The Working United Nations Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight
A dispatch from IMEX Frankfurt 2026.
For three days every May, in the medieval-rooted exhibition complex on the eastern edge of Frankfurt, where the city has been hosting commercial gatherings of nations under public charter since Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II granted the first imperial trade fair privilege in 1240, the global meetings community assembles into what is, almost without anyone naming it as such, the closest functioning approximation to the United Nations the contemporary world has produced.
One hundred and fifty countries send delegations. Thirteen thousand citizens arrive from every continent. At the center of the room are the planners, the people who decide where the world’s associations and corporations and professional bodies will hold their next conferences, congresses, and conventions. A single decision by a single planner can move tens of millions of dollars in economic activity from one city to another, which is why the destinations have been building pavilions in Frankfurt every May for more than two decades, and which is why IMEX itself pays to bring the planners into the room as hosted buyers.
The institution covers the planners’ travel and lodging in exchange for a quid pro quo. Each hosted buyer must qualify as a genuine decision-maker with real upcoming events to place, and must commit to attending a specific number of pre-scheduled appointments with the destinations and venues that want their business. The structured matchmaking is what makes the floor work. The institution has been refining the screening and the appointment architecture for more than two decades, and the result is the most sophisticated piece of matchmaking infrastructure the global meetings industry has produced. But the delegations do not stand at podiums to read policy statements.
They build pavilions. The Mexican pavilion offers mezcal at four in the afternoon under the colors of Oaxacan textiles. The Japanese pavilion is hushed and precise. The Brazilian pavilion is loud with samba. The smaller Caribbean island nations and the central African delegations project at full visual presence alongside the Saudi and Emirati pavilions, which the European exhibition system permits to rise two stories high in architectural compositions that would be impossible to build under the American convention center labor agreements that govern IMEX’s parallel show in Las Vegas. Each member state has been given a footprint of the same scale and the freedom to design it as the embodied demonstration of what its place actually is. The result, walking the floor on the first morning, is the United Nations as it would be if every delegation were permitted to bring its country with it rather than only its policy, and as it would be if the smaller members of the human family were as visible as the larger ones.
This was my first IMEX Frankfurt. For decades I was producing local shows in the American market through BizBash, which meant I was running parallel to this institution rather than walking into it. Now in this new chapter of my career, with the production work behind me, I can step back and truly see. I came to Frankfurt this week intending to file a conventional dispatch on a conventional trade show. I am filing something different.
The strangeness began on the first morning. I had walked maybe ten paces onto the floor before the city began to recognize me. David. A hand on my shoulder, someone from a convention bureau I had spoken with at one of our shows years ago. David. From the other direction, an executive I had not seen since some October at a meeting in New York. David, David. The recognition propagated down the aisle ahead of me, one greeting catalyzing the next, until by the time I reached the first cross-aisle I was inside a corridor of welcome that the community had built for me without my having walked into this specific hall before. The body knows it is among its own before the mind has caught up. The citizenship is in the community, not in the venue, and the community had decided I was already a citizen.
The institution works because the ownership permits it. IMEX is owned by the Bloom family. Ray Bloom founded it in 2002 after selling his stake in EIBTM to Reed Exhibitions, used the proceeds to build the institution privately from a base in Brighton, and has passed operational stewardship to his daughter Carina Bauer while keeping the chairmanship into his eighties. I have written that Carina Bauer is the closest thing the global meetings community has to a Secretary General of Belonging, and the corridor of recognition I walked into on the first morning is what she has been building, day by day, for nearly two decades.
There is no public board to answer to, no private equity fund demanding an exit, no conglomerate parent allocating across competing portfolio assets. There is the family, the multi-decade time horizon, and the founding commitment to a philosophy that almost no other institution in the global meetings industry can operate from because almost no other institution has the ownership structure that permits the patience the philosophy requires.
The high priests of the field’s intellectual side recognize it when they see it. James Latham, who founded the Iceberg as a labor of conviction. Martin Sirk, who left the CEO role at ICCA after thirteen years and stayed inside the field as the Iceberg’s curator rather than going where his talents could have earned him more elsewhere. Kai Hattendorf, who stepped down as the CEO of UFI at the end of 2024 after a decade running the largest global association in the exhibitions industry and chose to join JWC, the German exhibition industry consultancy founded by Jochen Witt out of Koelnmesse, as managing partner rather than take any of the higher-paying corporate roles his standing would have commanded. Hattendorf is one of multiple generations of strategic figures who came up through the German Messe system, which has taken events seriously as a piece of national civic and economic infrastructure for decades and which has produced the senior strategic thinking the rest of the global industry now operates from. They stay because there is something about thinking through what a gathering actually does, and about the attachment to place that this work produces in the people who do it for long enough, that does not let go once it has formed. They describe IMEX as a collaboration laboratory. They describe it that way because they understand that the laboratory is only possible because the ownership demands the audience first instead of the extraction first.
Beneath the high priests sits the institution’s brains trust. The working layer of practitioners who facilitate the conversations that produce the field’s thinking, the way effective non-governmental organizations operate through smart facilitation and wisdom tribes rather than through top-down strategic planning. Natasha Richards, who runs the Impact team at IMEX and who brings a diplomatic background to her work, is the institution’s Special Rapporteur for Place. The Policy Leaders Forum she stewards at IMEX Frankfurt convenes policymakers and destination leaders and industry thought-leaders in the kind of structured deliberative session that the United Nations specialized agencies were meant to host and that the actual political institutions have been losing the capacity to convene. She facilitates rather than asserts, which is the diplomatic move that separates effective NGO conveners from the ones who get nothing done. Around her sit the others who do the daily facilitation work. Greg Clark, the British urbanist whose work on cities as platforms for civic and economic life has been shaping global place strategy for two decades. Mike Duignan, the academic whose event management research at the University of Surrey and elsewhere has been quietly setting the field’s intellectual standards. Jane Cunningham at Destinations International and Virginie De Visscher at Destinations Canada, both deeply engaged in the European and trans-Atlantic destination strategy work and the broader convening of city-level thinking. Genevieve Leclerc, the meetings strategist whose work has been threading meaningful program design back into incentive and corporate gatherings that had drifted away from it. These are the figures who do the daily facilitation work that the high priests theorize about, and the institution has been protecting their working conditions for years because Carina Bauer understands that smart facilitation by skilled conveners is the operational substrate that produces the thinking the field actually uses.
The patience extends to the next generation. Since the first IMEX Frankfurt, the institution has been running the IMEX-MPI-MCI Future Leaders Forum, which brings fourth-year university students from a dozen countries to Frankfurt every May for their own day of learning followed by an afternoon on the show floor, introducing them to the field they will inherit. The Forum is the institution’s talent pipeline, operating from the multi-decade time horizon that the family ownership permits, and it is one of the quiet ways IMEX has been investing in the future of the community that the contemporary American meetings industry has largely stopped doing. The naming I have done in this paragraph is necessarily incomplete and am working on a industry brain trust list that will be coming soon.
The work happens in rooms that the trade press almost never enters. The day of the gala I sat in a thinking salon convened at the Steigenberger Icon Frankfurter Hof, the grand Frankfurt hotel that has been hosting the actual European salon tradition since 1872. The convening was led by Melissa Riley, the long-tenured senior vice president of convention sales and services at Destination DC, who has spent the better part of three decades inside the same institution and who carries the kind of accumulated authority that decades of relational stewardship produce. Destination DC framed the afternoon explicitly in the lineage it was tapping into. Inspired by the great European salons, where philosophers, artists, and visionaries gathered to exchange ideas and shape the future, the invitation card read. The salon produced more substantive convergence in ninety minutes of structured conversation than any formal industry panel could have delivered in three days, which is what happens when a skilled convener brings a deliberative method to a room full of people who already have the standing and the expertise to know what they think. When the conversation closed, the participants moved to the lobby and boarded shuttles to the gala, still in the formal attire they had arrived in, the room of facilitated thinkers reassembling an hour later inside the recognition hall as the room of dignified honorees and presenters. The transition was seamless because the people were the same people. The substantive policy facilitation and the civic recognition ritual are two faces of the same institutional life, performed by the same community in the same evening, and the institution has been designing for this seamlessness for decades.
What the laboratory produces is visible everywhere on the floor. Hall 9 has been redesigned for 2026 as a working demonstration of the institution’s Design Matters Talking Point, with layout, texture, scent, color, and wayfinding all engineered to support the kinds of encounter the institution exists to produce. Oliver Bailey, who runs the experience design work at IMEX and whose academic background is in art, philosophy, and aesthetics, told me on the floor that the team thinks of itself as a city planner. We have to start looking at the infrastructure the same way as a city planner might think about doctor’s surgeries, hospitals, schools. The Quiet Room is the city’s hospital, run by Janet Cheung and Victor of Inner Sense, with design learnings drawn from the American and Australian Psychological Associations. The physical form was realized through the support of Weichlein under Marina Parra-Fleschig. The Inspiration Hub is the city’s town square, with three named theaters honoring the River Main and the Frankfurt City Forest. The education sessions are staged in stadium seating rather than the straight rows that have been the trade show default for decades. Stadium seating is the architectural move that turns a session room into an amphitheater, inviting the audience to linger rather than to exit, and the lingering is the design intention. The post-session moments are what the institution understands as the substantive work the session was meant to produce, the conversation in the ninety seconds after a session ends, when two people who have just heard the same thing turn to each other and start to work out what it means. You can’t bake blueberry muffins by pushing the blueberries in at the end, Bailey said. It has to be baked in at the start.
The intellectual life inside the rooms Bailey builds is curated by Tahira Endean, the institution’s head of programming and the closest thing the temporary republic has to a cultural affairs minister. She wrote a groundbreaking book called OUR KPI IS JOY arguing that joy should be the metric every voluntary gathering measures itself against, which is the kind of argument that does not survive the metric infrastructure of the contemporary American meetings industry but that the ownership structure at IMEX has the patience to operate from.
She has been spending the last several years quietly importing into the educational track practitioners who do not think of themselves as meetings industry people. The College of Extraordinary Experiences, held in a thirteenth century Polish castle and built around a participant roster of immersive theater designers, escape room architects, civic ritual practitioners, professional facilitators, and experience designers from the adjacent worlds of theme parks and museum design, has been one of the wells she has been drawing from. Their presence on the IMEX program is the visible signal of the larger move she has been making, which is to refuse the disciplinary boundary between meetings and the adjacent fields that the meetings industry has been ignoring for decades.
The result, on the floor, is a citizen who walks into a session expecting a panel of convention bureau executives and finds, instead, a conversation between a corporate planner from Deloitte, an immersive theater designer who builds three-day participatory experiences in shuttered warehouses, and an academic who studies the neurochemistry of belonging in groups of strangers. The institution has been hiring philosophers to run its experience design and writers of philosophy of joy to run its content. The team is not what a trade show team is supposed to be.
The gala is where the institutional design philosophy becomes visible as printed document. The Awards 2026 booklet I am holding at my table runs to about fourteen recognitions, almost every one of them conferred by the president or CEO of a different member association of the global industry. Michelle Mason presents the ASAE Global Association Visionary Award. Don Welsh of Destinations International presents the Global Ambassador Award. Marsha Flanagan of IAEE presents the International Excellence Award. James Rees of JMIC presents the Unity Award. Amy Calvert of the Events Industry Council presents the IMEX-EIC Innovation in Sustainability Award. Carina Bauer sits in the audience and applauds. The discipline of the number is itself the substance. Fourteen recognitions, carefully selected and presented in printed institutional form, is the kind of restraint that nations exercise when they confer civic dignity on those who have served the polity. The chivalric orders of the European monarchies have always operated at this scale. The actual United Nations was meant to operate at this scale, honoring the citizens of the world community through ritual conferral that elevates rather than promotes.
The gala at IMEX is operating at this scale now, with the conferring institutions taking the stage and the convening institution stepping back into the audience, and the production values restrained to the point where the honoring is unmistakably about the recipients rather than about the venue. The gala itself has been held for years alternating between the Sheraton and the Alte Oper, and going forward will be at the Alte Oper, the nineteenth-century opera house that anchors Frankfurt’s cultural identity and that elevates the recognition by locating it inside a venue of genuine civic significance.
This is the soft power doctrine that Ray Bloom has been operating from across his decades in this field, by which an institution becomes stronger by claiming less authority for itself and providing instead the convening infrastructure within which its members perform the substantive recognition. It is also national honoring, scaled to the meetings community, which the meetings community would not necessarily articulate in those terms but which the printed brochure in my hand makes structurally clear.
What this resembles, the more time you spend on the floor, is the working model of voluntary multilateralism the actual United Nations was meant to be and increasingly cannot be. The Security Council is paralyzed. The General Assembly issues resolutions that go unenforced. The institution that was meant to be the carrier wave of global belonging operates, in much of the world’s perception, as a venue for performative deadlock. Into the vacuum left by that decline, a British family business operating from a small office in Hove has been quietly building, across more than two decades, a parallel structure that does what the United Nations was meant to do. The press centre operates. The specialized agencies release their research. The Council of Elders shows up. The honorific economy is conducted in the open with the chivalric seriousness that voluntary civic orders have always understood. And the citizens return, year after year, because the discipline of return is what builds the kind of civic infrastructure that compounds across decades into something the contemporary world does not have many other working examples of.
So that is what I thought of the show. The trade press will file its IMEX 2026 coverage within ten days of the closing bell and most of it will treat the show as a trade show, which is to say correctly at the level of category and inadequately at the level of significance. What is actually happening in Frankfurt every May, and in Las Vegas every October, is that the global meetings community has been quietly building the most successful functioning model of voluntary multilateral civic gathering the post-war order has produced. Owned by a family with the time horizon to protect it. Led by people who think of themselves as city planners and cultural ministers rather than as trade show operators. Recognized by the long-tenured thinkers who study the field as a laboratory the rest of the world should be studying. The community has been hiding this in plain sight because the language to describe it has not yet existed.
Now it does. Pass the report along.