AfO,
An other one for you (short article) a bit gloomy, but that is how most of us think about the world we live in.
The conference was founded in 1963, originally as a tight-knit gathering for U.S. and German officials to quietly talk shop on how to prevent future armed conflicts. But in recent years, it’s snowballed into a horde of world leaders, generals, intelligence officials, and other top thinkers. Behind a dense thicket of security checkpoints, they all crowd into Munich’s five-star Bayerischer Hof hotel for a weekend of nonstop networking and events.
This year, organizers say, the crowd included 22 heads of state and government, 41 foreign ministers, and 39 defense ministers, as well as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, the heads of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and dozens of finance tycoons and CEOs. Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State John Kerry also made cameos.
But many conference goers weren’t there for the conference; they went for what goes on behind the scenes, where in the shadows, conference staffers and partnering organizations churned out private side events on an industrial scale.
The numbers are astounding: In the course of just three days, conference organizers say there were 150 side events — most invite-only and off-record — and well over 2,100 separate private meetings, where foreign ministers, heads of state, and others could quietly meet their counterparts for in one-on-one sit-downs — dubbed “bilats” in Eurocrat lingo.
