For once, the Nobel doves make the right call twice in the same year
“But Paddy,” says the bartender, “Your wife’s been in a coma since January.”
“You’re right”, the customer replies, “Isn’t peace grand?”
Actually, there was an even less funny joke going around – that Bono was going to win the peace prize this year.
Of course, some of us were beginning to think the Nobels were becoming a bit of a joke, period, after the award last year to Barack Obama. A wonderful election campaigner, no doubt, but he had been President of the United States for precisely two whole weeks when nominations closed. What he had actually done to deserve such acclaim is anyone’s guess except he wasn’t George Bush.
The former president became a bit of a fixation for the Nobel committee. They as much as admitted they gave the prize to one of his predecessors, Jimmy Carter in 2002, just to stick a thumb in W’s eye during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Actually, no one should have been surprised by Obama’s elevation.
Al Gore, whom Bush ever so narrowly beat by a Floridian hanging chad or two, was compensated with a peace prize in 2007 – jointly with the UN’s Let’s Scare the Living Daylights Out of Everybody About Global Warming Committee.
Yes, the Nobel Peace Prize sometimes seems in danger of becoming a parody of itself. It is actually organised by something called the Norwegian Nobel Institute set up by one Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the Swedish inventor and chemist who, among other things, invented dynamite.
Over his lifetime, Nobel accumulated fabulous wealth, much of it from oil prospecting in Azerbaijan.
He specified in his will in 1895 that the peace prize to should go 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”.
The list of those who can nominate is pretty broad. Any parliamentarian anywhere in the world has the right. So do university professors. Perhaps it’s not so surprising then that, over the years, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini all received nominations. It helps explain why Mikhail Gorbachev got one and the likes of Vaclav Havel or Pope John Paul II did not.
In addition to the peace prize, the institute established prizes in the areas of chemistry, physics and medicine. Over the years, these prizes have mostly gone to scientists of genuine achievement. The literature and the more recently established economics prizes are quirkier, but the peace prize has always been the most controversial. How Gandhi was passed over while Yasser Arafat secured one the Nobel Institute cannot explain.
Closer to home, some might recall, for instance, the hoo-ha when David Trimble won and refused to indulge in pieties, instead giving a stern lecture about the need for moral clarity when dealing with political fanaticism (Not a single person remembers what his co-winner John Hume said because, great man that he is, he got to the end of his speech without managing to say anything very much. Everyone clapped respectfully).
And that’s the problem in part with the Nobel prize. Occasionally, someone with a bit of fibre slips through the net but, all too often, the prize is a pat on the back for seeing no evil. For example, they honoured Mohamed El Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005, by which time Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea all probably had access to nuclear weapons.
Incidentally, Kim Dae-jung, president of South Korea a few years back who gave us the love and harmony the world enjoys with the North Koreans, was another peace prizewinner.
More than once, the Nobel committee has frequently shown itself to be a bit naive when it comes to nuclear issues. In 1985 they gave their prize to an outfit called International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Their chairman, it turned out, was reputedly a senior member of the Soviet Communist Party – scarcely a peace organisation in most people’s book.
What do we mean by “peace” anyway? I hesitate before quoting Margaret Thatcher but, back in the Cold War era, she asked the pertinent question: “We speak of peace, yes, but whose peace? Poland’s? Bulgaria’s? The peace of the grave?”
Timing has frequently been another issue for the Nobel committee. Way back in 1913, Henri La Fontaine, a member of parliament in gallant little Belgium, received the prize for being president of the Permanent International Peace Bureau. We know what happened the following year.
Aristide Briand and Frank B Kellogg, both peace prize winners, forged the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 in which the great powers of the day all forswore “recourse to war for the solution of international controversies”. That didn’t stop the Japanese from marching into Manchuria.
Other winners such as Nelson Mandela and Menachem Begin didn’t so much negotiate peace as negotiate their manner of winning. You have probably guessed by now that when I was having all these thoughts, it was in anticipation of another eccentric choice by the Nobel committee. Half the Irish media was secretly praying for Bono to win.
But then, last week, the committee deprived us of our fun. It demonstrated some rare intelligence. It showed some of that flair it exhibited when it gave the peace prize to the likes of Albert Schweitzer, Andrei Sakharov, Aung San Suu Kyi and Lech Walesa. That’s the problem with writing off the Nobel Peace Prize altogether: occasionally, they give it to someone worthy.
SO, after last year’s premature – and immature – award to President Obama, the committee has redeemed itself and the future of the prize by honouring Liu Xiaobo. The committee has shown it does still have a bit of steel. By selecting Liu Xiaobo, instead of bowing down, the committee is challenging the most oppressive power of all: the Chinese Communist Party. Unlike the great powers of our day, it hasn’t surrendered to the People’s Army before it is even asked.
True, Liu Xiaobo is just one of many Chinese dissidents – “common criminals” according to the erstwhile Maoists – but he happens to be the most articulate and the most unbending. Liu could have gone into exile but that would deprive him of his claim to legitimacy. Instead, he fights the good fight from behind bars. For him, that fight is for nothing less than for his own land to become a normal country – a real democracy, not the perverted parody of that concept which Beijing upholds.
Occasionally, the Nobel committee has bestowed the prize on obscure characters in a commendable effort to represent the world’s diversity. In recognising Liu, though, it hit the nail right on the head. An injustice has been righted. He is a global citizen fighting for universal values. His passion for liberty is inspiring. That Mario Vargas Llosa, a rare accessible novelist who also happens to be a scourge of authoritarianism, has also been awarded a Nobel prize this year is a cause for double celebration.
The Nobel Institute has redeemed itself. Yes, in spite of all the oddball decisions, those prizes are still to be coveted.
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