October 12, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize II Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:30 PM EST I was a little disappointed to see that John Steele Gordon tackled the subject of the Nobel Peace Prize before I could get to it today—although not that disappointed. Predictably, Mr. Gordon’s thoughts are rather different from the ones I’ve been mulling over. There is plenty in Mr. Gordon’s post that I find ill-reasoned and problematic, but rather than setting our views in direct and artificial opposition, I thought I’d offer the alternative observations that occurred to me this morning. The Nobel Peace Prize has an interesting history. As Mr. Gordon helpfully detailed, many winners of the prize have been people who worked on peacemaking in a formal, legalistic sort of way. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Ralph Bunche are good examples of this kind of Peace Prize recipient. The majority of Nobel honorees, not just the American winners, have been of this variety. Consider the examples of Oscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica who was awarded the prize in 1987 for his efforts to end civil strife in Central America, and John Hume and David Trimble, who won in 1998 after they worked to forge a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. An increasing number of honorees, however, have been coming from outside the sphere of government and have been winning as a result of accomplishments outside the field of legal peacemaking. Historically, plenty of Nobel Prizes have gone to activists, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Lech Walesa, and Desmond Tutu, whose political contributions improved the condition of humanity but didn’t directly deal with preventing war. Now, two years in a row, the Peace Prize has gone to a private-sector actor whose accomplishments seem even more tenuously tied to literal concerns of war and peace. Last year’s recipient, Muhammad Yunus, is a pioneer of microfinancing, which aims at promoting popular entrepreneurship and business growth in impoverished countries. This year’s winner, Al Gore, has worked to build international consensus around the need to act on the issue of climate change. Neither of these men, or the organizations with which they shared the Peace Prize, has dealt with ending an armed conflict or anything like it. Yet they have both won the highest award a peacemaker can receive. It seems, then, that the Nobel Commitee (not, as Mr. Gordon stated, the Norwegian parliament) is judging Peace Prize nominees by a slightly different understanding of “peace” than it used to. Their principal interest seems to be in honoring individuals whose work has advanced humanitarian, internationalist ideals, rather than in picking out the best peace negotiators. Yunus may not have stopped a war, but he has contributed a remarkable economic innovation in the form of microcredit. This invention may, in the long run, help far more people than the Treaty of Locarno ever did. I think that outcome is pretty likely. Similarly, if Gore’s activism continues to spur international action on the environment, it will help reverse the deleterious effects of climate change and avert famines, epidemics, and disastrous flooding. It seems to me there’s a pretty good case to be made that this achievement would be equivalent to Norman Borlaug’s or Linus Pauling’s. In Akira Iriye’s Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World, the author argues that the Nobel Committee’s decision in 1999 to award the prize to Doctors Without Borders signaled a recognition that international NGOs had begun to rival governments in their ability to shape the common path of humanity. Now it seems the Nobel Committee has come to understand that our world is one in which private individuals, like Gore and Yunus, can effect similar changes in the global social landscape by interacting primarily with other private individuals. This morning Gore sent out an e-mail to his supporters calling the climate crisis “our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.” I find it amazing, and moving, to think that the “global consciousness” he’s referring to is grounded not only in compacts between states but also in an actual community of countless, disparate, concerned individuals. Whether or not you want to call them “peacemakers,” the men and women who have helped build this community are blessed indeed.
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