The group's agenda, originally to prevent another world war, is now defined as bolstering a consensus around free market Western capitalism and its interests around the globe.
The group states that the purpose of this is to encourage candid debate while at the same time maintaining privacy, but critics from a wide range of viewpoints have called it into question, and it has provoked conspiracy theories from both the left and right.
[6] The conference was initiated by several people, including Polish politician-in-exile Józef Retinger who, concerned about the growth of anti-Americanism in Western Europe, proposed an international conference at which leaders from European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim of promoting Atlanticism—better understanding between the cultures of the United States and Western Europe to foster cooperation on political, economic, and defense issues.
Bernhard in turn contacted Walter Bedell Smith, the then head of the CIA, who asked Eisenhower adviser Charles Douglas Jackson to deal with the suggestion.
As well as organizing the conference, the steering committee also maintained a register of attendee names and contact details with the aim of creating an informal network of individuals who could call upon one another in a private capacity.
[17] The banker and industrialist Marcus Wallenberg Jr. was a member of the steering committee and attended the meeting twenty-two times from the 1950s to 1981, a year prior to his death.
[5] In 2001, Denis Healey, a Bilderberg group founder and a steering committee member for 30 years, said, "To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair.
"[21] However, in November 2009, the group hosted a dinner meeting at the Château of Val-Duchesse in Brussels outside its annual conference to promote the candidacy of Herman Van Rompuy for President of the European Council.
[28] In 2002, in Them: Adventures with Extremists, author Jon Ronson wrote that the group has a small central office in Holland which each year decides what country will host the forthcoming meeting.
[42] Ian Richardson sees Bilderberg as the transnational power elite, "an integral, and to some extent critical, part of the existing system of global governance", that is "not acting in the interests of the whole".
[43] For example, an article by the English commentator Charlie Skelton in The Guardian in June 2017 criticized the world view expressed in an agenda published by the Bilderberg group without engaging in speculation about conspiratorial activities.
"[46] In a 1994 report, Right Woos Left, published by the Political Research Associates, investigative journalist Chip Berlet argued that right-wing populist conspiracy theories about the Bilderberg group date back to as early as 1964 and can be found in Phyllis Schlafly's self-published book A Choice, Not an Echo,[49] which promoted a conspiracy theory in which the Republican Party was secretly controlled by elitist intellectuals dominated by members of the Bilderberg group, whose internationalist policies would pave the way for world communism.
[50] In August 2010, former Cuban president Fidel Castro wrote an article for the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma in which he cited Daniel Estulin's 2006 book The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club,[51] which, as quoted by Castro, describes "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists" manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self.
[57] Although conspiracy theories about the Bilderberg Group have gained the most widespread credence by far in the United States, some high-profile non-American proponents have raised them as well, including Lithuanian writer Daniel Estulin[58] and British politician Nigel Farage.