To reduce the political paralysis that threatens the U.S. and Europe, the billionaire donated $100 million to create the Nicolas Berggruen Institute, with offices in Berlin, Los Angeles, New York and Washington.
In early September, the institute assembled a group called the Council for the Future of Europe. It includes former government leaders Gerhard Schroeder of Germany and Felipe Gonzalez of Spain, former European Commission President Jacques Delors, as well as economists Nouriel Roubini, Joseph Stiglitz and Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive officer at Pacific Investment Management Co. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has served as an advisor.
Integrating Europe
In public statements from Brussels, the group called for greater political integration within Europe. That includes the centralization of some fiscal policy, wider powers for the European Central Bank and European Financial Stability Facility to restructure the debt of private banks and the issuance of joint euro-area bonds to relieve the sovereign debt crisis.
Berggruen, who in the past has funded the campaigns of U.S. Democrats, including Senator Charles Schumer of New York and President Barack Obama, says his institute isn't necessarily introducing new ideas. Rather, his aim is to help experts reach agreement and then lobby to turn their proposals into policy.
"In Europe, all the experts say you need more integration, but the public doesn't buy it yet," says Nathan Gardels, a senior advisor to the Berggruen Institute. "So their job is really to resell the vision of an integrated Europe to the public."
Berggruen seamlessly slips between the worlds of politics, finance, art and Hollywood. He flew to the island of Borkum in the North Sea, where Schroeder was vacationing, to talk to him about the European initiative. Schroeder then helped recruit other former heads of state for the project.
"We got them one by one," Berggruen says.
In Los Angeles, the investor throws an annual party at the Chateau Marmont that has drawn the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Paris Hilton. Berggruen is also a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has begun acquiring contemporary works for its collection.
"He's a natural networker," says Michael Govan, the museum's director. "He looks at the world holistically, encompassing culture and economics and politics, and he weaves it together with all the people he knows."
Berggruen grew up under the influence of the art world that made his father, Heinz, rich. Heinz was a Berlin-born German Jew who fled the Nazis for San Francisco in 1936. While there, Heinz writes in his 1997 autobiography, he worked as a curator and art critic and had a brief affair with Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
After World War II, he settled in Paris and, as a dealer, amassed one of the world's most significant collections of works by Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, says Andrew Strauss, senior director of impressionist and modern art at Sotheby's in Paris. Before he died in 2007, Heinz donated some 90 works by Klee to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and sold more than 100 paintings by Picasso as well as works by Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse and Klee to the Berlin State Museums for the below market price of $120 million.