Nobel's Strange Pathfinders for Peace
By Jay Nordlinger
Encounter, $27.99 (459 pages)
Here is a quick quiz. What do these people have in common? Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann, William Randall Cremer, Ludwig Quidde, Nathan Söderblom, Norman Angell, René Cassiu, Betty Williams, Alfonso García Robles, and Máiread Corrigan? Except for Briand and Stresemann (for those who can recall their college courses on European history), probably even most educated readers have never heard of any of them. The answer is - all have been recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. "Peace, They Say" is an informative and surprising look at the award and the political culture behind it by Jay Nordlinger, the multifaceted editor of the National Review, blogger and music critic for The New Criterion.
Informative because, in the first instance, Nordlinger reveals the otherwise insignificant country behind the prize itself - Norway. When Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, decided to create it in 1893 (along with prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine, and literature) Norway was linked in a union with Sweden. (Nobel even wrote the bequest in his own hand, in Swedish.) As a result, a five-person committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, the Störting, mulls over nominations from around the globe each year and makes its choice in the autumn. (Some years there have been no prizes awarded.)
The fact that it is Norway, not Sweden or France or Greece, let us say, that is allowed to determine the winner of the prize (at present worth $1.5 million) puts a special spin on matters. Norway is small, neutral, rich, self-satisfied, egalitarian, and self-righteous. Swimming in North Sea oil revenues, it opted not to join the European Union, and can thus congratulate itself once again, this time on its isolation from the latter’s current financial problems. Norway also regards itself as something of a moral exemplar for other countries, a status of which it is happy to remind us often. Norwegians positively love the United Nations, and the UN loves Norway in return; in 2009 its global index ranked it as the most desirable place in the world to live. (Warning: the UN’s index loves Cuba too.)
One would expect that under these circumstances the prize would go uniformly to left-wing, anti-American personalities, and indeed it has on some occasions. But that leads to the surprising part of the book. A very large number of mainstream Americans have been the recipient: Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Dawes (vice president under Calvin Coolidge), Jane Addams, Nicholas Murray Butler, Cordell Hull, Ralph Bunche, and George C. Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and Henry Kissinger (who shared it with Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho). In recent years the selection of Americans seems to have become somewhat more politicized, as the award to Jimmy Carter and latterly Barak Obama seem to suggest. But still and all, for a prize awarded by a country and a political culture which views the United States with some antipathy (if not actual distaste), this is a remarkable record.
Nordlinger points out that the Nobel committee has been unduly impressed with process rather than actual outcomes insofar as peace is concerned. This explains its taste for honoring international organizations and advocacy groups rather than individuals. The list includes the American Friends Field Service, the Institute of International Law, the United Nations High Committee on Refugees, UNICEF, Amnesty International (in its most recent, radicalized phase), and the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, the UN Peacekeeping Forces and Doctors Without Borders, or International Atomic Energy Agency. While the work of some of these organizations is commendable (but alas, not that of all of them), it is difficult to see how they promote peace, unless one assumes that the sole and unique cause of war is hunger, poverty and injustice (which is actually what the Nobel committee probably does believe).
It is also striking that some people have been awarded the prize for what many might regard as the wrong reasons. Willy Brandt was honored not for the Oder-Neisse treaty (which renounced Germany’s territories lost to Poland after World War II) or even his not-insignificant contribution to the development of a solid democratic political culture in Germany, but rather his advocacy of coexistence between the Communist and non-Communist world (no human rights, thank you very much).
Jimmy Carter’s 2002 prize had hardly been announced when the cat was out of the bag. As the committee chairman explained to the press, it “should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current (Bush) administration has taken. It’s a kick in the leg to all who follow the same line as the United States.” (“Kick in the leg” is a Norwegian way of saying “poke in the eye”.) No such indiscreet explanation was necessary in the case of Barak Obama. He replaced the evil George W. Bush; that seems to have been enough.
Even more interesting are the people who didn’t get the prize (there is no way of knowing whether they were nominated by someone or not). They include Gandhi, Herbert Hoover (who supervised a massive humanitarian relief program in post-World War I Europe), Andrew Carnegie, Vaclav Havel, Pope John Paul II, or any of the well-known Cuban dissidents who have been awarded other European prizes, such as Oswaldo Payá of the Christian Liberation Movement. The most startling omission is President Ronald Reagan, particularly in light of the Nobel committee’s tendency in recent years to link pairs of peacemakers - Kissinger and Lee Duc Tho, or Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, Yasar Arafat/Yitzhak Rabin/Shimon Peres. By honoring Gorbachev alone for ending the Cold War, the Norwegians were presumably justifying post hoc their hatred of our 40th president while he was actually in the process of peace-making.
This leaves a rather small list of genuine peacemakers. Theodore Roosevelt arbitrated the end of the Russo-Japanese War; Ralph Bunche negotiated the cease-fire in the first Arab-Israel war; Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin ended a decades-long Israeli-Egyptian conflict; Mandela and de Klerk ended a real and even more potentially explosive conflict in South Africa; Kim Dae-Jung is responsible for huge advances in democracy and human rights in Korea (that is, South Korea, for those who haven’t been paying attention). That just about exhausts the possibilities.
Nordlinger suggests that in recent years at least the Norwegian Nobel committee has shown itself to be slightly schizophrenic in its political tastes. This may well be; some years it seems to veer onto a more sensible road (Lech Walesa, Andrei Sakharov, Elie Wiesel, Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama); other years it balances things out by taking bizarre ideological detours - the best example of which is the Guatemalan leftist phony Rigoberta Menchú (well, it was 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “encounter” with America, so it was time to honor an Indian).
Some honorees were sensible enough at the time of their award (Argentine human rights activist Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu), only to become weird and irresponsible in their public pronouncements and activities afterwards (in the case of Jimmy Carter, simply more weird and irresponsible). For example, Pérez Esquival, Carter and Menchú have all subsequently proven to be great friends of the Castro dictatorship.
"Peace, They Say" is a witty, entertaining book that demystifies a subject that has hidden far too long behind a façade of distortions, propaganda and misunderstandings. Autumn is not far off. This book prepares us for the next episode in the adventures of the prize committee - and just in time at that.
