Are Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch, the pope and Osama bin Laden part of a new global power elite that may make traditional governments obsolete?
March 14, 2008 | In the first chapter of David Rothkopf's "Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making," the author quotes Mark Malloch Brown, a British minister of state and former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, recalling what it was like to walk with his wife through a reception in New York for the World Economic Forum. The WEF puts on the famous annual meeting of business leaders, political figures, NGO heads, scientists and other movers and shakers, nicknamed after the small Swiss alpine town where it takes place, Davos. After crossing the room and shaking countless manicured hands in the process, the couple turned to each other and marveled that "we walk though the Davos party and know more people than when we're walking across the village green in the town we live in."
Brown is far from the only one who could tell such a tale. "Davos man" is an epithet coined by the conservative scholar Samuel Huntington to describe the very specific type that attends the conference. These are people who, as Huntington wrote, "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations."
Not everyone Rothkopf writes about in "Superclass" is a Davos man, but despite his efforts to remain impartial toward "the global power elite" he describes, you can tell that the elect milieu of the WEF gives him a palpable thrill. The book opens with a scene of the author making his way through the town's frozen streets, recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant. Suddenly, he's greeted effusively by a bestselling inspirational writer with whom he has been trading e-mail: Paulo Coelho, "an icon of the global literary scene"! (The literary scene? I don't think so, though Coelho certainly is a publishing phenomenon.)
Rothkopf's credible, if not especially original argument in "Superclass" is that over the past several decades a "global elite" has emerged whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments. They schmooze regularly at conferences like Davos, go to the same schools, serve together on corporate and nonprofit boards, and above all do business with each other constantly -- to the point that they have become a kind of culture in themselves, a "class without a country," as Rothkopf puts it. Furthermore, these people are "the new leadership class for our era."
A former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and an officer in an assortment of "advisory" firms (including Kissinger Associates, run by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the consulting company Rothkopf himself founded, Garten Rothkopf), Rothkopf is an insider of sorts, well enough connected to sit in on meetings of power brokers without quite being one himself. He also writes Op-Eds on international affairs for major newspapers and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, positions that require the display of some critical distance. "Superclass" isn't as condemnatory as Naomi Klein's anti-globalization manifesto "No Logo," let alone the conspiracy theorizing of "The Iron Triangle," Dan Briody's exposé of the Carlyle Group, but it doesn't merely fawn over its subjects, either.
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/03/14/superclass/
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