Das Thema der Diss lautet: "The Jewish people as global actor" Voluntary global communities as emergent players - a case study of the Jewish commuinty.

Die konkrete Frage war: Warum hat es der Jüdische Weltkongress 1998 als relativ kleine Nichtregierungsorganisation geschafft, die drei mächtigen  Schweizer Grossbanken in der Frage der nachrichtenlosen jüdischen Konti in der Schweiz aus der Zeit des Zweiten Weltkrieges auf die Knie zu zwingen?

Hier meine Antwort:

Dear Ms.
Why was the World Jewish Congress WJC so tremendously successful with his campaign against the three biggest Swiss banks in 1996/98?

How was a small non government organization able to bring the leading lights of Swiss financial industry down to their knees, three huge financial institutions with 150 years of successful experience, each of them with hundreds of billions of Dollars in the balance sheet.

And why was the WJC able to blow the he problem of dormant Swiss accounts of Holocaust victims so completely out of any realistic proportion, a problem of numerically limited scope, openly debated for many years in the Swiss government, parliament and press in two rounds of - incomplete - restitution in the fifties and sixties.

Today, eight years later, more than half of the 1.25 billion dollar restitution money from UBS and Credit Suisse, is still not paid out to holocaust victims an their descendants, even though many an accepted claim was honored from hearsay without any documentation, and skyrocketing administrative costs and legal fees in New York, Switzerland and elsewhere.

As I told you on our recent phone-conversation, I think, the WJC knocked out  Swiss banks not as an NGO, but as a GONGO, i.e. Government Non Government Organization.

GONGO, that's how grassroots-militants call the government-inspired NGOs, operating among the grassroots "like a fish in the water type" NGO.

It was, I believe, not the tactical genius of the Bronfman/Singer WJC-leadership, nor public opinion and the media, i.e. the the moral dimension of the dormant accounts question, but the strategical backing for WJC from no less than three governments, that did the trick.

GONGO WJC had the the full backing of the Israeli Government, the US-government (Undersecretary Eizenstat) and the UK-government (Foreign Minister Rifkind) plus some New-York-politicians such as Sen. Alfonse D'Amato and City-Comptroller Alan Hevesi.

It was not so much WJC, but the Anglo-American-Israeli-axis - that brought down Swiss banks to their knees.

In other words, the facts of new geopolitics after the fall of the Soviet union.

UBS, Credit Suisse and Swiss Bank Corp imploded in the first place because they were threatened by a boycott of their substantial US and possibly UK-businesses.

Secondly by the lack of  full backing by the Swiss government, and thirdly weakened by some serious tactical mistakes from their incompetent leaders. 

I wish you good inspiration for your thesis and I am certainly interested to get a copy, when you have finished it.

best regards
Gian Trepp