Between the Alps and a Hard Place Read Free

politics of a diverse country with the international balance of power. The Swiss experience also drives home the age-old lesson that the capacity of any country to influence another is proportionate to its capacity to harm or to protect the other. American statesmen in World War II knew these lessons. But their grandchildren who play with images are largely ignorant of them.

A Pseudo Event
    The least important lessons concern the anti-Swiss campaign itself. These are largely about the state of American politics at the end of the twentieth century. In short, the only real event was that another coalition of powerful Americans had mounted another campaign using the power and prestige of the United States government to funnel money into its own hands.
    A shrewd observer could see that the campaign against Switzerland was a pseudo event because those who waged it did not really mean what they said. Some, including U.S. officials, spoke as if the Swiss people, with whom the United States had always been friendly, had really been enemies all along. They broadly hinted at economic reprisals unless the Swiss paid a heavy sum—not to the U.S. Treasury, on behalf of the public, but to certain private organizations. But, if the charges of a covert alliance with the Nazis were true, the remedy—paying to the World Jewish Congress and other private organizations a fraction of one percent of Switzerland’s yearly gross domestic product (GDP)—surely was too light. If Switzerland had really been an accomplice to some of this century’s worst crimes, if we had really just found out that the Swiss had been in on Hitler’s schemes, the proper course of action would have been to treat Switzerland as a treacherous enemy. But no one introduced a bill in Congress to these ends. Nor did the U.S. government make or even formally study making such a serious charge. Nor did any department of government even consider renouncing the 1946 U.S.–Swiss agreement that settled the claims arising out of World War II, much less did any department consider economic warfare against Switzerland.
    This, then, was just another instance of the semi-official use of American power to transfer cash from not-so-favored parties
to powerful officials’ favored private constituents, who then recycle some of the money back to the officials who made it all possible. A basic feature of pseudo events is that they serve the interests of their creators. Edgar Bronfman’s World Jewish Congress, the principal creator of the campaign outside of government, was also among its beneficiaries. As for President Clinton and Senator D’Amato, Edgar Bronfman paid them in advance with major political contributions. In sum, contemporary American politicians play with humanitarian and moral outrage as they do with other deadly tools of statecraft.
    On April 23, 1996, Senator D’Amato opened a hearing of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee he chaired, claiming, “We have in our possession recently declassified documents that shed new light” on Switzerland’s role in World War II. 3 D’Amato claimed that the money deposited in Swiss banks in the 1930s by Jews like the father of one of his constituents, Greta Beer, amounted to “[h]undreds of millions of dollars of assets . . . monies under the direction of the Nazis being hidden away in Switzerland, we’ll get to that.” 4 The only evidence for this nonsensical statement was a hearsay report from 1945 that cited someone saying that he had deposited $28 million in a Swiss bank. The Swiss government claimed that only $32 million in unclaimed assets remained in major banks in 1996.
    The only documentation D’Amato cited was an article in the Wall Street Journal that had broken no new ground but rather had reported charges the World Jewish Congress had made against Switzerland. 5 The emotional component at the hearing came from the elderly Mrs. Beer, who said her father had