Message in a Peace Prize

Rather than focusing on whether Obama's prize was political, commentators should have been asking what impact it would have.

On October 9, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama became the 97th individual, and 120th overall recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. His receipt of the prize has been alternately characterized as undeserved, premature, a joke, a call to action, a parting shot by the “European establishment” at George W. Bush, as well as an endorsement of his vision for a more just and peaceful world.

Obama’s selection certainly generated a lot of discussion; intriguing, however, was the way in which it fizzled out so quickly. Arguably, this evanescence was a product of both the insubstantial character of much of the discussion itself as well as a revelation of something deeper. While the multiplicity of reactions to the prize committee’s choice might seem to suggest some significant and concrete differences of opinion regarding the place of the prize in world affairs, the superficiality of much of the commentary was, to me, much more indicative of a fairly unreflective conception of the prize’s actual purpose.

In accordance with the will of Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel, the Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901. It is unclear exactly what Nobel hoped to achieve with the establishment of the prize, but in his will he clearly stated that it should be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” in the year preceding the award’s conferral.

Unfortunately, while this statement outlines the selection criteria, it does not provide much guidance concerning the actual purpose of the prize. That the prize committee openly admits that it has liberally interpreted the selection criteria also suggests that, even if the award’s purpose had been explicitly stated, it is by no means clear that it would have been strictly adhered to.

The discussion surrounding Obama’s win was remarkable precisely because it revealed, notwithstanding the official silence on the subject, a number of strong, if perhaps inappropriate, beliefs concerning the prize’s purpose.

In particular, two of the more common criticisms of Obama’s selection are especially interesting. The first being that awarding Obama the prize was “political,” and the second, that it was undeserved or premature.

To my mind such arguments make some problematic assumptions. First, if the awarding of the prize to Obama was political (and thus a bad thing?) one must assume that a better selection would/could have been made on a non-political basis. In reality, however, the awarding of the prize is, and has always been, unavoidably political. To see this, one need only recognize that the prize is awarded by a committee of human beings who are inevitably biased by their own subjective worldviews. These views are in turn inescapably shaped by the political milieu out of which they have emerged. Thus, any selection will always and necessarily be “political” in the most basic sense of the word. One wonders then if this inevitability can thus really be a bad thing?

The second problem is connected to the first, namely the belief that the prize is awarded on the basis of some objective criteria which seeks to recognize the individual who has already contributed the most to world peace.

Certainly, the award can be a recognition of the individual who has most contributed to world peace in the past year or years. However, while it has often been awarded on this basis, it has just as often not been. Aung San Suu Kyi is certainly an admirable person and one deserving of recognition, support, and emulation, but one wonders if she was really the person who contributed most to international peace in the year she was awarded her prize.

Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres’s shared prize – analogous in some ways to Obama’s – is difficult to hold up as solely, or even predominately, a recognition of a major accomplishment. While the signing of the Oslo Accords was an important and courageous step towards peace, these three men were not, strictly speaking, the ones most responsible for the actual breakthrough, nor, as we have unfortunately seen, were the Accords worth very much in and of themselves. Rather, in both these cases we see the committee sending a deeply political message that the advancement of world peace would be best served by supporting what these individuals stood for and what they were trying to do, rather than what they had already accomplished.

Such an analysis suggests that the prize committee is itself a political agent, pursuing its own agenda, and not simply an objective award-granting institution. Indeed, it would be naïve to believe that there is not a more abstract and ambitious additional objective that sits behind this, the committee’s more widely accepted nominal role. After all, why bother to award a prize recognizing efforts towards peace if one did not also want to promote the expansion of peace?

It seems clear to me that the prize committee has its own indelibly political agenda, namely the promotion of world peace through the awarding of a highly prestigious and attention-grabbing award. While this agenda is often best advanced by recognizing those who have made significant contributions to world peace, its actions are not strictly limited to this narrow task. In fact, the current prize committee head, Thorbjoern Jagland, made this argument quite openly in his justification of the committee’s recent selection by saying that “[w]e hope [Obama’s selection] can contribute a little bit to enhance what he is trying to do.”

To me the more interesting question, which has unfortunately been mostly neglected, revolves around whether or not the selection of Obama was the one that was most likely to best advance the prize’s goal of building peace. Hopefully the committee, unlike much of the media, gave this question a long hard think when they made their decision.