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June 19, 2013
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"The
corporate-policy network is highly centralized, at both the level of
individuals and that of organizations. Its inner circle is a tightly
interwoven ensemble of politically active business leaders..." --
Academics William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski
In
an article titled "The Global Corporate Elite" in the journal
International Sociology,
William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski examined the relationship
between the corporate elite and the emergence of a “transnational
policy-planning network,” beginning with its formation in the decades
following World War II and speeding up in the 1970s with the creation of
“global policy groups” and think tanks such as the World Economic
Forum, in 1971, and the Trilateral Commission, in 1973, among many
others.
The function of such institutions was to help mobilize and
integrate the corporate elite beyond national borders, constructing a
politically “organized minority.” These policy-planning organizations
came to exist as “venues for discussion, strategic planning, discourse
production and consensus formation on specific issues,” as well as
“places where responses to crises of legitimacy are crafted,” such as
managing economic, political, or environmental crises where elite
interests might be threatened. These groups also often acted as
“advocates for specific projects of integration, often on a regional
basis.” Perhaps most importantly, the organizations “provide bridges
connecting business elites to political actors (heads of states,
politicians, high-ranking public servants) and elites and organic
intellectuals in other fields (international organizations, military,
media, academia).”
One important industry association, according
to researchers Carroll and Carson in the journal Global Networks (Vol.
3, No. 1, 2003), is the International Chamber of Commerce. Launched by
investment bankers in 1919, immediately following WWI, the Paris-based
Chamber groups roughly 7,000 member corporations together across 130
countries, adhering to largely conservative, “free market” ideology. The
“primary function” of the ICC, write Carroll and Carson, “is to
institutionalize an international business perspective by providing a
forum where capitalists and related professionals... can assemble and
forge a common international policy framework.”
Another policy
group with outsized global influence is the Bilderberg group, founded
between 1952 and 1954, which provided “a context for more comprehensive
international capitalist coordination and planning.” Bringing together
roughly 130 elites from Western Europe and North America at annual
closed meetings, “Bilderberg conferences have furnished a confidential
platform for corporate, political, intellectual, military and even
trade-union elites from the North Atlantic heartland to reach mutual
understanding.”
As Valerie Aubourg examined in an article for the
journal Intelligence and National Security (Vol. 18, No. 2, 2003), the
Bilderberg meetings were organized largely at the initiative of a
handful of European elites, with heavy financial backing from select
American institutions including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford
Foundation and the CIA. The meetings incorporate leadership from the
most prominent national think tanks, such as the Council on Foreign
Relations, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment and others from
across the North Atlantic ‘community.’
Hugh Wilford, writing in
the journal Diplomacy & Statecraft (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2003),
identified major philanthropic foundations such as the Rockefeller,
Ford, and Carnegie foundations as not only major sources of funding but
also providers for much of the leadership of the Bilderberg meetings,
which saw the participation of major industrial and financial firms in
line with those foundations (David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan is a
good example). Bilderberg was a major force in helping to create the
political, economic and strategic consensus behind constructing a common
European market.
With the support of these major foundations and
their leadership, the Bilderberg meetings became a powerful global tool
of the elites, not only in creating the European Union but in designing
the process of globalization itself. Will Hutton, a former Bilderberg
member, once referred to the group as “the high priests of
globalization,” and a former Bilderberg steering committee member, Denis
Healey,
once noted:
“To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but
not wholly unfair...we felt that a single community throughout the
world would be a good thing.”
The large industrial foundations
have played a truly profound – and largely overlooked – role in the
shaping of modern society. The ‘Robber Baron’ industrial fortunes of the
late 19th century – those of Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman,
Vanderbilt, etc. – sought to shape a new order in which they would
maintain a dominant influence throughout society. They founded major
American universities (often named after themselves) such as Vanderbilt,
or the University of Chicago which was founded by John D. Rockefeller.
It
was through their institutions that they sought to produce new elites
to manage a new society, atop of which they sat. These universities
became the harbingers of modern social sciences, seeking to "reform"
society to fit the needs of those who dominated it; to engage in social
engineering with the purpose of social control. It was in this context
that the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and later the
Ford Foundation and others were founded: as engines of social
engineering. One of their principal aims was to shape the development of
the social sciences – and their exportation around the world to other
industrial and imperial powers like Great Britain, and beyond. The
social sciences were to facilitate the “scientific management” of
society, and the foundations were the patrons of "
social control."
The
Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford foundations were instrumental in
providing funding, organization and personnel for the development of
major American and international think tanks such as the Council on
Foreign Relations, which became essential to the emergence of a dominant
and entrenched U.S. business class linking academia, political,
strategic, corporate and financial elites. The Rockefeller and Ford
foundations in particular constructed the field of modern political
science and "Area Studies" with a view to educating a
class of people who would be prepared to help manage a global empire.
They
were also prominent in developing the educational system for black
Americans designed to keep them relegated to labor and “vocational”
training. They helped found many prominent universities in Africa, Asia
and Latin America to train indigenous elites with a "Western" education
in the social sciences, to
ensure continuity between a domestic and international elite, between core and periphery, empire and protectorate.
Another
major policy planning group is the Trilateral Commission, created out
of the Bilderberg meetings as a separate transnational think tank and
founded by Chase Manhattan CEO (and Chairman of the Council on Foreign
Relations) David Rockefeller along with academic-turned-policymaker
Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973. The Trilateral Commission linked the elites
from Western Europe, North America and Japan (hence “trilateral”), and
it now also includes members from China, India and a range of other
Pacific-East Asian countries.
Consisting of a membership of
roughly 350 individuals from finance, corporations, media, think tanks,
foundations, academia and political circles, the Trilateral Commission
(TC) has been immensely influential as a forum facilitating the
development and integration of a "transnational elite." The aim of the
TC was “to
foster closer cooperation among these core industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system.”
The
most famous report issued by the Trilateral Commission in the mid-1970s
suggested that due to the popular activism of the 1960s, there was a
“crisis of democracy” that it defined as an “
excess of democracy,”
which needed to be reduced in order for “democracy to function
effectively.” According to the Trilateral Commission, what was needed
was increased “apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals
and groups” to counter the “crisis” being caused by “a highly educated,
mobilized, and participant society.”
Moving elsewhere, the World
Economic Forum, founded in 1971, convenes annually in Davos, Switzerland
and was originally designed “to secure the patronage of the Commission
of European Communities, as well as the encouragement of Europe’s
industry associations” and “to discuss European strategy in an
international marketplace.” The WEF has since expanded its membership
and mandate, as Carroll and Carson noted, “organized around a highly
elite core of transnational capitalists (the 'Foundation Membership') –
which it currently limits to '1000 of the foremost global enterprises’.”
The meetings include prominent individuals from the scientific
community, academics, the media, NGOs and many other policy groups.
Another
major policy planning group emerged in the mid-1990s with an increased
focus on environmental issues, called the World Business Council for
Sustainable Development (WBCSD), which “instantly became the pre-eminent
business voice on the environment” with a 1997 membership of 123 top
corporate executives, tasked with bringing the “voice” of big business
to the process of international efforts to address environmental
concerns (and thus, to secure their own interests).
Among other
prominent think tanks and policy-planning boards helping to facilitate
and integrate a transnational network of elites are many nation-based
organizations, particularly in the United States, such as with the
Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution and the Center
for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), among many others. The
advisory boards to these organizations provide an important forum
through which transnational elites may help to influence the policies of
many separate nations, and most importantly, the world’s most powerful
nation: the United States.
The Council on Foreign Relations,
founded in 1921, refers to itself as “an independent, nonpartisan
membership organization, think tank, and publisher,” with roughly 4,700
members. It is largely based in New York with affiliate offices in
Washington D.C. and elsewhere. The CFR is, and has been, at the heart of
the American foreign policy establishment, bringing together elites
from academia, government, the media, intelligence, military, financial
and corporate institutions.
The CFR worked in close cooperation
with the U.S. government during World War II to design the post-War
world over which America would reign supreme. The Council was active in
establishing the “
Grand Areas” of the American Empire, and in
maintaining extensive influence over the foreign policy of the United States.
As
Carroll and Carson noted, there is a prominent relationship between
those individuals who sit on multiple corporate boards and those who sit
on the boards of prominent national and transnational policy-planning
groups, “suggesting a highly centralized corporate-policy network.”
Studying
622 corporate directors and 302 organizations (five of which were the
major policy-planning groups: ICC, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission,
World Economic Forum and World Business Council for Sustainable
Development), Carroll and Carson assessed this network of transnational
elites with data leading up to 1996, and concluded: “The international
network is primarily a configuration of national corporate networks,
integrated for the most part through the affiliations of a few dozen
individuals who either hold transnational corporate directorships or
serve on two or more policy boards.”
Out of the sample of 622
individuals, they found roughly 105 individuals (94 “transnational
corporate linkers” and 11 others “whose corporate affiliations are not
transnational but who sit on multiple global policy boards”) making up
“the most immediate structural contributions to transnational class
formation.” At the “core” of this network were 17 corporate directors,
primarily European and North American, largely linked by the
transnational policy groups, with the Trilateral Commission as “the most
centrally positioned.” This network, they noted, “is highly centralized
in terms of the individuals and organizations that participate in it.”
In
undertaking a follow-up study of data between 1996 and 2006, published
in the journal International Sociology (Vol. 25, No. 4, 2010), Carroll
and Sapinski expanded the number of policy-planning groups from five to
11, including the original five (ICC, Bilderberg, TC, WEF, and WBCSD),
but adding to them the Council on Foreign Relations (through its
International Advisory Board), the UN Global Compact (through its
advisory board), the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT),
founded in 1983, the EU-Japan Business Round Table, the Transatlantic
Business Dialogue, and the North American Competitiveness Council.
The
results of their research found that among the corporate directors,
“policy-board membership has shifted towards the transnationalists, who
come to comprise a larger segment of the global corporate elite,” and
that there was a growing group of elites “made up of individuals with
one or more transnational policy-board affiliations.” As Carroll and
Sapinski concluded:
"The corporate-policy network is highly
centralized, at both the level of individuals and that of organizations.
Its inner circle is a tightly interwoven ensemble of politically active
business leaders; its organizational core includes the Trilateral
Commission, the Bilderberg Conference, the European Round Table of
Industrialists and the World Business Council for Sustainable
Development, surrounded by other policy boards and by the directorates
of leading industrial corporations and financial institutions based in
capitalism’s core regions."
Organizations like the European Round
Table of Industrialists (ERT) are not think tanks, but rather, industry
organizations (exclusively representing the interests and individuals of
major corporations), wielding significant influence over political and
social elites. As Bastiaan van Apeldoorn wrote in the journal New
Political Economy (Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000), the ERT “developed into an
elite platform for an emergent European transnational capitalist class
from which it can formulate a common strategy and – on the basis of that
strategy – seek to shape European socioeconomic governance through its
privileged access to the European institutions.”
In 1983, the ERT
was formed as an organization of 17 major European industrialists (which
has since expanded to several dozen members), with the proclaimed
objective being “to revitalize European industry and make it competitive
again, and to speed up the process of unification of the European
common market.” Wisse Dekker, former Chairman of the ERT, once stated:
“I would consider the Round Table to be more than a lobby group as it
helps to shape policies. The Round Table’s relationship with Brussels
[the EU] is one of strong co-operation. It is a dialogue which often
begins at a very early stage in the development of policies and
directives.”
The ERT was a central institution in the re-launching
of European integration from the 1980s onward, and as former European
Commissioner (and former ERT member) Peter Sutherland stated, “one can
argue that the whole completion of the internal market project was
initiated not by governments but by the Round Table, and by members of
it... And I think it played a fairly consistent role subsequently in
dialoguing with the Commission on practical steps to implement market
liberalization.” Sutherland also explained that the ERT and its members
“have to be at the highest levels of companies and virtually all of them
have unimpeded access to government leaders because of the position of
their companies... So, by definition, each member of the ERT has access
at the highest level to government.”
Other notable industry associations include the
Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE),
formerly called the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), a group
comprised of Canada’s top 150 CEOs who were a major force for the
promotion and implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA). The CCCE remains one of the most influential “interest groups”
in Canada.
In the United States there are prominent industry
associations like the Business Council, the Business Roundtable, and the
Financial Services Forum. The Business Council describes itself as “a
voluntary association of business leaders whose members meet several
times a year for the free exchange of ideas both among themselves and
with thought leaders from many sectors.”
Likewise, the
Business Roundtable describes
itself as “an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S.
companies with more than $7.3 trillion in annual revenues,” which
believes that “businesses should play an active and effective role in
the formation of public policy.”
Finally, the
Financial Services Forum proclaims
itself to be “a non-partisan financial and economic policy
organization” which aims “to pursue policies that encourage savings and
investment, promote an open and competitive global marketplace, and
ensure the opportunity of people everywhere to participate fully and
productively in the 21st-century global economy.”
