Oslo Syndrome

This was painfully obvious last week, when Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.–as the Nobel committee punctiliously identifies him–was awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, in conjunction with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As if to demonstrate how the foreign press seldom comprehends American politics, the Financial Times of London led the weekend edition with a breathless account of Gore’s triumph, headlined “Gore Prize Transforms Debate on Climate.”

Up to a point, FT. As it happens, there is no evidence whatsoever that Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize has had any effect at all on the 2008 Democratic or Republican presidential campaigns, and, according to polls, Democratic voters remain resolutely uninterested in a potential Gore candidacy. Indeed, the laureate himself, who had been coy on the subject, took the occasion to repeat his intention not to seek the presidency next year.

Gore could still change his mind, of course, and global warming might be mentioned at one of those televised debates. But it is symptomatic of the depths to which the Nobel Prize has sunk that its impact this year, such as it is, was inspired by a movie (An Inconvenient Truth) and confined to one phase of U.S. presidential politics. No doubt, a glow will emanate from Gore’s capacious skull, and he will savor the ceremony in Oslo and the big gold medal with the profile of Alfred Nobel. But, as if we didn’t already know, the Nobel Peace Prize ain’t what it used to be.

The problem is that the Nobel Peace Prize, endowed by the conscience-stricken inventor of dynamite, has always had a slightly ambiguous quality about it–unlike, say, the prizes in physics or medicine, even literature.

For many years, it functioned as a kind of gold watch for elder statesmen: the American Elihu Root (1912), Aristide Briand (1926) of France, Britain’s stalwart League of Nations advocate Lord Robert Cecil (1937), the Canadian Lester Pearson (1957). There was the occasional miscalculation, of course: The American secretary of state Frank Kellogg (1929) won for his pact, coauthored with the aforementioned Briand, outlawing war as an instrument of national policy–just one decade before the Nazi invasion of Poland. North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho (1973) shared the honors for peace in Indochina, as did Yasser Arafat (1994) for peace in the Middle East. But the prize customarily went to benevolent politicians–Woodrow Wilson (1919), Gustav Stresemann (1926), Cordell Hull (1945)–to well-intentioned people–Jane Addams (1931), Ralph Bunche (1950), Albert Schweitzer (1952)–and to humanitarian organizations–International Committee of the Red Cross (1944 and 1963), U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (1954 and 1981), Doctors Without Borders (1999).

In the past few decades, however, the Nobel Peace Prize has developed a certain political edge. The process might be said to have begun in 1962, when it was awarded to the 1954 chemistry laureate, the American Linus Pauling, whose anti-nuclear pronouncements were usually directed, with considerable heat, toward his own government. In some instances the committee has aimed its arrow at a proper target–Andrei Sakharov (1975), Lech Walesa (1983), the Dalai Lama (1989), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991)–but such lucky shots have grown increasingly rare.

In 1985, for example, the prize was awarded to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a coalition of American and Soviet “peace activists” highly critical of the Reagan administration but notably silent on the use, in the Soviet Union, of psychiatric hospitals to silence political dissidents. The 1987 award to Costa Rica’s president Oscar Arias Sánchez was an evident endorsement of the now-forgotten Arias Plan to thwart U.S. efforts against Communist insurgencies in Central America. The 1992 prize to Guatemala’s Rigoberta Menchú was not only recognition for “ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples”–in the delightful language of the committee–but reward for a reliable critic of the United States and author of a (as was later discovered) fictitious autobiography.

To be sure, hostility toward the United States does not always govern the choices of the Nobel Committee. But while it is impossible to find a modern laureate who could, in any reasonable way, be identified with American foreign policy, it is easy to find critics and adversaries. This includes American winners–Jody Williams (1997) of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines–and even onetime U.S. officials, such as Al Gore and Jimmy Carter (2002), whose public opposition to George W. Bush seems to have been decisive in Oslo.

Undoubtedly, the most egregious example was the award of the prize, in 1990, to Mikhail Gorbachev “for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community.” It may be difficult to comprehend what, exactly, the committee was saying here, but the fact that 1990 was the first year in which it felt obliged to furnish a citation suggests that, even in Oslo, the exclusion of Ronald Reagan required an explanation.

Which brings us to the ambiguity of the Nobel Peace Prize itself. Certainly, it is right and proper to recognize and reward humanitarians, and people who resist oppression at cost to themselves. But what is the promotion of peace, anyway? Is it the pronouncement of words and the striking of attitudes, or the action that guarantees freedom against tyranny? Secretary of State Marshall was awarded the prize for his eponymous plan which assisted the postwar European recovery. But a stronger case could be made for another Nobel Peace Prize for General Marshall as the “organizer of victory” against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Philip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.