La Suisse et l’argent sale

Roland Rossier takes us into the murky underbelly of the banking sector of a country that is “completely above suspicion”, according to the title of this book by the sociologist Jean Ziegler, which is not a recent release (our translations throughout). He approaches the book in the manner of a journalist (currently working for the Tribune de Genève) and an historian, basing his narrative on a huge body of evidence made up of some hundred works, most of them written by his fellow Swiss colleagues, official reports and his own experiences and meetings. The result reads like a novel, except that reality stands in for fiction, making it almost laughable.

Although not the only cause, the infamous banking secrecy, which came about in November 1934, is a key factor in this tale of tax evasion, fraud and money laundering. Although still in place for Swiss nationals and foreign residents, its phase-out began in 2009 for accounts held by individuals residing abroad, under pressure from the United States and the OECD. Ten years later, it has been replaced by a system of exchanging banking information, which has been automatic since 2018. It would take a great many scandals, court cases and, in particular, fines to get to this point, with the American IRS having succeeded in collecting no less than five billion dollars from Swiss banks over the years.

Starting with the gold, which has never been valued, that was transferred by the Deutsche Reichsbank to the Swiss Banque Nationale, more specifically the 4944 cases of gold mostly from Belgium that were entrusted to France in 1940, transported to Dakar, then Algeria, before returning to French soil and being handed over to Berlin by the Vichy government, Roland Rossier tells of the antics of bankers, shady middle-men and criminals of all stripes. The list is long but distinguished, featuring the FLN, the OAS and the SDECE, American and Italian mafiosi, criminal organisations along the lines of ‘French Connection’ or Colombian and Mexican cartels, not to mention the Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge, the Vatican along with the IOR and the Banco Ambrosiano, Crédit lyonnais and the purchase of MGM, weapons trafficking and FIFA.

The author also reminds us of the many bankruptcies that strew the path of Swiss banking history and that the largest bank of them all, UBS, had to be bailed out by the Swiss State in 2008 in the wake of the sub-prime crisis and that in February 2019, it was fined 4.5 billion euros in France for illegally soliciting clients and laundering the proceeds of tax evasion. Although the bank has appealed against the ruling (the verdict is due in mid-2020), the sentence makes the point that many cases are still ongoing.

Although it is hard to imagine what the future of the Swiss banking sector will look like within an environmental that is more competitive simply due to the end of the hallowed banking secrecy, the haemorrhaging it has suffered over the last thirty years will, one can only hope, have helped to clean up its act.  From 631 banks in 1989, there were just 253 left in 2017. Yet in 2013, Swiss banks were managing assets of no less than 1800 billion euros on behalf of non-residents, according to Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics. Of this amount, 1000 billion euros were owned by Europeans, from Germany (200 billion), France (180 billion), Italy (120 billion), the United Kingdom (110 billion), Spain (80 billion), Greece and Belgium (60 billion each) and Portugal (30 billion).

Let us share the conclusions of Bernard Bertossa, former public prosecutor of Geneva and former federal criminal judge, who wrote a preface featuring an appeal to continue the fight: “with his contribution, Roland Rossier reminds us of the extent to which the Swiss financial industry has been and continues to be vulnerable to dirty money. The events he relates certainly highlight the most welcome evolution of our political and judicial authorities’ attitude towards this deadly cancer for human society. However, it is not enough to allow us to cease the efforts needed to make sure that crime no longer pays”. (Olivier Jehin)    

Roland Rossier. La Suisse et l’argent sale – 60 ans d’affaires bancaires (available in French only). Éditions Livreo-Alphil. ISBN: 978-2-88950-039-0. 288 pages. €24.00.

L’hégémonie contestée

In the view of Bertrand Badie, professor at Sciences Po Paris, the hegemony to which so many authors have referred in the course of the long history of international relations is a myth, as it implies consent, freely given and possibly even actively sought, along the lines of the Delian League, an association of Greek city-states under the leadership of Athens. This episode from antiquity – dating back to 477 BC – comes down to us from Thucydides. In the face of threats from Persia, the Greek cities turned to the most disciplined of them to lead them and protect them. Athens would accept the role and, bit by bit, force the worship of Athena upon them and impose the use of the tetradrachm, whilst taking on the role of policemen in the internal quarrels within the alliance. And so hegemony was born but, the author stresses, the socio-political context was specific to this period of Greek history. This has not stopped actors and observers of modern history from claiming hegemony or from identifying it over the centuries, from the Holy Roman Empire to the British Empire, via Louis XIV and Napoleon and, closer to home, the United States. In all of these cases, the domination is genuine, but the hegemony is a myth, Badie claims, but struggles to bring his argument home.

The United States unquestionably has some of the characteristics of hegemony. After the Second World War, the Americans were the heroes of the victory against Nazism. They were subsequently able to cast themselves as the leader/protector against the USSR. They also had an exceptional economic capacity at the time, with a 22% share of global trade, compared to 9% today. The military spending of the new hegemon would remain above 10% of GDP until 1970 and hover around the 500 billion-dollar mark until the Gulf War. Up to 1975, the US had an unequalled stock of nuclear warheads and “there is no doubt as to its military hegemony”, the author concedes, adding shortly afterwards that the “Atlantic Alliance had something of the Delian League about it” (our translations throughout). However, he stretches the analogy beyond its reasonable scope by adding that “playing the part of principal victor and liberator, clearly visible to all, was not enough to create hegemon status: at most, the posture could inspire a feeling of ‘recognition’ or passive acceptance that the science of international relations has never managed to conceptualise, as it struggles to find convincing examples in history of a solid and durable ascendant that was built on the foundation of a moral debt”. Furthermore, “being the only one to have a weapon of mass destruction suddenly makes your protection friendly and desirable, especially when your potential enemy, which is becoming more and more of a threat, is believed to be in the process of getting one of its own”. That is doubtless true, but concluding that there is no hegemony because it did not result from a free association on the Delian League model is particularly dubious given that the Greek hegemony was undoubtedly less universally welcome when, a few years down the line, it enforced the payment of a tribute and moved the treasury from Delos to Athens. Another argument concerns the Machiavellian connivance that led to shared hegemony with Moscow, feeding off the rivalry between the two co-hegemons, the disappearance of the former (USSR) bringing about the obliteration of the latter (the US).

“As the third millennium progresses, many of the principles considered eternal seem to be turned on their heads in a very surprising way: a complex and multiform counter-hegemony is winning out over hegemony, a challenge to domination, destructive power over the power that builds and invents, hegemonic instability over the stability that a benevolent leader ought to guarantee”, writes Badie, the second part of whose book offers an interesting analysis of the phenomenon of the challenge and, in particular, neo-nationalism. The author draws a distinction between, firstly, an “emancipatory nationalism” which, in the South, bears witness to an incomplete process of decolonisation and “inspires many movements seeking successfully to embody peoples who have been forgotten or who are not recognised, or segments of the population being held hostage by geographical oddities, weakening the principle of intangibility of territories and borders”. A symptom of the sickness of the Western nation-state and of its forced exportation, this emancipatory neo-nationalism is spreading like wildfire, up to and including the European Union (Catalonia, Scotland, Corsica and Flanders, most notably). A “neonationalism of revenge”, which is at work in Russia in particular, is characterised by a desire for reconquest, fuelled by a feeling of declassification. Although it shares with the previous variety the objective of creating a barrier to any form of hegemony, “affirmation neonationalism” brings together countries generally described as emerging, such as India, Brazil and Chine. The author also identifies “survival neonationalism”, which is exclusive to the poorest and weakest nations, and a “withdrawal neonationalism” which, in Europe in particular, arises from the fear of globalisation. With Trump, it is the hegemon itself that has become the challenger, seeking to deconstruct everything that his predecessors had helped to build and generating permanent instability with his Tweets and speeches, which are aimed exclusively at the American electorate.

So where does Europe stand in all of this? “It helped to forge and maintain the illusion of a hegemonic world by reconstructing itself under the shelter afforded it by Washington’s firepower. Today, the need for protection has been separated from a targeted State threat, whilst Washington’s displays of power contain a logic that runs counter to the guarantee of power. Once it was structural, organised and based on solidarity; today, the policy of power displays is everywhere, even against yesterday’s allies… More importantly, the new American need for self-affirmation is now trivialising Europe in a position of exteriority that will potentially make it a rival, possibly even an ‘enemy’ and certainly a target”, argues Badie, stressing that the European leaders are still struggling to accept this new reality, which will outlive Donald Trump’s presidency. (OJ)

Bertrand Badie. L’hégémonie contestée – Les nouvelles formes de domination internationale (available in French only). Odile Jacob. ISBN: 978-2-7381-4934-3. 227 pages. €22.90

Prolifération des territoires et représentations territoriales de l’Union européenne

This work is characterised by its multidisciplinary nature, as it is made up of contributions from lawyers and geographers. “The State, as a territorial unit of sovereign space, faces competition from new loyalties (ethnicities, religions, local authorities, international organisations, cross-border companies, etc). Between globalisation and fragmentation, it is no longer possible to confuse the legal State  with the absolute sovereign of conventional modern political theory”, says Yann Richard in his introduction, stressing that the territorial principle is holding out and that it is even possible to talk of re-territorialisation (our translations throughout).

Although the first part concerns itself with territorial engineering, its effectiveness and political legitimacy, particularly on the basis of the French and Tunisian situations, the second part is given over to the European Union, on the basis of five articles. The first, a joint effort by geographers Sylvain Kahn (IEP de Paris) and Yann Richard (Université Paris 1), argues that the “current European crisis is actually a crisis of territorial sovereignty”. There are two opposing conceptions, the first of which postulates that the EU territory is that of a European civilisation that should be preserved from foreign influences, whereas the second sees it as a territoriality produced by multiculturalism. At the same time, the multi-level governance that is a feature of the EU makes this territoriality hard to see past. The community territory is “built collectively, but does not refer to a European sovereignty and a collective society with self-awareness, which makes the ideas of appropriation and identity reference problematic”, state the authors, adding: “the idea of delimitation is also problematic, as it is hard to say where the EU’s boundaries are. This is a major issue for proponents of the EU if they hope to get the Community process back on track”.

This uncertainty over boundaries is put forward as an obstacle to the emergency of a common identity in a highly interesting article by three other geographers - Clarisse Didelon-Loiseau (Paris 1), Karine Emsellem (Université Côte d’Azur) and Sophie de Ruffray (Université de Rouen) - on the contribution of mental maps in analysing the feeling of belonging to the EU. As part of a project under the 7th Framework Programme for Research, students were asked to draw regions on a map of the world as a polar projection. This exercise was carried out without reference to any feeling of spatial belonging, the aim at the end being to see whether the results corresponded to Europe and, if so, in what form. The exercise produced starkly contrasting results, with outlines covering the EU by students from the ‘old’ member states (Belgium, France, Portugal) and very different representations by Hungarian or Maltese students. It is also worth noting that of the relatively few students who spontaneously gave a name to the result, the word they used was “Europe” and not “the EU”.

More poetically, Professor Andreas Faludi (University of Technology of Delft) suggests three metaphors – the archipelago, the Arctic Sea, with its icebergs, and clouds – to illustrate spatial or territorial relations to correspond to the area of the EU as it actually is, not to the so-called territorialism it should be. He argues that these images reflect the great complexity, not to say chaos, that comes of attempting to represent the EU. It is not a “finished product”: it is “as liquid as the shape of clouds; it is fluctuating”, Faludi stresses, going on to conclude: “accepting the idea of permanent chaos requires imagination and an ability to adapt. This is true of all the challenges facing Europe”. (OJ)

Sylvia Brunet, Lydia Lebon, Yann Richard (under the direction of). Prolifération des territoires et représentations territoriales de l’Union européenne (available in French only). Les dossiers des annales de droit. Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre. ISBN: 979-10-240-1322-0. 274 pages. €21.00

Le commerce des armes: un business comme un autre?

The Belgian think-tank Groupe de recherche et d’information sur la paix (GRIP), which has just celebrated its 40th anniversary, has published a cartoon aiming to raise public awareness of what it describes as an “opaque world” (our translation). A GRIP conference was used as the platform for this album, which lists the official arms sales figures, the top 15 biggest weapons exporters and staff numbers in the armaments sector in Belgium. It is hard-hitting from the first page to the last, but it is also highly colourful and, at the end of the day, entertaining enough, if you can briefly forget the fact that weapons were made not only to defend, but also to kill. (OJ)

Benjamin Vokar, Philippe Sadzot, Tomasz. Le commerce des armes: un business comme un autre? (available in French only). Editions GRIP (http://www.grip.org ). ISBN: 978-2-87291-153-0. 54 pages. €10.00