Doctoral candidates

As a representative body for the Jews living in the diaspora, the World Jewish Congress is a non-state actor. Despite this, it has far-reaching powers and extensive representative power. Not only how and why it achieved this representative power is interesting in this, but also how it puts it to use.

This can be illustrated especially well using a specific conflict case: the negotiations regarding the ‘reparations’ to be paid by Germany to Israel and the Jewish population of the diaspora. The developments in the 1950s were preceded by a decade in which predominantly the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and its Institute of Jewish Affairs collected extensive material and developed legal bases in order to avenge the disenfranchisement and extermination of the Jewish people after the war and to enable them to create an economic position which would allow the reconstruction of Jewish life. However, the fact that three actors – Germany as opponents of the claims on one side and Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference on the other – were involved in these negotiations was problematic. At the same time, the CC adopted a special role in these negotiations. Its legal personality was unclear at this time; it was a coalition of various Jewish advocacy groups (with one President of the WJC); it was not backed by a nation state which would legitimise an agreement in international law in accordance with the classic doctrine of international law. However, through the negotiations regarding compensation claims, the CC gained the power of representation and administration for the compensation claims of the Jews outside Israel. The topic not only allowed a dispute (which remains) regarding representative power, assimilation and Zionism to be reworked and, as part of this, perhaps an assertion narrative to be developed; it also allowed a focus on a conflicting situation in which a solution in international law was developed: the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany in 1952.

The specific questions to be addressed in this dissertation project are: How were legal bases developed in the early 1940s? Which ‘inter-Jewish’ conflicts were decided and how? How did the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel react to the non-state actor? Can the knowledge gained be used to form strategies for conflict regulation in international relations and in international law?

For the German states, the socioeconomic transformation which occurred in the 19^th Century meant a transition to wage-dependent employment and the formation of new lines of conflict in industrial relations. Traditional and emerging branches of industry and jobs existed alongside one another; old and new forms of labour organisation overlapped. In this, state intervention (increasingly) encountered the principle of self-organisation in the working world.

This opens up a field of investigation to which little attention has so far been paid. This research project plans to take into account collective conflict resolution in industrial relations, i.e. institutions and mechanisms for resolving conflicts which affected a group of employees. The period investigated will be between the 1830s and 1880s, before the more intensive codification of regulations in labour law and the establishment of trade unions and employers’ associations.

The various options for and modes of collective conflict resolution and their respective significances will be worked through for this area of economic, social and political tension in the 19^th Century. The ‘success’ and implications of these modes will be evaluated and reflections and discussions about them included. The relationship between individual and collective conflicts and conflict resolutions will also be investigated. At the heart of the investigation is the question of the actors: What role was played by the employers, the various parts of the heterogeneous workforce, the state in the form of the courts, police or administration and other third and fourth parties (notables, academics and others)? Not least, it must also be investigated how the various modes originated and whether and to what extent state law or traditions form guilds and trades were drawn upon, examples existed in neighbouring German and non-German states or completely new forms of conflict resolution came into being.

The research project is intended to contribute to the LOEWE Research Focus “Extrajudicial and judicial conflict resolution’ by tracing the emergence and functions of modes of conflict resolution and developing categories and models thereof.

As well as the central common law courts (Court of King’s/Queen’s Bench, Court of Common Pleas, Court of Exchequer), the Court of Chancery, which decided according to equity, also existed as a court of appeal into the 19^th Century in England. The Judicature Acts of the 1870s combined these courts into a single supreme court, the High Court of Justice. The doctoral project is concerned with the background to English common law and equity and its reform in the 19^th Century.