When Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Peace Prize, first awarded in 1901, he wanted to celebrate pioneers of peace. He hoped that the prize would recognize “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.”
Over 112 years, the Nobel Peace Prize has honoured statesmen such as Lester Pearson (1957), Dag Hammarskjöld (1961), Willy Brandt (1971) and Mikhail Gorbachev (1990).
It has honoured those who promoted peace among races or religions, such as Martin Luther King Jr. (1964), the Dalai Lama (1989) and Nelson Mandela (1993). It has honoured those who promoted human rights and democracy such as Aung San Suu Kyi (1991).
It has also honoured organizations: United Nations Peacekeeping Forces (1988), the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (1997), Médecins Sans Frontières (1999). The winners have included the United Nations (2001) and European Union (2012).
Whether an individual or an organization, though, the point of the prize was to recognize an initiative of immediate impact, such as the ceasefire that Pearson brokered at Suez in 1956. Or, it was to honour an enduring commitment to conciliation or human well-being. Now, though, the prize is becoming something less. It no longer celebrates achievement this year or in previous years. Now it honours the promise of achievement.
So it is with this year’s winner: the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It is leading the effort to find and dismantle chemical weapons in Syria. This is hard, heroic work, which deserves the world’s applause. It does not deserve the Nobel Prize — at least not yet.
This isn’t to diminish its credentials or its raison d’être, which is to conduct inspections in countries with chemical weapons. This is to say, more prudently, that its work in Syria has just begun, and we should wait and see.
The Nobel committee has decided to honour an organization “for its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons,” a job the OPCW has been doing for 16 years. Terrific, but it will be doing that for several more years, and we can salute it then. Meanwhile, there are organizations and people toiling for peace for decades, often in anonymity.
Or, there are those like Malala Yousafzai, who is at the height of her influence in inspiring girls to pursue an education. Although she is just 16, she would have been more than a sentimental choice.
But it wasn’t Malala or someone like her this year, because the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t always about that. Increasingly, it’s becoming a promissory note.
None of the other Nobel prizes work this way. Alice Munro didn’t win to encourage her to write more short stories (though it might); the literature prize recognized her extraordinary oeuvre. So it is for the chemists, physicists, doctors and economists who become Nobel laureates. They are honoured for their performance, pure and simple, not their potential.
The Peace Prize thinks otherwise. In 2009, it chose President Barack Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international co-operation between peoples.” He’d been in office less than a year. Perhaps it encouraged him to end America’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he’d promised to do; it did not discourage him from embracing drone warfare.
The contemporary view of merit has caught up with the Nobel committee. “Everyone’s a winner” is the ethic in grade schools, where athletic and scholastic trophies are distributed like candy, grades are inflated and few fail. Merit had nothing to do with many of the recipients of the 2012 Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, which became a national joke when politicians, among others, awarded it to themselves.
The judges of the Nobel Peace Prize, long criticized for being out of touch, are now very much in touch. They are pleased to announce that good intentions matter almost as much as good works.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University.
