings have a certain romantic appeal, because a supposed balance of interests, without elite interference, makes “each of them really quite impotent, then no one set of higher circles and no manageable set of institutional arrangements can be held accountable for the events and decisions of our time.”
In Mills’ conceptualisation of a power elite, he explained how a uniquely powerful grouping of economic, political, and military interests emerged after World War II that had the means to make decisions with significant consequences for the whole of American society.
The narrow and centralised group of individuals at the apex of economic, political, and military hierarchies constituted an elite with the technical and institutional means of power, which are beyond the reach of ordinary people. Far from conspiratorial, this was a group seeking to maintain its position of social power via the maintenance of its own coincidence of shared interests.
Indeed, Mills argued that “to accept either view – of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift – is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.”
Writing in the 1950s, Mills’ conceptualisation of an elite was rooted in facts of power that existed, for the most part, within the nation state. One big exception to this was the Bilderberg Group that formed in 1954, which brought together elites from across the world into a transnational network. The group’s official website states that it was developed in response to opinions “expressed by leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.”
It fails to say how non-leading citizens, the general public, had a say in its organisation or operation. The World Economic Forum, Trilateral Commission, and Atlantic Council serve as similar transnational elite knowledge networks where individuals with shared, and in this case globalist, interests can work to further their own agenda. Since the era of globalisation moved political and economic power beyond any single country, so too have elites transcended the bounds of the nation. The problem, then, is that how do the masses, bound within borders, stand a chance of influencing the decisions that this transnational elite are making?
To think of institutions like the Bilderberg Group as inconsequential is to underestimate the role they play in constructing a global ideological consensus among elites that is then brought home and applied to the “nation.” Bilderberg allows elites to interact and acquire a shared education in how to think about the world in globalised terms. While it is an unofficial institution, in the sense that is it not legally constituted, the decisions it makes are subsequently endorsed by official agencies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and national governments.
This is especially true of its neoliberal economic position. If there is a global ruling class, as critical political sociologists have identified, then to constrain political analysis to only the official institutions of the nation, and omit anything akin to Bilderberg, is a major misunderstanding of the ways of the powerful in modern times.
The Bilderberg Group’s powerful members come from across the world and represent the political, economic, military, technological, and ideological spheres of globalisation. There is absolutely no representation of alternative interests and ideological positions, such as small business, populists, socialists, or nationalists. [...]
Understanding the Bilderberg Group as the center of an elite knowledge network is far more accurate than any simplistic, and often naïve, claim to the contrary; especially from those that would malign it with the catch-all, ignorant label of “conspiracy theory.”
Knowing that the locus of political, economic, and military power now resides offshore helps to explain the pandemic of political disaffectedness sweeping across the planet. Some even see this as the emergence of a global civil war, which is surely the last thing the world needs at this very moment. Apparently, Bilderberg’s secretive nature is to ensure its participants can “speak freely in an environment of trust,” but precisely what would these people, who themselves claim a proclivity for transparency and democracy, want to speak about free from public discussion, criticism, and alternative points of view?
The public, rationally, can only surmise that it is nothing good. Unless politicians revert to assuming their proper role as national, and local, leaders, responsible for their own constituents’ needs as opposed to those of transnational corporations, the global crisis of democracy is surely set to continue.
by Stuart J. Hooper, The Wire | Read more:
Image: Reuters/File
[ed. The Press are typically excluded (see list of 2026 attendees here) and all discussions are conducted under the Chatham House rule (meaning you can use and report what you learned, but you cannot share who you got it from, nor their affiliations). See also: At Bilderberg’s bigwig bash two things are guaranteed: Kissinger and secrecy (Guardian).]
