ABSTRACT
The concept ‘global elite’ (also ‘trans-national elite’) is anchored in both the elite theoretical tradition and in a rather nebulous contemporary body of thought about globalization and its effects. It has four main referents:
(1) The first, and perhaps most popular, is the concept of the ‘global elite’ or ‘superclass’, referring to an allegedly new grouping of supranational power-holders, including the leaders of large nation states, heads of the most powerful military establishments, leaders of the largest religious movements and even the heads of international terrorist/criminal groups. According to Rothkopf (2008), the emergence of such powerful individuals, and their alleged integration into a single ‘global elite’ ‘without a country’ is the result of economic and political globalization. Also, Freeland identifies the new ‘global elite’ as a worldwide plutocracy consisting of networked ‘super-rich’ individuals and families. Its ascendancy ‘is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalisation of global trade’ (2011: 3). In a similar vein, a ‘Special Report on Global Leaders’ in The Economist (2011) identifies the emergent ‘global elite’ as those ‘with enough brains,money or influence to affect the lives of large numbers of others.’ It includes mainly the super-rich beneficiaries of the recent info-digital technological revolution. Thus all three – Rothkopf, Freedland and The Economist – see the ‘global elite’ as new, spawned by recent globalization and the info-tech revolution, and as an autonomous social-political actor, independent of any particular nation or class.
