Reposted from The European Tribune
The Nobel Peace Prize committee has a curious sense of timing: awarding President Obama the Peace Prize before he had accomplished anything much in office, and now awarding the EU the Peace Prize at a time when it seems intent on unraveling much of what has been achieved in European Solidarity in the past 60 years. Perhaps both awards can be described as a form of preemptive peace making: Instead of the more usual approach of rewarding a peacemaker for a life-times achievement of making peace long after it can do any good to help their efforts, it chose instead to reward Obama early in order to make it more possible for him to unwind the warmongering of President Bush. And now it is rewarding current EU leaders for NOT YET having unraveled most of what has been achieved in terms of EU solidarity in order to remind them of the rich peace making heritage bequeathed to them by the EU’s founders, and thus make it more possible for them to reverse current negative trends.
In any case, that is the most charitable spin I can put on today’s Nobel Peace Prize presentation ceremony in Oslo. Many readers here may view it as a study in the increasing irrelevance of both the Nobel Peace Prize committee and the EU: The establishment congratulating itself on how relevant, innovative and peace loving they are – whilst all the while destroying the efforts of their predecessors and taking and giving credit where none is due. However it seemed odd to me that a forum dedicated to European Affairs would let the day pass unremarked, so this is my attempt to get a conversation going. What relevance has the EU and the Nobel Peace prize got to peacemaking today? Are both still making a valuable positive contribution, or are both living off (and diminishing) past achievements?
Can we seriously look to the EU to make a further positive contribution to European and world Peace today, or must we look elsewhere, and if so, where?
