Bern–Washington, new tensions

by Christian Campiche,* Lausanne

(15 August 2023) And here we go again! It was thought that Switzerland had reconciled with the USA after the dormant assets’ affair. However, this is not the case. But is that so surprising?

In 1998, Bern and Washington agreed that Swiss banks should pay back 1.25 billion dollars to the victims of the Holocaust and their descendants. The agreement did not ruin the Swiss financial centre, but it did lead to the lifting of Swiss banking secrecy in favour of American tax havens. Above all, it sealed the end of a myth. Bilateral relations between the two countries no longer have anything to do with friendship. Now the focus is on competition. In a merciless competition, with marked cards.

Twenty-five years later, it is once again a question of putting Switzerland in its place. The Alpine country is not sufficiently disciplined in implementing the sanctions imposed on Russia to punish it for the invasion of Ukraine. So, it is no coincidence that one suddenly hears again about the Helsinki Commission, an agency close to the US government whose name is linked to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the CSCE. In 1975, in the middle of the Cold War, the great powers agreed on a comprehensive security concept to prevent a nuclear derailment. The USSR was of course involved in this forum, in the elaboration of which Switzerland played an active role.

The current paradox is that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the successor to the CSCE, is officially taking sides with Ukraine against Russia, which means a break with the Helsinki Declaration for the Western bloc. NATO is breaking with Moscow, its original contracting party. A contradiction that does not seem to bother the Helsinki Commission at all, and especially one of its members, the financier Bill Browder, co-founder of Hermitage, an investment fund that used to be very active in Russia. The US Congress charged him with pulling the ears of two former federal prosecutors and an official of the Swiss Federal Office of Police. Since these persons took part in a celebration at Lake Baikal, he accuses them of aiding and abetting tax evasion by Russian oligarchs, which the persons concerned vehemently deny.

The Swiss media have so far given little coverage to this new tension. For example, it has not been reported that Mr Browder, a speaker at the Davos Economic Forum, is the grandson of Earl Browder, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USA in the 1930s. At first glance, nothing really scandalous, but the media’s lack of curiosity is nonetheless astonishing when one considers just a little the implications at stake for Switzerland.

Admittedly, the media are no longer concerned with one superficiality more or less. When, against all logic of continental solidarity, the Defence Department decided in favour of the American F-35 fighter-bomber – there were also European fighter jets in the running – there were only a few critical voices wondering about the absurdity of this decision.

* Christian Campiche, 1948, is a Swiss journalist, essayist and novelist. He was a journalist with the Swiss Dispatch Agency (1980–1988), deputy editor-in-chief of Bilan magazine (1989–1994) and the daily newspaper L'AGEFI (1994–1996). He headed the business section of the Journal de Genève (1996–1998) and La Liberté (2000–2007). He is a contributor to the online newspapers Infosperber, journal21 and sept.info. In 2003, he founded the Swiss online newspaper La Méduse, which he still runs today.