PARIS — Outside the secure elevator leading to his penthouse hotel suite at Le Bristol, Nicolas Berggruen handed a visitor his key.
“I’ll meet you there,” he said as he inserted the white buds of an iPhone into his ears and bounded up five flights of lushly carpeted stairs.
When Mr. Berggruen, the billionaire founder of the private equity group Berggruen Holdings, arrived at the hotel’s top floor — just as the elevator doors opened for the visitor — he was wrapping up a quick phone call.
“I’m sorry,” he said, shrugging, not the least bit winded. “I don’t get much exercise.”
Nor, it seems, does he ever stand still.
Having amassed an estimated $2.5 billion fortune over the last two decades by buying up troubled companies and turning them around, Mr. Berggruen, 51, has been preoccupied of late in addressing what he sees as the woeful state of Western democratic institutions.
To that end, he spent more than $100 million in 2009 to establish the Berggruen Institute on Governance, packed with a global A-list of the rich and powerful. Its mission is to urge new — and, he says, better — forms of global governance.
Mr. Berggruen was in Paris in the past week to convene a “town hall” meeting of European political and business leaders to discuss the future of Europe.
In the United States, his efforts have so far focused on California — the institute is based in Beverly Hills — pushing (not always successfully) for tax, budget and education overhauls.
Globally, meanwhile, the institute’s “21st Century Council” of more than three dozen business leaders and former heads of state is set up to lobby the leaders of the Group of 20 richest nations with recommendations for economic and financial market overhauls.
But it is in Europe where Mr. Berggruen and his institute have been most active recently.
As the debt crisis has ground on and recession has set in, fraying the always loosely woven fabric of European political unity, Mr. Berggruen has shuttled among capitals in his private jet, leveraging the collective influence of about two dozen prominent friends in the hope of saving Europe from itself.
His coterie includes Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor; Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission; and Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain.
“Europe really suffers from a structural governance problem,” Mr. Berggruen said in an interview overlooking his sprawling hotel terrace. “Brussels is powerless. It doesn’t have the legitimate political authority — not because they wouldn’t like to, they just don’t have it.”
When the debt crisis first emerged in 2009, he said, “we felt very quickly that this was a political crisis, that the financial and economic repercussions were really just symptoms.”
Not everyone is so enamored of Mr. Berggruen’s professed crusade.
Claus Leggewie, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany, wonders why wealthy financiers and power brokers should be entrusted to devise solutions to a crisis that he argues is largely of their own making.
He also rejects the notion that true reform can be forged through “back-room politics, by a closed shop of influential ex-politicians that thinks it can solve problems from the top down.”
“That kind of policy-making is democratically problematic,” he wrote in an e-mail, “and in view of those in the European periphery who are affected by it, paternalistic.”
Mr. Berggruen, for his part, insists that it is by addressing some of Europe’s most acute economic symptoms collectively that public faith in the European Union can be mended — a requisite first step, he argues, toward the goal of deeper political and economic integration.
In that vein, the Berggruen Institute’s gathering in the past week — timed to coincide with the annual ministerial meeting of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — made a convenient backdrop for prominent discussion of a multinational program to address Europe’s alarmingly high youth unemployment rate.
Only the broad outlines of a European youth jobs initiative, which is still being negotiated by governments, were announced at the conference by President François Hollande of France. They included low-interest loans to small companies to encourage hiring, new job-training programs and steps to increase the geographic mobility of young people.
Initial financing would come from a pool of 6 billion euros, or nearly $8 billion, that has already been set aside by the European Investment Bank, the European Union’s bursar for big development projects. Priority would be given to parts of the union where youth unemployment is above 25 percent.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/business/global/nicolas-berggruens-big-dreams-of-steering-europes-future.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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