Doon Online - The Good Network Guide: Being One of Us; Social Networks; Directory

Social networks around the world are described and rated. The ratings address the network's power, level of secrecy, how well it is organized, its conviction s, its rituals, and its level of exclusivity.

It's not what you know, it's who you know," is the cry of the disappointed and excluded around the world. How true: intelligence and application help in life, but contacts are what count. Effective networks are usually formed in one of four ways: at school and university, through shared ideas, through shared beliefs, or as an extended family. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. We start in Britain, and with the ties that bind closest of all: the old-school variety.

When Britain ran the world, Old Etonians ran Britain. From the mid-19th century, products of Britain's most exclusive school regularly ended up as prime minister. In the post-war period, three successive Tory prime ministers--Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home--were Old Etonians.

Thatcherism seems to have put a dent in all that. In the most recent election for leadership of the Tory party, the lone Etonian candidate, Douglas Hurd, tried to persuade people that he was of humble origins. To no avail. Victory went to the state-educated John Major, who promptly proclaimed his desire to see a "classless Britain".

Etonians prefer not to regard themselves as a network. The idea of promoting each other's careers would seem ineffably vulgar to most of them. The phrase "effortless superiority", usually associated with graduates of Balliol College, Oxford, is a typically Etonian conceit. If you have to make an effort, you cannot be superior--and overt networking would count as a very trying form of trying. Etonians are likely to cope with their declining influence much as Britain has: with reasonable good grace, bolstered by a feeling that they remain superior, even if other people no longer notice the fact.

At some point most Cambridge undergraduates, hoping to be plied with free drink, will attend a recruiting drive held by CUCA, the Cambridge University Conservative Association. Most will react with scorn and derision. Seeing a lot of 19-year-olds pretending to be elder statesmen would indeed be risible, were it not so alarming. For the sad fact is that some of these pompous, pink-faced students with their blue blazers and their champagne buckets will end up running Britain.

The current Conservative cabinet is a CUCA roll-call: the chancellor, the home secretary, the agriculture and environment ministers--are all former chairmen of CUCA. So is the current chairman of the Conservative Party.

Competition to rise to the top of CUCA is good preparation for a political career in the Conservative Party, for several reasons. Ideology counts for nothing. What matters is knowing how to make friends and when to stab them in the back. If you cut your political teeth at CUCA, you are liable to end up sporting a sharp set of fangs.

Faced with the grim fact that their colleagues are vulgar enough to wear college sweat-shirts, many students at America's Ivy League universities take refuge in secret or exclusive societies. Of these the most influential has been Yale University's Skull and Bones, founded in 1832. George Bush, the ultimate Yalie made good, attended reunions of Skull and Bones and sometimes called upon its members for political help. Mr Bush's acceptance speech to the 1992 Republican convention was written by fellow Bonesman, Ray Price.

In leaning upon fellow members of Skull and Bones, Mr Bush was following a tradition among the American foreign-policy establishment. Many of the "wise men" who made American foreign policy this century--Henry Stimson, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett--once dwelt in the "tomb" at Skull and Bones before moving on to other locations like the State Department and the White House. There are those in Washington who still blame the Bay of Pigs on a coterie of bone-headed Bonesmen at the CIA.

The "Boodle", as members of Skull and Bones call themselves, still have a tradition of influence-mongering, but have been having a difficult time of late. Some modern students think it rather silly to sit around in a crypt swapping sexual confessions. In the 1980s a disturbing number started to reject the once-cherished invitation to join Skull and Bones.

The real trouble, however, came from feminists. They argued that it was pernicious for a club to exclude women. So Skull and Bones decided in 1991 to admit women--a decision which provoked outrage among its old members, who argued that the magic of male bonding would crumble. Some desperate old Bonesmen changed the locks on the society's tomb. Much embarrassing publicity ensued before the decision to admit women was ratified. Skull and Bones may have passed its "best before" date.

The heart of France is the state, so it is no surprise that France's most powerful network is an elite within that state. It is the 400 past and present members of the Inspection Generale de Finance. They have one thing in common: they are uncommonly clever, and have shown it by passing out among the top ten of the 100 students who flow each year through ENA, the Ecole National d'Administration, a top-flight school for civil servants which is itself quite something to get into.

The inspectors de finances are never threatened with enforced leisure. They hand each other plum jobs in the public and private sectors without any sense of shame: they are, after all, the best. Should they find themselves unemployed, the Inspection will be happy to take them back at a salary a normal civil servant would be proud of.

The real job of inspectors resembles that of Britain's Audit Commission: they are empowered to travel round the country asking acute questions of those spending the taxpayer's money. This job is fun for ex-ENA 25-year-olds. For older mandarins it is less gripping--but an untesting pastime while they find themselves other, better positions.

Inspectors will always agree to see each other, even those of very different ages: a telephone call is enough. Those in the private sector are expected to reinforce the brotherhood with incestuous lunch-parties. Should this network not do the job, inspectors might parlay their way into the 500-strong Le Siecle, a club that unites the different castes of the French elite. Useful: but the caste's the thing, and in France the Inspection is the caste.

In the true land of castes, the Doon School was founded in 1935 as a sort of Eton for India's upper classes. Doscos, as old boys of the school are called, have been pillars of the Indian establishment in everything ranging from politics to business and journalism. The best known Doscos were a former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and his brother Sanjay, who brought several school chums into politics. The Economist December 26, 1992

Curiously, the Doon School has not preserved the Indian establishment, but shaken it. Originally the school catered to the scions of the landed aristocracy, civil servants and members of the professions. As everywhere, these types looked down on businessmen. The attitude was buttressed by caste distinctions--Brahmins (mainly intellectuals and professionals) and Kshatriyas (mainly landowners) are sniffy about Vaishyas (the business castes). So there was much Doon support in the early years of Indian independence for Nehru's socialism.

Then the business classes came to send their sons to the school, which therefore became a melting-pot of castes. It was hard for a Dosco Brahmin to look down on a Dosco Vaishya who outclassed him at cricket. The economic liberalization that started with Rajiv owed something to the fact that some of his schoolmates were businessmen. Some of the strongest support in the press for the current wave of liberalization comes from Dosco journalists.

Like France with its ENA, Japan has one educational establishment that counts above the rest: the law school of Tokyo University. Established in the 1880s, the law department of Todai has been the breeding-ground for Japan's elite ever since. The traditional route to power in Japan leads directly from the Law Department to the Ministry of Finance, and then to a political career in the Liberal Democratic Party. Over 80% of the 20-30 high-fliers recruited eachyear to the Ministry of Finance come from Tokyo University's law department.

Curiously, despite (or perhaps because of) the Stakhanovite efforts demanded of Japanese schoolchildren seeking to pass the entrance exams of institutions like Tokyo University, the course at the law school is not particularly demanding. Many of its pupils regard their stint there as a four-year rest-cure before embarking on a lifetime of grind as a salaryman or aspiring politician.

When Cecil Rhodes dreamed up the Rhodes scholarship, the idea was to skim the cream from the British colonies and America, give them an Oxford education and so create eternal ties of loyalty to the mother country. It does not always work out like that. Bob Hawke, a former Australian prime minister, reacted against his Oxford past by becoming aggressively "Ocker". James Fallows, an American, remembers his days at Oxford as "one long ritual humiliation".

Most Rhodes scholars had a nicer time at Oxford than poor Mr Fallows, but the eternal ties of loyalty forged at Oxford seem to be more to each other than to Britain. Bill Clinton's advisers are not noticeably anglophile, although their ranks are swelled by Rhodes scholars like Ira Magaziner, a businessman, Strobe Talbott, a journalist, and Robert Reich, a Harvard economist. But when it was suggested that Mr Clinton's time at Oxford had been spent dope-smoking and draft-dodging, his old Rhodes-scholar pals sturdily rallied round to testify The Economist December 26, 1992

to the strength of his morals and the sharpness of his intellect. Mr Reich says that his bond with Mr Clinton was formed when the kindly Arkansan nursed him through a bout of vomiting on the boat over to Oxford.

There was a time when all the best intellectual networks, from the Comintern to the Homintern (the Cambridge spy ring), were on the left. Now the most influential intellectual networks swing the other way. The one with the most interesting history is the Mont Pelerin Society, which started in 1947 as a grouping of embattled liberal economists, dedicated to turning the intellectual tide against the dominant forces of collectivism. The group's founder and guiding spirit, Friedrich von Hayek, believed that the guardians of the sputtering flame of market economics were too isolated in their own countries and needed kindred spirits.

The initial meeting, held in Mont Pelerin in Switzerland, brought together free marketeers from three centres. Milton Friedman, making his first trip to Europe, was one of a group of Chicago economists mingling with other delegates from the London School of Economics and Vienna. The second meeting in 1949 attracted yet more stars of the intellectual right: Raymond Aaron from France, Michael Oakeshott from Britain, and, from Germany, Ludwig Erhard, the designer of the social market.

The Mont Pelerin has held regular meetings ever since. From 1960 to 1980 the group's membership ballooned as the right's intellectual counter-revolution grew in strength. In 1972 Mr Friedman even suggested dissolving the society, saying that its initial raison d'etre--to provide a home for the scattered followers of an endangered philosophy--no longer applied. Mr Friedman was ignored. In 1980, the dawn of the Thatcher-Reagan era, the society's growing size was demonstrated when 600 people turned up for a meeting at the Hoover Institute. Designed as a learned society, not a pressure group, it has remained obscure and a little secretive even as its influence has spread. The society still meets regularly, and its numbers are now being increased by members from Eastern Europe.

MOVE now to Poland, a country supposedly rife with hidden networks--Jewish, Masonic, communist, fascist, pro-Russian or pro-German. In fact, there is only one that really matters: the network composed of former members of the Committee to Defend the Workers, usually known as KOR.

Founded by a group of Polish dissidents in 1976, KOR was originally intended to bring Warsaw intellectuals together with striking workers. KOR leaders assisted the families of strikers who had been jailed, kept records of human-rights abuses and organized free legal assistance. In subsequent years, KOR evolved as Poland did. Most of the intellectuals advising the first Solidarity trade union in 1980 were associated with it; later, KOR leaders ran the largest segment of the Polish underground.

After the fall of communism, KOR and its associates were propelled into political office. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first post-communist prime minister and now the leader of the Democratic Union political party, once acted as a KOR spokesman; Jacek Kuron, his labour minister, was one of KOR's founders. KOR's underground newspaper, Robotnik, produced three vice-ministers in the first post-communist government, several parliamentary leaders, and the managing editor of Poland's biggest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza--whose editor-in-chief, Adam Michnik, was also a leading member of KOR. Jan Olszewski, the third post-communist prime minister, was one of KOR's lawyers.

Years spent keeping secrets and running illegal newspapers made KOR members extremely wary of outsiders. The movement fought not only against communists, but also against right-wing dissidents who questioned KOR's intellectual socialism. Nowadays, the same fight continues, as KOR alumni, mainly members of the Democratic Union Party, struggle with parties further to the right. Indeed, much of what passes for Polish politics nowadays is still a fight between those who were members of KOR and those who were not.

Officially, Russia's best-known network no longer exists. The Communist Party was outlawed after the botched coup in August 1991. But the old party nomenklatura lives on, metamorphosing into powerful democrats and born-again capitalists.

Far from suffering under the capitalist revolution, the old-comrade network has robustly diversified into new areas. Former communists still occupy their old strongholds: the commanding heights of politics (Boris Yeltsin, remember, is himself a former Politburo man) and state industry (most factory managers were appointed under the trusted nomenklatura system). But they have expanded into private industry, banking, property development and--more than ever before--organized crime. This gives former comrades an unrivalled set of contacts to get anything done, from grabbing top jobs to raising loans, expropriating state assets to cornering new markets.

The most profitable part of the network is the younger end: the people who in the Gorbachev era rose up through the Komsomol, the Young Communist movement. Former Komsomol leaders, now in their late 30s or early 40s, were shrewd enough to see that the future lay in business. They have been making fortunes setting up stockmarkets, joint ventures and consultancies. They all know each other. Outsiders can recognise them too if they look carefully for the tell-tale signs--a mildly irritating smoothness, the clash between the expensive western suit and the Slav shoes, and the confidence that comes when a person knows he belongs to the ruling class. The Economist December 26, 1992

Some networks actually are connected by blood ties; others, like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Freemasons (the Brotherhood) and South Africa's Broederbond (Bond of Brothers), revel in family imagery. The Broederbond boasts just about everything needed for a good network: a membership which is a roll-call of the country's Afrikaner elite, a semi-religious initiation ceremony involving vows of secrecy in darkened rooms, and around 800 cells spread around the country.

The Broederbond can fairly boast a large part in creating and then dismantling apartheid. Founded in 1918 by six Afrikaner nationalists, the organization had a membership of around 12,000 at its peak in the 1970s. A semi-secret network, it considers itself responsible for protecting the interests of its tribe. Its members, spread throughout the top echelons of the church, the government and Afrikaner business, debate ideas in earnest Calvinist fashion then circulate them quietly but surely. In the 1950s the Broeders backed white supremacy. In the 1980s, when black protest and foreign sanctions started to hurt Afrikanerdom's economic interests, the Broederbond changed sides.

At first this seemed to harm its standing. In 1986 the Broeders circulated a discussion paper promoting the (for South Africa) remarkable view that Afrikanerdom could survive culturally without hogging all the power. P.W. Botha, the country's president at the time, was, like all previous National Party leaders, a Broeder. But he listened more to soldiers than to Broeders. The The Economist December 26, 1992

Broeders had the last laugh. The National Party adopted their views after a stroke felled Mr Botha. The new president, F.W. de Klerk, another Broeder, leaned heavily on the advice of Gerrit Viljoen, a former Broederbond chairman. The Broeders' grip on opinion among educated Afrikaners may explain why Mr de Klerk has not suffered a white backlash against his liberal reforms. And the Broederbond, having abandoned apartheid, is now considering the real heresy--abandoning secrecy.

If Islamic fundamentalism has an Establishment, it is the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood has won tenuous respectability after years of conspiracy, violence and persecution. Age, no doubt, has mellowed it. But the overriding reason why some of the Brothers, in some Muslim countries, have matured into the acceptable face of fundamentalism is the appearance of younger, fiercer, far less accommodating cousins.

Yet neither respectability nor safety is assured for members of the Brotherhood. They have been elected to parliament in both Egypt and Jordan (though not, in Egypt, under the Brotherhood's name), but are now in trouble--and causing trouble--in both countries. They still find themselves in and out of prison. In the crueller Arab states, such as Syria, prudent members keep their allegiance as secret as they can.

The ultimate aim of the Brotherhood, as of the more militant fundamentalist factions, is a nation run on Islamic principles. These days the Brothers deplore, at least in public, the use of violent means to achieve these ends. The defining lines--between ends and means, and between the Brotherhood and its less scrupulous wings--are often blurred. But so long as Arab regimes remain repressive and undemocratic, fundamentalism's strength is assured. Dictatorial Arab rulers can forbid political parties; they cannot forbid the network of the mosques.

THE Jesuits have been around longer, but Opus Dei is rapidly supplanting the older, more intellectual order as a powerful elite at the heart of the Catholic Church. Although the organization is fairly secretive, it received unprecedented publicity earlier this year when 150,000 members descended on Rome for the beatification of the organisation's founder, Monsignor Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer.

Opus Dei (literally, the work of God) originated in Spain in 1928, but has now spread its network through 80 countries. Many of its members are recruited at school and university. Although only 2% of Opus Dei members are priests, the organisation's adherents dedicate themselves to prayer and self-discipline. The real masochists live in residencies run by the Opus Dei, where they practise self-flagellation and wear uncomfortable spikes on the inside of their trousers. But most members of the society live outwardly normal lives and keep their membership of Opus Dei a secret, even from close friends and relatives.

Outsiders hoping to identify members of Opus Dei must look for tell-tale signs. Somewhere in the house of most members will be a small model of a donkey, representing the ass that Christ used to enter Jerusalem. A whiff of Atkinson's cologne, the favourite of Escriva, is also a giveaway.

Some outsiders, alarmed by the organisation's numerical strength, secrecy and reactionary beliefs, regard it as a rather sinister force. Others credit the organisation's philosophy of salvation through hard work with helping to infuse southern Europe with an equivalent of the Protestant work ethic. But, politically, Opus Dei's influence seems to have declined since the 1960s, when its members played a dominant role in the Spanish government.

There was, however, a row in Ireland when it was discovered that the country's chief justice, responsible for enforcing the country's Draconian anti-abortion laws when a 12-year-old rape victim sought an abortion, was a member of Opus Dei. And whatever Opus Dei's influence in the secular world, inside the church itself the organisation is prospering. Many of the pope's entourage are members, and Escriva seems well on his way to sainthood.

One group with a long history of being persecuted by Catholics is the Freemasons. Yet their recent behaviour bears some comparison to that of Opus Dei. Like the Catholic organisation, the Masons are regarded by outsiders as a network which is simultaneously sinister and slightly ludicrous. Like Opus Dei, the British branch of the Masons has responded with a burst of glasnost. Earlier this year it held a huge public meeting in London, where members reaffirmed their dedication to good works of all sorts.

Not everyone is convinced. Ever since the 18th century, the Masons have been accused of being a secretive and self-promoting cabal. The movement seems to have originated in Scotland in the 16th century, when a craft guild took an aberrant turn, attracting gentlemen as well as stonemasons. With the formation of the Grand Lodge in London in 1717, the Masons became a national organisation, and by the end of the 18th century Masonry had spread throughout Europe and most of the British empire. Masonry evolved in two apparently contradictory directions. On the one hand the Masons tended to be enlightened chaps who believed in rationalist precepts like religious toleration; on the other they became increasingly addicted to secrecy and mumbo-jumbo rituals about Druids and Templars.

The two strands continue to co-exist, and still excite suspicion. In Britain the Masons are often accused of having a malign grip on the upper echelons of institutions like the police, city stockbrokers and banks. There is a strong network of Masons at work in the European Parliament, which has been accused of helping members to conceal corrupt dealings. But the most famous case of Masonry gone wrong came in Italy, when the P-2 Masonic lodge was shown to have evolved into a corrupt network, linking top politicians and the Vatican with the Mafia.

What the P-2 affair showed was that freemasonry, like any secretive network, is open to abuse. For the most part, however, Masonry continues to provide a harmless outlet for people who like assuming strange titles and dressing up in silly clothes.

The sort of people who used to believe the Freemasons ran the world are now more likely to get paranoiac about the Trilateral Commission. They may be closer to the mark. The commission, founded 19 years ago to bring together the rich and powerful from Japan, North America and Europe, has been highly successful in this endeavour.

Consider: the chairman of the North American branch of the commission is Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve; the Japanese end is run by Akio Morita, the head of Sony; and the European chairman is Count Otto Lambsdorff, the leader of the Free Democratic Party in Germany. The list would be even more impressive were it not that trilateralists have to resign from the 325-member commission when they take up any position in government. Both George Bush and Jimmy Carter were once trilateralists, and both filled their cabinets with fellow travellers: men like Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger and Richard Darman under Mr Bush, and Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance under Mr Carter. Bill Clinton joined the organisation in the late 1980s, although the North American organiser of the commission says sorrowfully that he was "not an active member"--ie, he never turned up for meetings.

The fact that so many powerful people of different political persuasions and nationalities meet periodically for secret discussions has inevitably attracted the attention of conspiracy theorists. Pat Robertson, the evangelist and one-time candidate for the American presidency, suspects the Trilateral Commission of trying to create a world government and has said that he thinks it springs "from the depth of something evil".

The trilateralists deny this. They say all they do is hold seminars and publish reports. Dull, perhaps, but hardly evil.

THE amount of travel trilateralists have to do underlines a problem with networking in the modern world. In future the best networks may be electronic, not personal, and their models will be USENET and Internet.

These really are networks, and even have wires. They link millions of computers around the world, and provide a global platform for everything from top-flight academic research to the distribution of salacious computer graphics. Internet grew out of a networking project started in the late 1960s by the Pentagon, to help its researchers share results. In the 1970s, having an electronic mailbox on the Internet was the mark of the true computer cognoscenti, the USDD-certified nerd. Today, however, Internet has become increasingly commercial. Various companies offer access to anyone with a computer, a modem and a few dollars a month for subscriptions.

USENET, by contrast, was always populist. It began in the 1970s as a grass-roots effort to share information about the Unix operating system--then, as now, the favourite of academics and serious wire-heads. It has grown by a simple rule: anybody who knows anybody on USENET can ask to be connected so long as he agrees to pay the price of his own telephone calls.

Internet's speciality is sharing software and computer services, which enables researchers to work closely with colleagues across the world. USENET specialises in argument. In addition to electronic mail, its principal offering is a few hundred "news groups", which serve as an electronic forum for the discussion of everything from the philosophy of artificial intelligence ("Is semiotics an informal logic?") to sex ("Shall I touch you where?").high-tech world, if you're not on the net, you're not in the know.

BEYOND all these networks lies the mother of all networks, the Order of Illuminati, known to some as the True Rulers of the World. Its age will remain uncertain until the story of the last days of Atlantis is better known. Though this secret body has hovered unseen over all history, its most public flowering was in the Enlightenment. Adam Weishaupt, a former Jesuit--who provided much of the inspiration for Shelley's Frankenstein--revealed its purpose and system of mutual surveillance to the world on May 1st 1776. Since then the order has taken a keen interest in another new-born of that year. It is significant that many American presidents have been Illuminati; some have been killed by the Illuminati; and the Illuminati symbol of the eye in the pyramid still graces the dollar bill.

The conspiracy is immense and terrifying, stretching from Hassan-i-Sabbah, 11th-century Assassin, to Ian Fleming (who caricatured the order as "SPECTRE"). It is the network of those who run networks. Given its power, you should assume that anyone writing about the order must be either lying or part of a conspiracy to confound you. In wondering about the Illuminati, merely remember this. You have never arrived.