The Bilderberg Group

The Bilderberg Group, the annual invitation-only conference that has brought together senior figures from the worlds of politics, finance, media, and academia since 1954, is one of the most thoroughly documented and, at the same time, most thoroughly mythologised gatherings in modern Western conspiracy culture. To the mainstream press it is a high-level off-the-record discussion forum whose published list of attendees is, in effect, a who’s who of the Western postwar establishment. To the world of conspiracy theory it is something else: the secret steering committee of a supposedly global elite, and one of the most important pillars of the modern Illuminati myth.

The Founding of the Bilderberg Group

The Bilderberg Group takes its name from the Hotel de Bilderberg, in the Dutch town of Oosterbeek, near Arnhem, where the inaugural meeting was held from 29 to 31 May 1954. The meeting was convened at the initiative of several people, including the Polish political adviser Józef Retinger, the Belgian Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, the U.S. ambassador to Italy Claire Boothe Luce, and the American financier and philanthropist David Rockefeller. The motivation for the meeting was a concern, common in the early Cold War period, about the rising influence of anti-American sentiment in Western Europe, about the perceived weakness of the NATO alliance, and about the need to cultivate a transatlantic community of policy elites who could coordinate their approach to common problems.

The first meeting was attended by roughly eighty delegates from eleven Western European countries, plus the United States and Canada. The delegates included senior politicians (the sitting and former prime ministers of several Western European states), senior diplomats and ambassadors, leading industrialists, senior trade unionists, and a small number of senior journalists and academics. The group met again in 1955 in the French Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and has met annually, with a few exceptions, in a different European or, occasionally, North American location every year since.

The Bilderberg Group was, in the early years of its existence, intended to function as a quiet complement to the more formal Atlantic institutions, particularly NATO and the OEEC (later the OECD). It was not, in the formal sense, a governing body: it had no permanent staff, no published budget, and no formal decision-making procedures. It was, in the words of one early participant, a “clearing house” for ideas, a place where senior figures from the two sides of the Atlantic could meet on an informal basis and exchange views on the issues of the day.

How the Meetings Work

The Bilderberg Group’s annual meeting is, in its current form, a three-day conference that draws roughly 130 to 150 participants from some twenty-five to thirty countries. Roughly two-thirds of the participants come from Europe, and roughly one-third from North America, with small but growing contingents from other regions. The participants are drawn from four broad categories: government (sitting and former heads of state and government, ministers, and senior civil servants); business (the senior executives of major European and North American corporations); media (the editors, publishers, and senior journalists of major newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters); and “experts” (academics, think-tank scholars, and other policy specialists). The list of participants is published in advance of the meeting, and the list of topics for discussion is published as well.

The meeting is structured as a series of plenary sessions, smaller working sessions, and informal dinners and receptions. The proceedings are governed by the “Chatham House Rule,” the standard British convention under which participants are free to use the information they receive in the meeting, but they may not attribute statements to specific participants. The meeting is closed to the press, but the list of participants and the official communiqué are published at the end of the conference.

Famous Attendees

The Bilderberg Group’s list of attendees over the past seventy years is, in effect, a list of the senior figures of the postwar Western establishment. The list includes: multiple sitting and former prime ministers of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and the Scandinavian countries; multiple sitting and former U.S. presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower (in a personal capacity before his presidency), Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama; multiple sitting and former U.S. secretaries of state, including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker, and Condoleezza Rice; senior executives of the major Western financial institutions, including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and the major commercial banks of the United States and Europe; the senior figures of the major Western media organisations, including the editors of The Economist, The New York Times, Le Monde, and Die Zeit; and a small number of academics and think-tank scholars.

The list is, in the conspiracy literature on the Western political elite, the principal evidence for the claim that a shadowy global elite is in fact running the Western world. The list is, in the academic literature on postwar transatlantic relations, the principal evidence for the claim that the postwar Western establishment has, in fact, been unusually well-networked and unusually successful at maintaining its cohesion. The two readings are not, mutually exclusive.

The Conspiracy Theory

The Bilderberg Group has, since the late 1960s, been the subject of a substantial and growing body of conspiracy theory. The central claim is that the group is, in effect, the secret world government: that it is the place where the major decisions of the postwar Western world are taken, that the participants in the meeting are the real rulers of the countries from which they come, and that the meeting is, in effect, the annual meeting of a shadowy world elite that is consciously pursuing a program of global governance.

The most common version of the theory treats the Bilderberg Group as a continuation of, or a stand-in for, the Illuminati. The Illuminati, in the modern conspiracy imagination, is a continuous secret society that has been running the world since the late 18th century, and the Bilderberg Group is, in this account, one of the most visible contemporary manifestations of that society. The two are connected in the literature by the claim that the Bohemian Grove encampment, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group are all, in effect, the same organization operating under different names.

A more conspiratorial version of the theory, popular on the political right in the United States and Europe, claims that the Bilderberg Group is a vehicle for the alleged political program of the alleged global elite: a program of population reduction, social engineering, the erosion of national sovereignty, and the establishment of a single world government. The most-cited proponents of this version of the theory include the American writer Jim Marrs, the British writer David Icke, the American radio host and conspiracy entrepreneur Alex Jones, and a long list of right-wing European political figures.

The Critical View

The critical view of the Bilderberg Group is, in summary, that the conspiracy theory is not supported by the available evidence, that the group is in fact a real and well-documented (if unusually exclusive) discussion forum, and that the mythology of the Bilderberg Group is, in the academic literature, a topic of sociology and folklore rather than a topic of history. The most serious academic work on the group includes G. William Domhoff’s Who Rules America? (1967, multiple subsequent editions), Daniel Estulin’s trade-press book on the group, and the 2010 Bilderberg People by the British academic Ian Davidson. They come to broadly the same conclusion: that the group is a real institution with a documented history, a published list of participants, and a published agenda, that the general theory of a New World Order is not supported by the group’s actual record, and that the conspiracy theory of the group is, in the academic literature, an example of the way modern conspiracy thinking works rather than a description of any historical reality.

The critical view is, however, more than a flat denial. The Bilderberg Group is, in fact, a real institution that brings together the senior figures of the Western establishment, and the fact that it does so is in itself a fact about the Western establishment that the formal study of postwar transatlantic relations has had to take seriously. The study of elite networking in the postwar Western world is, in this sense, a serious topic, and the Bilderberg Group is one of the more visible sites of that networking. The conspiracy theory mistakes a topic of serious study for a topic of occult practice.