Topic: Barack Obama
The first ever Nobel Prize for glamor. By their very nature, awards like the Nobel Peace Prize are not always given to the most deserving of qualified recipients nor do all deserving recipients win the Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has made some questionable decisions before, but none as bizarre as giving the award this year to U.S. President Barack Obama.by B. S. Kalafut
(libertarian)
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Nobel Prizes in general do not always go to the most deserving potential recipient, nor is it possible for all deserving parties ultimately honored. Even more so than the Nobel prizes in the natural sciences and literature or the economics prize in memory of Nobel, the Nobel Peace Prize is often awarded for reasons that seem later to be be ephemeral.
The 1973 award for a non-existent peace in Vietnam and the 1994 award for supposed progress in Israeli/Palestinian relations stand out--beyond the irony of giving a "peace" award to any of the named recipients--as particularly naïve. Similarly the splitting of the IPCC's deserved award with Al Gore, whose mostly but not entirely accurate film probably didn't convince anyone who disagreed, might have seemed like a good idea at the time to somebody with a provincial Norwegian perspective, but just two years later looks like a lapse of judgement. Some of the awardees--Albert Schweitzer, Mother Theresa--seem years later like minor figures compared to the others, leading one to think that the Norwegian Nobel Committee isn't immune to celebrity. And the Nobel Committee's desire for timeliness and relevance in awarding the Peace Prize means it is anything but a lifetime achievement award--Theodore Roosevelt, Mikhail Gorbachev, and numerous other recipients can hardly be called men of peace.
Even the most political of the Nobel prizes frequently goes to recipients whose contribution to "fraternity between nations...the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses" is incontrovertibly outstanding. Who would argue with the awards to Norman Borlaug or Doctors Without Borders? Yet other "obvious" winners never win the prize. The best the Committee could do for Mohandas Ghandi was to not give an award at all in the year of his death. Prizes were given in two years for work on the important but largely symbolic Kellogg-Briand pact, but for the great example of truly worldwide cooperation for common cause, the Montreal Protocol, there were no prizes. There was a prize for work on microcredit in Bangladesh but none for Manmohan Singh for his role in the end of India's "Licence Raj". And no prize was awarded to Milton and Rose Friedman jointly or to Milton Friedman alone for promotion of education reform, all-volunteer armies, free trade, and poverty-crushing liberalization.
Neither the past omissions nor the weaker or more ephemeral awards put the Nobel Committee's bona fides in categorical doubt. Each recipient won the award for some clear extraordinary substantiative accomplishment, had brought about at least temporary progress toward peace, international cooperation, or the securing of basic human rights. In contrast, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Barack Obama, received the award for insubstantial and profoundly ordinary acts, if he can be said to have won the award for any acts at all.
The Nobel Peace Prize is often given early, sometimes to encourage or support a reform effort. The award to Lech Walesa immediately following the period of martial law in Poland raised Solidarity's international profile, and that to Suu Kyi may have saved her life. Solidarity ultimately succeeded beyond expectation; neither the National League for Democracy nor liberty in general have advanced in Burma since 1991. Both of these awardees built grassroots social movements against highly repressive governments. Solidarity had already, among many other things, brought about a general "warning strike" and the first independent television news reporting in the Eastern Bloc; The National League for Democracy had the 8-8-88 uprising and continued activity in the face of military repression to show for itself. Although neither Walesa nor Suu Kyi had achieved victory at the time both had already done the extraordinary.
For a U.S. President to engage in diplomacy is not extraordinary. The Nobel Committee occasionally gives awards to encourage or support recipients, but the President of the United States needs no such encouragement or support. For Obama's yet-to-materialize peace and nuclear nonproliferation initiatives to succeed, he needs domestic as well as foreign support; if the Nobel Committee thought that an award that Americans from all over the political spectrum find undeserved--and one that many see as being a foreign commentary on their election--would actually boost his domestic credibility, they are even more provincial than thought. In American culture awards are given for accomplishments, not intentions, and the granting of high honors to the already empowered merely because they hold their office is seen as a primitive practice out of Third World banana-republics or the Old Europe we cast off in 1776.
Perhaps the closest case in Nobel Peace Prize history to Obama's was the 1971 award to West German chancellor Willy Brandt. As leader of a major First World state, Brandt did not need a boost from the Nobel Committee. Whether or not Ostpolitik would be fruitful was unknown at the time--although knowing what we know in 2009 it's difficult to imagine economic cooperation leading to anything but progress--and the Prize served as a sort of seal of approval. Unlike Obama,'s foreign policy however, Brandt's Ostpolitik was a fundamental, substantiative reversal and it could be said that the prize was given in honor of this bold change. The Obama administration, on the other hand, has continued to pursue its predecessor's foreign policy; Obama received the Prize for putting a simpering new face on standard post-Cold War U.S. policy.
As the Nobel Committee's announcement has it:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.
Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.
Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.
For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."
In short: Obama won the prize for his attittudes, beliefs, and stated aspirations--for his words, and not any actions, certainly none extraordinary for a President of the United States in his first year in office. One senses in the announcement the "glamor" effect as described by Virginia Postrel: the Nobel Committee is pleased to be able to find in Obama, correctly or incorrectly, a U.S. President more like themselves than George W. Bush, one inclined toward consensus-building and who leads "on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population," i.e. European and probably Social Democrat values a member of the Committee will hear voiced from the "majority" at the Norwegian's neighborhood bar. (If Obama's values were the majority of the world's, there'd be no need for peace prizes.)
If it wasn't clear enough that Obama won the first Nobel Peace Prize for glamor, we need only read "Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future" twice. Obama won the award not for anything he has done but rather for how he makes a room full of Norwegians and, as they perceive it, untold others, feel about themselves. (Does the Nobel Committee really think that people of the world were despairing--without "hope for a better future"--before Obama's election?)
2009 marked the first time the Nobel Peace Prize was given for glamor. Given that the Prize has in the past quite effectively raised awareness of and encouraged peace, humanitarian and pro-freedom movements, let's hope that it is also the last. The damage done to the award's and the Norwegian Nobel Committee's credibility will take years if not decades to repair, but past examples, such as the award to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, indicate that the damage done in one bad year is not irreversible.
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The views expressed in this
article are those of B. S. Kalafut only and do not represent
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I'm not seeing it. For one thing, where was the swimsuit competition? For another, he does *not* look good in an evening gown. His make-up is done poorly. Nope, it wasn't glamor.
It was the audacity of hopefulness. Childish, idiotic hopefulness.
Roosevelt may not have been an overall peaceful character, but he was judged on his work to negotiate peace between Russia and Japan which was a real achievement.
Your laudation of the IPCC award is interesting, however you may feel about the integrity of the panel aside, as it certainly stretches the definition of Peace rather far.
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