Five reasons why it was a bad idea to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU

1) The report­ing on the award­ing of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union has been sub­stand­ard in its sim­pli­fic­a­tion of per­spect­ives to a “for or against” bin­ary. It has been assumed that a view on the award­ing of the prize has cor­res­pond­ingly also been a view on the recip­i­ent: cri­ti­cising the prize is cri­ti­cism of the EU too, and vice versa. This is insuf­fi­cient, even on a purely logical level. One can be a sup­porter of the EU but a critic of the prize, or the other way around (see below no. 5). The fol­low­ing obser­va­tions are made from the former position.

2) Like the Nobel Lit­er­at­ure Prize, the Peace Prize rep­res­ents one of those rare moments when an announce­ment becomes a glob­ally news­worthy event pen­et­rat­ing the ever-​growing wall of com­mod­i­fied enter­tain­ment. Just like the Lit­er­at­ure Prize can bring to pub­lic con­scious­ness lit­er­at­ure that does not (yet) bene­fit from the mar­ket­ing sup­port of mul­tina­tional pub­lish­ing houses, the Peace Prize is an oppor­tun­ity to single out par­tic­u­larly per­sist­ent or dif­fi­cult con­flicts around the globe and to recog­nise the work of the men and women who are try­ing to resolve them. Only as an example, when have you last read about the ongo­ing civil war in Somalia or of the peace­ful (not mil­it­ary) efforts to end it? Or about the Colom­bian armed con­flict? The prize can also func­tion as an encour­age­ment to bring the parties to the table as in the case of North­ern Ire­land. There is no ongo­ing con­flict in the EU, and the EU needs no acknow­ledge­ment or pub­li­city for the work that it does.

3) According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize shall be awar­ded to a per­son or insti­tu­tion that has 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 the years there has been much debate over how con­crete the con­flicts must be to deserve the Peace Prize. The argu­ment used in favour of this year’s recip­i­ent was that, through its work for integ­ra­tion and demo­cracy, the EU has secured peace in Europe for over 60 years. Although the integ­ra­tion that has been pro­moted through the EU and its insti­tu­tions will have had some paci­fy­ing effect on the his­tor­ic­ally bel­li­ger­ent con­tin­ent, I dare any social sci­ent­ist show me a veri­fi­able causal link between the EU and peace. There is no nat­ural law that brings about Franco-​German wars if noth­ing is done, and even without a uni­on­ised Europe, we may still have been in the rel­at­ively peace­ful point at which we are now.

4) Thorbjørn Jag­land, mem­ber of the Nobel Com­mit­tee since 2009 and chair in 2012, is Secretary-​General of the Coun­cil of Europe. Need I say more: the Coun­cil awar­ded the prize to the Union.

5) Award­ing the prize to the EU at a time when Europe is exper­i­en­cing its most dif­fi­cult peace­time crises is like a kiss of death. The absurdity will fur­ther fuel anti-​European sen­ti­ments and enhance the sup­port of pop­u­list right-​wing parties who will cap­it­al­ise on that absurdity with sar­casm and cyn­icism. To ser­i­ously think that award­ing the prize to the EU was actu­ally bene­fi­cial for the European cause is polit­ical naïveté of the most dan­ger­ous kind.

Panu Minkkinen is Pro­fessor of Jur­is­pru­dence at the Uni­ver­sity of Hel­sinki.

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