Elite Knowledge Networks
Description
Nel:
"Inderjeet Parmar (2019) terms this the soft machinery of elite knowledge networks: “flows of people, money, and ideas” that institutionalize consensus from Washington to Berlin. The Fulbright Program, the German Marshall Fund, Atlantik-Brücke, the Munich Security Conference, and the Bilderberg Meetings are formative ecosystems. They sort, school, and elevate those who can carry the worldview forward.
Critically, these networks are not passive forums. They are “American elites’ essential power technology”: a mode of knowledge production and personnel selection that is spectacularly successful at reproducing a pro-U.S. worldview globally. Elite socialization in itself is not a benign process. It hardwires assumptions, defines what is politically imaginable, and naturalizes asymmetry.’
(https://themindness.substack.com/p/elite-capture-and-european-self-destruction)
Discussion
Nel:
“As Parmar notes, these networks define what counts as “thinkable thought” and “askable questions.” The Ford and Rockefeller foundations, RAND Corporation, Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Center for American Progress are elite integration machines where, through these processes of integration and socialization, a certain type of knowledge becomes power. Thus, a Fulbright or Atlantik-Brücke lapel pin becomes an all-access badge to Brussels and DC and the surest way to “belong.” Yet this ecosystem is not the whole planet. A 2016 study by Eelke Heemskerk and Frank Takes, mapping 400,000 board interlocks, shows that the densest transnational elite cluster still resides on the North-Atlantic axis. The Asian corporate elite, by contrast, forms a separate, far less entangled community, structurally poised to build its own power base and perhaps an alternative, Sino-centric capitalism. The more Asia’s networks remain self-insulated, the greater the risk (in Euro-Atlantic elites’ eyes) of a genuine “post-West world order.”
In other words, Western think-tank pipelines are about pre-empting that divergence and protecting their elite sphere. European elites are not merely influenced by the United States. Through this system, they are formatted, professionally shaped, and ideologically tethered to it. Of course, not wholly or completely, as if they had no autonomy at all or as if national history had no bearing on these elites, yet, each of these European nations' characteristics will give a unique flavor to the transatlantic worldview that informs their policies.
The result: U.S. foreign policy goals are not simply imposed on Berlin; they are voiced from within.”
(https://themindness.substack.com/p/elite-capture-and-european-self-destruction)