The Nobel Peace Prize: a medal for good intentions and a guilty conscience

Rather than a prize for peace, it is a prize for good intentions and a guilty conscience. Against a backdrop of many grotesque choices (the Vietnamese Le Duc Tho, the indigenous Rigoberta Menchú, the terrorist Yasser Arafat, Barack Obama) and few inspired ones (Carl von Ossietzky, Norman Borlaug, Andrei Sakharov, Mother Teresa, Lech Wałęsa, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad), most of the laureates have made us forget the time when receiving the prize still meant that somewhere, someone had stopped shooting at one another. Just as when the Nobel Peace Prize went to an American diplomat named Ralph Bunche. There was little debate as to why. Bunche, a United Nations official, helped broker the 1949 armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1931, wrote in 1910 that “to suppose that men and women, whose intellectual and moral education and development have drawn upon the glories of the world’s philosophy, art, poetry and religion… must be at each other’s throats, waging war and killing, in the hope of somehow thereby establishing truth, law and justice, is to suppose that the universe stands on its head”. The First World War, four years later, offered a less charitable assessment of the benefits of moral and intellectual education (and of the Nobel Peace Prize).

Butler became one of the leading advocates of the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact, which was intended to outlaw war. A fine monument to hope, which earned US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg the Nobel Prize in 1929 (Briand had already won it in 1926 for the equally ill-fated Locarno Pact), and which was immediately ratified by Japan (which invaded Manchuria in 1931), Italy (which invaded Abyssinia in 1935) and Germany (which invaded Poland in 1939).

No Nobel Prize for Franklin Roosevelt for defeating Nazism; for Winston Churchill for rallying Britain and Europe against Hitler’s onslaught; for Charles de Gaulle for keeping alive the flame of a free France; or for Douglas MacArthur for transforming Japan into a country at peace with itself and its neighbours. Yet these were the statesmen who did more than anyone else to secure peace and freedom in the 20th century.

The members of the Nobel Committee chose to honour the New England pacifist Emily Greene Balch (1946), the disarmament pioneer Philip Noel-Baker (1959) and the anti-nuclear activist and Lenin Peace Prize winner Seán MacBride (1974). Not to mention Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. Pauling also won the Lenin Peace Prize – formerly the Stalin Peace Prize – and said it meant more to him than the Nobel Prize.

The struggle against Soviet communism lasted as long as Soviet communism itself: from 1917 to 1991. Yet the Nobel Committee honoured only two participants in this heroic struggle: Sakharov in 1975 and Walesa eight years later (unless one wishes to count Gorbachev amongst the anti-Soviet figures). That is rather meagre, considering that the struggle against apartheid in South Africa yielded three Nobel laureates (Archbishop Tutu, Mandela and de Klerk).

The Committee decided to award the prize to Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and a mediator – a choice free of any controversy – prompting Sergei Kovalyov, a long-standing dissident from the Soviet era, to accuse the Committee of not wanting to irritate the Kremlin at a time when Europe was dependent on Russian energy resources. Instead of Ahtisaari, in fact, the prize should have gone to Lidia Yusupova, ‘the bravest woman in Europe’.

“Oil is expensive; it is better to be polite and not offend one’s ‘friends’, even if they are ruthless friends,” said Kovalyov. The Committee waited until after the invasion of Ukraine before awarding the Nobel Prize to the Russian NGO Memorial, led by Ms Yusupova.

The prize was established in accordance with the will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. It was intended for those who had ‘done the most or the best to promote fraternity between nations, to abolish or reduce standing armies, and to organise and promote peace congresses’. Yet for the past thirty years, the honour has often gone to those who cosy up to dictators – provided they are not too white or Christian – to professional Third World activists, and to those who hate their own successes more than they hate the failures of others.

Take Abiy Ahmed, the 2019 Nobel laureate. As Prime Minister of Ethiopia, he received the award jointly with Eritrea. The committee praised his “decisive initiative” in resolving a twenty-year-long conflict. A few months later, the Tigray war broke out: hundreds of thousands of deaths, war crimes, famine used as a weapon (unlike in Gaza), and an alliance with the Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki (the very man with whom he had made peace). Abiy, who had described the war as the “epitome of hell” in his speech in Oslo, found himself commanding military operations in uniform. Rather than restraining him, the Nobel Prize seems to have encouraged him: the medal became a moral licence. Today, the region is once again ablaze and the laureate is among the most controversial in history. Just as when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Liberian president, received the prize in 2011 and many criticised the choice because the president had supported the guerrilla forces of the dictator Charles Taylor. Or the Nobel Prize awarded to the Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, who legitimised the FARC terrorists.

Si vis pacem, para bellum. In Oslo, it’s the other way round: if you want war, prepare for peace. In 1977, the Nobel Prize went to Amnesty International, a noble organisation that has gone so far as to justify the wearing of the burqa in classrooms in opposition to the School Decree. Peter Benenson founded Amnesty in 1961 with an article in The Observer that still reads like an act of secular faith: every day, somewhere, someone is imprisoned, tortured or killed because their opinions are unwelcome to those in power.

Today, for writers, journalists, politicians and actors, Amnesty is a portable conscience: a mark of moral quality to be displayed between one festival and another, an licence that allows them to speak about human rights.

In 2007, the prize was awarded to Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “for their efforts in building greater understanding of man-made climate change”. Gore, with his doomsday documentary, became the secular prophet of an impending apocalypse (“make peace with the planet” – an excellent slogan for the Nobel Prize). It matters not that none of the disasters foretold by Gore have come to pass. Let the West atone; let the rest of the world develop.

Mohamed ElBaradei won the Nobel Prize in 2005 with the International Atomic Energy Agency “for his efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes”. While Iran was concealing its nuclear programmes in the mountains, enriching uranium to 60 per cent and moving towards the nuclear threshold, ElBaradei insisted that “suspicions are not conclusive evidence”. For twenty years, the agency was deceived by the Iranians; we only learnt of their nuclear programme from dissidents and from Israel. Yet ElBaradei seemed more interested in protecting Tehran from economic sanctions and military attacks than in halting its nuclear programme.

In 1992, the Nobel Prize was awarded in the year marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, and the narrative was all set: the Guatemalan Maya indigenous woman Rigoberta Menchú, who embodied the resistance of oppressed peoples against state violence and European-descended landowners. The prize was awarded for her autobiography, "I, Rigoberta Menchú", a canonical text on Western university campuses. Then came the anthropologist David Stoll, who interviewed dozens of witnesses and consulted archives. Significant discrepancies emerge: the land dispute was not against wealthy landowners, but an intra-family Maya feud; a brother whom she describes as having starved to death either did not exist or was alive; other episodes of domestic violence have been reworked or attributed in a misleading manner; Menchú herself had attended religious schools, contradicting the image of her being illiterate.

Granting small loans to entrepreneurs operating with extremely limited resources was, according to capitalism, supposed to be the cure for global poverty. Microfinance – the provision of loans in communities not served by traditional banks – was supposed to help poor people in developing countries to set up businesses and, over time, achieve prosperity. This was the aim of Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer of this practice in Bangladesh in the 1970s and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. “In a world free from poverty, the only place where poverty will be visible will be in poverty museums,” Yunus declared in Oslo in 2006, upon receiving the prize. Over the years, microfinance institutions have disbursed hundreds of billions of dollars to people living in poverty in countries ranging from Albania to Zimbabwe. Two decades after Yunus was awarded the Nobel Prize, very few of these aspirations have materialised. Academic studies have found that microfinance does not improve economic conditions. Economists have also found that over-reliance on microcredit has triggered loan repayment crises in several countries, such as India and Cambodia.

In 2011, Tawakkol Karman was honoured as the ‘godmother of the Arab Spring’, a journalist and activist. The chairman of the Norwegian committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, was explicit: including her was a signal that the Muslim Brotherhood ‘can be part of the solution’. Karman is a leading figure in al-Islah, a Yemeni party affiliated with the Brotherhood. The prize serves to legitimise “moderate” Islamism.

When the prize is awarded to genuine dissidents opposing totalitarian regimes (Liu Xiaobo, Narges Mohammadi, Ales Bialiatski), the Nobel Prize deserves respect. When it goes to the West’s guilty conscience – to those who flirt with dictators or hostile ideologies simply because they are anti-American, or to those who build icons on the basis of incomplete texts – it reveals more about the committee than about the laureates. The Nobel Committee consists of five individuals, all Norwegians, all elected by the Oslo Parliament. “It is hard to believe that the world has so much to do with the opinion of five unknown Norwegians,” said Ole Danbolt Mjos, the Committee’s former chairman.

Right up to Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay, the South African lawyer and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, honoured for chairing a commission that accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, alongside the son of another forgotten laureate, Elie Wiesel – Elisha – who pens the ‘de profundis of the Nobel Peace Prize’. However, the Norwegian honour could have been awarded to UNRWA, the UN agency infiltrated by Hamas, or to Greta Thunberg, who is present in every square and flotilla.

The award to Xiaobo, an intellectual, literary critic and Chinese political prisoner, was a courageous move. For more than sixty years, the committee had overlooked China’s heroes of freedom, and then finally honoured one of them. But will they ever honour a Cuban? Armando Valladares, the former political prisoner known as ‘the Cuban Solzhenitsyn’, observes: ‘If the Cuban dictatorship were right-wing rather than left-wing, we would have already won two or three Nobel Prizes’.

In Alfred Nobel’s day, it was customary to recite one of the Beatitudes: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’. Truly blessed, especially when the peace they bring is worthy of the name. As for the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Gerry Kasparov has said it all: ‘Perhaps next year they’ll award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to a Hamas bomb-maker’.